Apparently Meshner has been eavesdropping. ‘Their technology is superior to ours, we think? Why not let them call the shots?’ He still looks pale and sorry for himself despite convalescence in cold sleep, but he is back with them.
‘We have a large library of their transmissions,’ Helena points out. ‘They have almost nothing of ours.’
‘And I intend to keep it that way if at all possible,’ Kern puts in firmly. ‘I have not detected any attempt to compromise our systems’ – meaning herself – ‘but I have put some fail-safes in place and given instructions to certain crewmembers to check on me.’ The unspoken coda: if Kern is hacked by the aliens, will she know? The main hope is that Portiid computing is so different to the Old Earth systems the aliens appear to base theirs on that any attempt at taking Kern over would be doomed by sheer incompatibility, whereas Kern is growing increasingly familiar with how the locals’ computers must work.
It hasn’t escaped anyone’s attention that Meshner has been given broad access privileges to Kern’s systems, heading up a list of two ahead of Viola. That raises eyebrows and palps all round, but neither Kern nor Meshner are in an expository mood, and full disclosure will have to wait.
And then their engines are shouldering against their momentum, jockeying with physics to come close to a spectral sphere that seems to be nothing but a globe of water, dancing in slow circles with the alien ship. It is almost empty, save for two chaotic-looking jumbles of angular, unformed plastic facing one another across a vast fluid space. Except that Helena sees the assemblies are exact mirror images. Our side, your side.
The prevailing theory amongst the Portiids is that they will find something here like the stomatopod civilization back on Kern’s World, only vastly more advanced. The crustaceans back home are also highly colour-sensitive, and indeed their natural sensoria contributed considerably to Portiid tech. The slate Helena will be projecting her colourful messages onto, and all the screens in the crew quarters, form their pictures by modified chromatophores, myriad colour cells that swell and shrink, tiny and multitudinous enough to produce lifelike moving images.
‘How big are they, do we think?’ Zaine asks warily, because although the new globe is dwarfed by its parent ship, it is still a lot of water.
No larger than I am, Portia replies promptly. She flags the dimensions of the connecting umbilical, which a Portiid would just be able to crawl into. They must just like the open sea.
‘There is a problem,’ Kern puts in. Her human voice is flat, suggesting she has reassigned processing power from trying to sound like her old self. Helena catches subtext in the Portiid vibrations she gives out, though: warning, anxiety and an odd sense of confession, clarified by her saying, ‘I have been working on a weapon to deploy against the enemy. Only if things went wrong, obviously.’
‘Let’s not call them “the enemy,”’ Helena says quietly.
‘I had hoped that an electromagnetic pulse would impair their systems and allow us to escape, as we are far less vulnerable to such weapons,’ the computer explains primly. ‘However, this globe exists only by virtue of a magnetic field, which might not survive such an attack. Hence, our ambassadors enter very much at their own risk.’
It was always going to be that way, Portia puts in immediately.
‘I have prepared your suits, then,’ says Kern, somewhat mulishly. ‘Suitable for water or vacuum, for what it’s worth.’
‘Good luck,’ Meshner says, not sounding terribly optimistic. Helena manages to meet his bloodshot gaze and smile.
4.
Let us call this one Paul, in honour of Disra Senkovi’s nomenclature. Just as Portia does not think of herself as Portia, but instead a sequence of vibrational pulses (modified by palp motions to indicate mood and relative status), Paul does not think of himself in human terms. Unlike Portia he has no fixed designation at all. He has an I, an ego that looks upon itself and recognizes its separation from the rest of the universe, just as it recognizes distinct parts of that universe which are its kin, rivals, potential mates, entities to be admired or avoided. Simultaneously Paul recognizes that these other entities are not fixed, and a rival one day may be a friend the next. He recognizes that he himself is a protean being, psychologically as well as physically.
He emerges from the umbilical cautiously. Parts of him are alive with anticipated danger, but the rest of him is pure curiosity and a desire to explore and discover. His people have been presented with a new challenge to investigate. Under other circumstances there would have been none of the violence Paul recently witnessed and took part in, but his people are facing a great many challenges right now, enough that they are becoming challenges for each other. When the alien intruders sent that message, the first comprehensible signal they had produced, it flipped the perspectives of a number of Paul’s people into full defensive mode. And why? Paul doesn’t ask the question, because he accepts that these feelings and shifts just are. There was a sudden danger attached to that anthropoid silhouette and some of his fellows interpreted it as a threat. They – their Crowns – recoiled and knew that they must defend themselves, which led to the various nodes of their Reach signalling the ship systems that act as an extended nervous system and body. Paul and his confederates in the meantime, had come to different conclusions, a desire to understand and investigate overcoming the sense of danger, and their reaction was to protect the New Thing from impending destruction. Hence the unpleasantness between ships that left twenty-six of Paul’s people dead. These days it is an all-too-common occurrence. His people live on the knife-edge handed to them by history.
But the makeshift alliance for the defence won out, making a fierce enough display that the attacking party re-evaluated its priorities and became instantly of a different opinion, abandoning their hostile action against the aliens without a second thought. Which has led Paul’s ship out here to create an arena where he, of all of them, can encounter these visitors.
The umbilical is narrow, but Paul is malleable and rolls his soft body through it easily, even his brain compressing when necessary. Flowering out into open water he feels a need to observe from a safer position before moving forwards. An arm reaches out, of its own accord, to touch the shelter his people created here and he oozes into its gaps, navigating the irregular spaces within, until his eyes push their way up through a hole so he can observe them.
There are two of them. Paul sees that one is something crab-like – smaller than Paul but larger than he feels comfortable hunting. The other is humanoid. Paul recognizes the shape even though he has no memories of such a thing: he is linked to his ship and the ship’s databanks have a lot of old detritus they are even now dredging up. The shape of a human being haunts the octopus records like a ghost, a bogeyman, a god of elder days. Paul’s skin fluctuates as he tries to process this subconscious knowledge, his emotions racing: awe, fear, threat, wonder.
And yet it is just the shape. He has a sense of constraint, of barriers between him and the aliens even though there is just the water. The ship’s sensors understand the visitors are completely covered in material that is not endemic to them: suits, devices. Paul cannot see them, which means he cannot receive the information from them that he is used to. They are like shadows in his mind. His mood worsens, more trepidation eating away at the optimistic curiosity. For a moment he is about to go back into his ship and abandon the entire venture. After all, the newcomers are just hanging there in the water, a stance of dominance a predator might take, rather than making use of their own shelter to show prudence and humility.