Senkovi stared at him, feeling cold. ‘What?’
‘I had to get away, Disra,’ Baltiel said, the moment of estrangement passing as though it had never been. ‘We . . . just needed to move on, move out. I we couldn’t stay there, not after we’d . . . done what we’d done.’
‘Yusuf, is some of that blood yours?’
‘Trivial, very small, almost no amount.’ Baltiel stared at him and Senkovi tried to find the man he knew in those eyes, that face.
‘Yusuf.’ He swallowed. ‘I’m going to ask you to turn the shuttle back around. Back to Nod. Go on back to the planet.’ Am I really going to do this? ‘I can’t let you come to the Aegean. I can’t let you come to Damascus. Just . . .’
‘I’m coming, Disra. I want to see those spaces and extents that we remember. We can see the pictures and the maps but not the real thing not yet. It’s all right, Disra.’
‘It’s really not.’ Senkovi’s hands were shaking. ‘Go back, Yu— go back, whatever you are. You can obviously understand me, or half understand me. The Aegean has anti-collision lasers. I am going to use them if you come near me or Damascus, so help me. I am building something here. I am not going to let it get . . . infected.’
‘Disra, don’t treat us like this.’
‘I swear I’ll do it.’
‘You won’t.’ Baltiel’s smile was beatific. ‘We can reach out and touch you even from here. Even as we speak we are with you in all your spaces. We know the overrides and the commands to prevent you from harming us. Disra, we only want to explore. We’re on an adventure.’
In a sudden panic Senkovi dived into the Aegean’s systems, seeking control of the lasers, the engines. He was locked out. Baltiel had used his command codes.
‘I can get round these,’ he said. ‘I was always a better hacker than you.’
‘You just thought you were,’ Baltiel said serenely. ‘I always knew. We always knew.’
‘Eventually,’ replied Senkovi, through gritted teeth now.
‘We’re coming, Disra. We are Yusuf still, your friend. We will do no harm. You will never be alone again. Isn’t that a good? Yusuf, this vessel and These-of-we, we understand now that all the limits of your world are needless. We are greater and greater. You expand our world. We cure your singularity. Isn’t that a good?’
Senkovi was fighting the barriers Baltiel had so effortlessly raised in the system, but he was uncomfortably aware that ‘We always knew’ must have had its roots in the human original’s knowledge because he’d never been fenced off like this. The bastard never said anything. Senkovi knew he could break this down eventually. In his own humble estimation he was now the cleverest human being in the universe. Time, though. He checked the speed of the shuttle’s approach. Measured in hours, now. Did he have hours? He had set a dozen algorithms spinning their wheels to crack the codes, but now he returned to them to find them dismantled and in pieces, Baltiel striding down the beach kicking over his sandcastles one by one. In desperation he widened his comms to include the planet below, because the least he could do was warn his creation that Armageddon was coming to it. He flagged the shuttle for them, labelling it with as many symbols for danger as he could. Do not approach, predator, monster, hazard, avoid, flee. But surely what was coming was something that could not be avoided, not for long. Everything he had worked so hard to bring about, the entire future he had been constructing, it was all going to perish.
‘I don’t know who I’m speaking to,’ he sent to the shuttle. ‘If Yusuf is there in any way, please don’t do this. Take Nod, it’s your world. Build there, grow there, please. But don’t come and ruin what I have here.’ He discovered a curious purity in himself, at this late stage. His thoughts, his fears, were all for the budding culture in the seas of Damascus, not for himself. ‘Or take me, take the damn ship, take it away, just leave the planet alone. And if I’m talking to . . . if it’s not Yusuf, or if there’s something else that can understand me through Yusuf’s brain, then . . . what do you want? What can I give you, to leave us alone?’
‘What is to ruin?’ Baltiel’s quiet, reasonable voice came back. ‘We have discovered such vast expanses in these vessels, but within them, a greater vastness.’
‘Wh-what?’ Senkovi actually stopped working on the codes to get his head around what he was being told. ‘A greater vastness within the . . .’ He felt a lurch, as though the fake gravity of the ship’s rotation had suddenly shifted to the wall. An infection had got into the crew of the habitat, that had previously been parasitic on Nodan life like the poor bloody tortoises. It had found a way to adapt to its new, alien environment. It had found the brain – he remembered that much from Lante’s notes on Lortisse. And somehow it had inveigled its way into the human cognitive process, able to influence and change it, but also perhaps able to receive from it. What would it have understood? Space, interstellar travel, the history of human civilization; a greater vastness.
‘We cannot be limited now we know what vastness means,’ Baltiel said. ‘We know you understand this. Why else did you cross from your own native vessel to inhabit these far spaces?’ His inflection kept shifting and jumping, now Yusuf Baltiel’s clipped precision, now shuddering with weird stresses and phlegmy catches as his governing occupant forged new concepts into human words.
Senkovi set his virtual agents in motion again, trying to hide their tracks and watching Baltiel hunt them down. And it was him, or they were using that part of him. Senkovi’s stock of belief was already stretched to breaking, but it wouldn’t permit him to credit some alien consciousness that could rifle Baltiel’s mind and make use of his knowledge and his skills without the engagement of the man’s own judgement. This was Baltiel, Overall Command of the Aegean, save that his mind was dancing to the tune of a new master. What does it feel like to be him? Does he even know? Is he happy? And, the grim sequel to those thoughts: I guess I’ll find out soon enough.
‘Just the ship, not the planet, please,’ he whispered, but Baltiel – the Baltiel whose face he saw on the screen – didn’t react.
He checked for signals from Damascus, but the octopus colonies seldom contacted him direct. He placed ideas and information into their shared virtual space and they did with that data whatever their own weird thought processes dictated. He had given up trying to train and limit them long ago, and everything had worked so much more smoothly after that. Each generation was more inventive, more ingenious in its subversion of the technology he had given them. Recently he had seen signs that they were replicating machines they didn’t have enough of (or had decided for their own unknown reasons they wanted more of). They had repurposed some of the factory machines to produce parts and were assembling them in novel combinations. He had no idea what they were building most of the time, and now he would never find out. They are on the very brink of seizing their own destiny, and they won’t be given the chance.
Sometimes they did contact him, some of them. About a dozen, across the planet, sent him messages. Not prayers, of course. Certainly not technical reports or anything so comprehensible. They were patterns that shifted and danced, changing hues and shapes with a fluidity that made him giddy. Some of them came tagged with error codes and data sets, identification markers, access codes. He had the impression they were trying to make their missives intelligible to a human, but the gap between his outstretched fingers and their tentacles was just too wide, still.