‘We’re terraforming a planet that is almost entirely ocean,’ Lante pointed out.
‘Hey, what?’ Senkovi had been mentally elsewhere, slouching against the wall and ignoring the conversation, but that hooked him. ‘You want to . . .?’ He looked from Lante to Baltiel and then made a sulky face. ‘Well, I suppose that’s what it’s for, only I was thinking boats . . .’
Baltiel had a good idea what Senkovi was thinking and decided to set up some routines in the Aegean’s systems in case the man went entirely mollusc-native on them, routines that Senkovi hopefully wouldn’t be able to just circumvent. For now, though, he needed a response to Lante and the others.
I am a jealous god, he thought. That would be his standard party line, and it should have been frozen into him by the years in cold sleep, his attitudes crystallized until he was little more than a parody of himself. And yet, and yet. He examined his knee-jerk rejection of Lante’s mad, bold plan and found it nothing more than that, no substance behind it.
‘We’ll put them on Damascus, as much as we can,’ he said, knowing that even if he wasn’t such a jealous god, there was going to come a time when Zeus would go head to head with Poseidon over departmental demarcation. ‘On boats, as much as we can.’ It was an attempt to placate Senkovi, as much as one ever could. ‘But we’ll be on Nod, so I suppose you’ll be doing the initial work there.’
They had been so tensed for a scrap over this that Lortisse actually physically staggered, as though leaning against a door unexpectedly open. Baltiel shrugged.
‘Just don’t think about Nod as a colony world. The soil won’t grow anything people can metabolize, the entire biosphere is wrong for us, and we’re not changing that. And I’ve seen your work.’ Briefly, on the walk over. ‘You can’t make humans who could live there like natives. Low O2 and high grav mods won’t cut it. They wouldn’t be human once you’d finished making all the changes.’
Lante obviously felt that was defeatist talk, but she recognized the value of taking the victory he offered, rather than risking everything on pushing for more. And Baltiel reckoned he was right. Nodan biochemistry was alien from the ground up, a cocktail of elements hazardous to people and organic molecules that might have arisen on Earth but never did, out-selected by chance and time. There were probably some Earth extremophiles that could scrape a living there, but nothing more complex than that. Earth and Nod biology were ships that passed in the night without signal or hail.
3.
Salome is not fond of the elevator and, halfway down, does her best to escape it. Her co-prisoner on the journey down, Paul, feels alarm, jetting towards the top of the capsule and clinging to the plastic sheathing.
Technically he is Paul 51 and she is Salome 39, as per Senkovi’s notes. His numbering of generations is eclectic, however; unreliable. There have been co-existing Pauls, and of course Pauls 1–3 lived back on Earth in his aquariums. Any guilt he might have felt about poor bookkeeping went the way of the rest of the human race. As long as he understands his notation, nobody else is likely to care.
Paul has gone almost white, with black and purple patterns flickering and dancing at the edge of his mantle. Externally, he is much the same as the earliest Pauls, a football-sized body that is mostly stomach and brain; eight muscular tentacles ridged with suckers on the underside, surrounding a remarkably powerful beak. Internally he is a melange of ancestral genetics and the tweaks of the Rus-Califi virus. The virus, it will be remembered, was intended as an uplift tool. Califi and Rus started with the assumption that any sane researcher would want to tentatively nudge a mammalian species closer to human cognition. Senkovi has, therefore, not simply been dosing the tanks with it and hoping to wake up to vaguely tentacled humanoids able to discuss the nature of existence. Instead, he has used minimal and selected nanoviral samples to tweak, with his best guess, certain parameters of his subject species’ worldview. His belief has always been that he has merely assisted the clock of nature into moving a little faster, but Disra Senkovi is not the best for unbiased introspection.
In this case, though, it is impossible for such a self-focused man to create in his own image. Take Paul’s alarmed state. Paul is connected to the elevator systems, which contain the information – organized pictorially in a code Senkovi has painstakingly worked out as being something his pets can usually grasp – that if Salome succeeds in overriding the safeties then they will both find themselves outside, meaning miles over the surface of Damascus along with the rapidly dispersing watery environment currently sustaining them, and with about the same chance of survival as a bowl of petunias placed in the same predicament. Hence Paul’s alarm, but Paul himself – the brain that is the centre of Paul – is in no position to appreciate the cause-and-effect physics of this. He just knows that he is frightened, and that Salome’s actions are the cause. His fear is written across his skin for her to read – and she does – but not as a signal he consciously intends to send. His skin is the chalkboard of his brain, where he doodles his thoughts and feelings from moment to moment. If he wished to be deceptive he could fight himself for control of his own canvas, but right now he is more than happy for Salome to know just how stressed she is making him.
So where does the understanding lie, of their impending doom? Within the wider network of his nerves, perhaps; within and between the individual sub-centres of neurology that control his arms, a semi-autonomous battery of processing power that Paul’s brain lives in partnership with, and that makes his subconscious – insofar as he has anything humans would recognize as one – a powerful and world-affecting thing.
In just such a way, Salome – mottled red and angry purple, her skin pricked up into thorns and daggers – just knows she wants out. This is not her tank. Where are her games? Where are Great Large Entity and Calm Large Entity (system ID tags: Senkovi, Lortisse respectively)? What is this sense of motion and fluctuation of pressure within the water? Her brain proposes, her arms dispose. She is linked to the schematics of the capsule herself. The sub-minds of her arms grapple with the shape of it, turning it about and seeing where pressure can be applied to crack it open. She begins assaying commands; and though all of her, taken in aggregate, has the entire picture of her predicament, her active understanding is simply that she wants out, and here and here represent a way she can accomplish this. The greater drop outside eludes her, irrelevant to her priorities.
Paul, then: his own arm-driven undermind (his Reach, as opposed to the Crown of his central brain or the Guise of his skin) understands that to remove the fear he must prevent Salome from accomplishing her own goals. At first he simply signals this automatically, initially broadcasting a directionless fear but then adding qualifiers of colour and texture so that Salome understands she is the source of his anxiety. Normally this would be in response to her threatening him and indicate capitulation, but the raised whorls and darts of Paul’s malleable skin show that he means anything but.
Salome cocks an eye at him, reading his intent very clearly, and doesn’t really care. She is bigger than Paul; what is he going to do?
What he does, against millions of years of instinct, is try to attack her. He flushes his skin dark with angry courage, raises a hundred jagged crests across his body and jets towards her. They wrestle furiously, a boneless strangler’s writhing. Unlike vertebrates they have no proprioception, no mental picture of where all the parts of their bodies are. Eight arms that can bend in any direction at any point would tax the processing power of the Aegean, let alone an octopus brain. The Crown sets strategy, but battlefield tactics are the province of the Reach, those sub-nodes that run the arms.