The organism wants to meet us, Kern is saying. It wants to experience us and understand and learn from us. It wants to reach out and grasp the universe. But it no longer wants to be us, or for us to be it. It has learned the limits of monoculture, turned inward in an everlasting round of tedium. Only by accepting the other can it truly find diversion and inspiration; only by allowing the universe to be separate from it can it have the infinite variety it craves.
Helena speaks into her slate and watches waves of colour and feeling pulse out through the ambassador into the scientists, from them to their hull, from their hull to the neighbouring warship and the universe at large. She watches the commander of the Profundity of Depth turn slowly, hanging within its domain. She imagines the missiles, which feel nothing and care for nobody, leaping from their leashes like eager hounds.
And at the end of it all she feels a resounding silence, an uncertainty. The octopuses are shifting things, after all. You cannot rouse them to a cause and expect them to follow you without a battery of responses like Why? and Are you sure? and But . . . And yet Portia is receiving new telemetry that shows the slightest deviation in the attack, coaxing the missiles onto a new course, still live, still lethal, but curving into an orbital path laid out for them, where they can wait like falcons high above, that can descend on their prey at any moment.
Helena meets the eye of the Profundity’s commander, and she can imagine all manner of human meaning in that gaze: weariness, doubt, concern, a fellow feeling almost certainly entirely in the beholder.
‘They’re not convinced yet,’ she tells Kern, hoping that there is enough left at the other end to understand her. ‘It’s won us some time, maybe, a little. But I think they’re still—’
‘Stop prattling.’ Plenty enough of Kern left, apparently. ‘I am sending you a live link to a visual feed. They like visuals, do they not? And supporting data, seeing as that’s how they do things. I am providing proof. Watch, just watch.’
19.
It has taken the creature outside the best part of a day to cut its way in.
If the Lightfoot was still spaceworthy, Fabian thinks the hull would be proof against anything the creature could do. Although, seeing it go about the task, he is less and less sure of that. It learns. From simple flailing it has modified its ‘suit’, the case of debris that contains it and gives it shape. It has improvised shears from shells and knapped stones, and possibly from first principles. It has identified the weaknesses in the unspooling tangle of the Lightfoot’s walls and has sawn and severed its way in with a dreadful patience. No, perhaps patience is the wrong word. Fabian is imputing rational arachnid thought to something probably not capable of it, but it seems enthusiastic, a worker fired up for its task.
At one point he lost his nerve and attacked it with the drone, ramming into the creature and smashing open its body, as well as wrecking the remote itself. He did not think he had solved the problem, then, and when Artifabian went out through the makeshift airlock, the creature had mostly reconstituted its casing, or another like it, the same pieces in random organization to give a similar not-quite-human shape. Even as they watched, it went back to cutting, picking up exactly where it had left off, its tools perhaps slightly better suited to the task thanks to its opportunity to remodel them.
They are all suited up now – Fabian, Viola and Zaine, though the Human’s suit is the theoretically contaminated one she came over from the quarantine pod in because they have no way of fabricating a new one. Contamination, Fabian suspects, is going to be a moot point very shortly.
They have hauled Zaine back and the three of them huddle against the far wall, watching the light wax along the line where the creature is carving its way in. Artifabian is still out there, ready to make a desperate assault on the creature, but the robot is only Portiid-size, far smaller than a Human. Fabian can’t see that it will make a dent.
I suppose we have free rein in respect of final messages, he shuffles out, his words heavy and laboured through the encumbrance of his suit.
It is possible that we are still being recorded and that the recording will eventually reach the Voyager, Viola tells him primly. I recommend dignity, therefore.
Fabian had a great many things to say in the certain assurance none of it would ever be heard by the wider world, and so that puts the kybosh on that. Some of those things were about Viola, others about the matriarchy and his experience of it and his great bitterness about not achieving his potential, and being driven onto this ludicrously dangerous mission as the only way he could pursue his researches unimpeded. And probably something regretful about Meshner but, right now, that is far down the list. Now Viola has introduced the threat of posterity and he feels the clamp of social pressure again, even looking death in the piecemeal face.
For death is here, come through the wall after all that cutting, squeezing its body through too small a slit, its casing bulging and rippling to fit, giving the lie to any suggestion of humanity. Fabian sees parts of it vibrate, buzzing into motion so rapid he can barely see it. Zaine chokes and shudders, and Fabian guesses the monster has said something human ears can hear, because to speak like a human is part of its sham, even though it lacks anything like the requisite organs and parts.
Probably it was something about an adventure.
Artifabian charges in, legs flailing, and scales the monster’s irregular surface, trying to tear in with palps and fangs. The entity does not acknowledge the robot’s attempt at all, even when parts of it are ripped loose. Instead it takes one slumping step and then another, and something like an arm unfurls from its side to reach for them, almost a comradely gesture, almost a gentlemanly offer to help Zaine to her feet.
I really wish I hadn’t come. It’s not exactly the searing diatribe about social injustice he had planned, but it is from the heart.
I share those feelings, Viola says. I would rather spend my last moments with a female who was my intellectual peer. At his furious twitch, his legs raised in raging, impotent threat, she clarifies: Humour, Fabian. You are adequate as companionship goes. And a competent researcher, if that is what you are seeking.
Zaine starts again, kicking herself up to half stand, half lean against the curved wall. She is looking up and around, not at the slowly approaching creature. Her mouth moves, but Artifabian is too busy to translate.
A heartbeat later the message is repeated for Portiid senses. Do nothing rash. A flat pronouncement from the ship itself.
Kern? Viola demands. Where have you been?
Too complex to tell you. Make no contact. Wait. No, wait, I said. Fabian, are you well? Are you hurt?
Fabian does not like Kern singling him out. It seems a likely prelude to being commanded to do something dangerous. And yet the voice is filling out now, little taps and scraps of character jolting along with the words. It doesn’t seem like Kern to him, though. She had a very definite, forceful, female manner. This Kern seems almost . . . male.