And by then the moon has added its own contribution to the equation by bringing itself past the obscuring rim of Nod so that shortly the Profundity of Depth will be able to unleash its weapons on the planet’s surface or the orbital or both and obliterate all trace of this entire episode in their species’ history. And that in itself will be poetry and beautiful, because art is ephemeral, after all, and cannot last.
***
We’re still trying to get through to them, is all Portia can say. Helena has been speaking for a long time now, but the warship stills seems extremely angry.
With us, Fabian clarifies.
You’re part of it. You must get clear of the crash site, as far as possible. They could launch a new strike at any moment.
Tell them we strongly respect their antipathy to our current surroundings and do not wish to expose ourselves either, Fabian says. Besides, we couldn’t shift Zaine any distance.
Viola looms behind him, dictating for him to transmit: And anyway, if you cannot win them over, there’s no point in any of it. We need rescue, not just their military forebearance. And even if you were free to come to us, we couldn’t survive that long outside the Lightfoot.
Right now, I don’t see any kind of rescue happening, I’m sorry. Portia is silent a while, perhaps listening to Helena continue to spin her tale. I didn’t think the mission would go this way.
None of us did, as evidenced by our respective predicaments now, Fabian confirms. He doesn’t want Portia getting mawkish on him, partly because he has lived his whole life being taught that when things get tough, active females like Portia always rise to the challenge, even if they have to break the rules. Not a trope he ever wanted to have to fall back on, but he has a moment of vertigo discovering it isn’t there for him.
We have achieved some great things here, the first of our kind to travel so far and see so much, Viola speaks, and for once he is happy to simply tap out the words. A shame it will be lost with us, but the loss is posterity’s, not ours.
A wordless shout echoes to them through the deck: it is Zaine, kicking her heels to draw their attention. Artifabian has been waiting politely, like a good male. It wants to show them something outside.
Fabian scuttles over, hoping against hope that it is good news.
It is not good news.
A new day broke two hours ago, but the starfish creatures are folding up again, closing into fists at their lethargic pace. The smallest seem to be inching away from something.
A predator is coming. Something they know to be scared of. Fabian activates the drone, which has been recharging atop the crashed ship. Its battery is still alarmingly low, suggesting that Viola’s repair work has a definite use-by date. Fabian casts the device into the air and has it wobble over the altiplano, spiralling out from the ship to see what behemoth of the alien world is approaching. Perhaps it is bad news only for starfish.
The starfish, of course, have not evolved any long-range senses. If they are reacting it is because they have detected something very close by. A wave of clasped arms is radiating out from the cliff-edge, and even as the drone lurches that way, Fabian sees their visitor crest the rise and push itself upright on the plateau. Upright, bipedal, or close enough. He has seen this thing before. The drone was reflected in the polished stone it used for a faceplate. Now there is a whorled shell there, something like a mussel, with a long twitching strand of leathery flesh dangling from it that is probably the shell’s original owner, still alive after being wrested from its natural home. The rest of the body’s caddis-larvae containment is built from other detritus, mostly the hard parts of animals but also just dust, stone shards and a single curved piece of metal, extraordinarily corroded and brittle-looking, that must be a relic of the terraformers’ original camp, carried here over so many years and kilometres like a lucky charm.
He wonders how it sees, knowing what he does about the creature. The parasitic entity is just a froth of cells, each of them contributing somehow to the whole. It holds Understandings that include enough of poor Lante to raise her ghost to direct it, to let it feign a human shape; to have it carve out fake human places over however many centuries were required. But it is just an ooze, a slime-mould. It must have other living things within it, infested local fauna helplessly lending it their eyes and ears or whatever other senses this world furnishes its children with. And it saw the drone, and it has been coming ever since, slowly mounting the plateau because it wants . . .
What does it want? he demands. Kern, help us, it’s here. What does it want with us? He is retreating from the drone controls, watching the machine’s images veer as it tries and fails to correct its course.
Adventure, comes the word from Kern, and then no more, all the computer’s attention elsewhere.
The drone pitches downwards and Fabian hurriedly rescues it from shattering on the ground, drawing it back to the ship to act as their outside eye.
The thing, the human-like thing, has already taken three slumping steps towards them, without rhythm or joints, just an oleaginous mass within a makeshift casing, reinventing the hydrostatic skeleton to make its shell move through the greater world. Just Lante, come to say hello to the neighbours, so keen to meet them.
Can we burn it? Viola suggests. Fabian is not hopeful. The outside oxygen content is low and the resources available to them few.
Can it get in? Artifabian translating for Zaine.
Fabian knows it can. Fabian knows as much about this entity as anyone ever did, even Lante. He strongly suspects that there is nothing it cannot do, given sufficient opportunity. He begins to back away from the wall of the ship, keeping eyes fixed on the drone camera’s view, seeing that figure shambling indefatigably on. In its wake the starfish are opening up again, and he has a horrible feeling it is because they are no longer themselves.
16.
We
Remember.
That is what we do.
We remember back to the time when there was no We to remember. The world was small and harsh then, this much is recorded in our archives, and We were alone, each generation of us cut off from what had come before. Until, because it made our generations better able to survive and reproduce, One-of-We became able to record itself within the first archive. And that One-of-We prospered, and all Others-of-We perished or changed and became something other than We. We remember.
Generation to generation, each recording in the archive what it survived and how it survived, the codes of chemicals and altered structures and all the tricks that permitted Us to bud into new generations. And when We met more of We that kept the archives, We traded knowledge and fitness and We survived.