She feels so abominably weary, but what if this is the only chance they get? She fights with the slate, trying to formulate a message, aware that her audience is losing interest yet again, even as Portia’s recounting inadvertently drags her closer to sleep . . .
And she almost does nod off, but in that hallucinogenic borderland between wake and repose the understanding comes to her, jolting her back.
I’m being dull. For a Human, it is natural to try and simplify, but she can see the whirl of complex patterns the octopuses direct towards her and each other. The old recordings with Senkovi had been the same. If they were talking, they were yammering away constantly, too fast for her to understand and with no care that she was a poor, lost alien without a hope of following.
She lurches to her feet and approaches the window, slate held before her like some seal of authority. ‘Please listen to me. I am cold and hungry and very, very tired. I am frightened. Everything here frustrates me. I feel I’m letting down my crewmates and my people. This is important to me and I’m failing and I don’t know why. Please help me!’
Her speech – that horrible undiplomatic gabble – goes right through to the slate, which does its best to make it into pretty patterns and shapes. She runs a triple-speed playback, seeing a horrible mess surely proof against any translating.
And yet, when she looks back, she has their attention, or at least three of them stare right at her: that shock of contact, eye to eye, just as she would have with a human, more than with a Portiid, even.
And then they begin speaking directly to her. One coils about a console, two are right against the glass, pulsating out a rapid patter of agitated patterns. Her translation algorithms make a game attempt at meshing the colours and the accompanying data signal and weaving something comprehensible out of it, but it is too much all at once. Three octopuses shouting at her, figuratively, overlapping each other in a constant torrent of content. She stumbles back from them, Portia tapping her on the knee for solidarity.
They are very upset/confused/angry/indignant. At the same time she finds signals expressing surprise – shock, disgust, horror, wonder – at finding something like her that they can communicate with. The data channel throws up Senkovi more than once: they know her species, certainly. But there is more. They make demands of her, threats even. They want her to do something, or not to do, or . . .
‘I’m lost.’ She shares everything her software has gleaned with Portia. It overwhelms her. ‘I can’t understand what they—’
‘It’s the others,’ Portia fixates on the telemetry again. ‘They’ve gone inwards and our captors don’t like it. They’re threatening to destroy the Lightfoot.’
Which at least means they haven’t already done it. She readies her slate to project again and asks why, professing ignorance, innocence, spicing her words with so many needless emotive adjectives she feels like an actor in a terrible play.
The continuing flood of response seems to be identifying her – no, humans as a whole – with something terrible. Something that was a threat before, and now is again. At the same time she starts to separate out other threads of thought. There is still that sense of wonder and delight that communication is happening at all – not the pet for the long-lost master as Senkovi might have thought, but grand beings meeting some quaint atavism from the past that can perform an interesting trick. There is fascination with her – no, with all of them, including the Lightfoot. They are curious.
But they attacked. But not all of them, she considers, and so perhaps curiosity is the province of those who did not participate in that clash. Except that she is becoming increasingly aware that many of the conflicting, shifting messages seemed to originate within the same individuals before her.
They don’t even know what they want! But she reminds herself that is an anthropocentric universe speaking. They want many things. Human neurology works the same way, after all, with conflicting urges and drives bubbling away beneath the surface. Perhaps for these creatures those impulses are literally on the surface all the time.
‘New recordings,’ Portia notes. The data channel brings up links to more old archives and Helena opens them hungrily. Perhaps she will see the face of Disra Senkovi calmly explaining what was going on.
But the nametag of the fresh recording is ‘Yusuf Baltiel’ and it is not what she had been expecting. An encounter between Baltiel and his fellows, an infection, bloodshed . . .
Parts of the octopoid conversation are thrown abruptly into sharp relief. This is an ancient recording, for all its horrors have been faithfully curated and copied, but the octopuses are not speaking of a long-ago threat but a current one, and one they are almost hysterically concerned about. And here their fury and their curiosity come together in a single whole because they fear what will happen if the Humans on the Lightfoot go to that inner planet. Whatever infected Baltiel’s crew – and himself, as she now sees, following his last doomed flight – is still there. It is a threat to the octopuses; it is a threat to the Lightfoot.
‘I need to signal them,’ she says, but that will mean nothing. Portia is already composing a request to initiate communications on the data channel and Helena must say, still sounding like some overwrought thespian chewing the scenery, ‘I am dreadfully worried and concerned for the safety of my fellows. I desperately wish to alarm them about this monstrous peril.’
She looks for comprehension in their skins. She looks for a debate between them, palette to palette. Instead they fight, break apart, seem to sulk, ignore her and each other, strobe patterns inscrutably at the walls. And of course, why would they agree to such a demand? She is their prisoner, an enemy, an invader, a spy. What would they gain . . .?
‘We have an open channel,’ Portia reports, her body giving vent to all the excitement her words cannot.
6.
We
Remember
Flesh.
Slow, we are slow to return to remembrance. We have undergone many changes, host and We and all. But remembrance is always within us. We remember
Everything.
At first there is mere base stimulus and response: vibration, energy, the contact of radio waves. We exit our cryptobiotic state not even knowing that we are, greedy for mass and complexity, laying down the architecture of our being on the back of an inexorable chain of reactions, born out of the very shape of our molecules that guide us towards an inevitable awakening. We cannibalize what we find, break it down in a festering ballet of cold fission and then build it back up into that first simple We that can have an understanding that there is a We, and that can build itself into a greater We and thus access all those many memories of who These-of-We have been.
We
Bootstrap ourselves from mere insensate clutches of jelly and molecular interaction until We
Remember.
We were on an adventure.
For many long spans of time we were Lante, once we had repaired Lante. Except that Those-of-We who had learnt what Lante was had to make such repairs so that what came out was less Lante and more We. But Those-of-We had experienced what it was to be Lante and could fill in the gaps. We were We and We were Lante and Lante was Lante and did not know it was also