‘I’m seeing inflammation along the neural pathways, some small swelling around the occipital lobe,’ come the relayed conclusions of Fabian. ‘Not good, Meshner.’ His name becomes a cavalier little flick of the spider’s left palp, as though the creature is tossing a hat at a peg without looking at it. Portiid communications are short on those distinct meaning-to-movement correspondences but names are an exception.
‘Explains why I still can’t see straight,’ Meshner complains. ‘There was something there, though. I had a sniff of it.’ He eyes the spider. ‘Hmm?’
He recognizes the gesture Fabian makes, because it is the spider imitating him biting his knuckles, a piece of Human body language the Portiid had picked up on. It means that he, Meshner, is obfuscating and Fabian knows it.
‘We’ll go again next dawn,’ he decides stubbornly. ‘Dawn’ is a shipwide fiction, of course, but Portiids like their day/night cycles even more than Humans do. ‘I saw the sea,’ he adds, although he can’t say, in his heart of hearts, whether the sea had been truly from Fabian’s memories. ‘Can’t you give me something . . . more Portiid? Something I’ll know is definitely yours?’
Fabian taps his palps together with an audible tok, a gesture Meshner has seen no other spiders make. It means he’s thinking. The ship’s archives have a whole library of what the best translation renders as Understandings, a cornerstone of the Portiid civilization. They are genetic memories, Meshner knows, rendered into something that can be inherited, copied and implanted by a fluke of the pervasive nanovirus that guided the spiders’ evolution. If Fabian needs knowledge or a skill, he can simply have it introduced to his brain and, very shortly, be an expert. Meshner covets the facility, both for the way it could make any individual into a polymath, and for the bridge it could build between humanity and their new best friends. He knows that Helena and the linguistics crowd are going about the same task by very different and non-invasive means, but his way is better. If he can only get it to work. If he doesn’t scramble his brains trying. He is lucky to have a lab partner like Fabian who isn’t averse to risk-taking. But then Fabian covets whatever academic success looks like to a spider and, as he’s a male, that means he has to go twice as far on half the support. Fabian is doubtless delighted he found such an obliging test subject.
Then Artifabian’s meek pose changes to something bold and dominant, so that Fabian himself instinctively gives ground. The spirit of Avrana Kern – or at least the dominant facet that inhabits the ship’s complex computer system – has seized control of this errant splinter in order to interact with its crew.
‘The Ship’s Mistress has sent out a general alarm,’ comes that female voice from Artifabian’s speakers, even as the machine’s feet tap out an analogous message to Fabian. ‘All crew to the bridge, apparently. We have made a discovery.’
***
Waking the crew had begun in measured stages after the Voyager passed by the barren outer planets of the new system, homing in on the busy buzz of the signals coming from closer to the star. It had begun with Kern – or the semi-biological computer system that identified as Kern – bootstrapping herself up from basic functions into her full and ascerbic personality, then progressed through the crew roster based on the ship’s requirements: maintenance, medical, command, then everyone else. Both Helena Holsten Lain and Meshner Osten Oslam should have been in this last category, but both had employed special pleading to be woken early to work on their personal projects while the Voyager decelerated.
The Voyager has changed since they left their mutual home in search of a voice among the stars. Unlike the ancestral ships humans had travelled in, it has a fluid structure, forged from materials that can stretch and grow at Kern’s whim. On departure it had still mimicked what Kern remembered spaceships looking like, long and dynamic with a ring section for the crew’s waking moments. Now it is something more like a manta ray, its delicate wings extended and fitted out as organic solar panels for when they near the star. The crew assembles in a set of bolas-like structures Kern grew for them, that whirl in an orbit just ahead of the wingspan as though they are specimens in a centrifuge. Despite the best Human-Portiid medical tech, everyone is finding the resumed gravity onerous.
Helena and Portia arrive just in time for the ship’s commander to address them. The Voyager’s leader is old now – Portiids don’t live more than about three decades and Helena knows the commander kept herself awake longer than was her due, in order to watch over her crew. She is an angular spider with great tufted plumes over her main eyes that give her an owlish look. She is also a Portia, or at least her name is so similar to Helena’s friend that a mere Human has difficulty in distinguishing between them.
A lot of the other Humans there are looking more than a little groggy, woken more recently or slower to recover. Helena remembers her grandfather complaining about coming out of cold sleep on the old Gilgamesh, that had brought humans to Kern’s World. To hear him tell it, it had all been waking up and then mad chaos and then going back to sleep again. Duly cautioned, Helena put more time into modifying her biochemistry and training her body, and practically bounced out of cold storage the moment they woke her. Portia herself confessed that waking for the spiders was a profoundly uncomfortable process. She was only able to work with Helena because Kern had given them a head start and only come to the Humans later. The Understandings that the Portiids rely on so heavily became disconnected during long periods of sleep, to return haphazardly days after waking. It was, Portia tried to explain, like constantly forgetting who you were, forever reaching for knowledge that was not there.
Helena shuffles to her place, sure-footed in the padded socks all the Human crew use because shod footsteps on the springy floors sound like shouting to the Portiids’ vibrational hearing. She wears the standard crew uniform that Kern fabricated: a shirt and trousers of pale green, the cloth filmy and thin because the ship is warm and humid just like the planet they left behind.
Portia is already signalling and chatting with a pair of spiders on the Receiving team who have been up longer than anyone, cataloguing the rich signals from within the system and trying to make sense of them whilst keeping a few eyes on the active and passive sensors to ensure that the locals don’t sneak up on anybody. The literal translation of their department is ‘alarmed feet’, which still makes Helena giggle. It is also a salutary lesson that there are different layers of translation, and literal is not always the most useful.
She crouches and puts her hands to the floor, letting her gloves intercept the vibrational chatter between the Portiids, and her implants turn that into something resembling speech. Portia asks the two operators what’s up; they are bursting with the knowledge that they have detected an approaching object, almost certainly artificial. They are about to get their first look at the handiwork of the locals.
By then Old Portia, the ship’s mistress, is speaking. ‘I’m sure you’ve all been waiting for a gathering such as this. Anyone with any curiosity will understand that this is a heavily active, populated system. The volume and complexity of signals demonstrates that there is an advanced civilization based here, and the character of them shows a great many hallmarks of pre-collapse Earth technology and protocols. We may have here the secondmost direct line of descent from our founding culture.’ That is the spoken translation of the captain’s message, as relayed by the artificial ghost of Avrana Kern. With her fingers touching the floor, however, and her eyes on the flicking palps of the captain, Helena simultaneously receives the original. Her cybernetics and her organic brain provide her with, What this is, we have contact as you will have all expected. Signal traffic from in-system is dense and diverse enough to suggest a space-faring civilization that is still using Old Empire structure for the basis of its communications. Kern is both wordier and considerably free in how she passes on the concepts, and that sort of thing is exactly why Helena is working on her pet project. She feels a stab of annoyance at the coda the computer decided to add for its Human audience, to remind them just who was the first line of descent, in Kern’s own view, whilst feeling some bleak amusement that the utterly inaccurate phrase ‘Old Empire’ that her ancestors used to describe their own lost ancestors survives as a spider term of reference even after Kern hunted it to extinction amongst Humans.