Neal Asher - The Gabble

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The Gabble by Neal Asher

The curious creature that Neal Asher first introduced to Asimov's in "Softly Spoke the

Gabbleduck" (August 2005) reappears along with a new mystery in his latest story for us.

Inspiration for the gabble stemmed from some ideas first arising in his novel The Line of

Polity, then touched on in Brass Man, and now being pursued in his current book project,

Polity Agent. Neal's latest, non-gabble novel, The Voyage of the Sable Keech is just out from

Tor. Another book, The Engineer ReConditioned is due out from Cosmos Books. Drop by his

website freespace.virgin.net/n.asher for more information.

* * * *

The shimmer-shield visor was the most advanced Jonas had been able to acquire. It only

occasionally caught the light as if to let him know it was still there, it allowed a breath of the

native air through to his face as he guided this clunky aerofan over the landscape--the breather

unit only adding the extra 10 percent oxygen he required--and he could actually experience

the damp mephitic smell of the swampland below. This would be the closest he could get to

this world, Masada, without some direct augmentation.

Jonas looked around. The sky was a light aubergine, the nebula a static explosion across it

fading now with the rise of the sun, ahead of which the gas giant Calypse was in ascent: an

opalescent orb of red, gold, and green. Below him a flat plain of flute grasses was broken by

muddy gullies like a cracked pastry crust over some black pie. From up here the grasses

looked little different from tall reeds reaching the end of their season. The reason for their

name only became evident when Jonas spotted the monitor transport and brought his aerofan

down to land beside it. The grasses tilted away from the blast of the fan, skirling an unearthly

chorus. The hollow stems were holed down their length where their side branches had

dropped away earlier in the season. Thus each one played its own tune.

Settling on a rhizome mat, the fan spattered mud all around as it wound down to a stop. Jonas

waited for that to finish before opening the safety gate and stepping down. The mat was firm

under his feet--this might as well have been solid ground. He looked across. Three individuals

stood in a trampled clearing, whilst a third squatted beside something on the ground. Jonas

walked over, raising a hand when he recognized Monitor Mary Cole turning to glance toward

him. She spoke a few quiet words to her companions, then wandered over.

"Jonas." She smiled. He rather liked her smile: there was no pretension in it, no authoritarian

air behind it. She was an ECS monitor here to do a job, so she knew the extent and limitations

of her power, and felt no need to belittle others. "This is not what I would call the most

auspicious start to your studies here, but I knew you would be interested."

"What's this all about, Mary? I just got a message via aug to come and meet you at these

coordinates to see something of interest to me."

She shrugged as they turned to walk toward the clearing. "That was from B'Tana. He likes

rubbing people's noses in the rougher side of our job whenever the opportunity presents." She

glanced at him. "Are you squeamish?"

"I've been working for Taxonomy as a field biologist for fifty-three years. What have you got

here?"

"A corpse, or rather, some remains."

Jonas halted. "Should I be here, then?"

"Don't worry. This is not murder and you won't be bringing any contamination to a crime

scene. We got everything that happened here on sateye shortly after he screamed for help over

his aug."

Entering the clearing, Jonas glanced around. No doubt about what that red stuff was staining

the flattened grasses and spattering nearby upright stalks. Mary held back to talk to one of her

companions while Jonas walked forward to stand beside the man working with the remains.

There were fragments of bone scattered all about, the shredded rags of an envirosuit, one

boot. The skull lay neatly divided in half, stripped clean, sucked dry.

"May I?" Jonas asked, gesturing to the bone fragments.

The man looked up from the handheld scanner he was running over the rhizome mat. Beside

him rested a tray containing a chrome aug, a wristcom and a QC hand laser--all still bloody.

"Certainly--he's past caring."

Jonas immediately nailed the forensic investigator as a Golem android. That was the way it

was sometimes: a disparity between speech, breathing, movement, maybe even a lack of

certain pheromones in the air. It never took him long to see through human emulation

programs. He turned his attention to the fragments, squatted down, and picked one up. It was

a piece of thigh bone: as if someone had marked out a small diamond on that bone, drilled

closely along the markings with a three millimeter bit, down to the marrow, then chiseled the

piece free.

"Hooder," he said.

"Medium sized," the Golem replied.

Jonas turned to him. "Who was this?" He nodded toward the remains.

The Golem winced and glanced toward Mary Cole, then said, "A xenologist who came here to

study mud snakes. We lose between five and ten each year."

Jonas called over to Mary, "Is this what you would call an educational outing for me?"

Glancing over she said, "Jonas, you would not have been sent here if you needed that." She

nodded to her companions and they headed back toward the transport, then she came over and

gestured at the remains. "We get them all the time. They upload skills then come here

thinking they're going to brilliantly solve all the puzzles. You, as you say, have worked for

Taxonomy for fifty-three years. The maximum experiential upload is less than a year--enough

for a language or some small branch of one of the sciences."

Jonas watched the Golem stand, extend the head of his scanner on a telescopic arm, and begin

swinging like a metal detector.

"I upload," he observed.

"Yes, on top of your fifty-three years of experience."

"Granted," he said. "So you get a lot like this?"

"Certainly--there's a great deal here to study."

Jonas knew that. Prior to twenty years ago, this world had been Out-polity and ruled by a

vicious theocracy. With the help of undercover ECS agents, rebels managed a ballot of the

planetary population, the result of which was the Polity subsuming this world. But events had

been somewhat complicated. During that time, some biophysicist had come here in a stolen

Polity dreadnought and caused all sorts of mayhem. Jonas did not know the details--all he

knew was that it had taken ECS twenty years to clear up the mess, and that some areas of the

planet were still under quarantine. Also, at about the same time, one of the four spheres of a

transgalactic alien bioconstruct called Dragon had arrived and suicided on the planet's surface,

and, in the process, out of its mass, created a new race: dracomen. These creatures alone were

worthy of centuries of study. They used direct protein replication rather than some form of

DNA transcription and could mentally control their body growth and substantially alter their

offspring. Their initial shape was based on a human thought-experiment: what might

dinosaurs have been like if there had been no extinction and they had followed the

evolutionary path of humans. But, besides these, the planet boasted much weird fauna: the

tricones forever churning the soil, a multitude of herbivores, mud snakes, siluroynes,

heroynes, hooders, and the decidedly strange gabbleducks. And those were only the larger

wild creatures.

"Do you know if there are any instructions concerning his remains?" Jonas asked.

"We will know, soon enough," said the Golem. He was squatting down now, digging at the

ground with a small trowel. After a moment he stood, holding up some item about the size of

a little finger.

"Memplant?" Jonas suggested.

The Golem nodded.

Jonas turned back to Mary. "I'd like to make some recordings and measurements, and take a

few samples. That okay?"

"That's fine. And if he has no special requirements concerning his physical remains I'll have

Gryge," she gestured to the Golem, "box them up for you."

"And a copy of the sateye recording?"

"Certainly."

"Thanks."

Jonas headed back to the aerofan for his holocorder and sampling equipment. He did not

suppose he would learn anything new here, or from the recording--it would just be more

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