Salome wants resources to build a new city elsewhere, just start afresh and let those who feel the whim drift over. Paul and his fellows, the shifting alliance of the city centre, want those same resources – the factories, the power, the access to the ageing Aegean’s computers, for their own needs, to continue their stranglehold on the slowly disintegrating city, so that when everything does fall apart they will remain in control. It is an age-old struggle, another octopus trope that would translate well into human history. And of course – and perhaps unlike his human analogues – Paul does not think of it in such terms. He simply knows the rightness of his stance, of his controlling position. The detailed and self-serving logic that underlies it is invisible, yet drives the tides that motivate him.
This, then, is octopus governance: an assembly of whoever feels inclined to turn up, organized into dozens of factions whose boundaries are infinitely permeable – literal floating voters moving from one allegiance to another constantly without their disloyalty being seen as anything exceptional or worthy of shame. Paul and his kin are each true to themselves, while knowing that ‘self’ is a thing as boneless and malleable as they are. When Paul and his more influential peers rise up above the rest to give their declamatory displays they might seem like human politicians taking the podium to tubthump and spout rhetoric, but so much of human rhetoric is based on creating a false certainty – weaving fictions together so closely they can be presented as contiguous fact. Paul and his kin know there are no certainties, not even within their own minds. Paul simply follows the flutter of his emotions, letting his sense of what is right be tugged and stretched by the buried coils of his distributed subconscious.
Soon, Salome and her supporters are engaging in similar flag-waving, and below them the less influential citizens shift and crawl and flicker their messages of support or disagreement, so that, from his elevated viewpoint, Paul can see tides and eddies of public opinion ebb and flow. He and his peers are leaders, but at the same time he feels he is a banner above an army, a signifier of its cause without necessarily being in command.
Tempers are riding high – there are a dozen separate squirming melees already, nothing unusual for this sort of meeting. Paul drifts closer to Salome, his colours darkening into reds and blacks, his Guise spiking up into angry warning textures. She follows suit. She is a large female, slightly smaller than he but a known fighter. They let their skins advertise their intentions, united in this one thing.
They clash, full of fury, skins shouting out their campaign slogans. Around them the others watch, echoing the colours of their champions. To a human eye it would seem barbaric, settling a civic dispute by way of a gladiatorial spectacle. And Paul means business: he wants to humble and defeat his opponent, instincts that have not changed since the long-ago days in the oceans of Earth. He has a territory, even if it is an intellectual territory as much as a physical one. There is an intruder who he has not been able to cow or drive away. Violence is the last resort but it is a resort and all others have been exhausted. And his are a passionate, mercurial people.
And of course as their Crowns trumpet their defiance of each other, their Reaches interlock and fight for dominance, eight separate calculating engines per octopus running in networked parallel, expressing pure maths and logistics by way not just of tentacles but the muscles of individual suction cups, a perfectly evolved engine of rational expression serving the tumultuous whims of the brain. Paul only knows he is stronger, out-wrestling his opponent until Salome can only show her pale colours of surrender and hope he spares her. And yet when he releases his hold, triumphant, letting Salome jet away into the crowd below, Paul’s own messages are different. He has switched sides seamlessly, now a champion of the very cause he had come to break apart. Below, the tides shift once more, seeing his defection. Now Paul must fight some of his former allies. All this is perfectly normal, understood by all present. Rigid certainty is anathema to their mind; they would never trust a leader who nailed his or herself to any one issue or belief. Such dogmatism would be truly alien to them.
Far, far away, unknown to the masters of Damascus, a species of spider is undergoing an accelerated evolution that, nonetheless, follows a path that might possibly have been arrived at, in time, without the help of the Rus-Califi virus. The octopuses have a very different start, a leg up, so to speak. They inherited the human technology that Senkovi left behind. They have the multitude of terraforming engines used to turn their planet from iceball to ocean paradise. They have the space elevator to take their heavy, water-filled capsules into orbit. They have the Aegean, its computer systems in full working order, crammed with knowledge of Old Earth that they will never properly understand; crammed, more to the point, with technical know-how that they can partway decipher. Not for them the slow crawl from the Stone Age. They begin in space, as much as beneath the waves. They are aware, in their own way, that they are a chosen breed, and they have been gifted a world and all the keys to its secrets.
And they are aware of Senkovi, as the generations march away from the moment of his last breath. In Paul’s city, that is even now undergoing a division of resources and population, there is a monument to their creator and patron. Senkovi, had he survived to lay eyes on it, would never have known that was what he was looking at, but he would have seen it as art, and that the citizens touched it and swam about it with an unusual tenderness and respect. It is a thing of glass and plastic, standing tall in the water, its tip almost high enough to be troubled by the roiling surface above. Its outline is irregular, curved in upon itself. The octopuses do not produce representational art of living things, for to live is to change and be in constant motion. The monument reflects the sculptor’s emotional response upon Senkovi’s death, described in cold numbers by her many arms, fed into the factories to produce a single crystal moment of remembrance that will stand above the city for centuries.
The seas are rich with life they can catch and eat, and they have shellfish farms that practically run themselves. Overpopulation is a local difficulty but, right now, the entire planet is unclaimed real estate. Octopus townships spread across the sea floor – deep water, shallow water, even on the slopes of mountains that practically breach the surface. The speed of their spread is governed only by the speed that machines and housing can be manufactured, and resources can be extracted from the planet itself. They have no predators and few pressures, and while that might not stop them fighting each other, that is merely a part of their social interaction, as natural as small talk.
They create abstract sculpture like the memorial, they make poetry with their skins, they dance through strange, boneless ballets in the water. To the octopuses this is not distinct from living. The translation of emotions into the visible, whether permanent or transient, is something they have to work hard to stop. Those who are the most skilled at rendering the invisible inner-world apparent are as respected as those who can brawl the hardest. To perfectly capture the moment can sway a crowd more than bullying it.