some sort of goal . An end-state that people arbitrarily labelled their enemies as knowingly – consciously, by definition – striving to reach . It was the propaganda of the natural world, endemic to every species of sufficient complexity. Once you got smart enough to talk about killing each other for natural resources, smart enough to consider not killing, to consider sharing instead, the old monster inside you started to get smarter too. And it started to come up with justifications for doing what it always had. And ways of doing it that were complicated , proportionate to the species.
Janya had often considered basing her mastercraft on the nonexistence of evil. Certainly, whenever somebody trotted out more pedestrian examples like the paltry deeds of single human murderers, she had to stifle a giggle. Not even up-close-and-personal contact with a killer could shock a true student of history. Although it could leave more literal scars.
Are you okay with that?
How are things?
“Of course I’m okay,” she repeated more firmly. “Why wouldn’t I be?”
GLOMULUS
Glomulus had actually met an aki’Drednanth once.
Fridge. That had been her human-friendly pseudonym. They all had names like that. Aki’Drednanth had quirky senses of humour.
He wasn’t entirely sure why he was thinking about her now. It was a peculiarity of nerves and senses and memory, perhaps. The tight, bordering-on-uncomfortable feeling of the micro-film setting on his hands, the smell of sterility, the quality of the light …
Quite aside from the fact that standing at an examination table, looking down at an article of dead flesh, tended to make him philosophise at the best of times, he supposed he had been thinking about minds, and the amazing spectrums in which they could come. Synth, able, eejit, Contro … and yes, all the variety of the Six Species. But there really was no mind like an aki’Drednanth mind, and when it came down to the choices and fates that had brought him here, his musings often took him back to Fridge.
He hadn’t entered the Dreamscape with Fridge – Blaren rarely, and Molren even more rarely, had the mental flexibility and raw capacity to interface on that level, and Cratch didn’t know of any Bonshoon or human to manage it, not even a human of Contro’s unique character and mentality. Whether Damorakind or Furgunak managed it, he couldn’t say and didn’t much care to speculate. But with only about five hundred aki’Drednanth in the entire extended Molran Fleet population of – what had it been, forty billion, and ten times that in sleepers? – just meeting one was something of an achievement.
Yes, Fridge. Fridge had been an interesting encounter.
Aki’Drednanth were believed to be a type of Ogre, like the ones that were said to have founded Þursheim. Whether or not they were the same species was questionable, especially since there was no real material evidence left in Þursheim anymore. They were big, hairy, tusky, they tended to speak in roars …
And they were smelly. Above about minus ten degrees Celsius – and Fridge had been out of her envirosuit for various reasons, and while it had been chilly it had not been freezing on the day of their meeting – various parts of the aki’Drednanth anatomy and certainly some of the bits on their skin, under the pelt, began to melt and that stuff was fragrant. An aki’Drednanth would not melt if left in a warm environment, that was one of the many myths about the species … but she would most likely die or suffer pulmonary failure or brain damage long before actually turning into a puddle of sludge. Much of their circulatory systems consisted of a series of supercooled fluids in channels of fibrous material with a melting point somewhere below ice, and their brains were like great, intricate snow-sculptures of crystallised ammonia and fatty acids and other more exotic substances. And the aki’Drednanth took brain damage very seriously indeed.
The
Janya had often considered basing her mastercraft on the nonexistence of evil. Certainly, whenever somebody trotted out more pedestrian examples like the paltry deeds of single human murderers, she had to stifle a giggle. Not even up-close-and-personal contact with a killer could shock a true student of history. Although it could leave more literal scars.
Are you okay with that?
How are things?
“Of course I’m okay,” she repeated more firmly. “Why wouldn’t I be?”
GLOMULUS
Glomulus had actually met an aki’Drednanth once.
Fridge. That had been her human-friendly pseudonym. They all had names like that. Aki’Drednanth had quirky senses of humour.
He wasn’t entirely sure why he was thinking about her now. It was a peculiarity of nerves and senses and memory, perhaps. The tight, bordering-on-uncomfortable feeling of the micro-film setting on his hands, the smell of sterility, the quality of the light …
Quite aside from the fact that standing at an examination table, looking down at an article of dead flesh, tended to make him philosophise at the best of times, he supposed he had been thinking about minds, and the amazing spectrums in which they could come. Synth, able, eejit, Contro … and yes, all the variety of the Six Species. But there really was no mind like an aki’Drednanth mind, and when it came down to the choices and fates that had brought him here, his musings often took him back to Fridge.
He hadn’t entered the Dreamscape with Fridge – Blaren rarely, and Molren even more rarely, had the mental flexibility and raw capacity to interface on that level, and Cratch didn’t know of any Bonshoon or human to manage it, not even a human of Contro’s unique character and mentality. Whether Damorakind or Furgunak managed it, he couldn’t say and didn’t much care to speculate. But with only about five hundred aki’Drednanth in the entire extended Molran Fleet population of – what had it been, forty billion, and ten times that in sleepers? – just meeting one was something of an achievement.
Yes, Fridge. Fridge had been an interesting encounter.
Aki’Drednanth were believed to be a type of Ogre, like the ones that were said to have founded Þursheim. Whether or not they were the same species was questionable, especially since there was no real material evidence left in Þursheim anymore. They were big, hairy, tusky, they tended to speak in roars …
And they were smelly. Above about minus ten degrees Celsius – and Fridge had been out of her envirosuit for various reasons, and while it had been chilly it had not been freezing on the day of their meeting – various parts of the aki’Drednanth anatomy and certainly some of the bits on their skin, under the pelt, began to melt and that stuff was fragrant. An aki’Drednanth would not melt if left in a warm environment, that was one of the many myths about the species … but she would most likely die or suffer pulmonary failure or brain damage long before actually turning into a puddle of sludge. Much of their circulatory systems consisted of a series of supercooled fluids in channels of fibrous material with a melting point somewhere below ice, and their brains were like great, intricate snow-sculptures of crystallised ammonia and fatty acids and other more exotic substances. And the aki’Drednanth took brain damage very seriously indeed.
The
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