And of course they are curious. The virus would have forced the trait on them if it needed to, but they had more than a species’ fair share long before Senkovi started meddling. Even without threats to guide their development, they expand through a constant frenzy of experimentation, their Crowns supplying the ‘What if . . .?’ and the networked calculations of their Reach giving them the means to pursue their idle puzzling. They innovate and improve their lives because every piece of knowledge they have about the world is merely a springboard for another question. They question everything. Save for one thing.
Senkovi’s prohibition holds. The deformed tomb that is the last shuttle out of Nod remains, crusted with sea life, drifting with weed, half buried in the mud. The expansion of Paul’s civilization moves only away from it; the seabed for miles around is untouched, a forbidden zone within easy reach of countless infinitely curious octopuses held back only by the word of one dead human.
3.
And now we come to something more like yesterday, a mere century or two before the Portiids and their Humans arrive to make ripples.
Civilization on Damascus has not advanced dynamically over the centuries, nor over the millennia. The philosophers among the octopuses would find the idea of historical inevitability absurd. History winds and pools, gathers itself and then makes sudden lunges, but just as often retreats to old ground. The lack of pressure, the gift of technology, the abstract nature of cephalopod thought, these things act against any great drive for organized advancement. Similarly, their approach to records is very different to humanity. The Aegean and its systems failed long ago, but before they did they were replicated and improved upon. There are dozens of elevator cables spread around the waist of their world, tethered to the deep reaches of the sea and stretching out towards the cosmos like reaching arms. Something like the old Aegean can be found beyond the waning edge of the atmosphere at each one: like but improved, in the Damascans’ haphazard, intuitive manner. They maintain a worldwide communications net, and they have, after many failures, approximated the cybernetic implants that their human predecessors took for granted. At least ten per cent of the population is constantly engaged in the virtual space their network generates, using it for design, for art, for amusement. Their technical language, that underlies all their interactions with the machines their planet is so busy with, is still built on the skeleton of the old human systems, modified for octopus ease of use but remaining something that would be recognizable to a ship from old Earth.
They have no other written script. Language and communication is spontaneous to them, impossible to fossilize in sterile representations of their thoughts and ideas. Their only records are cinematic; the dances, fights and debates of centuries recorded as performance art, not historical document. Their culture exists as a shifting zeitgeist even as their technology is rigorously documented back thousands of years.
They have ebbed and flowed their way through time. Sometimes vast quantities of them have lived for generations like the simple molluscs their Earth ancestors were, while a fragile handful maintained the machines or lived a life of technocracy in orbit. At other times flashes of mad inspiration crackled through the populace, every octopus was a scientist, rediscovering what their ancestors had been given, jetting off into a hundred dead-end areas of speculation, making new discoveries that the builders of the Aegean would never have dreamt of. Then, a century later, half that knowledge would be gathering dust in the databases, the fleeting interest of its creator civilization gone on to other things. The high-water mark of their scientific development has crept up over the generations, but the tide goes out as well as in. Human historians, somehow able to observe over such grand periods of time, would tear their hair out at the lack of historical narrative, the weirdly amorphous shamble of the Damascan cultures.
Other historians might also remark that, despite springing into being, like Athena from the head of Zeus, fully armed with a technology that could unmake their world entirely, they have persisted all this time, constantly wrestling and skirmishing and yet never destroying themselves.
But all good things must come to an end, and this is how it happens. Despite this long shift back and forth, the sway of their culture has been leading to a point of crisis, and just like human crises it is the result of their being too successful.
The liveable area of Damascus is huge compared to Old Earth. No continents and islands for them; they have the whole seabed to colonize, and they have done so. The population of the planet now stands at some thirty-nine billion octopuses. They reached the load-bearing capacity of their ecosystem a long time ago, but cephalopod ingenuity stepped up its game over and over, reaching out into the solar system and devising new ways to harvest what they found there, building in orbit for yet more space, stopgap after stopgap; and, just like humans, they are unable to fully confront the problem or take measures to curb it. That same ingenuity, though, is now compounding the situation. Broken machines, waste products, failed experiments, all of them are cordoning off areas of sea floor that might otherwise provide a living for the crawling hordes. Whole populations are on the move, or else are fighting to the death over ever-reducing living space. A million genius intellects wrestling with the problem on any given day, a hundred innovations and a dozen revolutionary scientific plans, always the promise of The Solution just around the corner, but everyone is living in each other’s personal space, and that is never something the octopuses have been able to put up with for long.
They look to space, just as their progenitors did. Around the equator, growing outward from every elevator terminus, there is a ring of habitats that grows and grows. Most of the planetside octopuses find the idea of living in the sky disconcerting, but there is a whole separate culture growing up there, each submerged city claiming some part of the sky to call its own and make its colony. The orbital habitats are without even rotational gravity, but gravity is something the free-swimming molluscs have little need of, and long-term exposure to zero-G leads to far fewer health problems than a human might suffer – no brittle bones for them.
Damascan orbit is by no means the extent of their ambitions, either. They have sent probes to their sister-planet, Nod, but only to swing by, not to land. The prohibitions of Senkovi hold, there. Some octopus adventurer or other is always on the point of testing that forbiddance, but they are either prevented, or some internal warden steps in to change their flexible mind. Their Reach, the subconscious reasoning part of their cognition, accesses the records carried forwards faithfully from the dawn of their age and understands the danger of the world of Nod. They let it sleep.
Instead, their focus is the outer solar system. There is a great asteroid belt there, between Damascus and the gas giants, and they have been mining it for centuries, first with machines, then manned stations that all too often met a disastrous end, and now with bioengineered agents uplifted from the humble tardigrades that share their oceans. The octopuses have become patrons of new life in their turn, although their living miners lack anything approaching true intellect. But perhaps that might change in the future, or might have changed, before things went so wrong.
And even before they went Wrong, they were going wrong. The conflicts below had begun to spread to the orbital settlements. There were a hundred factions at any given time, and any individual or clique might shift its allegiance on a whim, without warning. A war that no side could win, because there were never the same sides from day to day.