‘Boss, I am.’ He sounded partly embarrassed, but also impressed with himself, too, or at least with his pets. ‘I taught them to access the system, play games, basic teaching stuff, and now they’re past my security and just, you know, poking around. Curious, like I said, only I can’t stop them and they’re screwing everything up. It’s all innocent, but . . . I made a bit of a monster, boss. Look, I’m suited up and everyone else is getting the fuck out on the shuttle. I’ll fix this.’
‘Why aren’t you on the shuttle, Disra?’
‘Boss, it’s my bad. I can sort it better from in here. There’s always something you have to go do by hand.’
‘Use a remote. Disra, do you hear me?’ Baltiel’s own shuttle was beginning its landing approach now. They were over the black and grey mottling of the salt marsh and a flash of white in the distance was the habitat.
‘I’m suited up. I have independent power. All set, boss. Got to go.’ Senkovi’s voice cracked at the end and Baltiel suddenly understood. His pets. Shutting the ship down was a death sentence for his precious octopodes and he wanted to be there for them, or maybe even save some of them. And probably he’d get killed, and Han and the rest would have to finish the terraforming without either Senkovi’s brilliance or his goddamn molluscs.
With that, Baltiel forced himself to let go. Senkovi had finally found a way to get out from Overall Command, and now neither Baltiel nor any other human agency could help him. It isn’t my problem, he decided. Not for want of trying, but he’s going to have to get out of it himself. He imagined the Aegean as if the ship was literally crawling with Senkovi’s rebellious progeny, monstrous cephalopods blobbering through the compartments waving angry tentacles. Of course, they would be in tanks somewhere, their intrusion purely virtual, and yet irresistible, circumventing everything Senkovi could throw up to keep them out. But then, when you’re designing an interface to let molluscs play computer games you probably don’t build in that much security.
Baltiel had a moment to consider how that was a sequence of words he’d never expected to be relevant in his life, and then they were landing, Rani hovering over the controls like a hawk in case the shuttle’s onboard got it wrong, and Baltiel already had a hand up to release his straps because, goddamn it, he was going to be first on the ground.
***
Amazing.
How quiet.
Almost worth it just for this.
But Senkovi didn’t really believe that. He couldn’t know about Baltiel’s inner child thoughts, but he himself was making a very similar comparison. Only, for him, his inner child had done a very bad thing indeed and, unlike all the other times, hadn’t been able to cover the evidence before being found out. Baltiel is going to have my hide as soon as he’s done playing Lewis and Clark.
Also like a child, some part of him was desperately casting about for some superior authority to blame. Someone should have told me not to. Except that he had worked very hard to abstract himself from any kind of oversight, even the distant watch that Baltiel could have kept over him. Senkovi had been absolutely convinced of the rightness of his own actions, and it had all been wholly amusing until it had become utterly fucked up. It struck him, in a moment of wry self-reflection, that he was the whole terraforming programme in miniature, Kern and Baltiel and all of them. We get them to throw money and resources at us so we can go and be gods somewhere else, because when you were thirty light years from Earth, who was going to tell you to stop?
And now he was standing in a vast silent tomb of a ship, wearing a cumbersome space suit and knowing he had a remarkably long time before the computer system cleansed itself and bootstrapped itself back into being. Han, Poullister and Maylem were kicking back in the shuttle, anxiously waiting to hear from him. If he had been playing it by the book – insofar as this particular book existed – he should have been with them, doing everything remotely. By hand was better, though, especially as Salome had somehow accessed the remote channels and begun to use the machines as bonus limbs in her spirited attempts to dismantle the Aegean to find out what it was and whether she could eat it. Paul had always been Senkovi’s favourite student, meaning he had entirely missed how destructively smart Salome was. And that was not to mention Saul, Ruth, Methuselah (renamed from Peter after he got to ten years without showing signs of ageing), Jezebel and . . . well, Senkovi had worked quite hard to ensure that casual scrutiny from a distracted Baltiel did not pick up that he now had forty-three octopi on the staff register, all of them of Biblical nomenclature because of the original Paul, and because once he had Damascus and Nod past the censors he might as well stick with a theme. And because it would have annoyed some of the irritating fundamentalists back home had they ever heard about it, and Senkovi loved nothing more than amusing himself.
Forty-three octopodes as Baltiel would say, but Senkovi preferred the feel of the even more incorrect ‘octopi’ on the tongue, and he was used to pleasing himself first and foremost.
And now he was learning just precisely why he had been considered a good second but only when careful Baltiel was there to hold his leash, because he had royally screwed up.
He had known from long before, from his pets back home, that octopi responded very badly to rigid Pavlovian training. They weren’t like rats or pigeons or dogs, who would do the same thing over and over until they had more food than they could eat. Instead, they were curious in a way even dogs weren’t, because evolution had gifted them with a profoundly complex toolkit for taking the world apart to see if there was a crab hiding under it. As I am bloody well now having cause to regret.
Senkovi had charged up every portable battery he could find, and now had a trolley of devices to get to the centre of the Aegean. The centre was where the gravity wasn’t, of course, and he had set up his labs there because the octopi got used to not caring much about up and down quickly enough. The Pacific striped octopus had always been his preferred test subject, just as it was his preferred pet. Unlike most of their relatives they were passably social and long-lived, the two major deficiencies that, in Senkovi’s opinion, octopus-kind had been cursed with. They were intellectually agile, too, but that was true across the octopus board. Senkovi’s personal theory was that the pressure of being in the middle of the food chain was an essential prerequisite for complex intelligence. Like humans (and like Portiid spiders, had he only known), octopuses had developed in a world where they were both hunter and hunted. Top predators, in Senkovi’s assessment, were an intellectual dead end.
He had bred several generations, each one further mediated by limited intervention by the Rus-Califi virus. That had been hard, but mostly because he had needed to be ruthless, and Senkovi was soft at heart, especially when it came to the objects of his obsession. The later generations had been markedly better at interacting with abstract devices and operating machinery, and then his lax experimental procedures had borne unexpected fruit. Most of the previous generation had still been around and in contact with his new enfants terrible, and they had started picking up the same behaviours, less directed, but still determinedly exploring the virtual space he gave them access to. The major challenge had been developing cephalopod-friendly interface devices, and Senkovi was aware that his own imagination had been the primary constraint with that. For creatures that were a boneless, infinitely mutable hand with independently sensing and thinking fingers, his pitiful controls were wasting most of their potential. One day they’ll design their own. But that was taking things too far. Or rather, it was stable door after bolting horse because things had already gone too far.