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

  The first thing that happened, as she’d been warned, was that Nashoon’s immense shaggy head and paws descended to bite and claw away the remaining gestation peripherals from Oona’s newborn body. This was done in moments, with a slight battering but no undue harm, and the shadowy figure of the adult aki’Drednanth moved on to the next pup. Sensory information was imperfect, feeding as it was from a physical environment and into a flesh brain through a selection of flesh sensory organs, but Oona had been working on this in the limited sense it was possible in the womb.

  But there wasn’t time, as serenely unhurried as things seemed to be in the physical sphere, to watch Nashoon finish delivering the litter.

  Amused, though a little fraught, at how abruptly her casual practice had given way to urgent reality, Oona guided her physical form through the cough. This was successful – an icy glut of amniotic slush ejected from her mouth and froze in a vivid pattern on the dark grey ice – and she drew in her first lungful of air. She coughed it back out again, spat up some more slush, and breathed in a second time. Successive breaths grew easier, until by the fifth breath her body was simply doing it without needing any particular effort.

  By the time Oona’s eyesight cleared after the cough, Nashoon was already loping away in languid slow-motion, limbs and great white-haired body looming above her like the Myconet on four shaggy trunks. Oona must have been one of the last to be born, she judged. The other aki’Drednanth were already moving, and so Oona turned her attention to the next challenge.

  Moving her body by using her limbs to support her weight was an unexpected difficulty, compared to the practical weightlessness in her practice environment. But she mastered it with what she thought was acceptable speed, and heaved herself towards Isaz and the Myconet.

  Her eyes, nose, and mind began to tell her very strange and confusing things at this point, because all twelve of her squirming, slush-and-fur-clad sisters looked much the same. It was their minds that distinguished them, and nothing coming through her physical sensory organs told her anything about those. Although … her flesh brain did, in a sense, resonate with the brains around her, but it was impossible to say how much of that was the fatty ice inside her skull, and how much was the reflection of the Dreamscape.

  Still, by crudely reconciling the aki’Drednanth and the Drednanth information, she was able to easily pick out Isaz and the Myconet from the mass, and push herself across and between them.

  In the Dreamscape, she looked at the mushroom that was the Myconet’s extension.

  “You look like an aki’Drednanth pup,” she accused, tickled by the idea.

  “What did you expect me to look like?” the Myconet replied with a lash of her fronds.

  “I don’t know,” Oona said. “Something a bit older and more dignified, with a bit less amniotic frost crusted over your face. You are half a billion years old.”

  “Shiverteeth pushed my face into the ground while I was coughing,” the Myconet said, practically grumbling.

  For the first time since Nashoon’s majestic departure into the frosty distance, Oona looked around with her new eyes.

  The thirteen of them were loosely clustered in a wide, shallow indentation of hard grey ice clustered with blocks and fragments of the same and sprinkled with frost that seemed to hang in the air. Beyond the lip of the crater was a rugged landscape of grey and blue and black, split by crevasses and scattered with more chunks of dirty ice. The air was still, only the occasional slow current sending the tiny crystals to dancing, and even by aki’Drednanth standards – apparently considerably more on the sub-freezing side to that of most mortal organisms, to such an extent that their bodies would slowly fail if subjected to temperatures that the other member-races of the Six Species found tolerable – it was bitterly cold.

  It wasn’t, in fact, a landscape. Oona had learned that the expanse of misty ice was built onto the hull of an old Molran starship, and roofed with a dome to hold in the air and protect against the truly murderous cold of deep space. The starship herself was no longer capable of interstellar flight, but orbited a world called Coriel. The dome, however, was so thickly encrusted with ice and the air within was so heavy with drifting ice-dust, it was impossible to see outside and so the only ‘sky’ was the featureless grey.

  She looked down as her body was jostled, and noticed that Isaz and the Myconet were gathering up the darker-grey chunks and shards of ice that lay scattered around them. It was organic sustenance, she realised without needing to be told, and began belatedly scrabbling for pieces herself. She was just beginning to get the hang of this when the first attack began.

  They struck the Wicked Sisters first.

  Shiverteeth, Naafa and Casaxis finished Marashka, their bodies crawling determinedly over to hers and falling on her with surprising vigour and a suspicious amount of pack-hunter coordination. But although the three pups made short work of Marashka, it was Thraal who returned first – almost immediately, in fact – to the Dreamscape. Oona felt it, as she had when she was trying to pick Isaz and the Myconet out of the crowd, in that odd combination of senses and mind. She felt it as Thraal withdrew from her broken flesh and resumed existence as pure Drednanth.

  Isaz, Thunder of Chasms, Fallen Worlds, the Myconet, Oona, Memory-of-Ages and Mother-of-Angels looked on, lying or crouching quite still, while the Wicked Sisters were brutally dispatched. Even as Marashka’s flesh twitched her last and she returned to the Dreamscape, Shiverteeth, Naafa and Casaxis also turned to look at the other fight, which had already been over for some time.

  The fuzzy, hunched form of Roar was crouched tense and unmoving over the limp figure of Thraal, as if still holding her down against the ice. Unnecessary, as her body had failed moments after the attack had begun. Then Roar lifted her head, turned to face the rest of the litter, and gave a high, mewing but nevertheless defiant cry. Oona felt jarring shock run through her, and felt it echoed to varying degrees throughout the litter, as she saw the dark grey stains covering Roar’s wide mouth, and the sharp, gleaming little needles poking up through her gums.

  Roar had been born with teeth.

  VIII

  They were alone. Their ‘father’ and ‘mother’ – absurd and meaningless concepts to the Drednanth but something the mortal organics apparently tended to consider very important – were gone, the former shortly after conception and the latter shortly after birth. They were irrelevant, the Myconet said, to the litter as a whole.

  “With the technical exception of you, of course,” she added, “since you are the only one who inherited physical genes from either one.”

  “Your flesh is not a product of their mating?” Oona asked, focussing her body’s eyes on the absurdly fuzzy little shape beside her. They were crouched in the nest along with a cluster of others, and they were eating steadily. The ice, or the frozen nutrient layers inside it, was not a particularly pleasant thing to push through her physical form’s digestive system, but it strengthened her.

  And there wasn’t enough of the stuff for all of them. Sooner or later, they would begin running out and then the weaker bodies would waste away while the ones strong enough to either forage or steal would survive.

  “No, not exactly,” the Myconet replied, as her body licked and chewed with her tough grey gums. Not as hungrily or desperately as Oona or most of the other aki’Drednanth, she noticed … perhaps she was already relinquishing her place in the flesh sphere. “A mere cell from each parent was required to quicken the growth of our flesh inside Nashoon’s womb, and after that we extended from the Dreamscape. We used Nashoon’s mind as a conduit even as we used her flesh as an incubator, and we altered the forms growing inside her one tiny fragment at a time, customising them for our minds and from our own ancient physical schematics.”

  “And in Roar’s case, developing teeth well in advance of her juvenile growth phase,” Oona added critically.

  “Yes,” the Myconet replied. “Not a great transgression – not ultimately affecting the genetic wh
ole – but a critical one for the fight. A minute shift in hormones and balances. It may lead to problems for her body in the long run, and will certainly make her a target in the short, for she is a greater threat. And it is generally not approved by the Drednanth, as it represents the beginning of competitive enhancements that can threaten our consistency.”

  “She probably isn’t the only one who changed herself in some minor way,” Oona said.

  “Almost certainly not.”

  There didn’t seem to be much she could do about her cheating sisters, and she had to admit she was guilty of her own little deceptions, so Oona returned to her earlier train of thought. “I take it using Nashoon’s mind as a conduit is not as great a demand on her brain as storing yourselves in there would be,” she said.

  “Not even slightly,” the Myconet agreed. “But this is why her departure into the grey would have disturbed our early progress. Ours, but not yours.”

  “Not mine?”

  “No. Your mind, as oona’aki’Drednanth, was the only one not to use Nashoon as a conduit to the flesh sphere. Your mind, and brain, and body, all grew simultaneously from those two cells, as nature and random chance dictated, and you found your own way to the Dreamscape. It is a dichotomy, is it not?” she concluded, raising her body’s face from the shard of grey ice she was licking desultorily and looking into the eyes of Oona’s body.

  It was, Oona realised, the first time she’d ever met the Myconet’s gaze. The vast fungus in the Dreamscape had no corresponding anatomy. She looked at the aki’Drednanth’s eyes, but couldn’t get much of a sense of the hundreds of millions of years echoing behind the glittering crystalline orbs.

  “I was dependent on their flesh for the growth of my body, and my brain, and ultimately my mind,” she said, “but I was the only one of the litter who was truly independent of Nashoon’s presence, when it came to establishing the reflection between Dreamscape and the physical sphere.”

  “Yes,” said the Myconet.

  All of this, like the rest of their communication, was still taking place in the Dreamscape as an exchange of concepts and knowledge beyond the sounds created and interpreted by flesh. Her body was capable of creating words and the aki’Drednanth had a flesh language of sorts, but it was crude – and her immature pup’s palate was, at the moment, incapable of reproducing it. She wasn’t sure why they even bothered to develop physical language, especially since the mortals had devised their own ways of interpreting aki’Drednanth communication.

  It wasn’t a matter of Oona being familiar with the intricacies of biological genetics, either. It was context and ideas, backgrounds that her mind was still slowly unpacking as she explored the worlds of the flesh and the dream. But when it came to the other pups … well, they’d all grown in the same womb, and were all now roughly similar-looking pups. She’d thought, in her own simple primary-coloured way, that they were all sisters, were all related, had all sprung from the same pair of progenitors. Only now did she begin to realise the extent of this misconception. The pups around her, for all their similarities, were as different as the ancient minds of which they were extensions. Puppets, avatars, shells …

  “You are the only trueborn daughter of Nashoon and Arberus in this litter,” the Myconet was saying, “and even that does not really mean anything, as our genes are intentionally standardised to allow reproductive viability across huge gulfs of time and drift. Which is why we all look like aki’Drednanth pups,” she concluded dryly.

  “At least the matter of which your body and mine are made come from the same source,” Oona said.

  “All matter has the same source,” the Myconet said in amusement, her body setting down the grey ice practically untouched. “It was all forged among the stars, and coalesced into this ice, this Worldship, the aki’Drednanth who hosted us and sparked the birth of our litter,” in the physical sphere, the little furry pup heaved a glacially-slow huff of amusement. “When I was oona’aki’Drednanth, I imagine most of the matter of which we are now formed was still blazing in the heart of a sun that has long since shone its last.”

  “That wasn’t what I meant,” Oona grumbled.

  “Wasn’t it?” the Myconet replied placidly.

  Roar had pulled herself away from the litter shortly after her shocking butchering of Thraal, her small body gaining in strength and mobility all the time just as the rest of them were. She’d vanished into the freezing mist of ice crystals surrounding the nest, striking out on her own as much to show her independence as to acknowledge the threat posed to her by the other pups.

  Fallen Worlds and Casaxis had followed her, whether to likewise attempt to survive away from the litter or to pursue and kill Roar, Oona wasn’t sure. Communication among the pups was increasing –not to mention increasingly including Oona – but aside from her conversations with the Myconet it was stilted, matter-of-fact. The truth was, they were now all in competition with one another, and communication and cooperation were anathema.

  “You’re giving up already,” Oona said after a while. “Aren’t you?”

  The Myconet sighed, a gesture reflected in dream and flesh alike. “I cannot take aki’Drednanth form,” she said. “Not any longer. Not properly, and not viably. Certainly not permanently. I have too much life to fit into a single body. Too many years to fit into a single brain. Too much of me is sedentary now.”

  Oona thought of the great cold fungal complex spread through the Myconet’s Dreamscape. Well, that didn’t really mean anything because that entire world was hers, was her. But even so, most Drednanth restricted themselves to relatively small figures within their dreams. Symbolism. It was only when you grew too large, had too much mind to conceptually hold it within even a dream form, that you became like the subterranean surges of Casaxis, like the swirling thunderheads that made up Memory-of-Ages and Mother-of-Angels, like the immensity that was the Myconet. But Oona thought of the great network the Myconet had sent through the Dreamscape proper. Her extensions into the Dreamscapes of other Drednanth.

  “The aki’Drednanth by my side is not you,” Oona said, simultaneously placing a slow-drifting flesh paw on top of the Myconet’s shoulder, and a slim grey dream-hand on the Myconet’s upper swell. “The Drednanth by my side is not you either. You – the real you – is too deep down.”

  “After a while, as I told you, only a certain amount of one’s personality can be extruded into the flesh, to gather new experience,” the Myconet agreed. “The rest is dependent on the Dreamscape. It is enjoyable for the experience – I have not been born on a Molran Worldship in over two thousand years, and never on this one – but it becomes uncomfortable. Travel through the grey is unpleasant. Even looking out through the flesh is unpleasant. It becomes less a pinhole, and more a smothering of all but a pinhole-sized fragment of all senses. And the older you get…”

  “You don’t want to survive to the next stage,” Oona said, deliberately taking the shard of grey food-ice from in front of the Myconet and putting it in her own body’s mouth. “But you won’t help me by letting your body get strong, taking the others’ food, and helping me to kill them.”

  “No,” the Myconet said, although she seemed pleased at this accusing line of thought. “It is not our way. But sooner or later, the others will realise you are not the weakling you were pretending to be before our bodies were born. It’s a dangerous situation. The weaker you pretend to be, the more at risk you are. They will kill a weakling, whether or not she can stand on her own in the Dreamscape or fall into Níf. It is the best course, to weed out an oona’aki’Drednanth incapable of standing on her own as one of our kind.”

  “But they would also kill an oona’aki’Drednanth skilled enough to pretend the way I have been,” she said, “wouldn’t they?”

  “Even faster than they would kill one who failed to achieve full Dreamscape realisation,” the Myconet agreed, her huddled little flesh form giving another slow huff of amusement. “One with such a devious mind and precocious ability would not on
ly be deemed worthy of facing true competition and combat, she would also be a greater threat to their own flesh lives, and so worth targeting more directly. The difficult part, for them, will be killing an oona’aki’Drednanth with that level of skill.”

  Oona glared at the Myconet. In both spheres, she returned the look with a blandness only an aki’Drednanth pup and chest-high mushroom could muster.

  “Have you ever extruded into two bodies at once – taken two separate aki’Drednanth forms, I mean, rather than these smaller extensions of yourself?” Oona asked, picking up another piece of her own ice. Even with Roar, Fallen Worlds and Casaxis gone, the supply in the nest was dwindling rapidly. The pups had all started eating with unthinking mechanical ravenousness as soon as they were mobile, and Oona had done the same on the assumption that the others knew what they were doing. Each of them had secured a fraction of the available ice, and there was nothing left in the spaces between the pups.

  Sooner or later, Oona knew, the pups would need to sleep. Newborn flesh did a lot of two things, from what she’d learned during the gestation – eating and sleeping. One to take in nutrients, the other to help disperse them around the body. When the first pup surrendered to physical fatigue, the others would begin trying to take her food. Oona intended to eat all of hers, if she could manage it before her body collapsed. She’d never fallen asleep before, so she wasn’t sure what it felt like.

  “Taking on a flesh form is not like establishing a parasitic presence in another’s dream,” the Myconet said. “Each of those extensions have a connective web, they are part of the Dreamscape – a part of me, and a part of the Drednanth I am connected to, and a part of the Drednanth entirety. Should the Drednanth I have connected to take a body, and should that body enter the grey, my connection remains on the Dreamscape side. We reconnect when the host returns to the physical sphere. Or we don’t,” she added, fatalistically. “It depends on the age of the Drednanth I am connected to. Some of them, I remain connected to their Dreamscape selves, which cannot go whole into their brains when they enter the grey. I wait with the blind and disoriented whole while the avatar is severed. Others – like you – can and should pour your entire minds into your brains when you enter the grey, leaving only an echo in the Great Ice. Only this mushroom would remain with you, a severed fragment of me occupying a tiny slice of your brain lattice.”