Her own shriek is soundless, communicated only by the spasm of her limbs. She flings the thing off and loses touch with the floor, boots detached but failing to kick off properly so that she is left with limbs flailing, turning head over heels in the centre of the room directly before the thing, which lazily reaches out an arm that ripples beneath the fabric of the suit.
Meshner panics—he wants to run forwards and grab Zaine but he can’t move his feet, fear and magnetism immobilizing him. Instead, Artifabian leaps, just like the Portiid the robot resembles, striking Zaine in the chest and sending her end over end through the air, weirdly slowly because even an artificial Portiid weighs far less than a Human.
For a moment the spacesuited wraith just undulates, rooted, but then its own boots disconnect and it drifts into the air like a discarded piece of clothing. Some part of the antique suit emits a plume of stale gas and it flies towards them with the underwater lethargy of a jellyfish on the tide.
“Go! Meshner, go!” Zaine pushes off from the wall towards the airlock, but of course there is no hurrying the doors. Their makers made them well, and their later octopus masters only reinforced them. There is no swift escape from this chamber, because it is a prison and now they are face to face with its inmate.
Still, Zaine makes a game try of it, cramming herself into the narrow chamber with its awkward, inhuman controls. The yammer of comms from the Lightfoot clogs all the channels now but Meshner has no capacity to pay attention to it.
The suit is coming for him, drifting across the chamber. The helmet is turned towards him but he sees no face in its glass window, only darkness. He can’t get his boots to disengage properly. He backs away, each step tortuously slow, a nightmare making the effortless transition to the waking world.
Artifabian leaps again, tearing into the quivering spacesuit’s leg, dragging it sharply sideways. The intention was surely to simply pin it there, away from the vulnerable Humans, but instead the friable old fabric of the suit just shears off at the knee, leaving the robot in possession of a single boot, sending the remainder of the antique spinning, its torn leg vomiting… fluid.
Ichor, comes a word into Meshner’s head, he has no idea where from. It is an oily, dark substance, lumpy as though full of half-formed sinews and tissues, clumping and oozing over itself in the centre of the room.
For a handful of heartbeats, as Zaine screams at him, it roils and re-forms, bundling itself into the semblance of a human figure. There is a face turned to them, sightless eyes staring past Meshner. Protean lips move and he is horribly certain it is saying, We’re going on an adventure.
Then it breaks apart into pieces and the pieces become other living things: spiny urchinous protrusions, quivering raw tissues, whips, spasming amoebae, radially symmetrical jellyfish shapes that claw a purchase in the stagnant air, pulsing themselves forward in sudden bursts. Zaine is yelling for him to get into the airlock with her, but Meshner is still lurching, step after magnetically-locked step like a zombie.
He feels impacts on his back, soft, barely noticeable. Something dark begins to ooze-crawl its way across his faceplate. Zaine is still yelling at him—everyone is yelling at him—but he stops moving. His limbs are locked with terror. He watches more of the stuff accumulate around the release catch of his helmet. He can see it flow together, shift shapes, grow extrusions of itself until it is a pair of ragged claws, glutinous simulacra of human hands joined at the wrist, experimenting with an unfamiliar mechanism but learning, learning. The back of one of the hands boils. He sees features form and dissolve there: an eye, a mouth. We’re going on an adventure.
He swings his body to lock eyes with Zaine. She cannot open the far door until the first is shut. He tries one more leaden step, but his legs won’t work for him.
I will give you clarity. The voice is fabricated in the chambers of his implant, spoofed into the auditory centres of his brain. Kern’s voice. Get yourself out, Meshner. I need you. I will help you. And the panic is gone, the fear stripped from him. He is numb, as though a great weight of suppressing medication has flooded through his system. He can think terribly clearly, and no action he contemplates has the possibility of upsetting him. “Artifabian,” he instructs. “Get into the airlock and close the inner door.”
No! says Kern, spiking him with a sudden lance of outrage and fear and pain—his own, but played on a stage for her benefit—but the robot is already scuttling to obey. Perhaps it has its own survival to think about. It is a Kern-instance after all. Perhaps it argues furiously with its older sister all the way to the door.
He takes another step, for the form of it. Then those wriggling hands have understood the release catch from first principles and his suit—knowing only that there is a safe atmosphere outside—lets them open up his faceplate.
He has a brief glimpse of Zaine on the far side of the closing door before they reach for him.
8.
Portia transmits over and over: Lightfoot, Portia present, are you there? Something has gone wrong, but Helena feels deaf and blind: her translation system is still configured to wring what meaning she can from the octopus visual language, and she receives only the most basic of translation as Portia and Viola speak. And now Viola has just stopped replying.
Helena doesn’t need to stretch her imagination to come up with possibilities. Her mind is still full of the images that Baltiel recorded, long, long ago. Something deadly lives on that planet, the one he’d called Nod. Something insidious, that gets inside you. It got inside Lante and her fellows. It got inside Baltiel.
She turns back to the octopuses, still watching her—or at least mostly keeping one eye on her during their constant back and forth amongst themselves. She sees a lot of agitated hues and textures there. Whatever the plague of Nod actually is, the locals are terrified of it.
And yet, and yet… She focuses on the oddities, the flickerings and undercurrents across their skins that go against the chroma of the majority. She is already seeing a great deal of something she loosely translates as “forbidden”, backed up by code from the data channel that repurposes warnings and prohibitions used in Old Empire computer routines. Except there are a few flickers that seemed to contradict this. She already knows that contradictory emotions and thoughts are the very meat and drink of her hosts, but these are covert, flashed just between a couple of her interrogators; a minimal targeted display, one to another, the baglike bulk of their body hiding the aside from the rest. If they thought of her fully as a sentient creature then perhaps they would conceal the sentiment from her as well, but apparently she doesn’t rank so highly.
She focuses, recording, running the sequences back and forth through her internal software. The implications are of some tempering of the forbiddance—she has the sense of this linking to past associations, but not in the same way as Senkovi or Baltiel are referred to, so: more recent events? Were there those who had not let that forbiddance curtail them, perhaps? But here the recipient replies with warnings, a covert flicker of danger colours almost lost in the general alarm that seem to carry a separate message.
Be careful what you say, she translates tentatively. The furtiveness of the communication suggests that. More divisions amongst the molluscs, more factions. And what these two are worried about isn’t just the plague of Nod, but discovery by their peers.
Then Portia twitches, and a scrambled communication comes in from Viola that Helena has to beg interpretation for, to her chagrin. Portia shakes herself—she saw the old Baltiel recordings as well—and just says, “It has Meshner.”
“The others?”
“Well.” Portia bristles. “What are the creatures here doing?”
“Talking, or the nearest equivalent.”
“No.” Portia flags up segments of the data channel—incoming not from their interrogators but a whole separate stream of staccato chatter received from elsewhere. “There’s some other thing going on.” She returns to the Lightfoot channel and Helena can just follow, Viola, get the shi
p moving now.
Everything about the Portiid is agitated, aggressive. Portia is in the full throes of threat-response and Helena doesn’t waste time asking questions. She goes back over the data channel, following from flag to flag, trying to understand what her friend has seen. She had been concentrating on the visual displays, but Portia had focused on the data channels.
She finds it there: a section of communications dealing entirely with the course and position of the Lightfoot, along with the disposition of several octopus vessels already out patrolling near the inner planet. They are given ludicrously grand labels, explosions of joy and pride, anger and exhilaration. Her linguist’s instincts twitch, but she has no time to decode them because the closest of them (and her rebellious mind thinks its name might be the Profundity of Depth to a Human) has been shadowing the Lightfoot, running on minimal emissions to avoid detection. Tags drawn from a dozen different Old Empire conventions that nonetheless indicated combat readiness.
She thrusts her slate at their interrogators, wrestling with language in order to ask the simplest of questions. “What are you doing? Why? Make it stop!” Because why have they let Portia speak to Viola so freely if at the self-same time they were planning an attack?
Portia has found that most human of things hidden in the numbers: a countdown.
One of the octopuses drifts down to the console and begins communicating, its skin flushing and stuttering with didactic meanings. Mostly it does not understand the question, and much of the rest seems to be some personal recounting of its own attitudes that is utterly impenetrable, but she gets just enough for the bleak understanding: There are some who wish this thing done. There is a threat; there is a response to a threat. And it is plainly something entirely everyday, that random members of their race might decide to go blow up some visiting alien ambassadors without any recourse to higher powers or consensus. They fear; they seek a solution; they act.
Acted. She understands the qualifier to all these emotive messages. The gloss has faded from the feelings because they are in the past, now being twice-told over to her. The decisions Helena rails against have already been concluded, only now coming to fruition across the vast reach of space. All this diplomatic talk, and the attack was already on its way.
Kern’s voice comes over the channel, flat, stripped of the last vestige of her humanity.
“I am detecting incoming missiles, many of them homing. Deploying countermeasures. Portia, Helena, confirm receipt.”
“Confirmed,” Helena whispers into the gap of long minutes and millions of kilometres.
“It has Meshner. The thing from the station.” Kern’s voice fuzzes with static. It almost sounds like a jag of emotion. “I am trying to regain contact with him. There is a signal from his implants.”
“Kern, the attack!” Helena shouts at her. “Why are you—?”
“I need him,” comes Kern’s affectless drone. “Incoming now. I think they’ve learnt. I think the chaff won’t be enough. I’m diverting all free mass and reinforcing the crew section. I—”
Helena blinks, waiting for that “I” to be followed by a verb, even one as bizarre and meaningless as I need.
And she waits, waits longer, knowing that, by the time that severed dog-end of transmission reached her, the Lightfoot had already been struck, the battle over.
Later, Portia finds a reconstruction one of the octopus systems created, drawn from long-range scanner data of the incident: how the Lightfoot was light and nimble, but not quite enough. How the impacts tore into the scout ship’s drive section, rupturing the engines. How Kern jettisoned the damage, changing the ship’s aspect, fighting with centres of gravity as great spools and sheathes of hull material unwound into space to intercept the next barrage.
How they were struck, unravelling, swatted from orbit like a fly, sent spiralling down into the atmosphere of the planet below.
PAST 4
PILLARS OF SALT
1.
These days, Senkovi didn’t leave the tank.
The Aegean’s crew sections no longer rotated, but they were empty now anyway, a drifting mess of loose fragments, clothes, personal effects. Nobody went there any more, but then, he was the lone human being left in the cosmos. If Disra Senkovi considered a place out of fashion, the universe itself turned its back. He was the lone arbiter of what was in and what was out. For the last eight years or so, “in” had been the flooded section in the heart of the ship, that had once housed his tanks and the progenitors of all the many inheritors of Damascus. At last count there were… too many octopi to count, given that they themselves seemed supremely disinterested in holding a census. Thousands; tens of thousands, spread by their weirdly social/antisocial nature into hundreds of communities across the shallower portions of the sea, and now making inroads deeper. And here was Senkovi, who had never dipped his toes into the world whose transformation he had overseen. Here was Senkovi, one hundred and eighty-nine years of age, floating in his own private fishpond.
He’d had grand plans. He would go into suspension and come out again, fifty, a hundred, five hundred years later. Except the Aegean would not last, and the octopi would not repair it, or at least he could rely on neither. And Paul’s children, the busy molluscs below, were always doing something new, alien, fascinating. And he never quite got round to it, and then, older and more peevish, he would not trust the cold-sleep chamber to wake him, would not trust the Aegean’s increasingly distributed computer network (so much of it now looping through the baffling tangle of connections on the planet). He had wandered the great empty spaces of the ship, poked through the possessions of dead men and women, let their voices play from the archival recordings so that echoing ghosts followed his bare footsteps as he padded in circles around the ring of vacant rooms.
There had been a time when he had listened out for signals, abruptly convinced he was not alone, that other humans were out there and they wanted to talk to him. He had spent hours trying to sift gold dust from the clay of universal static. Had there been faint scratchings from other terraforming sites? Had there been a hiss and a whisper from Old Earth? He had realized eventually that he could no longer tell, and the Aegean could not distinguish signal from noise. If he listened to the background murmur of the universe for long enough it became a song to which he could fit any words he wanted.
And eventually he knew that the one meaningful thing his life was orbiting around was the thing his life was actually orbiting around; the one thing he had built; the thing that would survive him, miraculously stable, evolving, growing. Somehow he, Disra Senkovi—trickster, wastrel, bored misanthrope—had bequeathed something beautiful to the universe.
And it might not last. By the time he came to that revelation he had watched the spread of his cephalopod progeny for decades and neither he nor they nor the Aegean could detect any snowballing catastrophe that would unmake it all. But decades were nothing in geological time. The terraforming seemed stable, but some invisible error might still become a world-ender a century down the line, or the octopi themselves could upset it all, or some outside force could hurtle in from the uncaring cosmos and dash them all to dust. In the end, that was really why he eschewed the cold-sleep chambers. He could not abide the thought of waking, centuries later, and finding a cold, dead world below him, the jewel of his achievement turned to dross while he slumbered.
And so he had stayed awake and watched, and had grown old even for the stretched lifespan of the technologically privileged.
And they knew him; they came to visit sometimes, up the gravity well on the elevator that was now the Aegean’s permanent, geostationary dock. They made channels of water within the old ship’s bowels that led to the central tank, and floated before Senkovi, staring at this vertebrate prodigy. Their skins flickered and flashed and they adopted coiled, deliberate poses as though they were dancing for him. His eyes—ah, well, not his eyes, not any more, but the lenses of the Aegean’s systems that had outlived such ephemeral organs—followe
d their displays, and the ship’s voice in his mind whispered meanings to him, fragmentary, elliptical, won by many decades of hard translation algorithms and Senkovi’s own gut instinct from a lifetime of living alongside cephalopods. There was a common language between them, incomplete as torn netting: not the words of a human son of Earth nor yet the colours and coiling of Paul’s kindred, but a compromise mediated within the ship’s systems, grown organically because the octopi wanted to talk to their creator.
He never quite understood them, not where it mattered. He could liaise with them on technical details, collaborate on models and diagrams, flowcharts and patterns. He laid all the groundwork for those who would come later—those he never believed in—but he could not quite communicate with the octopi as individuals. He confessed to them, sometimes—either in person or in long, rambling communiques to the planet below. He talked about Earth, although he felt his own memories of it decompose a little more every time he took them from their box to examine them. Had all that really been true, those triumphs, that despair? And how had such an edifice of progress brought about its own downfall so swiftly? He couched his recollections as cautionary tales, or at least he hoped the octopi would receive them as such.
And they responded: sometimes with that meticulous technical fore-planning that leapt ahead of his own ability to innovate and predict, at other times with complex utterances that the Aegean’s systems made into a kind of song. He could not grasp the precise meanings there, but filled the gaps in with emotional tones that were surely as much in his head as in theirs.
His current visitor was one of the Salomes—Senkovi had taken to thinking of all of them as Paul or Salome these days, after his long-gone original experiments, frequently irrespective of gender. Salome was dancing for him, the system struggling to keep up with the fluid patterns and shapes. Was this a new thing? Senkovi’s mind’s eye was his only functioning eye, and he let the ship show him three views of the complex attitudes Salome was adopting. There was more repetition than he was used to, broader gestures, as though the octopus was speaking slowly for a deaf foreigner.
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