But he had overcome. He had decided that there was a line of direct communication, even if it was only in the broadest generalities. He could not know if Paul had just been complaining about the tasks or demanding a purpose of his creator. So he would answer all the questions at once by providing Paul and the others with a full and frank disclosure of what was going on.
Not Earth, not humanity, not Senkovi’s past or the intent of the original mission, but Damascus, the blue planet. Damascus, where a number of Paul’s relatives were already living, drifting through the habitable currents of the sea and occasionally descending on terraforming equipment to modify it, hopefully to Senkovi’s plans.
Senkovi was going to change how he went about that. He would still have the system flag up problem predictions, mostly in the form of warnings about negative conditions. The macro-terraforming of Damascus was mostly complete now, and there were robust ecosystems in place with multiple redundancies and diversity, all those little lives spawned from the genetic library aboard the Aegean. The fine work remained to be done, though. ‘Ocean world’ covered such a wide range of different environments, many of them inhospitable to both humanity and octopi. The tools to tweak and mould were all down there, along with mobile hatcheries to continue elaborating on the food chain, but there came a point where he couldn’t just do it himself. Why? So he would show them why. He had spent almost a hundred and fifty hours with the Aegean’s computer now, drugging himself to the eyeballs to do away with sleep and hogging a remarkable amount of the ship’s attention in order to model it all. He was giving his pets the world in miniature, a complete picture of the Damascus project, showing them what they could have, and how they could shape it, if they wanted. And, in moulding the world for their own protean purposes, they would be finalizing the terraforming of a human-habitable world, but in his mind it was first and foremost for them.
He had already begun to roll out sections of the code, broadening the world that Paul and the others looked on to. Instruments were recording the busy activity of the octopi in the Aegean’s tanks as they flickered and pulsed with colours, or clasped in brief, violent fights that broke apart almost instantly. Virtually they were exploring. He could track their presence within the system he was building for them. What they actually understood – if they understood anything – he could never know. There would forever be that barrier between them. He could not know how it was, for them. If a lion could speak, as the man said, we could not understand it.
And yet Paul had spoken, and he had chosen to assign meaning to those words. Why?
Senkovi was aware that, by now, he was not acting entirely rationally. The obsessive part of his nature, never that far from the surface, had been riding him through the streets at midnight.
The system was still pulling everything together, but at last he had to accept that his own input was finished. He could review the completed simulation, but he set the computer to keep feeding new sections to his pets, broadening their submarine horizons. It was all he felt he could do, in the end. He had reached the Seventh Day and the drugs couldn’t manage it any more.
Just as he broke away from the system, though, dialling up a new pharmaceutical cocktail that would bring him down far enough to actually let sleep happen, he saw that he had some seventeen outstanding messages from Baltiel, all of which were marked with a level of urgency he shouldn’t have been able to shunt into the background, but apparently had done. Somewhat tentatively, with the feeling of being in trouble, he checked the first one and discovered something had happened to Lortisse.
2.
Nobody had any answers for why the tortoise had stabbed Lortisse. By the time they got him back to the habitat he was already in profound shock; Lante spent four hours working their medical lab to its limits just to stop his body shutting down, mostly by taking over failing parts of his nervous system and practically running them by hand until they found their feet again. After that, ‘stable’ was not the word for his condition, but the constant attentions of the medical systems sufficed to keep his brain, heart and body all within the tolerances they required to ensure that he lived, and that what lived would still be Lortisse.
The unexpected answer Lante did have was just what the alien had injected him with.
She met with Baltiel once Lortisse’s condition no longer required her constant intervention. By then she had managed to extract a small sample of the material from his bloodstream and cross-reference it to the database.
‘You remember the tortoise graveyard.’ She was hauling up files almost carelessly, dumping them in the common virtual area for Baltiel to pick over: dissection recordings, her spoken logs, half-complete entries on alien life that were an exercise in speculation.
Baltiel revised the facts quickly: a collection of a dozen tortoises apparently dead or in some deep torpid state; Lortisse had hauled them all back for study because it looked like some other odd behaviour that might perhaps have led to more. Except it hadn’t. They had been inactive, and the very low level biological activity Lante had detected might count as ‘dead’ on Nod. The boundary wasn’t quite that clear-cut even in Earth biology. What Lante had gone on to investigate – what had seemed quite the rabbit hole at the time – was that three of the twelve contained a thick opaque fluid in their central sac, which was normally filled simply with a fluid close enough to the brackish water of the marsh. Her interest, as Baltiel saw, had been a flight of fancy that she’d found some differentiation of sexes in Nodan life, but that had gone nowhere. All the studied species appeared to practice sexual reproduction without genders, just exchanging identical gametes equably (cue Lante writing about ‘the parasitic gender of the male’ in Earth evolution and various other hobby horses). She hadn’t been able to show that the liquid had anything to do with reproduction, but it had been very dense compared to most Nodan cellular material, the interior of its cell walls maze-like with complex molecular structures. This was Nodan genetics, as far as Lante could tell, but if so, the stuff had either a very complex or a profoundly inefficient genome.
That was what the tortoise had shot into Lortisse, more of the same. Baltiel had a headachy moment when he thought Lante was going to talk about mating rituals and imply the damned thing had been after the equivalent of humping the man’s leg, but Lante had gone on to grimmer areas of speculation.
‘I think they were diseased, the tortoises,’ she explained flatly. ‘I think this stuff is an infection, some sort of fungal or bacterial equivalent found in the tortoise population. And maybe it spreads by having them stab one another. Its injection went through Lortisse’s suit like it was tissue paper, but that’s not surprising if it was expecting to have to get into a shell. Having gone over my data, I’m thinking maybe even something like a slime mould – a collection of cells that can act in unison. Clots of it seem to be holding together within Lortisse’s body, at least.’