‘Ha, yes. Half-fixed, the rest on their way, so that’s all right.’ Senkovi had obviously worked out that a noncommittal noise was all he was getting.
‘That’s good.’ Senkovi really must be in a manic mood. ‘Does that mean you don’t need Rani to help with the remote work?’ And then, speaking over Senkovi’s response as the delay tripped him up, ‘Does that mean your mollusc diagnostics worked out?’
Senkovi was silent for longer than the signal gap as he worked out what to answer, and then silent a little longer, so that Baltiel was already cued to pick up the twitchiness in his voice when he finally spoke. ‘Actually, no remotes needed. They . . . they fixed it, Yusuf.’
Baltiel paused, about to delve into the murky depths of the Nodan reproduction archive. ‘What?’ Because that had been the plan, of course; to use the damn octopodes as aquatic crew, because Senkovi had sworn it was possible. Only he had tried and failed to demonstrate any such thing in the Aegean’s tanks. He had called everyone, full of his own prowess, presenting his molluscs with a virtual simulation of the trashed equipment they would be working with. Baltiel remembered the event with exquisite embarrassment. The molluscs had investigated the interface, moving things around in virtual space in a desultory manner, but there had been not a hint that anything Senkovi taught them had stuck. The whole exercise had dragged on unnecessarily until Baltiel had overruled the man and brought an end to the entire sorry affair. The little monsters had been sent down fitted with surveillance gear and hopefully trained to be curious about the malfunctioning kit so they would go take a look at it.
‘I, er . . .’ And now Baltiel was beginning to process the mixture of unease and elation in his colleague’s voice. ‘Yes, they went down and just . . . did it. Diagnosed the faults, patched them. Everything’s working again, for how long I don’t know. I mean, not all of them actually got to work but . . . fifty per cent of the pairs I sent down. They just . . . Yusuf, I’m going to admit something now. I don’t really understand it.’ He didn’t seem distressed by the admission. ‘In the lab . . . I gave them every chance to show that they understood the job, you know. And nothing. It was like they’d forgotten the first thing about learning anything. But now they’re down there and . . . they’re fixing things. As though all that technical stuff was in there somewhere, but . . .’ An exasperated noise. ‘We’ve got sixty per cent restored coverage along the fault. I’m trying them with new instructions.’
Baltiel had been running over the repair data. The work on the faultline kit had been erratic, unorthodox, not what a human with a remote would have turned out. Senkovi would doubtless sell it as his little pets devising their own solutions to the problem, which Baltiel was unwilling to accept. Not that he had a better explanation. Then something else snagged his attention. ‘Hold on, pairs? Why pairs?’ He brought up the specifics of just which pets Senkovi had been sending down the line to Damascus. ‘Disra, I can’t help noticing these are male-female pairings you’ve been sending down.’
Now it was Senkovi’s turn to make a noncommittal noise, and Baltiel ground his teeth at the distance between them. So Damascus had its first long-term residents, did it? Breeding pairs of octopodes sent down by Disra Senkovi, patron saint of all things tentacled.
‘It’s not as if anyone’s coming,’ Senkovi muttered after another long span of dead air.
‘Lante’s coming, with her goddamned chimera babies,’ Baltiel shot back, not as tactfully as he might.
‘Tell them to build boats,’ Senkovi said, and closed the connection.
After that, Baltiel felt he’d played cataloguer for long enough and moved on to Lortisse’s latest recordings of the fliers. It was a weakness, Baltiel knew. They had a whole alien ecosystem, every part of it novel and baffling. Focusing on a large dynamic carnivore was old-style human thinking, the same idolatry that put lions and eagles on so many old flags. Yet there was a strange malaise taking hold of him, and Lortisse and Rani as well. Now they were here, now this was it, they found themselves faced with a great absence in their work. Lante had her breeding programme, but the rest of them had an alien world filled with brainless, docile beasts. In the absence of the balance of the human race, they felt a lack of meaning to it all. The universe was no longer watching them. The data they were collecting was for no eyes but their own. And those who come after? Lante’s work was becoming more and more of a good idea, for all that she was still wrestling with the practicalities. We will understand this world and its life, but its life will never understand us. And that hurts, somehow. Because we need to feel ourselves important to our environs, and Nod has no way of knowing us. And so, unspoken, they had begun to concentrate on species whose behaviour showed complexities that might indicate a greater intelligence, some level of awareness of self, even if there was no brain to house it. It was a dreadfully anthropomorphic desire, but none of them could shake it. Humanity justified its premier position on Earth by its intelligence. But here was a vast and complex world that seemed to lack anything with thoughts as complex as a goldfish’s.
Lortisse had set remotes to shadow any fliers that overflew the marsh. The creatures were certainly active predators with a high-energy lifestyle, something that seemed vanishingly rare on Nod. Baltiel settled back to review the latest footage.
. . . Fliers powered through the air high over the marsh with that frenzied flapping sequence of theirs. The ‘up’ pole of their radial anatomy had shifted until it was ‘forwards’ and their flight was born of three pairs of hydrostatic wings being inflated in turn, a motion utterly unlike anything that had ever flown on Earth. The remote focused in on a trio of them, and Baltiel tried to read some social interaction between them, but for all his human eyes could tell they were simply sharing the same camera’s width of sky.
. . . A flier stooped abruptly, dropping from the air to tackle a mid-sized tortoise. Its descent was steep enough that its prey was unable to hunker down like a limpet, and the flier’s wings were repurposed as grasping, levering arms to get its victim onto its back, whereupon it flensed the luckless creature from its shell with a half-dozen claw-tipped tentacles. Lortisse had filmed a dozen of these attacks, plainly impressed by the savagery of the attack compared to the sedate pace of everything else on Nod.
. . . and then, the last recording, an attack that went wrong. The flier dived on its shelled prey but broke off, floundering desperately in the air as though its placid target had become suddenly toxic. The aborted dive left the predator on the ground, flapping and shouldering through the rock pools as it fought to get airborne again. There was no obvious reason for it.
Complex behaviour, of a kind, Baltiel thought, clutching at straws. Behaviour they couldn’t fathom, though. Alien behaviour. What had they expected?
He stared at the wall. In truth he was staring further, out past the horizon, out into the alienness of Nod. Notice me, he thought irrationally. Acknowledge that I’m here, before it’s too late.
5.
Such
hostile environments.
Such killing grounds.
And yet so strange. Word spreads until All-of-We know that here, here is something. As we generate and spend our energies new patterns emerge, a dizziness and madness of chemical gradients that lead Some-of-We to yearn towards this newness.
Some-of-We touch their substances, encounter their new elements, learn their valences and their shapes, the folds of their curious molecules.