He knew Baltiel was still there, on the inside of that half-melted, half-crushed box. The certainty crept up on him over the years. Ask his younger self and he’d have laughed at the thought, but now Senkovi found the ghost of Baltiel all too often in his mind. I killed him, he thought, and even though it was not entirely true, he could not escape the accusation. He thought of the others, too: those who had died on Nod, those who died in orbit around it, or who perished in that other shuttle. He found that wreck, of course, or rather the octopi did. That ship had burst, striking the waves at the wrong angle, and the human remains of Han and the others were just scattered bones, devoured by the very ecosystem they had been installing. He thought about all of them, but it was Baltiel whose unseen presence stopped him sleeping.
Sometimes he went over the recordings Baltiel had sent, of the last days of the Nodan habitat. Sometimes he wondered if he needed to do something about Nod. The octopi would surely go there, some day, even though he had surrounded it on their charts with the same warnings of quarantine and danger. He had linked to the remotes that still functioned over there, sending them gliding over the alien deserts, over the dark seas, under the red-orange sun. He needed to do something, but there was an entire world out there, placid and self-contained; a world that had seduced Baltiel with its inhuman wonders and then infected him somehow. He, Disra Senkovi, had spoken with a denizen of that world, a thing whose evolution had followed an unfathomably different path to anything on Earth, yet which had been able to live in the brain of Senkovi’s friend and pull his strings.
We’re going on an adventure. The words tormented him. Asleep in the tank, he thrashed, clawing at the water with his withered hands, blind eyes staring. The octopi there reached out timid tentacles to touch him, but he was beyond any comfort they could give him. We’re going on an adventure. Perhaps, that night, he met Baltiel in his dreams, the Baltiel he believed dwelt in darkness in the sunken shuttle wreck, a thing half man, half crawling alien chaos. The eyes that fixed him, in that dream, were swarming with motes of life; the breath from those jaws was infectious, rotten with the decay that births monsters. In the dream, perhaps, he could not escape; he was there in the crushed wreck himself as the oozing and re-forming hands reached for him. Come on, Disra, we’re going on an adventure. The voice the only part of Baltiel not transformed, familiar as a knife.
Or perhaps it was nothing of the sort; unlike the octopi, his subconscious was severed entirely from the electronic systems that surrounded him and nothing of its deliberations was recorded. Perhaps he went peacefully, in the end. Regardless, he did not wake. Disra Senkovi, to his knowledge the last human being in the universe, passed away and left the watery world of Damascus to his adopted progeny, for better or for worse.
2.
The city sprawls over several kilometres of shallow sea floor. To the casual human eye it would seem to be nothing but chaos, a great dumping ground of angular blocks and pipes from which crooked spires protrude at irregular intervals, like stairways to nowhere. There are no human eyes, however, not even by proxy. Senkovi has been dead for twice as long as he was ever alive. The city belongs to its builders: no shadowy father-figures, no creator-gods, no orders from orbit.
And yet, if a human were there to see it, and if that eye were less casual, there would be an underlying order, a mathematics. The colours that are streaked and pooled about the place (that are, in reality, encoded into the moulded plastics and grown-stone of the city’s construction) would look less like the daubings of an infant and more like the offerings of some latter-day Jackson Pollock, interacting with the geometry of the city in strange ways, as though it is all language just beyond the human capacity to grasp. And it is.
Or perhaps it is like graffiti or gang signs, marking territory. Paul’s people are still ambivalent about the virtues of social living.
Paul himself feels anxious a great deal of the time. He is an old male octopus whose solitary den is in one of the central districts of the city. He lives within tentacle reach of too many of his kin, some related to him, others not. On a good day, when the sunlight filters warm through the shallow water above, he can connect with them. They each have their individual beauty. Their skins – their Guises – shine with their unfiltered thoughts as they ghost overhead, as though everyone is singing all the time. In moments of harmony Paul can recline at the heart of his little empire and know not mere animal contentment but a true appreciation of the beauty of the world. It is not quite the human feeling Senkovi might have experienced, back when there were humans to experience it, but something analogous, something Paul could have spoken about to that long-gone mentor, and perhaps, just perhaps, the intermediary computer systems might have been able to bridge the gap between them.
On bad days, which are more and more common, every other octopus in his sight, within reach of his irritable, questing tentacles, is a potential threat and rival, and he fights. Paul has a deep well of aggression when he needs it. He is the major player in his little playground. In his mind – his Crown – this is because he is large and swift to fight and bully others, carrying all before him on a wave of violent emotion. At the same time, the distributed neurons of his Reach, that give precision to his many arms to put into motion the desires of his Crown, are rigorously logical, an organic calculating engine with few peers across the city. Paul has no idea about this, no clue as to the concepts being passed from Reach to Reach when he grapples with his political rivals.
Right now, the city is in crisis. Large as it is, it is far too populous. Everyone is living on top of everyone else. There are fights that turn into cannibalistic orgies. The crooked, spiralling thoroughfares are rife with factions, each against the others. Those good days of quiet contentment are growing fewer and fewer. The language of Paul’s neighbours as they jet from nook to nook is increasingly ugly, their skins shouting with war paint.
Paul was originally master just of a small stretch, dominating a score of his kind. If his Crown was truly the governing force it takes itself to be then that would be alclass="underline" a mollusc gangmaster lording it over whoever he could intimidate. His Reach makes him more, though. There are other lords and ladies of the sunken city, his neighbouring magnates. He has fought each of them, in person, which means he has engaged in a free and frank exchange of views even as he strangled and nipped at them. Uneasy alliances are the common result, the brawling leaders breaking apart, gifted with a new appreciation of the virtues of their opponent. To Paul, to all of his kind, this unsought inspiration is entirely natural. It is the right and proper way of intelligence to be blown on the winds of subconscious whimsy. He does not need to know the deeper workings of his own mind, indeed he cannot, any more than he can know the precise positioning of his arms: the data is simply too complex to be consciously grasped.
Paul has travelled towards the city outskirts, trailing an entourage of some of his people, while other little cliques swarm below him or drift through the water, flashing complex, elegant threats at each other, poised and posturing by the very nature of their being. They are a species for whom to exist is to broadcast their mood and thoughts, barring a conscious effort to shut down their skins. Some elevate this to an artform, so that even their enemies pause to watch them hang in the water column and emote the complex poetry of war and anger. One such is Salome, at whose behest this grand meeting, or perhaps battle, is being held.
The city is breaking. Something must change. The machinery that stirs the water and keeps it fresh cannot keep up with the increasing concentration of citizens. The emotional state of the inhabitants is growing steadily darker, and they are a people for whom to act on emotion is a natural, instinctive thing and a cultural virtue. The hero-figures of Paul’s society are characterized by their grand gestures, their great sufferings, their capricious and reckless acts. Perhaps Senkovi would have approved; he who had once seen himself as the trickster god of the pantheon, before there were no more gods left to trick. Perhaps Senkovi would have recalled ancient human myth figures whose outsize griefs and loves and rages were applauded by ancient audiences as noble, right and true.