Neal Asher - The Gabble

Shardelle wormed out of her tent, smelling coffee and feeling a deep overpowering need for it. For a moment she could not figure out what was different, then she saw it: the frame tent was gone, the hooder’s cowl and two attached segments were in pieces. Jonas was sitting crosslegged on one of the limestone slabs, sipping a self-heating coffee. He gestured to another sealed cup resting nearby. She walked over to him.

“You’ve finished?” she asked incredulously.

He grinned. “Amazing what you can achieve when you have no need for sleep. I’ve been working for Taxonomy for fifty-three years. In my last eighteen years of being asomnidapted I’ve done more work than in the previous thirty-five.”

“Perhaps I should consider that for myself,” said Shardelle, pulling the tab on her cup. She preferred the coffee from her machine in the Tagreb, but here this convenience was preferable.

While she waited for her drink to heat, she observed that he had a piece of carapace resting on a brushed aluminum box before him.

“Any conclusions?” she asked, leaning her buttocks against a nearby slab.

“Very definitely.” He reached inside his coat and removed a small handheld gun.

Shardelle recognized it as a quantum cascade, QC, laser.

“I promise not to steal your research,” she quipped.

He grimaced. “It’s not the stealing I would worry about, but how it may well be hushed up.” He pointed the laser at the carapace and fired. A wisp of smoke rose, picking out the beam in the air. There was a red glow at the point of contact, but whether from heat or simply reflected light, Shardelle could not tell. But nothing else was happening to the carapace.

“You know, every piece I’ve managed to study has been old and partially broken down by bacteria. These are the freshest remains I’ve ever studied.” Still he was firing the laser, and still the carapace was unaffected. “You see, a piece of old carapace would have started disintegrating by now, that’s because certain nanostructures inside it would have broken down.”

He turned off the laser, then abruptly put his bare hand flat down on the carapace.

Shardelle leaned forward. “An insulator?”

“You’d think.” He poured coffee on the aluminum box and it immediately sizzled into steam.

“Shit!” Shardelle squatted down beside the box to peer closely at the carapace. She then looked up at Jonas. “Conductive … superconductive?”

“Carbon fullerene nanotubes. When was the last time you saw something like that naturally produced?”

“About never.”

“They’re laced through the carapace material, which bears some resemblance to the shock-resistant composite laminates we use in our spaceships. The interesting part is that the nanotubes link down deep into the hooder’s body. I’ll have to look closely at the scans but my guess is that the more you heat up one of these bastards the faster it moves.” He picked up the piece of carapace. “Of course, though you won’t see stuff like this naturally produced, you can find it elsewhere.”

“Sorry?”

He looked at her directly. “Polity battlefield armor.”

“What? … What are you saying?”

“The genome was the first clue: so short, so concise, so exact. What I’m saying is that hooders, though living creatures, are artifacts; biogenetic artifacts.”

Ahead lay a plain of flattened flute grass, boring and level as it disappeared into misty distance. Shardelle set the ATV on automatic, monitored by Rodol, and decided it was time, as Jonas was now doing, to check into the virtual world. She took her aug from a pocket of her envirosuit and plugged it in the permanent plug behind her ear, closed her eyes, and booted up.

First she checked her messages and was appalled to find over four thousand of them awaiting her attention. She opened only those from recognized sources. Some of them were personal; from her brother, from two of her three children, one from her third husband, another from her great-grandmother. The first ones were easy enough to answer with pages from her diary run through a personalizing program. The one from her great-grandmother, who was a xenobiologist of some standing, she took rather more care over. As she laid out the reply, detailing her frustrations and nascent theories, she wondered if Jonas knew her great-grandmother. She had been in Xeno for seventy years and he in Taxonomy for fifty-three, perhaps they had met at some time? Other messages updated her with news from the Tagreb. A gabbleduck’s bill had been discovered in the mountains. In her absence it had been measured and analyzed ad nauseum, but nothing new learned. Still other messages debated the merits of this linguistic theory or that one, and it was with a sinking sensation that she opened some of the messages from unrecognized senders to find links to where papers on The Gabble had been published. She turned her attention to the linguistic net.

The hardcore had now dropped down to below a thousand. It seemed that most of the lunatic fringe had dissipated, hence the appearance of all those papers. Most serious theorists did not publish until they had something worth publishing. That was accepted protocol to prevent too much rubbish clogging up the informational highways. Nothing new on the net. Returning to her messages she deleted every one from unknown sources. Only then did she spot the message from the haiman Kroval on Earth:

“Every bird sings for a reason, similarly do dogs bark. Perhaps the Anglic similarity is misleading and the morphemes longer than we would suppose … maybe the length of a gabbleduck’s life. Perhaps they are all saying the same thing?”

That made Shardelle pause. She groped for meaning and it seemed to her to be lurking out of reach.

“The meat is forbidden,” the dracoman child had said.

Something there … something.

After time, her frustration became too much and she removed her aug. Once again taking up the controls of the ATV, she noticed that Rodol had reset its course, taking the vehicle away from the big gabbleduck. The reason was obvious: a hooder only five kilometers away from it.

With a quick glance at Jonas, Shardelle manually overrode that and put them back on course. She was damned if she was going to miss seeing it on the way back to the Tagreb. Jonas had made his big discovery. Maybe she could come out of this with at least something.

A minute later, Jonas looked at her and said, “Rodol just informed me that you are taking us closer to a hooder than might be safe.”

Shardelle pointed at the map screen.

He nodded. “Just be ready to run. Hooders move damned fast when they want to.”

Shardelle felt almost angered by his reasonable attitude, and felt too ashamed to analyze too closely the reason for that.

Afternoon, and they were back into still-standing flute grass. Shardelle spotted the gabbleduck when they were still kilometers away from it. It sat, a pyramid of alien flesh, its green multi-eyed gaze fixed on the horizon, bill swinging gently from side to side.

“How close would be safe?” Jonas asked when they were only a kilometer away.

Shardelle looked down at her hand gripping the joystick. Her knuckles were white. “I’m going to approach it. I’m going to walk up to it. You can stay in the ATV if you want.”

Five hundred meters, two hundred meters. Shardelle felt her frustration increase. The gabbleduck had not even turned to look at them. It was as if it could not be bothered to acknowledge their presence. At a hundred meters she just trickled the ATV forward.

“That thing is fucking immense,” said Jonas. He had abandoned his seat to go into the back of the vehicle. She saw that he was clutching an ECS pulse-rifle.

“What do you intend to do with that?”