The Gabble and Other Stories Read online

  Praise for Neal Asher

  ‘If you want sex, violence and excellent aliens this is your book’

  SFX

  ‘As always, Asher is unparalleled at creating this unique and dangerous environment… as exhilarating as his previous books’

  Good Book Guide

  ‘Supreme storytelling confidence… a “first-tier” SF writer’

  Interzone

  ‘Close to the violence of splatterpunk, and ideas, jokes and puns splatter his pages’

  Guardian

  ‘Neal Asher is becoming a big name in sci-fi. His stories revel in their violence and imagination, and his central character of Ian Cormac is, it seems, here to stay in the collective consciousness of sci-fi literature … Thoroughly enjoyable stuff’

  SciFiNow

  ‘One of the best yet … destructive high Space Opera spectacle’

  Starburst

  ‘Straightforward action sci-fi. And, boy, is he good at that … I cannot recommend it highly enough’

  Daily Telegraph

  Praise for Neal Asher’s novels

  ‘Yet another storming performance from the prolific Asher of high-octane violence, exotic tech, and terrifying and truly alien aliens’

  Daily Mail

  ‘What has six arms, a large beak, looks like a pyramid, has more eyes than you’d expect and talks nonsense? If you don’t know the answer to that, then 1) you should and 2) you haven’t been reading Neal Asher (see point 1)’

  Jon Courtenay Grimwood

  ‘A powerhouse cocktail of lurid violence, evocative world-building and typically grotesque monsters, but it’s amazing how much emotion he’s also layered into what could have been a simplistic SF potboiler. Asking difficult questions while still delivering plenty of full-tilt adventure and widescreen action, this is top-notch stuff from an author well and truly at the top of his game’

  SFX

  ‘Rail-guns rattle off, pulse rifles fire out shots and explosions ring out. This is what Asher does best’

  SciFiNow

  ‘Shadow of the Scorpion skilfully combines graphic action and sensitive characterization and is Asher’s most accomplished novel to date’

  Guardian

  THE GABBLE

  and other stories

  Neal Asher was born in Billericay, Essex, and divides his time between here and Crete. His other full-length novels include Gridlinked, The Skinner, The Line of Polity, Cowl, Brass Man, The Voyage of the Sable Keech, Polity Agent, Line War, Prador Moon, Shadow of the Scorpion, Orbus, The Technician and The Departure.

  By Neal Asher

  The Technician

  The Owner

  The Departure

  Zero Point

  Agent Cormac

  Shadow of the Scorpion

  The Line of Polity

  Polity Agent

  Line War

  Spatterjay

  The Voyage of the Sable Keech

  Orbus

  Novels of the Polity

  Prador Moon

  Hilldiggers

  Short story collections

  The Gabble

  NEAL

  ASHER

  THE GABBLE

  and other stories

  NIGHT SHADE BOOKS

  An Imprint of Start Publishing LLC

  New York, New York

  THE GABBLE AND OTHER STORIES Copyright © 2008 by Neal Asher.

  First Night Shade Books edition 2013.

  First published in the United Kingdom by Tor,

  an imprint of Pan Macmillan,

  a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited.

  All Rights Reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Night Shade Books, 609 Greenwich Street, 6th Floor, New York, NY 10014.

  Published by Night Shade Books,

  an imprint of Start Publishing LLC

  New York, New York

  Please visit us on the web at

  www.start-media.com

  ISBN: 978-1-59780-522-3

  For

  Peter Lavery and his scary pencil.

  Happy retirement!

  Contents

  Acknowledgements

  1 SOFTLY SPOKE THE GABBLEDUCK

  2 PUTREFACTORS

  3 GARP AND GERONAMID

  4 THE SEA OF DEATH

  5 ALIEN ARCHAEOLOGY

  6 ACEPHALOUS DREAMS

  7 SNOW IN THE DESERT

  8 CHOUDAPT

  9 ADAPTOGENIC

  10 THE GABBLE

  Author’s Notes

  Acknowledgements

  Thanks to those who first grabbed and published these stories: Gardner Dozois, Sheila Williams, Andy Cox, David Pringle, Chris Roberson, and Paul Fraser. My best wishes to those whose work at Macmillan brings this book to the shelves: Peter Lavery, Rebecca Saunders, Emma Giacon, Steve Rawlings, Liz Cowen, Neil Lang, and many others besides. And thanks as always to my wife Caroline for not objecting too strongly to being a word-processor widow.

  1

  SOFTLY SPOKE THE GABBLEDUCK

  Lost in some perverse fantasy, Tameera lovingly inspected the displays of her Optek rifle. For me, what happened next proceeded with the unstoppable nightmare slowness of an accident. She brought the butt of the rifle up to her shoulder, took careful aim, and squeezed off a single shot. One of the sheq slammed back against a rock face then tumbled down through vegetation to land in the white water of a stream.

  Some creatures seem to attain the status of myth even though proven to be little different from other apparently prosaic species. On Earth the lion contends with the unicorn, the wise old elephant never forgets, and gentle whales sing haunting ballads in the deep. It stems from anthropomorphism, is fed by both truth and lies, and over time firmly embeds itself in human culture. On Myral, where I had spent the last ten years, only a little of such status attached to the largest autochthon – not surprising for a creature whose name is a contraction of ‘ shit-eating quadruped’. But rumours of something else in the wilderness, something that had no right to be there, had really set the myth-engines of the human mind into motion, and brought hunters to this world.

  There was no sign of any sheq on the way out over the narrow vegetation-cloaked mounts. They only put in an appearance after I finally moored my blimp to a peak, above a horizontal slab on which blister tents could be pitched. My passengers noticed straight away that the slab had been used many times before, and that my mooring was an iron ring long set into the rock, but then campsites were a rarity amid the steep slopes, cliffs and streams of this area. It wasn’t a place that humans were built for. Sheq country.

  Soon after he disembarked, Tholan went over to the edge to try out one of his disposable vidcams. The cam itself was about the size of his forefinger, and he was pointing it out over the terrain while inspecting a palm com he held in his other hand. He had unloaded a whole case of these cams, which he intended to position in likely locations, or dangle into mist pockets on a line – a hunter’s additional eyes. He called me over. Tameera and Anders followed.

  ‘There.’ He nodded downwards.

  A seven of sheq was making its way across the impossible terrain – finding handholds amid the lush vertical vegetation and travelling with the assurance of spiders on a wall. They were disconcertingly simian, about the size of a man, and quadruped – each limb jointed like a human arm but ending in hands bearing eight long prehensile fingers. Their heads, though, were anything but simian, being small, insectile, like the head of a mosquito but with two wide trumpet-like probosces.

  ‘They won’t be a problem will they
?’ Tholan’s sister, Tameera, asked.

  She was the most xenophobic, I’d decided, but then such phobia made little difference to their sport, the aliens they sought out usually being the ‘I’m gonna chew off the top of your head and suck out your brains’ variety.

  ‘No – so long as we leave them alone,’ said Tholan. Using his thumb on the side controls of his palm com, he increased the camera’s magnification, switching it to infrared then ultrasound imaging.

  ‘I didn’t load anything,’ said Anders, Tholan’s PA. ‘Are they herbivores?’

  ‘Omnivores,’ I told her. ‘They eat some of that vegetation you see and supplement their diet with rock conch and octupal.’

  ‘Rock conch and octupal indeed,’ said Anders.

  I pointed to the conch-like molluscs clinging to the wide leaves below the slab.

  Anders nodded then said, ‘Octupal?’

  ‘Like it sounds: something like an octopus, lives in pools, but can drag itself overland when required.’ I glanced at Tameera and added, ‘None of them bigger than your hand.’

  I hadn’t fathomed this trio yet. Brother and sister hunted together, relied on each other, yet seemed to hate each other. Anders, who I at first thought Tholan was screwing, really did just organise things for him. Perhaps I should have figured them out before agreeing to being hired, then Tameera would never have taken the shot she then took.

  The hot chemical smell from the rifle filled the unbreathable air. I guessed they used primitive projectile weapons of this kind to make their hunts more sporting. I didn’t know how to react. Tholan stepped forwards and pushed down the barrel of her weapon before she could kill another of the creatures.

  ‘That was stupid,’ he said.

  ‘Do they frighten you?’ she asked coquettishly.

  I reached up and checked my throat plug was still in place, for I felt breathless, but it was still bleeding oxygen into my bronchi. To say that I now had a bad feeling about all this would be an understatement.

  ‘You know that as well as putting us all in danger, she just committed a crime,’ I said conversationally, as Tholan stepped away from his sister.

  ‘Crime?’ he asked.

  ‘She just killed a C-grade sentient. If the Warden AI finds out and can prove she knew before she pulled the trigger, then she’s dead. But that’s not the main problem now.’ I eyed the sheq seven, now six. They seemed to be confused about the cause of their loss. ‘Hopefully they won’t attack, but it’ll be an idea to keep watch.’

  He stared at me, shoved his cam into his pocket. I turned away and headed back. Why had I agreed to bring these bored aristos out here to hunt for Myral’s mythic gabbleduck? Money. Those who have enough to live comfortably greatly underestimate it as a source of motivation. My fee from Tholan wasn’t enough for me to pay off all I owed on my blimp, and prevent a particular shark from dropping in for a visit to collect interest by way of involuntarily donated organs. It would also be enough for me to upgrade my apartment in the citadel, so I could rent it while I went out to look at this world. I’d had many of the available cerebral loads and knew much about Myral’s environment, but that wasn’t the same as experiencing it. Still there was much for me to learn, to know. Though I was certain that the chances of my finding a gabbleduck – a creature from a planet light-centuries away – anywhere on Myral were lower than the sole of my boot.

  ‘She only did that to get attention,’ said Anders at my shoulder.

  ‘Well, let’s hope she didn’t succeed too well,’ I replied. I looked up at my blimp, and considered the prospect of escaping this trio and bedding down for the night. Certainly we would be getting nothing more done today, what with the blue giant sun gnawing the edge of the world as it went down.

  ‘You have to excuse her. She’s overcompensating for a father who ignored her for the first twenty years of her life.’

  Anders had been coming on to me right from the start and I wondered just what sort of rich-bitch game she was playing, though to find out I would have to let my guard down, and that I had no intention of doing. She was too much: too attractive, too intelligent, and just being in her presence set things jumping around in my stomach. She would destroy me.

  ‘I don’t have to excuse her,’ I said. ‘I just have to tolerate her.’

  With that, I headed to the alloy ladder extending down from the blimp cabin.

  ‘Why are they called shit-eaters?’ she asked, falling into step beside me. Obviously she’d heard where the name sheq came from.

  ‘As well as the rock conch and octupal, they eat each other’s shit – running it through a second intestinal tract.’

  She winced.

  I added, ‘But it’s not something they should die for.’

  ‘You’re not going to report this are you?’ she asked.

  How can I – he didn’t want me carrying traceable com.’

  I tried not to let my anxiety show. Tholan didn’t want any of Myral’s AIs finding out what he was up to, so as a result he provided all our com equipment, and it was encoded. I was beginning to wonder if that might be unhealthy for me.

  ‘You’re telling me you have no communicator up there?’ She pointed up at the blimp.

  ‘I won’t report it,’ I said, then climbed, wishing I could get away with pulling the ladder up behind me, wishing I had not stuck so rigidly to the wording of the contract.

  Midark is that time when it’s utterly black on Myral, when the sun is precisely on the opposite side of the world from you. It comes after five hours of blue, lasts about three hours prior to the next five hours of blue – the twilight that is neither day nor night and is caused by reflection of sunlight from the sub-orbital dust cloud. Anyway, it was at midark that the screaming and firing woke me. By the time I had reattached my oxygen bottle and was clambering down the ladder, some floods were lighting the area and it was all over.

  ‘Yes, you warned me,’ Tholan spat.

  I walked over to Tameera’s tent, which lay ripped open and empty. There was no blood, but then the sheq would not want to damage the replacement. I glanced at Anders, who was inspecting a palm com.

  ‘She’s alive.’ She looked up. ‘She must have been using her own oxygen supply rather than the tent’s. We have to go after her now.’

  ‘Clawframes in midark?’ I asked.

  ‘We’ve got night specs.’ She looked at me as if she hadn’t realized until then how stupid I was.

  ‘I don’t care if you’ve got owl and cat genes – it’s suicide.’

  ‘Do explain,’ said Tholan nastily.

  ‘You got me out here as your guide. The plan was to set up a base and from it survey the area for any signs of the gabbleduck – by clawframe.’

  ‘Yes…’

  ‘Well, clawframes are only safe here during the day.’

  ‘I thought you were going to explain.’

  ‘I am.’ I reached out, detached one of the floods from its narrow post, and walked with it to the edge of the slab. I shone it down revealing occasional squirming movement across the cliff of vegetation below.

  ‘Octupals,’ said Anders. ‘What’s the problem?’

  I turned to her and Tholan. ‘At night they move to new pools and, being slow-moving, they’ve developed a defence. Anything big gets too close, and they eject stinging barbs. They won’t kill you, but you’ll damned well know if you’re hit, so unless you’ve brought armoured clothing…’

  ‘But what about Tameera?’ Anders asked.

  ‘Oh the sheq will protect her for a while.’

  ‘While?’ Tholan queried.

  ‘At first they’ll treat her like an infant replacement for the one she killed,’ I told him. ‘So they’ll guide her hands and catch her if she starts to fall. After a time they’ll start to get bored, because sheq babies learn very quickly. If we don’t get to her before tomorrow night’s first blue, she’ll probably have broken her neck.’

  ‘When does this stop?’ He nodded towards the octupal activity.<
br />
  ‘Mid-blue.’

  ‘We go then.’

  The clawframe is sporting development from military exoskeletons. The frame itself braces your body. A spine column rests against your back like a metal flatworm. Metal bones from this extend down your legs and along your arms. The claws are four times the size of human hands, and splayed out like big spiders from behind them, and from behind the ankles. Each finger is a piton, and programmed to seek out crevices on the rock-face you are climbing. The whole thing is stronger, faster and more sensitive than a human being. If you want, it can do all the work for you. Alternatively, it can just be set in neutral, the claws folded back, while you do all the climbing yourself – the frame only activating to save your life. Both Anders and Tholan, I noted, set theirs to about a third-assist, which is where I set mine. Blister tents and equipment in their backpacks, and oxygen bottles and catalysers at their waists, they went over the edge ahead of me. Tameera’s clawframe scrambled after them – a glittery skeleton, slaved to them. I glanced back at my blimp and wondered if I should just turn round and go back to it. I went over the edge.

  With the light intensity increasing and the octupals bubbling down in their pools we made good time. Later, though, when we had to go lower to keep on course after the sheq, things got harder. Despite the three of us being on third-assist we were panting within a few hours, as lower down there was less climbing and more pushing through tangled vegetation. I noted that my catalyser pack was having trouble keeping up – cracking the C02 atmosphere and topping up the two flat bodyform bottles at my waist.

  ‘She’s eight kilometres away,’ Anders suddenly said. ‘We’ll not reach her at this rate.’

  ‘Go two-thirds assist,’ said Tholan.

  We all did that, and soon our clawframes were moving faster through the vegetation and across the rock-faces than was humanly possible. It made me feel lazy – like I was just a sack of flesh hanging on the hard-working clawframe. But we covered those eight kilometres quickly and as the sun breached the horizon, glimpsed the sheq far ahead of us, scrambling up from the sudden shadows in the valleys. They were a seven again now, I saw: Tameera being assisted along by creatures that had snatched the killer of one of their own, mistaking her for sheq herself.