And so she takes an action that she shouldn’t. Strictly speaking her relationship with the crew and their wider species is one of partnership, and the Portiids are not good with hard boundaries anyway, running their lives on social opprobrium rather than rigid legalities. But all the same, Kern is damned sure this particular violation is not something anyone is going to approve of. She connects to Meshner via his still-open implant and walks into his brain.
It is of course an utter nonsense to say that a Human or Portiid (or any living thing) only uses some small percentage of its brain capacity. Evolution is not known for laying in stores for some notional future. Meshner, however, might be the exception. Not in being simple; he is not. However, he has augmented his brain with a lot of extra processing power in his quest for Portiid Understandings, and if he’s not currently accessing it then he surely won’t begrudge Kern the chance to paddle in his pool? She expands her logic structures into the spaces of his implant and spreads out, trying to feel.
Seven seconds later—a long time, relatively—Kern realizes she has gotten carried away, because this is emotional space. Meshner has his implant specifically configured to translate sensory and experiential data, and that carries with it a burden of emotional meaning, Human and Portiid both. Kern opens herself to her emotions, organs that perished along with the rest of her long ago. In their absence she lets a facsimile of Meshner feel for her, creating a scenario that might generate a comparable response from him. Meshner has already solved the problem of translating the messy, chemical business of emotions into electronic qualia, and he never even realized the breakthrough he had made.
In the process she also finds several roadblocks that have been stymying his attempt to stream Portiid experience into a Human mind and, absently, patches them up. Kern has been working with the spiders for longer than Meshner’s entire species, after all.
The experience of shock, hope, awe and dread exceeds her expectations. Meshner’s emotions are an addictive brew even though his crewmates would probably say he was inward and distant. More usage alarms go off, and then some external ones. Kern overrides herself and disengages, clearing out of Meshner’s implant like a burglar hearing police sirens.
Now, what is the disaster? Ships? Still where they were. Ambassadors? A spike of alarm from Portia at some rubbery octopoid groping but otherwise unharmed. The Lightfoot? Currently seeing the second emergency treatment of Meshner Osten Oslam in recent memory.
Kern troubleshoots immediately, comparing Meshner’s (recovering) neural activity with her own experience of being in his implant. She comes to a profoundly awkward but inescapable conclusion, one she will have to discuss with Meshner, and possibly the entire crew. Currently they are blaming Meshner again, and that is not entirely fair, but Kern feels that setting the record straight while engaging in first contact diplomacy will be counterproductive.
And besides, she needs to find a way to phrase her confession so that she gets to do the forbidden thing again, because it was… She reaches into herself because she knows that she should feel something about the experience she had in Meshner’s brain, but all she finds is the unsatisfying knowledge that it was intellectually fulfilling, and that just isn’t the same.
Because her attention is now just about full with all of these things, her knee-jerk impulse to reply to the Imperial C signal is allowed to go ahead and she sends a simple Received and acknowledged.
Moments later everything goes to hell.
6.
One moment the octopus is right before her—far closer than within arm’s reach as it explores her suit curiously, the hard parts and the soft, the different materials. Helena is looking at its eye, its pupil swelling from a horizontal bar to an irregular blot as it examines her. She has no sense of eye contact from it; its attention is on her body as its own scrolls with dignified, slow pulses of colour. And I am mute, to it. Her slate is still presented, and the creature plainly notes the colour-messages she has cobbled together. Occasionally the ghostly reflection of one of her signals ripples back across the octopus’s skin. Received, but is anything being understood? And yet she feels curiously at peace, floating here in a bubble of force and water out in empty space. There is no sense of threat in the creature, for all that Portia is grumbling in her ear, the electronics-only transmission is simply conveying the spider’s general dissatisfaction with the tactile nature of their host’s advance.
And then something changes. The octopus abruptly broadcasts colours that Helena knows mean agitation and fear. It jets away from them, seeking to escape to its own ship. She feels herself lumber in the water, unwilling to simply activate her own thrusters and retreat without greater understanding. A babble of alarm comes from amongst her colleagues on the Lightfoot.
The ink clears: she sees the octopus has fallen back from its exit, dead white now, its skin raised up into barbs and devil’s horns. Beyond the transparent membrane of their bubble the universe wheels, the great ponderous baubles of the alien ships spinning—which means that they are spinning, disconnected from the umbilical. Helena flails at the water to turn herself, hunting out the Lightfoot, seeing a glimpse of it before the monolithic curved side of one of the alien vessels cuts her off from it.
Trapped, and in a bubble. Her environment, which seemed perfectly still and safe only a moment ago, now seems no more than a dream to her, that might vanish the moment some vast being awakes. “Portia—!” she starts, but the spider cuts her off.
Electromagnetic signals are fluctuating wildly.
For a moment, floating at the centre of her little aqueous universe, Helena can’t understand what she means. Some manner of weapon, lancing through the invisible walls at them from the alien ship? Then she catches up with what her own instruments are telling her. There is a particular problem with unstable electromagnetic fields, right now: electromagnetic fields are what form the outside of the bubble.
“Oh…” Helena says, because even as the revelation hits she sees cracks form on the outside of the bubble, as though it is glass. No, not cracks at all: they spread outwards from seed-points all over the membrane, beautiful, dendritic, like shimmering flowers that glitter in the light from the ships and the system’s star.
Helena hangs in the water, helpless in every possible way, and watches the outer layers of her watery sphere crystallize into ice, until all the universe is occluded, until a pale shell encloses the entire bubble, growing thicker by the moment, creaking and cracking and forming faultlines as it expands messily, spears and shards of rigid water jabbing into the interior like roots, jutting out fresh branches like trees. Like a forest, razor-sharp tines reaching and dividing and growing inwards, ever inwards. The cold comes to her through her suit, the bone-cold of freezing water leaching at her body’s precious heat.
She calls out to Portia again, feels the spider’s legs curve about her body, Portia’s underside clasping against her back in a futile attempt to conserve heat. Both their suits strain with the chill. Heaters that would have coped in the insulated cold of space are losing the battle against the conductive cold of the swirling water, and the spearheads of the ice forest grow closer and closer.
Helena feels another pressure around her legs. The lamps of her helmet show her the octopus, still as bleached as the ice itself, clinging there: one more doomed living thing seeking warmth and solace in these last few moments.
Her visor readouts tell her the exact moment when her suit heater gives out, ahead of schedule, shoddy workmanship, do better next time.
She had not known how much work it was doing to keep the cold from her. Even as some scientific part of her mind complains, It can’t be losing heat this quickly, they must be doing something to us, it’s not natural—the cold rushes in and clasps her so tight she can’t breathe. She feels Portia shudder at her back, legs clutching tighter—and then not even that, as she loses track of her own body, numbed into insensibility. Her heart slows.
The light goes out.
7.
>
The switch from calm to chaos is without warning. Helena and Portia’s readouts are replaced by warnings that the alien ships are lumbering into motion, weapons systems lighting up across their curved hulls. The Lightfoot is already pulling away—not that a little distance will make any odds—and readying its defensive measures. One screen reads out their available mass capable of being used as anti-missile chaff or to absorb laser energy, which has dwindled alarmingly since their first engagement. Meshner, himself in no position to contribute to the effort, hopes that at least the Voyager is watching somehow. Someone should learn something from this mess.
The aliens—the octopuses or whatever they are—seem infinitely mercurial. After his own shutdown he is entirely prepared to accept that he might have missed some nuance, but everyone seems equally taken unawares. The other side have gone from cautious diplomacy to full battle stations like a flipped coin.
“Is there another ship coming in?” he croaks. “They were fighting each other.”
“No other vessel, Meshner,” Kern says in his ear, sounding weirdly solicitous.
Fabian stamps out a new message that Artifabian translates as “The bubble’s lost its field.”
For a moment Meshner can’t work out what that means; then his stomach plunges. If asked, he would say his relationship with Helena and Portia is about as distant as you could reasonably get on a small ship, but in that moment he discovers that the prospect of losing more comrades is too much. He lurches over to a console, calling up information, already halfway through plotting some mad rescue attempt, scooping the pair of them from the rapidly expanding ice-grit of their habitat. Except the ice is only expanding the regular way, not dispersing. The smooth, perfectly round surface of the bubble is now a jagged tectonic chaos, as plates of freezing water shoulder against each other, rupturing into miniature mountain chains, cracking and shattering, spitting retorts of crystals and water vapour into the void. Yet the whole remains miraculously intact. Two of the alien ships have drifted into a stately opposing orbit around the smaller sphere—or around each other, with the iceball caught between them—denying the Lightfoot any chance to get at it. The third vessel is executing a very slow manoeuvre, clearing its colleagues to have an unimpeded view of them.
“Plenty of signals, for what it’s worth,” Zaine says. The vessels are all showing jagged red images against white backgrounds, veined with black and funereal purple. Nobody has any doubt about their emotional content.
Viola’s next utterance goes untranslated—Kern is focused on a lot of things right then. Meshner guesses she is stating the obvious, though: the weapons are all live but the aliens are not attacking or even launching fighters. Instead they have somehow secured the iceball between the two ships—no visible tethers but the electromagnetic sensors are giving utterly conflicting readings—and the entire assemblage is starting to accelerate away at a snail’s pace in the general direction of the nearest planet, the water world.
Meshner turns every instrument on the iceball, pillaging it for information. Are they still alive? No clear answer. He would have said they’d been crushed by the ice, except that the aliens are plainly keen to keep their prize, and he guesses not just as a trophy of their triumph over the invaders.
“Missiles launched,” Kern says calmly. “I’m taking countermeasures. Ensure you’re strapped in. Meshner, you in particular.”
He frowns at that, because Kern has never been the mothering type before, but she is right to be cautious. To his further annoyance, Fabian insists on helping secure him. When he tries to do without the help, his hands shake so much he can’t use them.
“I think I’ve fucked my brain,” he blurts out.
The two ships and their frozen cargo are properly underway now, their companion putting itself ponderously between their escape and the Lightfoot. A handful of missiles have been taken off by Kern’s webwork chaff but the vessel hasn’t launched its complement of small craft or undertaken a full attack. The initial panic seems to be calming—the signals are still reds and whites, but other hues have crept in.
“They’re telling us something,” Zaine reports. “It’s like—I don’t know, could they be having a succession of mutinies? It’s like different people keep getting control of the helm over there.”
“Telling us something we can’t understand,” Meshner complains. “What’s the point?”
“I have Helena’s work on translation,” Kern says, sounding abruptly far less like a human being because nothing in her tone admits Helena is gone. “I will do what I can and I invite other perspectives. However, the undertone of technical data indicates-s-s-s…” And she trails off, turning over the word end while she tries to calculate what she means.
“They’re getting further away!” Viola’s words, via Artifabian, match the agitation of her shuffling legs.
“We are being warned off,” Zaine decides. “And if we decide to go after them, they can make short work of us. We have very little of ourselves left to spend.” A beat. “I’m sorry, I am. I don’t want to abandon them if there’s any chance but… you’re all looking at the same numbers I am.”
“Their technical data includes coordinates for the next planet in,” Kern says, merely a flat delivery of information.
“How is that relevant?” from Viola.
Meshner watches the map on his screen, seeing the distances increase, the iceball and its escorts now clipping along and still accelerating. I’m sorry, Helena. Sorry, Portia.
“There was a signal,” Kern says, still with her poker face, and now the lack of affect becomes suspicious. Meshner feels his implant twinge again, and grips his harness in case another attack is on its way.
“Fabian,” he says, “my… head’s open. I think…”
Fabian flicks his palps, a common enough movement that Meshner knows means, Yes, but not now.
“Tell us about this signal,” says Viola.
“There was a signal,” Kern repeats. “It was in an antique format, one familiar to me from when I was human. It was not like the signals of these creatures. It came from the inner planet.” The screens run with data to supplement her words, including a capture of the signal itself, or part of it. There is no beginning, no end, just a ragged-edged chunk of transmission in Imperial C that reads…
Meshner squints. He can translate that ancient language easily enough, but what is he reading? There are visual files as well, he sees, but the base transmission is a fragment of…
“A natural history?” he wonders. “Or… a fiction, is it? This is all…” He looks over details of biochemistry, ecology, descriptions of impossible animals, or plants, or things that are neither or both. “Why would anyone…?”
“What is this? How is it relevant?” Viola demands.
“The change in attitude of the locals came immediately after I acknowledged receipt of the signal,” Kern tells her. “I believe it was that contact that convinced them we were hostile. I propose that they associate humans with threat because of some pre-existing situation here in this system. They are now sending us threats or warnings which are associated with that inner planet.”
“You think there are humans there?” Zaine asks incredulously.
“Humans who are sending out… this?” adds Meshner, still wading through it. “This is…?” Incredible. Or else nonsense.
“I believe that we are receiving a signal from something akin to myself,” Kern announces, and Meshner wonders if the slightly nervous tone was his imagination. “I do not believe this is direct human contact, but it seems to me that there could be a hybrid human system surviving here, just as I survived. Perhaps it has acted in a hostile manner towards these other locals prior to this. They appear frightened of it. But perhaps it will speak to us. Perhaps it will aid us in recovering our crew… if they are still alive.”
Why should it? But Meshner doesn’t voice the words. Kern is a thing, an operating system, and yet at that moment he is sure he can sense a yearning in her, almost as i
f it is his own. To find something that is like you, after ten thousand years of being unique. He always felt Kern rather valued being singular, but perhaps that was only because she had never been given another option.
“We’re short on other choices,” Viola grumbles. “But if this is a force that the water creatures are afraid of, it may give us some much-needed leverage. And they are definitely trying to get us to go away, so we may as well go and speak to this voice and see if it can hear us. Whoever it is.”
“There is a sender identity,” Kern puts in. “It claims that its name is Erma Lante.”
PAST 3
FOR WE ARE MANY
1.
Disra Senkovi had barely slept since he came face to face with his pets. Why? If he stopped to consider the situation scientifically, he could scrub the query clean of anthropomorphism and turn it into any glitch or neutral meaning he wanted. Scientific thought had always sought to avoid imparting human meaning to animal expression, a practice Senkovi felt had been convenient when the subject of what to test the cosmetics on came up. He could have taken up the mantle of Skinner and decided that there was no mind behind the slot-pupilled eye Paul had turned on him. The urge to do just that was surprisingly strong, for a man who had always felt octopi had such a wise world within their bodies. Coming face to face with the alien, even the aliens of Earth, was a faith-shaking experience.
But he had overcome. He had decided that there was a line of direct communication, even if it was only in the broadest generalities. He could not know if Paul had just been complaining about the tasks or demanding a purpose of his creator. So he would answer all the questions at once by providing Paul and the others with a full and frank disclosure of what was going on.
Not Earth, not humanity, not Senkovi’s past or the intent of the original mission, but Damascus, the blue planet. Damascus, where a number of Paul’s relatives were already living, drifting through the habitable currents of the sea and occasionally descending on terraforming equipment to modify it, hopefully to Senkovi’s plans.
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