Meshner looks at her sidelong, finding her expressionless. Ah, tact. Because that’s what it’s doing with me, right now. ‘Go on.’
Kern grimaces. ‘I don’t think it, the thing itself, understands what Lante is, but it can play her back, simulate her, and the Lante being simulated wouldn’t know, would think that she is just Lante. She is recorded in the organism, imperfectly but enough to be conjured up when it wishes.’
‘But why does it wish it?’ Meshner watches Lante wandering, staring up at the bright lights, the tall darknesses of the buildings. ‘What’s the purpose?’ And then, because Kern has no answer, he shouts at Lante, ‘What do you want?’
She turns, her features diffuse and shifting. Because Lante didn’t look in the mirror much, maybe, and all it has is her memory of her face. ‘We’re going on an adventure,’ she tells him calmly. ‘We have found such new rules and ideas. Worlds. Stars.’ A creeping change is stealing upon the creature, and Meshner feels that some of these intonations, some of its body language is his own.
‘It is expanding into the implant’s data-space, unpacking Lante’s memories,’ Kern says tightly. ‘That is our first problem.’
Meshner misses why that is any more of a problem than the rest of it, but fixes on the key word ‘first’. ‘So, what’s the second?’
‘There is a warship. Helena and Portia are trying to persuade it not to destroy the orbital and the Lightfoot. Because of this organism. The octopuses’ encounters with it have been entirely destructive. If we are to dissuade them we must give them a reason to keep us intact, or a reason not to fear. A weapon.’
Meshner eyes her sidelong. ‘A weapon,’ he echoes. ‘Really?’ He feels something akin to a headache, a pressure around him. ‘And you’ve turned one up in Fabian’s research?’
‘No.’ Kern’s voice is flattening audibly. ‘I am trying to hinder the organism’s encroachment into the implant.’
‘I don’t see that it matters now. Besides, it’s not attacking us.’ He indicates the oblivious organism, part him, part Lante.
‘It is consuming the space and processing power here, which I require to continue to function at my current level. Which you require because this is the only place you exist. I am losing ground, Meshner. The implant is intended for use by your brain, not external access by me.’
And my brain is not my own. ‘So I could have locked you out at any time, if I’d known what was going on?’ He expects a snarl, a glower, even a frosty look of disdain from Kern, but that would be an extra load on the implant and Kern is fighting a valiant rearguard action at the expense of her own ability to feel. ‘So what’s the plan?’ he asks, but they are at the end of all plans, now. She can only slow it. And even if we hold it off forever, the octopuses are coming to blow us all up. And with good reason, now I’ve seen what this monster can do. But he looks at it, the personification of the monster, and it is anything but monstrous. When it glances from the lights, the buildings, back at him, its smile is almost childlike in wonder. ‘An adventure,’ it had said.
‘Kern, I need you to do something that is going to strain our space in here a bit more.’
‘Speak.’
‘Import the study, the Lante study Fabian hacked into shape. Upload it to the implant, where this thing can see it. Let’s hold the mirror up to nature, shall we?’
Kern’s expression is . . . without expression, but she nods.
15.
Within the vast liquid spaces of the Profundity of Depth (as Helena has haltingly translated its name), a crew of octopuses are listening in on a time-delayed argument that started off as just the usual name-calling between two factions, but has now mushroomed into something rare and strange. There are aliens involved in it. There are fragments of narrative comprehensible to an octopus Crown, and a great many fragments that are not, but that can be rearranged and pieced together to make any number of fascinating cognitive patterns, like shells set out on the sand.
Ultimate command is fluid, but the current most influential crewmember’s designation is Ahab. He has spent most of his life in space on business like this. Not the resource wars of the outer system, because they fill him with a tentacle-curling fury over the waste of materiel and lives, but here, watching Nod and trying to find a solution to the problem it presents. He is a scientist, although not in the same manner as the science party themselves. He wants to use science to close Pandora’s Box somehow, and science has failed to provide him with the answers. His Crown is caught in a constant cycle of thwarted ambition, his Reach endlessly loops through failed equations and hypotheses, looking for the answers he believes are there, elusive and fleeting. This in turn makes him an angry tyrant to his crew, who tend to keep out of his way. His skin is utterly without deceit. Any of his peers can see the turmoil within him, and they respect it. To care, to be deeply emotionally invested, is a cardinal cultural virtue, after all.
Ahab has come very close to destroying the old human orbital on several occasions, the gyre of his decision-making spinning out to within seconds of ordering the strike, then wheeling back away. The irrevocable annihilation of something will not cure his frustrations, and he fears that, with it gone, he might discover a use for it.
And then the aliens came. The Profundity of Depth was caught unawares by their sudden arrival, and he wasted valuable hours talking to his fellows and catching up on emotional feedback from the Damascus orbitals. Aliens! Humans! How were they supposed to feel about such things? A whole new emotional dictionary was being written, and Ahab is not the quickest to adapt to the changes of others.
By that time, the Profundity had come around the planet to find the alien vessel beside the old orbital, and Ahab’s Reach and Crown came together to launch a pinpoint attack to remove the immediate threat.
He has maintained his lunar orbit since, because to actually orbit Nod is to feel himself somehow within reach of the monstrous infection. Part of him is constantly twitching towards an attack on the crash site, as apparently the aliens have survived down there. They cannot get out of Nod’s gravity well, though, and so he has the luxury of time.
And now there is all this to and fro with the science faction, Noah’s people. They are full of great enthusiasm about new ways to solve the Nod problem. They want what he wants, effectively, but they have very different means to reach that end. They want the orbital undamaged. Some of them feel protective towards the aliens, despite the fact that all the aliens have done since they arrived is try to open up Nod like a clam so that more of its poison can escape.
And now this weird piecemeal story, the thoughts of a human translated and retranslated until what comes through to Ahab is something like a tone poem, a sequence of triumph and sadness, joy and fear. Emotions of another species that are yet (mostly, sometimes) comprehensible. Ahab floats within the cavernous chambers of the Profundity and feels the emotive tides lift and move him, knowing that this is what he will destroy when the time comes: these things like and not-like him.
He links back to the warship accompanying the science faction, the Shell That Echoes Only. Across the millions of kilometres, he and the commander of that vessel share a communion, exchanging emotional poetry back and forth, making the delay a feature to give each of them time to appreciate the many meanings of the other. The human is speaking of old and new homes. A sense of home is an emotion in its own right, another commonality between species. This ship, after all, was meant as a home when it was built, and although it has become an implement of destruction, it has still been Ahab’s home for most of his life. In the same way, this constant fear and stress is a home, like a shell grown too cramped for the crab that resides in it, pressuring and deforming him with its grasp. He spells all this out, knowing it to be his most elegant moment. His opposite number responds, deeply moved, echoing and adding to the sentiments. They share a moment of perfect beauty.