Sometimes more octopuses squirm into the other adjoining chambers to watch her and Portia. She takes the opportunity to record them as their skins ripple and dance with colours. Patterns spread from individual to individual, mutate, change; they are constantly talking, or perhaps emoting. They touch often, and sometimes they break abruptly into what looks like fighting – one even loses an arm to such a struggle – but which she begins to think is an inherent part of their communication strategy. She makes notes, observing them just as they observe her.
The lone, pale octopus is kept segregated, she notes, and she is increasingly certain it is their former ambassador, contaminated by contact with aliens. Its own skin flickers hesitantly when its kin arrive, and she sees an interplay between it and them, yet there is also a distinct exclusion in the way they react to it, like humans turning their backs. The interplay within the group is far more dynamic than that between them and the loner. And yet they are still ‘talking’ to it, even as they ignore it. Which makes her ever more sure that what she is watching is something other than ‘talking’ and puts her in mind of the twin channel transmissions the creatures broadcast with.
She sleeps, Portia and she looking out for each other and taking shifts. They eat the tedious fish-smelling paste extruded sloppily into their chamber. She works alongside the long-dead Disra Senkovi, reliving his moods and despair, his moments of manic animation, the cut-off ends of his psychological low points when he abandoned his research and his recording to feed the black dog that constantly followed him.
He lived a long time, alone, she realizes. He spent half a lifetime trying to reach out to his creations, because there was nobody else in his universe he could talk to. And he came so close, negotiated a means of exchanging data and information, yet never made that emotional link. She thinks about herself and Portia, how she can recognize the moods of the spider, even though they are not quite Human moods; and vice versa, she hopes. I am damned lucky, is what I am.
And then she finds one long clip in which Senkovi tells a joke to an octopus. It isn’t a good joke; dreadful, in fact. He finds it hilarious though, being in that part of his mood-cycle, and she watches as the cephalopod’s skin slowly shifts and changes, and then begins to rapidly flicker and dance. Laughter? No, laughter is human. Beyond an appreciation of simple physical pratfalls, Portiids do not find Human humour funny, just as Portia once tried to describe a complex social engagement she plainly considered . . . something, some word Helena didn’t have, the emotive impact entirely beyond her reach. So here is poor Disra Senkovi, a man a century old and many thousand years dead, telling jokes to sea life and getting a response.
And the reaction delights him. He goes on and on, dredging up puns and wordplay and double entendres, almost splitting his sides with laughter, and the octopus glitters and shimmers with bright, daylight colours, clinging to the glass of the tank and watching the ageing comedian in fascination.
Helena’s notes are sufficient, by then. She can understand what Senkovi never knew. The octopus could not get the joke, but it understood that he, its creator, was happy. Happiness is a universal, perhaps; or at least it was something the octopus read in that cackling face, and married to some state of its own. The octopus knew he was happy, and it loved him, or valued him, or felt something enough that his happiness was important to it. And that in itself is a miracle; that is the grand triumph Senkovi never grasped, that his creatures could empathize, could apply a theory of mind to entities quite unlike themselves, could be great-hearted enough to be happy that someone else was laughing, even if they couldn’t get the joke.
She watches them for a long time, and then she turns the recordings off, lets the data lie fallow. She sits with her arms about her knees and stares at the solitary grey octopus in the next cell and feels unutterably sad.
At last there is a faint touch down her lower back, one leg-tip stroking her tentatively. Portia understands Human emotions, too. Sadness is another universal, maybe, even if different stimuli trigger it.
‘He was so lonely,’ Helena whispers, hoping Portia has her translation software configured.
Again that stroking touch. Emotional trauma is worse for Humans, Helena knows. Portiids still feel it: for them, shock or frenzy are most common. Portiid brains are more uniform, though; they have more common experience with each other than Humans, and hence sympathize with each others’ trauma more readily, rather than each becoming a solitary prisoner of their experiences, as Humans so often are.
Helena wonders if the octopuses have it better or worse. Except of course they wear their hearts on their skins, all the time. Perhaps there is simply no such thing as a private trauma, and hence no stigma to it. Perhaps they live their lives like operatic heroes and heroines, broadcasting the grandeur of their melancholies and their rages to all within eyeshot. Thinking of poor Senkovi, that alternative sounds eminently healthy to her.
And one day, after she has thrown her bucket into Senkovi’s well and heard it strike dry, she knows she is as prepared as she will ever be. When the little parliament of molluscs arrives to eyeball her and Portia again, she is ready. She takes her slate, now configured to encode and decode as much of the octopus communication as she has grasped (pitifully little, even now) and presents it to them boldly, and hopes she is saying hello.
4.
No word from Helena; no transmissions from the locals, no ransom note or demands or even threats. Or rather, plenty of incidental transmissions should one choose to turn receivers towards their world, but nothing aimed at the Lightfoot. No communications with the Voyager either, which is still hiding out in case the xenophobia of the aquatic civilization here turns out to be insuperable. And Fabian has the uncomfortable feeling that a timer is inching down the wire somewhere. The locals are technologically advanced and erratically paranoid. Octopoid eyes somewhere are going to be searching the further reaches of their solar system for perceived threat. It’s what Fabian would do, after all. He can only assume these angry molluscs have at least as much common sense as a male Portiid.
All of this makes Fabian very angry, an emotion he shows neither in palp nor footfall. It does not do for male spiders to give rein to that kind of outburst as a female might. He is expected to be meek and deferential, and it eats him up inside like a parasitic larva sometimes.
The Voyager mission had got him out from under the shadow of some particularly dominant females in his peer house, who would have blithely taken the credit for his researches – not necessarily a theft, so much as a kind of intellectual eminent domain: anything he produced would obviously be a product of the peer house itself, with Fabian as mere conduit. After that, and with his work hovering frustratingly near the boundary of success without quite crossing over, all these excursions aboard the Lightfoot came at exactly the wrong time. He resents the risk, because if there is one archetypally male trait Fabian espouses wholesale, it is a regard for an intact exoskeleton. He resents the interruptions. He particularly resents the fact that now, of all times, progress is being made. Why couldn’t this have happened back when they had the opportunity to focus on it?