Deadshepherd (Tales of the Final Fall of Man Anthology Book 1)

  Deadshepherd

  Tales of the Final Fall of Man

  Anthology 1

  Andrew Hindle

  Copyright © 2017 Andrew Hindle

  All rights reserved.

  ISBN: 1539845044

  ISBN-13: 978-1539845041

  For my muses (assorted).

  Now, can we move away from The Final Fall of Man

  for a bit, and concentrate on something slightly different?

  Would that be alright?

  Okay, stop shouting.

  I will turn this book right around, so help me…

  Contents

  Sisterhood

  Black Honey Wings

  Malachi’s Gambit

  Ghåål’s Ark

  Sisterhood

  I

  She met them before she was even born. They were twelve, and with her added to the litter they were thirteen, an unusual size in a species that usually produced between six and ten offspring at a time.

  The Myconet said the litter was so big because of her – the newborn.

  When a new pup was born into the world, the Myconet explained, there was a delicate balance that had to be observed. She had to be strong, she had to be tested, but she could not be expected to stand alone against the might of those who had known the flesh many times before. Indeed, by the time she even became aware of them, the other twelve had formed a network in the womb that mirrored a connection they’d all held for many, many years.

  Long before the litter’s conception, the other twelve had known one another. They had competed, fiercely, for the right to take a body and step back into the world outside the dream. They had stated their cases, submitted to judgement from innumerable multitudes of their ilk, and waited century after century for their eligibility to be confirmed.

  “For an old soul to regain the flesh is a heady experience worth fighting for,” the Myconet said – not in words, of course, for there were no words in the newborn’s universe, but in a slow flowering of image and impression that grew in complexity as her brain did. It was a series of signals and concepts devoid, temporarily, of context. “For a newborn soul, it is a necessity. Only once you have grown from the flesh can you truly transcend it, and only once you have transcended the flesh can you regain it.”

  Often, the Myconet said, the new pup would fail, and perish without achieving more than a few weeks – sometimes only a few hours – of life. But sometimes, if the pup was well-made and the facts of life were made clear to her, she would thrive. And the rest of the litter was carefully chosen, through trial and deliberation, to at once optimise her chances at a fair victory, and provide an adequate challenge to ensure her worth.

  There was Naafa, also known as NagaskaKran, one of the first of their species to have been enslaved by the Damorakind in their occupation of the Great Ice some seventy-five thousand years before. She had been granted the opportunity to retake a flesh form somewhat earlier than usual, this time, in recognition of her deeds and of her sacrifices in the name of stability.

  There was Shiverteeth, the Comet-rider, who had last drawn breath half a million years before, during the war with the Hungering Stone.

  Marashka and Thraal, the Wicked Sisters, had for three incarnations allied with one another to defeat their litter-mates and claim ill-gotten lifetimes. This was not truly forbidden – the Myconet said that cooperation and wit in adversity were admirable traits, keenly encouraged, and a flesh life by its very nature was cruel and unfair – but it was nevertheless considered a distasteful act. Marashka and Thraal had been prohibited from even petitioning to join a litter for over three million years in punishment for their previous transgression.

  Even more recent to return than Naafa, and granted a new chance at the flesh within an even shorter time period was bold Isaz, who had explored the stars with the Wandering Song and had discovered the Molran Fleet as they fled the Core. Isaz had lost her last body when the Damorakind had hunted the Fleet down, her flesh perishing along with the Wandering Song and so many of the great Worldships as the black-cloaks and their terrible sharks had harried them. But she had also been instrumental, from her haven in the Dreamscape, in orchestrating the slave uprising that had saved the Molren and Blaren in later decades.

  And then there were the impossible ancients.

  Casaxis, who had stood upon the Ice when the star called Soldier’s Rose had burned fifty million years ago – and who had been considered an elder, even then.

  Thunder of Chasms, whose terrible rage had brought down a mortal species called the Paqandi and whose appalling crime had proscribed her from joining any litter but one such as this.

  Fallen Worlds, the great adventurer who had formed the Burning Alliance a hundred million years ago. The Burning Alliance had unified several diverse mortal species that had survived the ravages of a rogue sun, and had culminated in the construction of the Ever-Web. With the Ever-Web the Alliance had harnessed the vagrant star and flung it into the grey, reducing the star to a harmless ribbon of hydrogen and helium stretching across half the galaxy – and almost destroying the Ever-Web itself in the process. But many fragments of the great edifice lived on, and drifted to this day through the emptiness of space with a dozen squatter-species evolving on their frozen flanks.

  Memory-of-Ages and Mother-of-Angels, a pair so old and so inextricably intertwined that they could no longer find the flesh separately, and rarely did so in any case when not tending to a newborn.

  Then there was Roar, who had poured her mind into a section of the Great Ice three hundred million years before, uprooted the thousand-mile-tall mountain and flung it into the teeth of a black hole called Deadshepherd. Roar, who even now hovered in a near-infinite moment on the threshold of Deadshepherd’s event horizon.

  And, of course, there was the Myconet herself. And her – the newborn pup, who was called Oona. Her name was not really Oona, of course. This was just another name for newborn, or firstflesh. She was a pup who had never before lived, whose extant self had not waited patiently in the dream for another chance at drawing breath but had spawned organically from the cells that grew and divided in her mother’s womb. It wasn’t her true name – but it would do, the Myconet said, until she acquired a true name of her own. In the meantime, it didn’t really matter.

  None of their names were really important at the time, after all, because only one of them – maybe two – would live to claim their birthright.

  II

  The first world Oona ever knew was the Dreamscape. But not her own dream – that would only come as she grew older and her mind strengthened. At the start, her brain was little more than a microscopic frozen lattice, a series of simple synaptic prompts that could only find the Dreamscape with the help of more developed minds.

  The first world Oona ever knew was the Myconet’s plain.

  It was a strange place, but it was rather meaningless to say so because she had no basis for comparison. Everything was strange, because everything was not nothingness, which was all Oona had ever known – if, that was, one could claim to know nothingness. Oona was forced to conclude, in her ever-present confusion, that one probably couldn’t.

  The Myconet’s plain was a wide expanse of pale pastel blues and greens and pinks, gently undulating beneath a sky of similarly mild oranges and yellows. Its only features, as far as Oona could tell, were the growths.

  Eleven of these were stunted and gnarled, each one crouching on the plain surrounded by a wide expanse of dusty grey sand. The twelfth was the Myconet herself.

  “This is not all there is to my dream,” she had told Oona
as soon as the pup was present enough to begin truly understanding her signals. “It is a layer. The layer in which I interact with you…” she indicated Oona with a wave of a frond, and then with another wave gestured towards the growths, only three of which were visible from Oona’s current standpoint, “…and the others.”

  The Myconet stood monolithic and mighty against the sky, a looming many-bulbed fungus in shades of grey and brown and bright, sickly yellow. Her central head expanded in a huge mottled hemisphere that Oona had once walked upon, having been deposited there by one of the Myconet’s innumerable hanging appendages. Many smaller mushrooms curved off her immense trunk, and grew from the ground near her base, but they were all part of the same entity.

  Oona could not judge how large the Myconet was, because Oona didn’t have a clear conception of her own size. Oona had developed from the unformed extrusion of nerves and impulses she’d begun as, into a compact, snakelike thing that she supposed was similar in appearance to the flesh growing in the world outside the Dreamscape. Here she was relatively free, able to power herself along with her tail and with the stubby growths of her budding forelimbs. Sometimes, when she concentrated, she was able to alter her properties and increase her mobility and stature – even, once, to float free of the soft ground and fly through the air. The Myconet stood at least ten times higher than the other growths scattered across her plain, and the growths in turn stood three or four times the height of Oona’s form.

  “If I change my shape here, will it change the shape growing in the flesh?” she asked once.

  “No,” the Myconet replied. “All creatures have two selves. There is the flesh form, and the dream form. Most mortal beings hold the flesh higher than the dream, as is natural since the flesh is the cage that confines them. With our kind, the mind is dominant. One form need not resemble the other. Indeed, it ought not. The mind does not resemble the body in any way.”

  “Mine does,” Oona said, moving her greyish-pink appendages guiltily.

  The Myconet curled her fronds in amusement. “You have had neither mind nor body for very long,” she said. “Both of your forms currently develop according to the vagaries of biology. Control will come.”

  “The others are growing their flesh with conscious intent,” Oona expressed a concept the Myconet had related to her in the jumbled past. She looked at the growths standing stark and twisted against the pastel horizon. “Their minds are building their new bodies, molecule by molecule and cell by cell.”

  “As am I,” the Myconet replied.

  “Can they not control the growth of their flesh to create such forms as they wish?” Oona gestured at the Myconet’s enormous trunk and waving tendrils.

  “Can you imagine flesh such as this being born of an animal mother?” the Myconet responded with another whisk of amusement. “No, there are very good reasons for us to keep the long march of our bodies’ generations a stable thing. Flesh is complex,” she went on, “though not as vast as the dream. We seldom vary the forms of our bodies and limbs. It is the mind, and the organic lattice pinning it to the flesh world, that is the most important thing. The main intent, for those of us reacquiring the flesh, is to build our dreams into our bodies. To create a brain through which we can express ourselves into the world beyond the Dreamscape. A vessel that is ours and ours alone.”

  “Their bodies, then, will be no different to my own.”

  “Not markedly,” the Myconet replied. “It levels the field of biological battle, and requires each creature to stand or fall on the merits of her mind – and of the harmony between her mind and her body that allows the flesh to obey her commands.”

  This struck Oona as rather unfair, since even the youngest of the litter – Isaz – had been a newborn like Oona some five hundred thousand years before, and had lived several successful incarnations in the flesh since then. The rest of them were older still – many of them unutterably so. They all had minds of exceptional and long-trained merit, and would likely find their harmony while she was still trying to figure out what each of her pup-body’s appendages did.

  “We allow nature, the science of organic reproduction, to largely dictate the forms we take,” the Myconet was saying, “and those in turn are dictated by the two bodies that conceived us, and those in turn were formed in an identical crucible of breeding. Thus it is that, no matter how many millions of years divide the origins of our minds, our bodies remain compatible with one another. Able to produce the spark, the conception of new flesh. Allowing much of the raw material to develop by its own organic process frees us to focus on the construction of the minds which house us.”

  “But my body, and brain, are both developing without me doing anything?”

  “Just so. You are newborn. Your only task is to learn, to realise the potential of the brain that is gestating by random genetic selection from the combination of Nashoon’s and Arberus’s reproductive material. Only by abandoning your first flesh’s growth to the vagaries of chance and throwing your full concentration into the understanding of your self can you hope to emerge from the crèche alive,” the Myconet extended a tendril and touched Oona delicately, with a strange sad solemnity. “You cannot hope to compete, after all, on the molecular level against your sisters.”

  Oona turned to look at the nearest growth. “How is it that you can speak to me,” she asked, “while they remain hidden?”

  “They, too, could speak if they wished,” the Myconet told her. “They attend most closely to their work, but they could emerge, in a limited sense, onto this plain to converse with you. They do not consider that there is much to be said at this stage, and I am here to impart the information you need. So it was agreed.”

  Oona looked up curiously at the great and ancient fungus. “You don’t need to attend closely to your work?”

  “No,” the Myconet said. “My work does not need to endure. Naught but a fragment of my dream must be housed in flesh, and that not for long.”

  Oona did not understand this until much later.

  III

  She crouched on the soft ground and looked at the growths. The surface beneath her shiny, delicate skin was slightly furred with a patchy growth that may, for all Oona knew, have been another part of the vastly-dispersed entity that was the Myconet.

  “What will they do when they come through?” she asked.

  “Nothing,” the Myconet said. “We do not fight in the Dreamscape. When our bodies are ejected into the world of flesh, then the fight will begin. They may take their measure of you, but they will do you no harm.”

  “We never fight here?”

  “Never,” the Myconet intoned sternly, her great hemispherical dome-head seeming to swell oppressively behind Oona. “Not in the way organisms fight. Our kind are unified. We are unity. Our bodies live as organic life does, because that is the way of organic life. It is struggle, it is competition, it is kill or be killed.”

  “Kill?”

  “The destruction of the physical flesh is, to mortal beings, a more permanent and total loss than it is to our kind,” the Myconet explained. “It eradicates not only the body, but the mind that has no recourse to a larger and more stable whole.”

  “They do not house their dreams within the Great Ice?” Oona said, recognising this as another concept the Myconet had introduced her to previously – or had at least attempted to. When every idea was new, and immediately normalised, it was difficult to comprehend the possibility of exceptions.

  “No,” the Myconet said. “This is why they are mortal.”

  “And this is why we don’t fight in the Dreamscape,” Oona concluded.

  “Yes,” the Myconet replied, pleased. “We have transcended the flesh, and with it the necessities of organic life. The struggle for strength and survival does not apply in the Dreamscape. Dream does not battle dream. The need that drives the flesh does not hold any threat for the Dreamscape. There is no scarcity in the Great Ice.”

  Oona looked back at the growths.

&nb
sp; Each one formed an arch, a cagelike doorway. The Myconet said they could be used – and would be used, soon – as access points to the Dreamscapes of the other eleven. They already had been used as such, indeed, when the litter had been formalised. Only Oona had not been present at the time. The growths were relics of that initial interaction, and would soon serve their original purpose once more.

  “These arches are a part of you,” Oona said, “but also of them.”

  “They are symbols of my willingness to allow the others to enter here,” the Myconet replied. “They will remain, on this layer, even after our emergence into the flesh world. Even as we return, one by one, to the dream. It is my hope that your own growth will come to join these here. Whether we live or return, then, we shall share this connection here. Each of you will be able to traverse the greater Dreamscape, from yours to here. And I, perhaps, will have a corresponding place in your dream.”

  The Myconet did not traverse. She was too old, too sedentary. Sometimes, she said, she extruded. Some element of herself would enter another’s Dreamscape, then retract, like an in-dream version of taking a flesh body to take on experiences. It could be absorbed back into the whole, thus augmenting her … or it could stay in the other’s dream, like a set of eyes and ears, patiently feeding experiences from the host’s dream into the Myconet’s immeasurable metaphorical-subterranean vaults. If others wanted to address her, personally, they came to her dream and did so. The growths were the litter’s means of doing this, enabled by the Myconet.

  Not all of the Myconet could move through into other Dreamscapes. Oona could understand this, having seen the sheer metaphorical size of the ancient mind. Just as not all of her could successfully be housed in a single flesh brain, she could only send representative cross-sections of herself into these smaller extrusions, either in the flesh or in the dream.