And no voice. He tells himself it was an artefact, his own inner monologue rendered as audible words by yet another glitch with his implant. And he is not quite convinced.
3.
The creator referred to these records as the Senkoviad. It means nothing to Helena but had plainly amused him. He had been human, from Old Earth, one of Kern’s contemporaries. Helena even stumbles across a reference to Avrana Kern herself.
There is a lot of material. The archive she uncovered is vast and she can almost imagine the dust on it alclass="underline" not curated by its owners, just left unheeded in the great jumble of their electronic architecture. There is no security; that was what surprised her at the start. As soon as she configured her access protocols to something suitably archaic, she was let in as though she owned the place. Obviously, she and Portia then spent a busy ten hours trying to access systems of more practical use, only to find that all they had access to was a great morass of data, and not, say, the doors or life support or even a map. She has the distinct sense that all those things are out there, part of the sprawling virtual landscape, but they are not being governed by the same Old Empire logic and access procedures. Portia is still gamely trying, because that is her nature, although right now opening any doors is likely to get them both drowned. Left with no other options, but a more than ample sufficiency of time, Helena has gone back to her first love, because it was the obsession of Senkovi’s later days, too. She is learning about translation.
The Senkovi she meets is a man ranging from late-middle to elderly years in various recordings. He wrote and recorded in Imperial C, although she wrestles with his accent, slang and various systems of abbreviation that were probably his own invention, born of being utterly without other human company. Senkovi considered himself the last human being in the universe. Mostly he made the reference flippantly, turning it into a joke. A couple of recordings see him bleakly, deeply depressed, just rambling to himself about loneliness and frustration, mentioning the names of the dead, talking about his far-away, long-lost home. Helena guesses there had been far more of that than she was seeing; that he hadn’t often been in the mood to turn the recorders on when he’d been at his low points.
But mostly her searches turn up sessions where he works with his . . . experimental subjects? She has a sense that the relationship between him and his octopuses had started there but, by the earliest recording she can unearth, they had already renegotiated their respective standings. By inference, it is clear that Senkovi was aboard a ship or station in orbit, and that the watery planet below was the domain of the octopuses he appeared to have engineered, but with which he could not – at this point in the records – reliably communicate. He seemed to have no real control over them, either: they came and went, up and down the gravity well, according to their own whims. Senkovi had been a hands-off creator, she feels, but desperate to talk to them, and in the recordings they seem just as keen to talk to him. Which is ideal for Helena, who now has a vast library of recorded sessions of them failing to talk to each other, far more useful for her purposes than actual successful communication.
Portia, she signals, and the spider lifts her palps in acknowledgement. I’m going to need to cannibalize some of my translation software.
Portia’s left palp cocks expectantly: Hmm?
I need to reconfigure it to deal with the visual information the locals use, to give me even a baseline translation of what they’re trying to put across. And it’s going to be a bitch, frankly, because it’s not . . . discrete. I don’t think they have distinct building blocks – it’s some kind of gestalt of colours and textures putting over a composite message. I mean, I’m watching the man who actually made them, and he was working on this for decades, on and off, and I’ve skipped ahead and I don’t think he actually managed to reach conversation-level interaction with them.
Portia’s front legs lift slightly, an echo of her threat display as she contemplates the scale of the task. But you can? she says, with considerable faith in her friend.
I have something he didn’t, Helena says, trying to match the spider’s optimism. I have their current communications, the two-channel ones. Looks like they found their current mode of conversation long after this Senkovi’s day and it gives me an insight into their communications he didn’t have. So I can build on his work and maybe we can start talking. She sincerely hopes, because she is a linguist and talk is all she has.
Portia regards her for long enough that Helena asks, What? and the spider gives a curious little shake of her body.
You have great faith in the ability of communications to solve our problem. What if they are more than happy to keep us here, talk or not?
We cannot afford to believe that, Helena says with desperate faith. But like I say, I need to devote my software to this, which means I can’t keep it configured to translate for you. We’ll have to rely on yours instead.
Portia goes still, at first just thinking but then Helena translates her poise as the equivalent of embarrassment: slightly crouching, hoping to go unnoticed.
I will . . . configure my jacket and implants, Portia says awkwardly.
Helena feels a curious stab of betrayal. You’ve been relying on my translation all this time? And, yes, she has been eager to speak to Portia in the spider’s own idiom, to listen through her gloves. But she assumed Portia was running a simultaneous facility to understand Humans. For a vertiginous moment she sees the situation from the spider’s point of view. Of course, Humans would make the effort to communicate with the Portiids, to learn their language and imitate their sensory capabilities, but why would the Portiids, the hosts and rulers of Kern’s World, spend all that effort on talking and listening like Humans? It is a melancholy thought that even Portia might not quite see her as an equal, despite their years together. The two species are still building that bridge between them, strand by strand, even two generations on.
And so she turns to that other bridge, the one that is hers to build, working off the rickety scaffolding set down so long before by Disra Senkovi. He had been an erratic researcher; intent and obsessive in some sessions, frustrated in others, and then there were the long gaps between recordings where he had plainly lost the will to go on. The recording sequences are incomplete, some are corrupted. She lacks key milestones and must fill in gaps. But time is what she has.
Sometimes there is food: a kind of fishy slurry that is sour but edible. Sometimes the lights dim, although not to any set pattern she can detect. In the next-door chamber, the solitary octopus comes to the window to stare at her, its colours fluctuating between chalk and ash but making no discernible attempt to tell her anything.
Without Senkovi she could never have made any progress. The octopus communication is equally distant from Portiid speech as it is from human. Senkovi never cracked it, but he made records and tentative lexicons and hours of recordings. She watches him in the tanks, floating alongside his interlocutors; out in the dry, wrestling with multiple screens and a computer system that was slowly failing just as he was. She watches him butt against his limits and not know it: a man of erratic genius trying to apply his personal toolset to a problem he was ill-suited to. Senkovi was a planetary engineer, she understands, and he fell back on pushing for hard solutions and exact answers. Helena, on the other hand, is a linguist, a specialist in non-human language – even if she has only had experience with one such language until now. She takes the dead ends that turned Senkovi around, and she finds a way forward.