‘Still,’ she says, ‘you’re going to have to find some way to not make us sound so awful.’ She subvocalizes into her own implants, her fingers resting ever-so-lightly on the deck, and her gloves patter out what she hopes is a good approximation of her meaning direct to the listening feet of her colleague.
‘But you are awful,’ comes the translated response, and Helena feels a leap of triumph, because, even if some meaning is lost along the way, she’s talking, even chatting with a Portiid spider in a way no Human has ever been able to save the sainted (and mostly artificial) Avrana Kern herself.
***
There is an itch at the back of his head. Not the itch of the surgical scars, which an interesting cocktail of medication is keeping at a respectable distance, but something inside his skull. Meshner concentrates on it, trying to draw it out, his own eyes sightless and dark because seeing actual real things is too much of a distraction and his eyelid discipline suffers when he’s distracted.
‘Not coming,’ he announces. ‘Give me a clue.’ He hears the tinny little sound of his lab assistant relaying his words to his partner in experimentation, and then that unique exhalation which is Fabian, said partner, going into a spectacular arachnid convulsion for the specific purpose of telling his Human confederate, Meshner, just how frustrated he is right now. Portiid spiders are a long way from their ancestral state, both in size and biology. The original diminutive jumping spider did not engage in active respiration, whereas the current model funds its life by expanding its abdomen to drag air in over the elegant filigree of its book-lungs. What they don’t do, as a rule, is sigh. By dint of great effort, however, Fabian has learned how to breathe in precisely such a way as to convey a Human emotion. Fabian and Meshner have been partners in crime, scientifically speaking, for a very long time. Despite the barriers to communication, they have developed an idiolect of their own, mostly devoted to complaining.
Then comes the rustle-shuffle of Fabian’s response to the translating lab assistant, and the assistant’s uncanny-valley voice saying, ‘Picture the ocean.’ The assistant was designed and embodied as part of Avrana Kern’s experiments in relating more closely to her chosen people, the Portiids. Coded to act as a spider male, it also speaks to Meshner in a male version of Kern’s usual tones, which he continues to find disconcerting.
The ocean . . . The idea passes deeper into Meshner’s mind in search of that spectral itch, and for a moment he has it: sunlight – dawn? – gleaming on water. He gets the impression of structure, wood and webbing, perhaps a pier? Shadows loom at the brink of his vision, hard-edged.
A faint rustle comes to him, Fabian making notes on Meshner’s brain activity and the data transfer from the ugly blocky implants that now make up a band around the back of Meshner’s head.
The brief moment of vision is gone, and Meshner knows his own excitement, and then frustration, conspired to drive it away. There is information waiting to feed into his brain, but his mind is an unruly mess and so it cannot find a way to its proper neurological targets.
Ocean, ocean . . . Images are there, but he knows them for his own memories and clears his mind again, using mindfulness techniques developed from scratch. What if I suppressed my own memory-accessing ability? he wonders. Could that work? There will be drugs that could render him an amnesiac for the duration, surely. Perhaps in that void, the alien impressions will come more naturally.
‘Couldn’t you give me something more . . . individual?’ he murmurs. ‘I don’t know if I’m getting anything through of yours.’
Again Fabian skitters in terse communication, and their assistant’s off-male voice reports, ‘I wanted you to have something that would fit naturally with Human experience, to make it easy.’
‘It’s not working . . .’ But even as he says it, his mind whirling with annoyance and resentment and the thought of another session wasted, he has a clear sight: a sea of a million blues – no, not even blues, a whole spectrum of colours that simply do not plug into the visual range he is familiar with. A sky that shimmers with the sun’s radiation. A ground beneath his feet that breathes softly with the traffic of a whole city at his back. Except his feet, his feet were in all directions, his back, his eyes, his eyes—
Meshner feels a sudden wave of nausea. The image, the sensory feedback, is gone in an instant, and yet his regular body has not come back to him. His proprioception goes haywire, all sense of where his body is, what shape it is, utterly deserting him. He opens his mouth to speak and his limbs spasm with palsy, sending him toppling backwards – had he been sitting, standing? – thrashing on the ground. His teeth snap and a sharp jolt of pain shoots through him as he bites his tongue.
Then a sudden rush of flattening artificial calm bullies its way into his mind like a thug, beating down the rush of panic and cooling his blood. Meshner opens his eyes, knowing that he’ll have a killer headache when the drugs wear off, and also that he might just have irreparably damaged his brain.
His colleagues regard him anxiously, or at least the fidget of Fabian’s palps conveys anxiety in a manner even a Human can understand. Fabian is a brindled black and grey spider with a body about the size of Meshner’s head, currently hunched over a spindle-shaped console with four legs making jerky adjustments to the program as he tries to mitigate whatever damage has just been done to Meshner’s mind. Beside him is the lab assistant he has taken to calling Artifabian. It has the general shape of a small Portiid spider, much like Fabian himself, but constructed entirely out of plastic, alternatively russet, transparent and iridescent. It is a robot of sorts with a dumbed-down copy of Avrana Kern’s personality inside it, splintered off from the ship’s. If it is genuinely concerned, there is no way of knowing.
Meshner stares at them, waiting for his eyes to focus properly. The headaches are starting now, the ones the medication never seems to touch. He suspects it’s all psychosomatic, his mind deciding that he damn well should be in pain given the stunt he just pulled. That doesn’t make it better, it only means he can’t actually use anything to get the pain to stop.
‘How’s my head?’ he asks, and Artifabian translates for him. They could just use the ship, but having this one servitor dedicated to their partnership means it learns their figures of speech and mannerisms, its approximations closer and closer to conveying the complexities of each other’s language. Meshner is fascinated by the way the device mimics Portiid attitudes. With Fabian it is plainly one rung down on the ladder, its stance polite without being quite deferential. When a female Portiid turns up, it is instantly obsequious, more so than Fabian, who is something of a boundary-pusher as far as his gender is concerned. Meshner has read simplified children’s histories of the spider civilization, vocal in explaining that, these days, everything is fine and male spiders are allowed to play a full role in society. In practice, even Human eyes can see it isn’t quite as advertised. He has no doubt today’s Fabian has far better prospects than the Fabian of a century ago, but the playing field still needs some rolling before it is level.