Deadshepherd (Tales of the Final Fall of Man Anthology Book 1) Page 3

  “Assuming I survive my first.”

  “Yes.”

  Oona had to admit, to herself, that she had rather been hoping the Myconet would say something like nonsense, you are sure to survive your first lifetime now, but she also had to admit she had no real precedent for such a hope. “You are not permitted to train a newborn in a litter containing other Drednanth you trained as newborns?” she asked.

  “Essentially, yes,” the Myconet replied. “It would be considered a conflict of interest.”

  Oona looked down at the twisted rope of interconnecting symbolism she had uncovered near the growth she had come to associate with Naafa’s appearances. “Should I consider cutting these cables?” she asked.

  “It is an interesting thought,” the Myconet said, “but it would achieve nothing. The connection you see here is just a metaphor, as I have explained many times. It is repeated in every one of our sisters’ Dreamscapes, as I have said of my own extended presence – each according to their own logics. Had you severed the connection in the beginning, when the bodies were all beginning their growth and all interdependent … it may have caused some disruption. But it is a symbol. Perhaps not even severing the connection in every dream simultaneously would have an effect.”

  “You’re present in each of our sisters’ dreams, aren’t you?” Oona asked idly. “The other sides of these gateways, for example – as well as your extrusions throughout the greater Dreamscape.”

  “I am present in many dreams,” the Myconet agreed placidly. “Nobody worries too much about a mushroom,” she waited.

  “Have you ever tried to sever all of the connections?”

  “I have tried many things.”

  Even as young as she was, Oona had come to recognise a conversational dead end when she heard one. Nevertheless, she had to persist. “But you don’t know if this would work.”

  “Every combination is different.”

  She changed tack. “You could … you might affect the final stages of my flesh’s growth, now that we are in the last stretch of gestation. Increase my strength, my speed.”

  “I could,” the Myconet said, not sounding particularly upset or outraged at the idea. “It is a clever thing to ask of me, although it might have been cleverer to ask it of me earlier in the development of our flesh.”

  “You won’t do it.”

  “No.”

  Oona sensed that the Myconet expected more of her. “Because if you did it for me, you would have to justify not doing it for others,” she said. “And every one of our kind would begin doing it, and the flesh species would destroy itself.”

  The Myconet gave an approving sway of her tendrils.

  There were always more of the old, the Myconet said, in a litter with a newborn. For the balance. The seven old ones of Oona’s litter – Casaxis, Thunder of Chasms, Fallen Worlds, Memory-of-Ages, Mother-of-Angels, Roar and the Myconet – was a fairly standard number. The Wicked Sisters, who had been newborn oona’aki’Drednanth some twenty million years ago, were somewhere in the grey area between ‘contemporary’ and ‘ancient’, but were considered closer to the level of the younger Drednanth in terms of experiences of the flesh, owing to their millions of years of exile.

  “Many of us have no great interest in the world of flesh,” the Myconet explained of her fellow ancients. “We are here simply to guide you, to ensure that the attacks you face are sufficient but not impossible to endure, and to help ready you for the trials you will face in both spheres.”

  “You said there were hundreds of your age who took part in training newborns,” Oona said. “Such that you are able to join a litter with Casaxis and Roar and the rest, without overlapping with any Drednanth you had helped when they were oona’aki’Drednanth.”

  “This is true.”

  “Do ancients such as yourselves ever lose interest and stop training oona’aki’Drednanth?”

  “Yes,” the Myconet said. “It is one reason there are hundreds of us, and not hundreds of thousands. Sometimes, we regain interest. Sometimes we do not.”

  “What would happen if you all lost interest?” Oona said. “Or your numbers dwindled so much that you had to coexist in litters of those you had mentored?”

  “It will be an interesting time,” the Myconet said in amusement. “Of course, oona’aki’Drednanth are quite capable of developing and surviving entirely unaided. Their confusion would be great, and they would be at great risk from their elder litter-mates … but there have been entire litters of oona’aki’Drednanth born at times of need. They fight just as instinct drives them, and the survivors grow to join the Dreamscape on their own terms. It is more difficult, and the process is longer, but it has been done. Fallen Worlds was born of such a litter.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes. Before the Burning Alliance, the aki’Drednanth who were Fallen Worlds’s progenitors sustained physical damage due to the radiation of the rogue sun. The litter that had just sparked … suffered a disruption to its connection, much as you were asking me about earlier. The Drednanth at work preparing for a new stint in the flesh were forced to return to the Dreamscape. The flesh continued to grow as nature dictated. The entire litter was born oona’aki’Drednanth, and Fallen Worlds was the only pup to survive to full viability.”

  Oona thought about this for a long time.

  “I’m glad you’re here to show me the way,” she said.

  The Myconet swayed her fronds again.

  “As am I,” she said.

  VI

  The Myconet accompanied Oona into her Dreamscape, but not until Oona invited her. Oona had not possessed a growth in the Myconet’s dream, because the Myconet had told her it was a matter of propriety, and constituted a lazy shortcut at best, a risk of dangerous dependence at worst. As the Myconet herself said, “I cannot provide you with a door to a place you must build yourself.”

  As such, it had been up to Oona to move away into the wider Dreamscape in her own small, careful, quick-to-retreat manner, and begin to bring form to her own personal self-sphere.

  Only then did she return to the shade of the Myconet’s great bole, and declare that she was ready. And only then did the Myconet cause a new, twelfth growth to curl up from the furry ground. Oona’s gateway was smaller than the others, and smoother – a sapling among trees. She stepped through it and admired its corresponding growth in her own dream, but had not found the transition functionally any different to the symbolically-unaided jumps she had made previously.

  When the ancient arrived, she welled up from the ground near Oona’s gateway like a bubble – like the strange underform of Casaxis in miniature – then extended upwards with an audible plop. The bulb rose to about half the height of the gateway she’d created, stretching into the air about chest-high to Oona where she stood on the splayed fingers of her rear four limbs, and waved slightly on a smooth, arm-thick trunk.

  “Well,” the Myconet said, extruding a pair of delicate whiskers from beneath her hood. “This is familiar.”

  Oona looked around, realising for the first time how similar to the Myconet’s own Dreamscape her surroundings were. A featureless undulating plain in pastel purples and greens, under a sky of pale yellow … all it really lacked was the growths of the other pups. In fact, Oona reflected in dismay as she looked at the little mushroom and the growth beside her, it even had a Myconet of its own already.

  “I’ve never been anywhere but your Dreamscape,” she said defensively, “and my own mind did not exist before–”

  “You misunderstand me,” the Myconet said. “To make such a close copy of my dream shows considerable sensitivity, observation and skill. These are gifts that will make you a great hunter in the flesh. Most newborns’ dreams are formless, not far separated from the chaos of Níf, or the blankness of the region the mortals call the grey. In fact…”

  The Myconet stopped. Oona, thinking of the way she was presenting her Dreamscape form to her other sisters, had already begun to concentrate. Her slender grey
feet lifted off the ground, or perhaps the ground withdrew from beneath her, and land and sky alike faded into pink-streaked grey void.

  “Perhaps our sisters can visit us here,” she said, swivelling to address the Myconet. The ancient mind had also drawn out of the ground, and now hung suspended in the air with a pale bulb glistening where she’d been buried previously. From the bulb, her trunk extended and at the top of this her dome and tendrils extended. Next to them, Oona’s little gateway-growth also floated like a twisted wreath of fungal vines.

  “Excellent,” the Myconet said.

  “Will the others come here?” Oona asked, shifting herself from developed-grey to undeveloped-pink form, and back again. She looked at the gateway the Myconet had crafted, imagining its counterpart standing amidst the others on the Myconet’s plain.

  “Not uninvited,” the Myconet said. “And at your … stunted … level of perceived maturation, I would consider you unlikely to invite them until just before our assumption of the physical world,” the little mushroom swayed, in the air and then in the ground, as Oona practiced altering the dream around them. “I would suggest,” the Myconet continued thoughtfully, “that just before the parting of our litter and the emergence of our flesh forms, you invite your litter-mates to witness your Dreamscape. It would be something they might expect me to push, as it is an important step in establishing independence and strength. It would be a mistake, of course, in their estimation – you are clearly not ready – but they would expect me to encourage you to try.”

  “Very well,” Oona said. They floated, and stood, and floated again, in thoughtful silence for a time. She looked at the mushroom. The mushroom, if only symbolically, looked back. “You’re not as big here as you are in your own dream,” she remarked.

  “No. Just as not all of my dream self can extend into the flesh I have crafted, neither can all of my dream self extrude into your Dreamscape,” the Myconet explained. “This piece is a small part of me – a sample, some portion of my personality and memory and knowledge and experience. It may even continue to exist independently, in a sense – but only as an extension of me, or as a parasite inside your Dreamscape.”

  “A parasite?”

  “My extension – this growth you see – is using a small amount of your flesh’s brain capacity to sustain herself,” the Myconet said. “Don’t worry – your own mind fills only a tiny part of your brain’s crystal lattice at this early stage in your existence, and my extension a smaller part still. And of course, both of our expressions in this dream take up only the tiniest space within the Great Ice.”

  There was another reflective silence after this.

  “I am nervous about the emergence of my flesh into the physical world,” Oona said eventually.

  “This is not surprising. A lot of your exploits here have been preparation for it,” the Myconet allowed. “It seems like a great shift, but it is not so overwhelming. No different from the step between your dream and my own. Even less than that, as you do not even inhabit the flesh with your full mind. There is always that conduit connecting you to the Great Ice.”

  “Unless the conduit is closed,” Oona said. They had discussed this, occasionally. Aki’Drednanth could be temporarily disconnected from the greater Drednanth whole by several means. In the Six Species, the principal means was called soft-space. The grey.

  If an aki’Drednanth body moved into the grey, her mind was cut off from the Great Ice and the Dreamscape, and was required to wholly inhabit the Great Ice-in-miniature that was her physical brain. This, indeed, was where Oona’s own Dreamscape resided – somehow there, and in the Great Ice, in simultaneous reflection. Now that she no longer clung to the Myconet’s Dreamscape, she was able to form this reflection on her own. In the grey, which Oona understood to be some sort of extreme blur of movement that prevented communion between brain and Ice, the aki’Drednanth was alone – unless there happened to be another aki’Drednanth hurtling alongside her. When the body returned to normal speed, the connection was apparently restored without any lasting harm.

  “Even if the reflection between your flesh and the Great Ice is hidden from you,” the Myconet said, “you will be able to contract your mind into your brain. And should your flesh be destroyed in the grey, while you are isolated within it–”

  “–I return to normal physical space and the reflection is restored,” Oona recited dutifully, “allowing me to return to the Dreamscape.”

  “Yes,” the Myconet approved. “Have you been extending yourself into your flesh senses? Contracting completely into your brain?”

  “Yes,” Oona said, although she had done rather more of the former than the latter. The latter still felt a lot like dangling on the precipice of howling Níf and then letting go with all her hands. “There is … not much to see.”

  “No,” the Myconet replied, amused. “Just shadows and fluid. Our bodies are separated from one another by the bodies of Roar, Memory-of-Ages and Mother-of-Angels. Otherwise I would have attempted to teach you some small movements of your limbs by now.”

  “I have practiced,” Oona said. The truth was, the bodies clustered around hers in the strange red-grey soup of Nashoon’s abdomen had begun to stretch and kick and punch some time ago, and she had begun to fear some sort of attack despite the Myconet’s assurance that such things rarely happened within the womb, and even more rarely against an oona’aki’Drednanth. It was considered poor form, she’d said wryly. Nevertheless, Oona had begun to curl and protect herself from the flexing limbs of her sisters, and to move her own in tentative combinations of gestures. All the while wondering just how much skill she should be exhibiting, if she wanted to convince her litter-mates that she was deficient in this area as well.

  The Myconet twisted slowly. “And have you been practicing the cough?”

  The cough was, the Myconet had told her, perhaps the most important physical consideration immediately following emergence into the flesh sphere. She had to force the soup out of her body’s lungs and make room for the air from which the body drew important ingredients to facilitate its function. The cough would eject the suffocating sludge and permit the vital interchange to begin. Nashoon would help her, the Myconet said – would help all of them, really, as even the most seasoned flesh-driver was unable to operate at full capacity in the first minutes.

  Nashoon’s first and final act in preservation of the pups would be to sever them from the remains of her own organs that had grown to sustain them and which she would shed along with the litter. And to give each pup’s body a gentle blow to aid in the expulsion of the fluid.

  Oona had wondered if the cough was more or less important than moving her body away from the Wicked Sisters, as Isaz had instructed her to as soon as she had emerged. The Myconet had assured her that it was. Without the cough, the Myconet said, Oona’s newborn flesh would likely lack the strength to move close to her sisters in the first place.

  “I have been practicing,” she said. “It is difficult, with no … air … to replace the fluid – just more fluid.”

  “Of course, it is not possible in the womb,” the Myconet said. “It will actually be easier, you will find, in the physical sphere proper. To expel the fluid and draw in more fluid, as you have discovered, is a laborious exercise. Drawing in air is what your lungs were grown for. The practice is important. There is no cause for concern,” she concluded. “At the very worst, your body might fail or be brought down by one of our sisters. It might even be broken, inadvertently, by Nashoon as she ministers to the litter. You will return to the Dreamscape, withdrawing from your flesh as it breaks down. You will miss out on your chance at life this time, but you are already entirely ready to exist as Drednanth, and take your place in line for your next attempt.”

  Oona was curious, briefly, as to why the Myconet hadn’t previously mentioned that she was ready to exist free of her body, free of her flesh brain even if it happened to perish. She realised at almost the same moment that she hadn’t needed to be told. O
n some level, she’d known for some time already.

  “How many times have you taken flesh?” she asked instead. She couldn’t actually remember asking this question before. She may have done so earlier in her life, when concepts were more vast and primary-coloured, as part of some wider query. But now that their bodies’ emergence had grown close, communication itself seemed to be becoming more precise.

  The Myconet laughed. “Times beyond counting,” she replied. “As to how many full lifetimes of the flesh I have lived … I should say the instances number in the thousands, but not the tens of thousands.”

  “So few?” Oona was surprised. She knew that, in the reckoning of the Six Species, an aki’Drednanth body endured for around five hundred years. The Myconet, by all accounts, had been oona’aki’Drednanth over four hundred and fifty million years ago. She was one of the oldest and perhaps greatest of the Drednanth. She had learned what it was to be Drednanth – and to be aki’Drednanth – from Malasen herself, great mythical mother of the species.

  “In a normal litter of eight, only one or at best two aki’Drednanth survive infancy,” the Myconet said. “Already, the odds are against success. When you fail, you return to the Dreamscape and await a new opportunity, if that is what you decide to do. Many, of course, do not. Even with but a small percentage of Drednanth minds seeking to acquire flesh, however, the competition is great. Many are fortunate to live a full life in a hundred thousand years of waiting. And of course, most wish a life of experience and adventure,” this seemed amusing to the Myconet. “Litters outside of Damorakind slavery, or the nomadic existence upon the skin of the Great Ice itself – litters such as ours – are prized. It is not that there are fewer lessons to be learned, or that the hardships are any greater, for bodies in less exciting places … but many who compete for places in the flesh sphere consider them dull.”

  “And the decision was still made to spare a place in the litter for an oona’aki’Drednanth?”