Paul, this new Paul of the last days, dwells in one of the greater cities, a drowned conurbation that sprang up a century ago on a deep ridge, the water there metallic with volcanism but at least clear of jostling neighbours. Now there are a million octopuses living there and conditions are becoming intolerable. In Paul’s district, one of the oldest, the original haphazard holes and pipes and boxes already built over by a reef of fresh construction, the water is thick with effluent, and waves of anoxia prowl the streets and reach into dens to asphyxiate the occupants. It is not the old geological processes that kill, but poor water circulation leading to build-ups of toxicity. Too many, all living too close, and the city was founded hurriedly, without proper planning. The conditions are worst on the young. A certain level of parental feeling is part of the cephalopod mindset, a germ of maternal egg care taken by the Rus-Califi virus and turned into at least a residual loyalty towards one’s offspring, and the young in general.
Paul has seen his spawn die, drifting lifeless in the cloudy water, their bodies’ decay only worsening the conditions that killed them. He has seen too many generations of hatchlings perish, too many eggs that never hatched. Other youngsters are killed young, because everyone is hungry now and another ancestral trait, one that breaks free of the virus’s shackles under stress, is cannibalism.
Other parts of the city are better off, so say the dark, angry skins of his neighbours. He has fought those neighbours for scraps, for the cleanest water and the best dens. Today he unravels from his meagre home and feels different. Perhaps the poisons have touched his brain a particular way today, Perhaps inspiration has come to him.
He lets himself rise up to where his seething host of neighbours can see him. Usually this invites attack and the desperate and impoverished spend their lives hiding and creeping, but Paul the downtrodden beggar lets his Guise flash bright and unlocks the floodgates of his emotions so that his Reach shivers and twists in its attempts to turn his feelings into meaning. A thousand slot-pupiled eyes are on him as he hangs there, rippling his mantle, strobing rage and desperation in stark patterns across his lesioned skin. Where has this come from? Only within. Today Paul has had enough, is sick of his life, sick of the foul water, sick of being sick. The undulations of his body are a savage call to arms. One by one the watchers jet up to join in, taking on his colours and his posturing, enemies become allies without any hard border being crossed. Within an hour there are hundreds, a thousand, all united and flooding like a rubbery carpet over the city, gone to attack those to whom privilege has dealt even a single extra card, gone to tear things down, to redistribute the substance of the city across the sea floor. Because of desperation, because of loss, because of residual heavy metal poisoning.
It is a scene replicated in cities all over Damascus. They are a passionate breed, these cephalopods. They have limits, and sometimes the poetry of destruction is the only art form left to them. This Paul will die. Thousands will die in this city alone, as though the entire metropolis is a single beast turning its countless arms against itself until it is torn apart by its own fervour for life. Paul flows ahead of his newfound followers, tentacles rippling as though he is the banner of their army. In his mind, set against the backdrop of deprivation and misery he has known, this is the most beautiful act he has ever accomplished.
4.
A generation later.
Salome’s vessel has a crew of nine but a living compliment of one hundred and seventeen. Salome is not the name she gives herself, of course. The octopuses have a gestalt of motion, colour and skin texture by which their Crowns identify themselves to one another, and this shifts over time, or after great events or trauma, variations on the same theme so that they are recognizable whilst showing the world that they are not quite the individual once known. A name itself can be exquisite performance poetry. Their Reach knows itself by another designation, though, something written in the ancient coding carried down from nerve-cluster to nerve-cluster, communicated by the fumbling of suckers and tentacles, and this is still drawn from the long-ago Biblical monikers that Disra Senkovi, in his humour, gave them. In the electronic systems that she is constantly connected to, she is indeed a Salome, one of many, with a string of numbers after to distinguish her from the rest.
The craft she dominates was made as a Homeship, an orbital habitat to pipette off some of the excess population below, spitting into the hurricane brewing down in the planet’s cities. At least some of the intended occupants had taken up residence before a shift in opinion resulted in the vessel being commandeered for another purpose entirely, and these civilians remain on board despite the risk, because quarters on-ship are far preferable to the murderous chaos of the cities.
Salome’s ship – call it The Requisitioner of Small Things, as a poor imitation of her meaning when she refers to it – is a sphere, as are most of the octopus spacecraft. Its hull is a double-skinned membrane that can be rigid or malleable as required, growing or shrinking as the water volume of the interior might vary. Its inner surface is riddled with regular holes, a thousand at least, each one made as living space for one octopus. When the ship cruises peacefully, as now, these are held open and the occupants have a window to view the stars on one side, access to the great watery ship’s interior on the other. The command centre, where Salome and her crew labour, is held at the vessel’s centre, buffered by the surrounding living space, connected to the thrusters that stud the exterior, and to other systems too, bolted on and not originally intended for such a sedentary vessel.
Had they evolved naturally, of course, most likely space would have been forever denied them. The Requisitioner weighs a thousand times what an equivalent human vessel would. Mere rocket science would not suffice to get a water-filled Apollo or Vostok programme into orbit. The octopuses would have been prisoners of their gravity well if they hadn’t already had a lifeline to space. As it is, the water that fills the Requisitioner came from tardigrade asteroid mining, jettisoned from the outer solar system towards the catch points near Damascus to be cleaned up and repurposed as living space. The energy required to haul so much fluid weight from the planet would be simply impractical.
It is those catch points that Salome is flying to inspect. The asteroid belt holds a wealth of minerals, fuel and all good things sufficient to regenerate the entire planet, allowing the octopuses to expand further into space and solving all the problems except one: time. Even though the tardigrades multiply in the dark reaches of the belt, their rate of extraction is too slow to let the Damascans get ahead of the disaster curve. Supply is limited, which means supply is disputed. A thousand shifting factions ally with and then abandon one another, and all too often it comes down to fighting. The little brawls and bullying of their native state have scaled up into spaceborne conflict.
This catch point is a vast object in space, itself a great sink of resources. Since it ceased broadcasting, Salome had feared some group had destroyed it, but now she hears from her crew that instruments have found it where it is supposed to be, but tilted at the wrong angle, so that the resources slung into its electromagnetic field by the distant miners are being redirected elsewhere. Even as she watches, another consignment reaches the huge dish’s magnetic field and is curved away to some distant enemy receptacle, the catch point alternating opposing launch angles so that the Newtonian displacement of each load shunts it back to its central waiting position. Salome is unsurprised. The ship’s systems broadcast a flurry of pale colours, warning of danger. She would not deign to issue commands to the civilians she has dragged along with her, but the wise amongst them will abandon their homes and seek the shelters built up alongside the command core. Normal water circulation around the perimeter ceases, and if the ship manoeuvres at all, the water mass about the outside will begin to spin, lagging behind events with its colossal inertia. The outer dwellings will all be closed off and any free swimmers left exposed will likely be killed. Only close to the centre, where the movement is least, will there be any safety to be had. Not that the Requisitioner can exactly dance through space like a butterfly: once that amount of mass is cruising in any given direction, considerable notice is required to change its bearing.