‘I didn’t ask for this posting,’ Meshner mutters sullenly.
‘You could have said no,’ Zaine tells him.
‘You can never say no. Fabian couldn’t. He needs to show he’s useful, or he’ll get passed over.’
‘For what?’
‘For everything. And I need him, so here I am.’ Meshner’s eyes are bloodshot and the skin about his boxy cranial implant is red and puffy.
‘Why were you even on the Voyager?’ Zaine demands. Helena glances round at the spiders, but of course they don’t hear like Humans do – speech is barely perceived by their vibrational sense, even Human shouting, keyed as they are to other frequencies a world in which the spoken word is irrelevant.
‘Time,’ Meshner spits. ‘Time, in transit. We were awake a lot longer than you, getting this set up.’ He jabs a thumb at his own head. ‘We knew we’d get more done than stuck at home dancing to everyone else’s tune.’
Zaine opens her mouth to lay into him again but then Kern’s voice breaks in from all around them. ‘Contact!’
Bianca responds immediately. Helena has her gloves to the wall in time to catch the trailing end of her questions, with Kern thrumming back that she has established a connection with an entity located within the asteroid belt that lies beyond the gas giant.
An alien vessel? A machine? Bianca taps out.
I am unable to say, Kern replies through the walls, Human words echoing after for the benefit of those without Helena’s advantages. But it is responding to the basic queries I have sent it, and not merely in the manner of an automated beacon or similar mindless system. I am receiving a battery of enquiries, most of which I lack the familiarity to answer. I believe we have contacted a real intelligence, machine or organic. I am responding as best I can. Kern makes a rapid tapping sound to indicate annoyance, mirroring her exasperated human sigh, artfully reproduced over her speakers. I am still receiving a vast preponderance of visual data. The comprehensible segment of the signal comprises less than five per cent of the information load.
She displays some of what they are receiving: the same bright-patterned, constantly-shifting abstract shapes Helena saw in signals previously intercepted. They are hypnotic, lacking a recognizable rhythm, heedless of geometry, just broad swathes of flowing, shifting patterns, or rapidly shifting non-Euclidian objects whose dimensions, textures and arrangements change apparently at random in bewildering, non-repeating sequences.
Viola suggests that perhaps it is art, mere aesthetic adornment to garnish the functional message. The amount of bandwidth it takes up makes that unlikely, but that is a Human/Portiid judgement. Who knows what the locals believe important? Speculative discussion breaks out, even Meshner making a contribution, but Helena just stares at the patterns, their weird complexity speaking to her with a seductive promise of meaning, of familiarity. She has worked all her life to break out of her own skull – not by drilling holes in it like Meshner, but by expanding her viewpoint. She feels that if she could only push that envelope a little further . . . but no, nothing. Whatever the message is, she is missing it.
Soon after, everyone is in their acceleration couches as the Lightfoot shifts its angle of approach towards the belt. Kern believes she has arranged a rendezvous through exchange of coordinates in the locals’ notation. They are going to meet the aliens.
3.
Portia feels herself at the hub of a network of threads, stretched taut and vibrating with alarm and excitement. ‘Alarm and excitement’ would probably be the Human translation of her answer, if someone asked her why she had volunteered for the Voyager crew. Of all those on the scout mission, she had no qualms whatsoever at being chosen – not just because she works very well with Humans (well, with Helena, who in her mind is not a particularly representative Human, but good enough), but because the thought of the Unknown, of cosmic mystery, of things to discover, motivates her even more than most Portiids. Her lineage is one of explorers and pioneers. An ancestress of hers stole the Sacred Eye of the Messenger from the ants, back when the ants were the great power in the world and not merely a convenient operating system to run Avrana Kern on. Amongst the myriad contributors to her genetic code are aviatrixes, warriors, astronauts. And others, of course, more commonplace, but Portia’s genetic inheritance skews far more to the daring and the groundbreaking. This is not simply a matter of a predisposition to certain personality types, of course (a trait observed in certain social spiders long ago on Earth), but a curation of Understandings all the way back to the days when those skills and memories could only be passed down by the natural union of sperm and egg. Portia really is the sum of her ancestors, crouching on the cephalothoraxes of giants. She remembers the thrill of striking out into virgin forest where monsters might dwell, contesting with the elements, mastering the technology that opened the doors of the sea and the air, seeing Kern’s World from orbit for the first ever time. And there is tragedy and loss and pain associated with those experiences, of course, but generation on generation such sharp edges tend to get rounded away.
When she was very young she faced her life’s great fear and it nearly destroyed her. It was that there might be no more frontiers, no new branch to leap to, no new prey to puzzle out and conquer. There is a lot in Portia with which her far distant arachnid huntress ancestors might feel a kinship. But she conquered that fear, took it on faith that science and global ambition would conspire to give her the opportunity she craved, to stand and measure legs with her illustrious forebears, and find herself at least their equal.
Now she waits, always hard for her. The crew have been in and out of sleep as their whims take them, but Portia hates the waking, and so she has been staying out longer under the excuse of research. Helena is working on the theoretical side of their communications studies, refining the sensory inputs of her gloves and goggles and training her brain to convert tactile subtext into impressions that make sense to Humans. For her part, Portia is tinkering in a desultory way with the acoustic translators she can wear like panniers, and which give a very basic – and sometimes howlingly inadequate – impression of Human speech. The drive to communicate is mostly the other way, though. After all, there is only a small number of Humans on Kern’s World compared to a billion or so Portiids. There is an implicit suggestion that the newcomers should be the ones to adjust. She has dismantled one pannier and is following some Kern-prompted suggestions on how to refine the outputs for a more intuitive result, but mostly she has her mental legs on those imaginary threads and is waiting for them to twang with activity.
Portia’s ancestors were not web-spinners as a first resort. If there were a species out there uplifted from orb web spiders, its outlook would be very different, evolved to sit at the heart of a far-reaching world of its own creation, where the landscape speaks to it in its own language and it does not need to travel. Portia’s tiny ancestors turned such perspectives against their non-sentient creators, forging the voice of the environment or sometimes even extending those artificial sensory organs into webs of their own that they could lure the original builders onto for ambush. The thought of waiting for that web-borne message is therefore a matter of far greater danger and excitement: in the core of their minds the Portiids know they are not the builders of the universe’s great web, but they dare to walk it and eavesdrop on its messages and turn it on its makers if need be.