‘You see?’ Kern asks it. She and Lante/Meshner sit on a beach Kern remembers from the world that bears her name, in this closing scene of the fast-forward narrative she has run for it. There are lights deep in the water, a city of stomatopods extending all the way to where the deep water starts. Behind them are trees shrouded in glittering strands, the Great Nest by the Western Ocean, still one of the key metropolises of the Portiid world. Kern had anticipated the much-abused implant failing before now, but the joy of working with an organism evolved to dwell and multiply in the microcosm of a drop of water is that simulations can be very low resolution and yet still entirely engrossing.
‘You see the problem?’ she prompts.
Lante keens, a sound just this side of human that expresses the grief and frustration of something as far from human as Kern has ever met, herself included.
‘Let me tell you a story,’ Kern says. She is still rebuilding herself, and she cannot find the acid sarcasm she would prefer. Instead she actually sounds calm and consoling, and barely recognizes herself. ‘There was a planet once, that humans made for themselves, but that instead was the domain of spiders. I will tell you about them, and about the humans that came to it, and how they could have destroyed each other, and been infinitely the poorer for it. But they found another way. There’s always another way. Even for you.’
18.
The octopus ambassador is trying to tell Helena something. It is showing her angry and frightened shades (still the most readily identifiable, and what does that say about interspecies relations right now?) but she can tell, by almost subliminal qualifiers that her software picks up on, that it is not feeling these emotions, but telling her a story about them. It is telling her about another anger, elsewhere. Not really news, then, except it is quite insistent about it. But then Human narrative structure is not the octopus way, and so . . .
But here Portia interrupts her, having burrowed into the data. ‘The warship. It means – no, not the warship here, the ship over there, that shot down the Lightfoot. It . . . is requesting to talk to you. I think that’s what this means.’
And Helena comes to the belated realization that the ambassador was, in effect, doing an impression, its take on the essential nature of the representative from the Profundity of Depth.
She composes a response, requesting that the ambassador will serve as translator. A moment later, she realizes she should have asked for a visual channel to the Profundity, because otherwise she is entirely at the mercy of what the ambassador wants to tell her.
Thankfully, a visual channel is the first thing the octopuses give her, a distorted lens onto a purple-red lit space where tentacled shadows drift on obscure errands of their own. One such is obviously the individual they are talking to, but unlike a human speaking to a communications screen, it is never still, and its attention appears to wander constantly as it bobs in and out of sight. Helena tries a few greetings, showing it colours and watching the ambassador passing on something approximate to her colours and shapes. For a long time there is no acknowledgement whatsoever that the Profundity of Depth is even receiving their signal, but then abruptly the octopus there has lunged for the screen, eclipsing their view with a mosaic of suckers for a moment before backing off, a couple of trailing limbs still absently attached. Its skin mottles and shifts, and Helena realizes the bruise-coloured lighting in the Profundity’s interior (and is that the equivalent of martial mood music for them?) completely skews her ability to know what the creature is saying/feeling.
So how angry is it? Because it is already launching into a furious tirade about something, its skin rippling and dancing with colours as its arms clench and lash at the water around it. In the background of her view, several of its compatriots hang in the water, watching their representative raptly, their skins muttering its sentiments to each other on a staggered delay like the chorus in a tragedy.
The ambassador is trying to give her the dumbed-down student notes of the lecture, and she braces herself for the fury. Instead, though, the sentiments are . . . calm, weirdly upbeat. She is at the stage in her relationship with octopus language that she gets the tone immediately, but the context must still trickle unreliably through the interspecial membrane. The enemy seems . . . happy? Not a pleasant thought. Maybe it has already obliterated her crewmates and this is its triumphal announcement. But Portia’s interpretation of the data channel is that it is directing this bombast at her in particular – she is very clearly isolated and identified. Helena feels like throwing her hands up in the air with sheer frustration. She and the ambassador had just about reached a working understanding but introduce one more mollusc into the mix and she’s lost again.
‘It is expressing positive regard for you,’ Portia tells her.
Helena squints at the spider. ‘What now?’
‘It is telling you that it admires you in some way. It has been . . . there is reference here to your earlier transmissions, meaning your account of our species’ shared history. It . . . appreciates whatever it understood or . . .’
‘It enjoyed the performance,’ Helena says emptily. She has a fan, apparently. Who knows what the creature actually understood of the content. Not ‘once upon a time,’ surely, because most likely even that basic storytelling building block is meaningless for creatures as mutable as these. But the emotions behind the story, perhaps those are what it grasped. The common language they share, or at least that no man’s land where their two species come close enough to clasp.
And then the ambassador continues, its own mantle shuddering a little with unhappiness, as the commander of the Profundity tells them to go away.
***
Ahab is moved, but that is no unusual thing. Being emotionally moved by something is practically the baseline for his species. He has been moved by the science faction aboard the Without Peering Within, though not enough to shake him from his ideological moorings. He is regularly moved by his fellows aboard the Profundity, or simply by notions of his own manufacture, by the sight of the sun cresting the ocean-edge of Nod, by the stars. To be lost in wonder at the universe by no means clashes with his duties as the leader of a warship.
But he has been moved by this alien, or by its awkwardly translated accounts. He has felt a connection with this human that has come to them like the shadow of Senkovi. His Crown desired that he be permitted to answer the creature Guise to Guise, and shortly afterwards this was accomplished, through a sequence of technical wrangling between Reaches of which he remained entirely unaware.
It is a strange thing, this human, as is its companion the crab. It is almost mute, almost paralysed, but that connection remains. Ahab can make that cognitive leap and accept this other as sentient, feeling. He wishes it to be preserved, for as long as such a fragile thing might last. And he wishes it to turn back and take the meddling scientists with it. He waxes eloquent with expression, sincerity in every coil and flash.
It replies, after a pause for thought in which he watches every part of its exposed skin for clues as to its inner nature. It says that it yearns for its surviving companions on the planet’s surface. It mourns. It knows hope, directed at Ahab.