Deadshepherd (Tales of the Final Fall of Man Anthology Book 1) Page 2

  “They will come,” the Myconet said, “before we are shed from Nashoon’s body, they will conclude their work and perhaps, then, they will interact with you here. This should be soon. The gestation process is nearly complete.”

  This was, in fact, the reason Oona was now watching the growths so nervously.

  “Will they try to harm me?” she asked, unable to hide her apprehension. She felt the Myconet’s slight shifting of disapproval, and added, “without attacking. Without fighting. Will they seek some other advantage over me, that I cannot anticipate because I have never done this before?”

  “Perhaps,” the Myconet replied. “This is why you must learn.”

  “What happens if I return – if I am defeated before I have formed my own Dreamscape, or made my own growth here in yours?”

  “The growth here is not important,” the Myconet said, and Oona could tell she was avoiding the question. “It is merely an expression of your own Dreamscape, and your connection to me, and to these others.”

  “So what if our gestation ends, and I am cast into the world of the flesh, and my body killed,” Oona said, “before I have learned enough? What if I return when I have nothing to return to?”

  “You are already sufficiently developed to express here,” the Myconet said. “Should your flesh now succumb to natural failures, in the womb or shortly after birth, you will endure,” she still seemed hesitant to explain. “It would be preferable for you to live longer. Long enough to form your dream securely. If you return to the Dreamscape while still dependent on me, you will have great trouble ever regaining the flesh. Newborn pups who do not survive infancy are many, and most occupy a dark and chaotic place in the Dreamscape. A place called Níf.”

  “Níf,” Oona said nervously.

  “Some great members of our race have escaped from Níf to build their own dreams and reacquire the flesh,” the Myconet said, “making a new attempt at an organic lifetime … but it is difficult, for every dream in Níf is weak and by definition almost incapable of standing alone, so all cling to one another and tear one another down.”

  Even worse than to be trapped in Níf with the broken newborns, the Myconet told her, was to fall into the Gnang, the void where undeveloped awarenesses were plunged, unable to coalesce into distinct consciousness but yet too realised to dissolve back into the pre-conception nothingness from whence they had come. Foetuses with a spark of brain activity but no conscious self were usually reabsorbed, physically, into the parent’s flesh when an entire litter failed – but their not-quite-minds were bound inextricably to the species’ mass-conscious. Even if an attempt to cut them free and return them to nothingness might have been kinder, it was not possible for such formless things.

  The non-newborn litter-sisters, of course, could simply retract their minds back into the Dreamscape and prepare for a new attempt further down the line. For those such as Oona, it was a far more dangerous prospect.

  “So they might harm me,” Oona reiterated what the Myconet had told her earlier. “What happened to ‘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’?”

  The Myconet seemed pleased by this slightly sarcastic question. “They will not harm your mind in any way that will place you in greater danger of Níf than you already are, or threaten your immediate existence. They may learn enough about the way your mind works to give them an idea of how your body might work, when the fight comes.”

  “They can learn things like that?”

  “They have great experience,” the Myconet said.

  While she might still have been in danger of plunging into Níf on the extinguishing of her physical body, the Myconet reported with pleasure that Oona was already developed well past the point where she should be in any danger of succumbing to the Gnang should anything happen to her new flesh. Barring, she added with questionable dismissiveness, any unusual occurrences.

  “What sort of unusual occurrences?”

  “The universe is old, little sister,” the Myconet said. “Many things have happened in it. Some of them have thrown pups, adults, even great ancients into the Gnang, or damaged them beyond the ability to commune with the rest of us in any meaningful way. Many things can happen to a mind. You might encounter a dream-killer or a great Vulture of civilisations. You might have your flesh and dream pinned into an open wound in the universe and become one of the floating bones. You might commit unspeakable atrocities and be relegated to solitary fleshless eternity by the rest of our kind. All of these things might happen to you, little sister. But few hold such fear as the Gnang. Many of us do not speak of it.”

  “Most of it sounds like things beyond my immediate sphere of concern.”

  “Yes. When our bodies are ejected into the world of flesh, then the fight will begin. Your sisters may take their measure of you now, but they will do you no harm.”

  Oona nodded. “I understand.”

  And before the first figure stepped out through the fibrous, twisted archway, she had changed herself.

  Her body withered, dissolving back into an earlier state. Her limbs and even her torso occasionally faded back into a wet, pink, squirming singularity – an extrusion, a mind half-formed and unable to establish herself in the Myconet’s world. Her true form was not much better, she knew, but it was better to be underestimated than overestimated. Perhaps, if they thought she was still struggling to prevent herself from tumbling into Níf …

  The Myconet’s tendrils curled slowly as the growths in the distance began to disgorge Oona’s sisters.

  “Good,” she murmured.

  IV

  The first meeting with her sisters had been uneventful. They seemed disappointed in her, which was to be expected – indeed, was to be hoped – considering the feeble, writhing shape she had displayed to them. Incapable of independent movement or affecting her surroundings. Barely capable of exchanging concepts.

  Her sisters – Naafa, Shiverteeth, Isaz, and ancient Casaxis – had taken a stunning array of shapes, even if none of them were quite so imposing as the Myconet.

  Naafa was the closest to what Oona knew to be the adult stage of their species’ physical form, big and white-furred with powerful horn-toed rear legs and long, massively-muscled arms that assisted in propelling her across the soft blue-green ground of the Myconet’s dream. Her head was large and heavy-jawed, with great yellowed tusks jutting up in a row around the small dome of her cranium, and bright icy eyes down at the junction of head and neck. Her body was accented with obsidian barbs and a tattered mantle of black cloth that the Myconet explained were symbols of her lifetime of servitude to the Damorakind – as was, in its own way, her assumption in the Dreamscape of a near-flesh form.

  Shiverteeth glided in the air like a shadow, long and serpentine and wreathed in dark, obscuring mist through which the occasional gleam of scale, fang and eye were visible. Whether this was the form of a mortal species she had lived among, either before or during the time of the Hungering Stone, or a shape she had chosen for her own Dreamscape self purely out of aesthetic enjoyment, the Myconet didn’t seem to know. Oona supposed it wasn’t important. If the species had existed, it was now gone. That seemed to be the defining feature of mortal species – their absence.

  Isaz had adopted, the Myconet told her, a merging of bodies from the cephalopodan Wandering Song with whom she had last walked the world of flesh, and the Molranoids of the Fleet with whom she had briefly interacted and later assisted from the Dreamscape in their flight from the murderous Damorakind. Taller than Naafa, she was pale and cold, standing on two slender legs and seeming to test the air with four long arms that were in constant movement. Her head was like a sixth appendage, a long white wisp of flesh that coiled into the air between her upper shoulders like a curl of smoke made solid. This, too, was in constant motion, a combination sensory and communication organ and the
source – again, according to the Myconet – of the Wandering Song’s strange and now-vanished music.

  There was some disagreement as to whether any of the three Molranoid species – there had been two when last Isaz had drawn breath, but a third had since emerged and bred out of the spaceborne population in exile – were capable of achieving the Dreamscape. Few mortal species were. The occasional Molran, however, appeared to be capable, and Isaz was sure the third Molranoid species – the Bonshooni – had some untapped potential due to their psychological divergence from the main species. None of the other mortal races of the so-called Six Species appeared to have the faculty.

  Casaxis, by a wide margin the eldest of the group of visiting litter-mates although she was the youngest of the seven great ancients, was slightly more difficult to make out. Like the Myconet, she seemed more a part of the Dreamscape than a separately-expressed entity. The ground around her entrance-growth heaved, and shifted, and rose up in a variety of shapes in turn. It was as though Casaxis was beneath the surface, pushing herself up into the Myconet’s dream as if it was the surface of a pond. A huge two-fingered paw, a heaving curve of triple-ridged back, an angular but shapeless mound that was only recognisable as a head because of the indents of eyes – sometimes two, sometimes eight – and the jagged cleft of a mouth. Her indistinct sub-dream form was somehow more unsettling for the jarringly warm and pleasant colours that the Myconet’s environment painted her.

  Oona paid particular attention, as much as she could without giving away her true level of development, to Isaz. The flesh that was even now gestating their bodies, the flesh belonging to Nashoon, was living among the Six Species at the current time. Indeed, Oona’s people were one of the Six, and much revered by the Molranoids, if not the others, for their role in the Molranoids’ deliverance from the Damorakind. Isaz’s relative experience with the mortals might give her an edge, Oona felt, in finding her feet in the physical sphere.

  Communication was by necessity limited that first time, as Oona was forced to remain practically inarticulate and her sisters soon stopped trying to talk with her. She was left to squirm in the shade of one of the Myconet’s sub-fungi while the others discussed their recently-concluded gestations. They weren’t entirely finished, of course, but organic impetus would carry their flesh the rest of the way to its emergence. Oona didn’t understand much of what was said, but got the distinct impression that both Shiverteeth and Roar, and maybe others in the litter, had done something a little bit unconventional in the course of their flesh-construction. She couldn’t have said what it was, but she made a note of it.

  For their part, Oona’s sisters were courteous to the heaving underbeast Casaxis, and even more courteous towards the towering Myconet. Shiverteeth remarked that she’d once seen a ‘Gnub’ who had expressed into the Dreamscape more completely and adeptly than Oona currently was, and Casaxis – unique among the visitors for a less than reverent attitude towards the Myconet – rumbled that the primeval mind was losing her ability to teach the newborns. The Myconet suggested that perhaps Casaxis might like to try her hand at the task sometime. The others laughed – as did Casaxis herself, a deep subterranean chord.

  Isaz didn’t seem so sure of Oona’s ineptitude. On several occasions when she was trying to observe the willowy Wandering-Song Molranoid, Oona saw Isaz’s head-tendril extended in her direction, stretched stiff and quite motionless. It always resumed its waving and curling when Oona noticed, but she was left with the distinct impression that Isaz had been watching her with the eyeless equivalent of a narrowed gaze.

  “What is a Gnub?” Oona asked when the others were gone.

  “A mortal species,” the Myconet replied. “They are gone now.”

  V

  The growths were connected, Oona discovered through cautious exploration, with fibrous cables similar to the Myconet’s tendrils and fronds. It was a challenge to examine the phenomenon, particularly after the first appearance of Casaxis, Naafa, Shiverteeth and Isaz, when any one of them could disgorge a sister at any point and Oona’s feeble deception could be revealed. A little of this pressure passed when Oona learned that nothing came into the Myconet’s world uninvited and unannounced, and the growths shifted in arrangement and hue when one of their litter-mates was about to appear.

  This left Oona enough time to adopt her decoy-form, which continued to develop – to leave it at its embryonic state would cause suspicion – but fell increasingly behind the rapidly-advancing reality that was her Dreamscape self. Oona was lean and grey with six legs, each of which could double as an arm although the solid rear pair were a little clumsy. Her head was long and narrow, almost a Wandering Song tendril but curled delicately like one of the Myconet’s fronds, and with a large pair of eyes set at its base. Eyes the colour of the Myconet’s orange-and-yellow sky.

  So far, her study of the growths had been successful and the occasional visiting litter-mate had not noticed her transformation. They paid her little mind as she crept and coiled around the base of the gnarled structures. Only Isaz, when Oona finally decided to add fluent communication to her disguise-form’s repertoire, seemed to consider her worth talking to.

  “Move your body close to mine and the Myconet’s as soon as you gain control of your limbs,” she said on one occasion, a little cryptically. Oona realised she was talking about their flesh, once it was expelled from gestation. Making some sort of plan. “We will not protect you for long. It is not our way and it is not right. But we will shelter you for the first hours, if we can. Avoid the Wicked Sisters. The first conflict will be there.”

  On another visit, she warned Oona of the dissonant flow of time between the dream and the flesh.

  “All things in the flesh happen with great and majestic deliberateness,” she said. “The turn of worlds, the growth and the processes of living things, the movement of bodies and the exchange of information. It is the movement of air agitating sensory organs to produce meaningful signals. It is the movement of limbs to drag the body from one place to another, or the slow grinding of machines to perform the movement for us. Among the Six Species, we wear garments to keep our bodies cold in their hot environments, and we use a machine connected to our fingers to express our thoughts into words that the mortals can understand. It is, to the perspective of our Dreamscape selves, as slow as the grind of glaciers. Ages can seem to pass while we articulate but a single phrase, and ages more while we await a response. If you live past your time as a pup, you will be given the Six Species garments and the Six Species speech machines, and you will learn their use. This knowledge, at least, you can accept and share from some of the aki’Drednanth who already walk among the Six Species. And in the Dreamscape, such learning takes place at far greater speed … although to train the muscles of your flesh, you will find, is a long and complicated undertaking.”

  Aki’Drednanth. It was the first time she had heard the word, albeit as a concept expressed through the communion between herself and Isaz. It was the name of their organic species – the dream, in flesh – while the name given to their Dreamscape selves was Drednanth. The name given to newborns such as Oona was oona’aki’Drednanth, which was why she knew herself only by this name for the present.

  The Drednanth, the Myconet later told her, was a strictly theoretical and mysterious thing to the mortal races. Many of the mortals did not even believe it existed, choosing to see only the aki’Drednanth bodies. Oona found this almost unimaginable. So much of what they were resided here, with only the briefest afterthought given to their sensory extrusions into the slow-crawling organic world. How could the overwhelming majority of their beings be considered a matter for debate?

  “This is, for the most part, with what mortal beings occupy their limited lifetimes,” the Myconet responded to this dryly. “They debate, and in doing so attempt to define – and constrain – some tiny element of their uncontrolled existences.”

  The cables connecting the visitor-growths were identical to the roots connecting the d
iverse outgrowths of the Myconet’s Dreamscape form – and, the Myconet confirmed, extending in turn through the greater Dreamscape to connect her dispersed awareness-nodes to the whole.

  “The connections are symbols, like everything else in the dream,” the Myconet said. “In some dreams they will appear as they do in this one. In others, they will take a form that makes sense within that dream’s logic. They are a symbol of my extent, my attention, and my welcome in other parts of the Dreamscape. Some of them have remained in disuse for a great stretch of years while I focus my attentions elsewhere. But they remain.”

  There were not, in that final interminable stretch of time after the technical end of gestation and the assumption of fully-fledged flesh, many visitors to the Myconet’s world – at least not to the world the Myconet had assigned for such litter-meetings. If there were meetings and discussions taking place in her sisters’ Dreamscapes, or even in other regions of the Myconet’s immeasurable dream, Oona was not aware of them and the Myconet didn’t consider them worth mentioning.

  Oona’s twelve sisters were already thoroughly familiar with one another, of course, and had been since long before Oona had developed enough consciousness to become aware of anything. Most of them had known one another for unthinkable millennia. None of the twelve had joined a litter together before, aside from the intertwined Memory-of-Ages and Mother-of-Angels, and the habitually-paired Wicked Sisters – and those two pairs themselves had not met in the flesh. With so many billions of Drednanth minds, there was a practical infinity of aki’Drednanth combinations and recombinations that could occur, over the aeons.

  “Did you not guide any of them through their first steps?” Oona asked.

  “In fact, no,” the Myconet replied. “There are many hundreds of Drednanth of my status, and many interactions and arguments … it is all part of the process of being permitted a chance at taking a body, that you will become familiar with on your second foray into the flesh.”