He is also beginning to resent Meshner, or at least his frailties. Humans are supposed to be robust. How could they not be? They’re huge, and they have that absurdly overcompensatory immune system that makes him wonder how any of them can ever fall ill at all. Except Meshner is not well, and months of research-heavy interplanetary travel cooped up aboard the Lightfoot is not mending him. Fabian has spent no small amount of thought on the subject of how much their researches (‘their’ when negative, ‘mine’ when positive, and he is fully aware of the mendacity of this and cannot train himself out of it) are to blame and tells himself stridently that it is only a little, and other factors outside his control are more culpable. And he is practically there. Only a little more and Fabian can go happily off and encode his findings for the benefit of future generations. Except that those findings are going to be trapped in the ship with Fabian for the foreseeable future, and may meet an explosive death in the vacuum of space with him. This, he particularly resents.
He has spoken with Kern, or rather he has spoken with Artifabian, in the hope the automaton will act as his go-between with a computer too important and busy to deal with him directly right now. Artifabian has a plan to compress Fabian’s data and transmit it on a broad frequency if it appears the Lightfoot’s destruction is imminent. This is less than satisfactory. The Voyager may not receive the signal; moreover the data will only be the bare bones and what Fabian wants to get out is his own Understanding, because in that memory will be him, set down for all posterity. He will become a part of his species’ legacy for future generations and this has been his goal for most of his life.
He goes and corners Meshner yet again, as well as he can in a crew space without corners. I have the first set of maze tests, he explains. I will download them to your implant now.
Fabian spots that Meshner’s expression is not the eager, tractable one he is used to. He queries Artifabian for translation and apparently his Human co-conspirator is unhappy, possibly traumatized. Fabian does not have time for this. Possibly none of them do. It’s only a maze, he says. The amount of data is considerably less than a full emotive experience. This is not entirely true because every Understanding comes with the innate baggage of she – or, rarely, he – who set it down, but Fabian has attempted to maintain a detached aspect throughout. They have reduced the scope of their experiments by minute increments over the course of their interplanetary journey, giving up the grandeur of their ambitions iota by iota, and this is what they are left with. Fabian has memorized a simple maze, and he wants to make Meshner run through it. Mentally, not physically, although the comparison with the laboratory animals of yore is unavoidable.
Meshner gives in, with poor grace, but he checks with Kern first – apparently she will give him all the time he wants. They are closing with the inner planet, and with the orbiting structure that is sending out the bizarre natural history lesson, but there is time, Kern says.
Fabian accesses the architecture of Meshner’s implants to download his maze Understanding. Things have changed in there, he notes. The complexity of the virtual space has increased by an order of magnitude, indicating that the implant’s algorithms are now vastly better at processing and storing complex data. The rate of change is a little unnerving, in fact, as though the implant is reflecting and copying greater external structures. Fabian has a moment of caution, about to call it all off, but he presses on. This just means that his experiment has a far better substrate on which to run.
The observed changes seem to have had no immediate ill effect on his subject, so Fabian gives Meshner the maze, and things go – not wrong, but unexpectedly, straight out of the gate.
I’m there, comes Artifabian’s translation of the words that Meshner is sending. It’s . . . where is this? Is this somewhere you saw?
Fabian fidgets nervously. Are you able to trace the path through?
It’s slick. Artifabian is working overtime to convey emotional distress. There’s . . . weed, sea things. The walls are green-black stone. Fabian, where did you . . .?
Just concentrate on finding the way out. This test is being timed, Fabian tells him primly.
I know the way.
Four words, but Fabian feels his limbs twitch with excitement. At the same time he is running diagnostic tests on the implant, because there are no walls, there is no weed. The maze is simply a configuration Fabian spun up within the computer, an intellectual exercise, but Meshner appears to be adding his own grotesque content, turning the simple game into a simulation, making use of all that convoluted new architecture. Sure enough the implant is running at capacity, and indeed has created new capacity by further optimizing its structure. More than that, it is drawing on outside resources: unused computational power from the ship plus Meshner’s own cerebral functions.
The process requires some refinement . . . Fabian tells himself timorously. In truth he is not sure what he’s looking at, except that the experiment is getting away from him. He tells himself that this is not damaging Meshner permanently. He is aware that he lacks the empirical data on which to base such a statement.
Meshner finishes the maze in adequate time, and the next three even faster as he grows used to the medium. He continues to complain about the character of the mazes, which have a ruinous, sunken aspect Fabian attributes to their recent travails with the octopuses. Fabian still has more tests, but by then Meshner has had another episode, a moment in which he loses all proprioception and sense of belonging in his own body. After that the Human seizes the chance to break away from vital research because a distraction has arrived. All that valuable time for experimentation has been used up; at long last they are nearing the orbiting station and everyone (except Fabian) wants to take a look.
***
Meshner guesses the others also expected something quite different, specifically something more Human – or at least human. Instead, the orbiting station is a bizarre hotchpotch of technologies that suggests the octopus civilization at least extended a tentacle out this way at some point.
The basic frame is certainly consistent with Old Empire technology – very old given the battered and friable look of the thing. The precise original dimensions would be impossible to determine, save that Kern already has them to hand, dredged out of her far-reaching, erratic memory.
‘It is, or was, a detachable module from a terraforming ship.’ Her voice, reporting, is very flat, all the ants and the wiring of her is devoted elsewhere, but Meshner finds he can’t avoid giving the lack of affect a human interpretation, as though Kern is filled to the brim with suppressed emotion. ‘The Brin 2 facility had one, identical to this.’ Except the Brin 2’s module was presumably destroyed with the rest of the facility, back during Kern’s long-ago lifetime, leaving her the sole survivor. ‘I’m not seeing any sign of the main station. Presumably that either lost orbital capacity in the intervening time or was deployed elsewhere. I favour the latter as there is no suggestion this planet has been terraformed.’ Planetary data unravels down the screen, based on their preliminary scans. Meshner cross-references it to the fragmentary transmissions and joins all the dots: a planet consistent with supporting the supposed biology and ecology the Lante signal claims.