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

  “But I would still have that echo,” Oona said, “and would still reconnect with the Dreamscape proper – the Dreadnanth entirety in the Great Ice – when I re-emerged. And with that reconnection, I could reconnect with you.”

  “Yes.”

  “That is…” Oona shook her head.

  “Very complicated,” the Myconet said. “Yes. And to extend into two flesh forms, simultaneously? More complicated still, by many orders of magnitude. For me, and for all but a tiny handful of Drednanth I have ever known, it is impossible.”

  “As usual,” Oona said dryly, “the universe is old, and everything has been tried.”

  “Everything will never be tried,” the Myconet said in a mildly scolding tone. “But two bodies? It requires too much focus. It is not an establishment of a knot of knowledge and experience inside the Dreamscape – it is a whole new presence in a new sphere. One will always fail, as the other receives the focus. Or both will fail, and return the mind to the Dreamscape.”

  “But some Drednanth can do it?”

  “Of course,” the Myconet said.

  “Because there are many Drednanth and we have been doing this for a long time.”

  “I feel you’re making fun of me.”

  Oona shrugged. “If you don’t like it–”

  Then Fallen Worlds returned to the Dreamscape, her body failing abruptly. Moments later, Casaxis’s flesh also succumbed.

  Roar remained healthy, as far as they could tell, but did not come back to the nest.

  IX

  Shiverteeth forced Naafa back into the Dreamscape when the litter finally slept. Oona had managed to finish her share of the food, although the Myconet was still curled up around some chunks of the grey ice. Oona couldn’t bring herself to take more of the pieces, and was stuffed besides, her body growing sluggish. She withdrew her senses, closing them to a series of strange filaments that still connected her to the flesh but left it basically deaf and blind to most of the sensory input. Sleep, she realised immediately, came very naturally to the aki’Drednanth.

  When Naafa returned to the Dreamscape, Oona felt the shift even though her connection to the others was limited. The Myconet, far more aware of Naafa’s Drednanth form, confirmed the attack.

  “Clubbed her with a piece of ice,” she said, “the inedible foundation matter. And took her food.”

  “When will she sleep?” Oona asked. She’d pushed herself back into her body fully, but found it even more slow to respond than usual. Exhaustion was still weighing her down, and would only pass with more sleep. “She must be weary.”

  “Shiverteeth has been sleeping in short stretches,” the Myconet said, “interspersed with short periods of feeding and exercise. She augmented herself very slightly in the womb, allowing herself a slightly matured diurnal cycle and ability to filter toxins from her blood. It is not indefinitely sustainable, but it serves its purpose and gives her an edge. She will not tire and sleep before your body falls into deeper slumber.”

  Still, after Shiverteeth had made her move, for a while there was peace in the nest. Oona slept, and awoke stronger. Hunger drove her from the nest and she went out to gather grey ice. She encountered Isaz, who was also gathering and munching lazily on food she’d foraged. The pup looked at her solemnly for a moment, then politely initiated Dreamscape contact. Oona swiftly checked that her undeveloped dream and form were expressed, and allowed the looming, pale shape of Isaz to sweep into her presence.

  “You are doing well, young one,” Isaz told her, looking around at her Dreamscape with a smoke-like coil of her sensory tendril. Oona had crafted a crude landscape for the benefit of her visiting sisters to replace the underdeveloped formlessness that she’d adopted before. Her false Dreamscape was jagged grey and black not dissimilar to the ice around the nest in the physical sphere, but with occasional shifting cracks of emptiness that suggested continuing lapses in her dream’s coherence. The Myconet had been impressed at the deception, saying it was very close to the Dreamscape an underdeveloped oona’aki’Drednanth would form. This wasn’t particularly strange, of course – the setting was quite close to the first attempts at a Dreamscape Oona had made. Backgrading to it was a simple matter of putting in less effort. “I am surprised,” Isaz went on, “but I am not fooled by this. The question I am asking is how deep does your deception run?”

  Oona’s Dreamscape form was approaching the shape she had chosen for herself, but was still a little shapeless. “I did not grow teeth for myself,” she said, “or do anything else to my body to help me survive.”

  “If you had done that, as oona’aki’Drednanth,” Isaz said with a gentle wave of her fragile-looking limbs, “I would have killed you already,” she circled the small, innocent shape of the Myconet, who still looked out of place and lonely in the jagged emptiness of Oona’s Dreamscape. “And what part are you playing in this, you old monster?” she asked.

  “Interested bystander,” the Myconet replied.

  Isaz’s head gave a slow and dismissive curl. “Same as always, then.”

  “Same as always.”

  Isaz grunted laughter in both spheres, her body continuing to gather up food in the physical and her elegant dream form continuing to pace sedately in the Dreamscape. “Did she teach you how to make the rich ice?” she asked Oona.

  “No,” Oona replied. “What is rich ice?”

  Isaz didn’t reply. “These deposits will not last more than a few days,” she said with a wave of her lower left hand. “We are in an enclosure. It is large, but not very large. There is not enough food for all of us. Roar, and some of the others, will soon have their own nests carved out. The rest will perish here where they were born. Good luck, young one.”

  When Isaz was gone, from Oona’s vicinity in the physical sphere as well as her Dreamscape, Oona rounded on the Myconet. “What is rich ice?” she demanded.

  “It is not worth the effort,” the Myconet said. “Just as we build our bodies in the womb, and our brains from the icy compounds that can contain our minds, we can also extend our awareness into certain kinds of ice. A certain density, a certain temperature, a certain chemical composition–”

  “Like the Great Ice.”

  “Yes. Cometary ice, like the band that runs around and through the inner part of the galaxy … it allows us to shape it on a molecular level, and this is what allows us to create the physical-sphere storage receptacle for the Dreamscape.”

  “And that is called rich ice?”

  “No,” the Myconet said. “Our focus can also create other formations and configurations of the cometary ice, to serve other purposes. It takes a very long time. You have seen how slowly things move in the flesh sphere,” Oona nodded. “Ice crystals grow more slowly still. It can form mind-structures. Or it can form sustaining chains, nutrient lattices that strengthen our bodies.”

  “The others could grow food?” Oona said indignantly.

  “Not if they wanted to grow their own flesh at the same time,” the Myconet replied. “If they did not focus their full attention on the growth of their bodies, their bodies would fail. None of our sisters attended to making the rich ice to the detriment of their own bodies.”

  None of our sisters … “Did you make rich ice?” she asked, as her body returned laboriously to the nest indentation. The Myconet didn’t reply – and wouldn’t, Oona knew – so she changed tack. “Could another Drednanth have done it? Or aki’Drednanth? Maybe Nashoon formed some, around the nest. Around this … Worldship we’re on.”

  “Maybe,” the Myconet replied. “I doubt Nashoon would have, but perhaps some other Drednanth. Some Drednanth with an investment in the survival of certain litter members.”

  “Which litter members?”

  “Well,” the Myconet said, “whichever ones find the rich ice when the meiofungus runs out, I expect.”

  “Is that what this is?” Oona dumped her meagre haul of grey chunks into the nest alongside the Myconet’s huddled form. She was already wasting away, Oona though
t. “Meiofungus?”

  “Yes,” the Myconet said. “Nutritious, but not very nice.”

  “Does it feel strange to eat fungus?” she teased. The Myconet alternately glared up at her narrowly, and lashed her tendrils in mock anger. “Is it allowed?” Oona asked. “For other Drednanth to make food for some of the litter?”

  “No,” the Myconet replied. “It is more likely that the ice here was seeded for our litter by Drednanth without any real connection or agenda.”

  “You just said it might have been done by Drednanth with an interest in helping some of us.”

  “So it might.”

  Oona sighed. “Did you make rich ice? Somewhere?”

  The Myconet did not reply.

  X

  Later, when the meiofungus began to run out in earnest, Thunder of Chasms clubbed Memory-of-Ages’s skull in with a chunk of ice. Her body perished without a struggle, her great old mind retreating back into the Dreamscape. At the same moment, in almost perfect synchrony, Mother-of-Angels returned wholly to her Drednanth form, her body slumping and falling still. So interfolded they were, so dependent on one another, that neither could endure in the flesh alone.

  The grey ice lasted a little while longer after this, with two fewer mouths to feed, but it still ran out after Oona’s fourth extended period of unconsciousness. Oona suspected Shiverteeth, she of the smugly augmented genetic resistance to exhaustion and adult-like ability to sleep in short sprints, had snuck around while the remaining pups were sleeping and stolen a large portion of the food.

  When Roar returned to the nest while Oona was out foraging, and tore Shiverteeth’s body to pieces, Oona couldn’t muster up a lot of sympathy. Shiverteeth could wait another quarter of a million years for another chance to cheat her way through the gestation of a physical body.

  Roar was still only a pup, despite her teeth, and the fight with Shiverteeth had been savage. Slushy grey blood leaking from her snout to mingle with the gore trailing from her needle-like fangs, Roar dragged herself back out of the nest and away, carrying a few chunks of ice with her after stuffing several more into her mouth. She hadn’t, to Oona’s surprise, stayed to dispatch Thunder of Chasms, Isaz or the Myconet. All three were still breathing, albeit now officially on the way to starvation, when Oona arrived back with her meagre haul.

  It was odd that Roar hadn’t finished the Myconet’s body, at least. Isaz was still healthy and capable of foraging, not to mention defending herself, and Thunder of Chasms seemed fine, but the Myconet was fading fast. Her flesh hadn’t moved for some time, aside from a slow, compulsive scraping of her front and rear left paws against the ice where she lay. Maybe Roar had some sort of abiding respect for the ancient, although that didn’t seem likely. Oona was forced to conclude that she probably just didn’t consider the Myconet to be a threat. She was incapable of fighting, and she wasn’t using any of their resources.

  Maybe, given that level of harmlessness, Roar could afford to treat the Myconet with respect. It wasn’t as if her body wasn’t going to fail anyway.

  Roar vanished into the glittering crystal mist again, leaving the four of them – Oona, Isaz, Thunder of Chasms and the Myconet – alone and hungry.

  Oona’s foraging redoubled. Not only did competition from Isaz and Thunder of Chasms drive her farther from the nest than she would have liked, but the clear signs that Roar had established territory a small distance beyond that meant she only had a very narrow range in which to search for food. And that range was soon almost entirely depleted. Oona realised she was going to have to think beyond the immediate if she was going to stave off starvation.

  This was obviously the intent of the wider Drednanth community, of course – there was insufficient food for all of them on purpose, so they would need to fight over it. But there probably wasn’t enough food for even one or two of them to survive on without locating some alternative source, thus forcing them to be resourceful as well as aggressive.

  Oona had learned about the Six Species, and the great machines in which they flew through space and through the grey. The litter was living in one such vessel at this moment – a Worldship, the Myconet had called it. Inside a domed enclosure on the hull, protecting them from the cold and vacuum of space but otherwise not providing much support.

  But an enclosure had edges.

  Her self-satisfaction with this realisation lasted approximately half a day as reckoned by her sleep cycle, at which point she realised that an enclosure might very well have edges, but an enclosure on the hull of a Worldship could be fifty miles across, and her body didn’t have the strength or resilience to traverse more than about half a mile. Not if she wanted to have the time and energy to return to the nest to sleep. Determined to put her theory to the test, however, Oona decided she didn’t want to return to the nest – there was little point in doing so anyway – and so she struck out in what she hoped was a straight line, and hoped was on some sort of tangent to eventually leave Roar’s territory behind.

  The grey chunks of meiofungus-rich ice grew steadily scarcer, and the ridges and mounds of ice and packed frost underfoot grew steadily smoother and thinner. After sleeping once, and waking unmolested, Oona continued until she judged that she had travelled almost a mile out from the nest. Here, the landscape – if such you could call it – flattened out entirely into a hard grey surface that Oona recognised, more by guesswork and deduction than actual experience, as the native material of the Molran Worldship hull. After ranging along the edge of the ice crust to collect a final few scraps of meiofungus, she began across the featureless grey plain at an easy lope.

  She didn’t come to any further change in the landscape, and didn’t come to an edge of the enclosure, by the time she ran out of food. Apparently the ice upon which their nest, and the meiofungus, had been placed only occupied a couple of square miles in the middle of the chamber, which was evidently vast. She couldn’t make out any walls, or any ceiling in the sky above her, but visibility in the chilly atmosphere was poor. Concerned about the possibility of becoming too weak to get back to even the scant food-source that was the ice-patch, she turned and headed for home.

  She’d kept the Myconet apprised of what she was doing. The Myconet had not objected to the plan, and had even said that it was an admirable bit of analytical thinking. She didn’t seem to be any more aware of the size of the enclosure than Oona herself was, and by this stage Oona was able to search for nearby aki’Drednanth presences by their Drednanth reflections. This was useful in roughly isolating the locations of threats like Roar and Isaz, but it was still a bit vague.

  It was also enough to tell her that aside from the remaining pups, there were no other aki’Drednanth anywhere nearby. Nashoon had vanished into the grey some days previously, and the rest of the aki’Drednanth were practically indistinguishable from the Drednanth at the distances involved – nothing more than a warm scatter of minds across the Dreamscape, waiting for Oona to mature and begin proper communion with them.

  Her body had to stop and rest again before reaching the ice, and she was faint with hunger – senses narrowing into a strange and worrying tunnel through which Oona’s Dreamscape self peered and cajoled anxiously – by the time it came into sight. She was just limping wearily across the crumbled edge of the formation and beginning to cast about for scraps of meiofungus when Thunder of Chasms retracted into the Dreamscape.

  “You should return to the nest,” the Myconet said, maddeningly casual.

  XI

  She was still a considerable distance from the nest and wasn’t sure if she would be able to make it with the food store she had. Keeping a mental eye open for Roar – she seemed to be ranging on the far side of the ice sheet – she detoured a little and collected a meagre few mouthfuls of meiofungus to keep her body moving.

  Isaz did not wait for her to return, but strode into her Dreamscape with only the most casual of concessions to propriety. Oona, preoccupied and weary and famished, barely had time to roll her Dreamscape back into s
tunted-newborn before Isaz appeared. As she did so, and as the slender, elegant figure of her sister appeared, Oona wondered why she was still bothering with the deception.

  “Are you close?” Isaz asked bluntly. “You are moving at a tangent to the nest.”

  “I know,” Oona said. “I’m looking for more food.”

  “You should return to the nest,” the Myconet reiterated. “It is more important.”

  “Without food, I think I will find it difficult to return to the nest,” Oona said with just a hint of asperity.

  “Yes,” Isaz said in clear amusement, “it must require a lot of energy to maintain this facet of your Dreamscape, as well as whatever your real one looks like. Energy that your body could otherwise use to keep its strength up.”

  Oona couldn’t help but glance at the small bulb of the Myconet’s mushroom.

  “I believe,” the Myconet said, “that the time for trickery is past – at least with Isaz and myself. She has been aware of your … development … for some time.”

  Oona nodded, and let the craggy grey proto-dream fade into the soft, colourful hills of her proper Dreamscape. At the same time, she swelled and firmed and flushed grey and blue and black, taking on her fully-fledged Dreamscape form. Isaz stepped back from her, delicate arms spreading and the coiled tendril of her head lashing in surprise.

  “You are far more advanced than I suspected,” she congratulated Oona. “I was fooled. It is just as well Thunder of Chasms is already gone, she would have killed your body for sure now that you are clearly capable of surviving as Drednanth. I would suggest keeping this hidden from Roar, as long as you may.”