He lumbered back and entered the airlock, which he’d left open because, well, why not, exactly? He’d left his helmet outside. Perhaps some alien crab would creep out and claim it as a home. He wished the hypothetical creature well.
The others looked in through the airlock hatch with no expression he could name. They would watch him like a hawk now, to see if something poisoned him, or if there was a planetwide plague that could somehow jump not just species but entire evolutionary trees. Working slowly, feeling the gravity twisting his joints, he stripped off his suit entire, letting the dead weight of the thing fold to the ground as though he was shedding a cocoon and entering a new stage of his life cycle.
He was going to try to sleep, there in the airlock and open to the elements, but then Lortisse was banging on the window, miming a winch. They wanted him to close the outer door. He couldn’t see why but, apparently, they were going to let him in early and that was a clear breach of his orders. Something else had obviously gone wrong.
Baltiel didn’t want to be commander, just then. He wanted to be a castaway without any hopes or cares at all, and just enjoy the alienness of the air. A spark lit in his mind at the banging, though. He was responsible, after all. It was his mission, even in defeat. He signalled his understanding and laboured away at the little winch until the outer door was shut and sealed, then stood there as they pumped Earth air in and Nod air out. The Earth air smelled worse, filled with bad odours his body was all too ready to identify.
‘What?’ he demanded. The others all had their helmets off, suit tanks empty, the last of the emergency supply slowly going stale between them.
He didn’t need to ask any more. He heard it. Rani’s makeshift radio had a signal. It was tinny and crimped by static, but there was a human voice out there.
‘Hello? Someone say something, won’t you? I know I screwed up, but come on!’ A tiny, far-off Disra Senkovi, coming to them from one planet away on a ship he had only now brought back to life. ‘Hey, boss, what the hell? Han, you can come back now. Hello?’
There were other shuttles on the Aegean. Not close enough that the Earth air would last, but Baltiel had taken his life in his hands to prove that wasn’t the end of the world. He held on a moment longer, trying to do the maths, but eventually he just smiled and shunted Rani out of her seat so he could speak to the expedition’s prodigal son.
6.
We
have
sampled strange molecules.
These-of-We taste stuff never known, break it down, build it up, nothing like anything, toxic, energy-rich, fascinating.
These-of-We recreate these stimuli for Others-of-We as we meet, interchanging ideas and selves.
None-of-We have encountered any-such, not anywhere.
Something new has come into the world.
PRESENT 1
ROAD TO DAMASCUS
1.
Once upon a time there was a civilization on a distant planet. The people of this civilization knew many things, including how to travel to other stars and remake the planets they found there, within tolerance, into places where they could walk and breathe the air.
But they were fractious, and just as they had reached up to seize the stars, they fell upon one another and all their work was destroyed. Almost all.
One of their scientists, the greatest mind of her age—
Or so she says.
She does, and I am not in the mood to measure legs with her over it. You have decades enough, but Portiid life is too short.
She was named Avrana Kern, and she had a plan to exalt the beasts of her world so that they would know and adore their creator. She made a world for them, and released a virus that would expedite their evolution towards such a state of adulation, and she had a consignment of monkeys, and of all of these things, that last failed in its delivery, for the wicked who made war on their fellows on her home also brought the war to her. So Kern was left in her tiny capsule, awaiting the call from the world below, which was devoid of monkeys but rich in many other forms of life. For many thousands of years she orbited, so that what was left was not, deny it as she might, much of Avrana Kern at all, as opposed to the computer systems she had bargained with for eternal life.
And when the call came, it came from that world’s new mistresses, the most intelligent, the most emotionally sophisticated, the most elegant of all its many beings.
Now you’re just bragging.
We must assume that any life we meet will value sophistication, intelligence and elegance, or what is life for? Anyway, I continue.
Unknown to the Portiids, for as such they would come to be known, visitors were coming to their world. The civilization that had given rise to them had fallen and risen again, and at last, on the brink of extinction from their own vices—
I’m going to put my foot down.
And if you do, it will only prove my point. It will sound like a hundred thousand ants in confusion. And I continue—
Will you at least preserve some dignity for the human species?
(A small fiddling of the palps to express resignation, like a sigh.)
Those who could, set out in a desperate vessel chasing their knowledge of the places their ancestors had walked so very long ago, and so they came to the world under the stewardship of Avrana Kern, or what was left of her. At first, they came in need, and at last they came in war, for they could not understand the Portiids and saw them as monsters, and neither side could communicate with each other, and the remnant of Avrana Kern was mistrustful and remembered only how her great project had been betrayed.
That is a very diplomatic way of putting it.
I count diplomacy amongst my many Understandings.
The Portiids took the virus that had aided their evolution, which had allowed them to know one another and come together rather than living out their lives as single hunters, and introduced it to their creators, who were also the virus’s creators, gifting them with the understanding that here, too, were minds who looked out and sought to know the universe. And so it was that peace was made between the humans and the Portiids, and a new golden age dawned, and the humans would forever after be not just humans but Humans, which is a far better thing.
And so it was, later, that the combined knowledge of these peoples would lead to a vessel setting out from Avrana Kern’s world to voyage to other distant places where once humans had set foot and remade worlds, for faint signals had been detected from such places, and they were eager to know new intelligences and meet with them in peace.
Helena Holsten Lain regards her companion, now crouching in an attitude Helena knows to read as ‘expectant’. Portiid spider communications, being a combination of eight stamping feet and the waving of two fuzzy palps, are always something of a performance. Helena feels quite mute in comparison, her body language coarse and huge, her lone voice lacking nuance. She was born into a civilization where her people were a tiny minority, a curiosity, surrounded by a vast population of spiders who speak to senses Humans barely even have. She was a mere child when she began working on that barrier between the intelligent species of Kern’s World – to overcome it in a way that the mere sharing of an engineered virus could not. The journey has a few more steps in it, true, but she has just listened to Portia tell an imaginative, biased account of their world’s history, and her gloves and optical and cerebral implants translated most of it in real time, complete with subtext, personality and humour. Possibly a fair chunk of what she received was best guesses and gaps filled with human-equivalents that were square pegs for round holes, but it was leaps and bounds beyond anything she had grown up with.