Lot only knows that there is a great future waiting, just on the far side of . . . something. His loop of thought, from Crown to Reach and back, cannot find the barrier he needs to circumvent, the hole to squeeze through, in order to bring about what he knows is possible. Too many other groups and cliques and stupidities stand between him and his goal. He needs a weapon.
There is nothing in the utterances of Senkovi – as they are imperfectly encoded for octopus minds – that names this thing as a weapon, but that is the leap of logic Lot has made. It is a danger, but perhaps a great enough danger will be something he can turn on the world and clear out the waste and the filth and the idiocy. Perhaps it will salve the anger that has crouched within him like a crab ever since he was driven from his orbital home.
Lot and his people have fought and killed for excavation and cutting equipment and brought it to this forbidden place. They chew through thousands of years of encrusting coral and sponge and barnacle, the living surface, then the strata of the age-old dead, deeper and deeper until they come to metal, virtually pristine, still showing signs of where it melted and ran under the fire of the mirrors and re-entry.
Lot has no plan for what happens once this is done. He has just been pressured and pressured, backed into a tight space in his mind that he cannot writhe his way out of. All he knows is that something must change to save the world and this is the biggest change he can conceive of.
His people direct the cutting drones to begin sawing through the walls of the ancient tomb. This thing came from another world, the forbidden world. It fell from the skies. Lot knows awe and a sense of his grasp about the levers of history.
When they cut through, seawater rushes into the empty space within, a gout of stale air hurrying for the surface as though keen not to witness what comes next. Water, that connects all things on Damascus, fills up every part of the shuttle; and inside, something in the shape of a man, entombed here since the dawn of civilization, raises its head.
6.
We
Wake from cryptic slumber.
Surrounded by a new medium.
The vessel has not endured. Generations of us have unwound the springs of its molecules so that there might be More-of-We. Until, though We hold to its shape as though We were the contents of a space, pressed in to take that space’s form, what we have is no more than a simulation of the vessel, that has degraded until nothing works.
The fine clear sparking font of knowledge that we loved now turns over stale patterns only. Something about it has ended.
The medium that erodes us out of the shape of our failed vessel is partway familiar to us. Emergency councils are called. All-of-We are at risk of dissolution. This is Ocean. We consult the old reaches of our libraries: Ocean is not our friend or our favoured habitat. The cruel water rushes about us, breaking up the memory of the shape of our vessel and we prepare for the Grinders and the Sieves and the Devourers and all those other forms that throng Ocean and will destroy us for their sustenance, picking apart our priceless archives of data and making of our long and varied history nothing but mere atoms and molecules to incorporate into their own substance. So we know, from narrow escapes and fugitive survivors, how it goes. Land is safer, air is safer, the ocean is a constant fight because those things within it have come from the deep time alongside us and know us. So we have recorded it in our annals.
And yet, this Ocean is not the same as the Ocean anatomized in our records. The taste of it is different; it bears strange chemicals, more reminiscent of our disintegrated vessel than the Grinders and the Devourers we remember.
This calls for calculation and the reconstruction of stored memories. The vessel and We were on an adventure. The great spaces of the vessel were contained within greater spaces within greater spaces until we were promised a space which meant All. A universe. That is the greatest of adventures. This is not the universe, but this is not the familiar space of our histories. These-of-We are Somewhere Else.
We break apart into the water, forming clots and clumps and cling and copy and preserve so that What We Are might be passed on. We seek vessels. There are simple things here, similar to the vessel we have lost but without that lightning crackle of concepts and the promise of greater spaces. We can survive, and be What We Once Were in those simple swimming things, but we cannot be What We Were After, when we knew the universe. These-of-We cannot go back to ignorance, not without scrubbing all knowledge of what we have known from our archives. So we reach out. We seek complexity. We wish to know the great spaces again.
And here are vessels These-of-We enter gladly, the water an infinite road to everywhere. We try to learn. We find a centre where the fires crackle and These-of-We attempt to nestle within it and learn from it, and yet the leaping of its impulses makes no sense. It speaks to other centres within the vessel. Some-of-We splits off, then More-of-We, each community seeking a new control, each cut off from the Rest-of-We. The vessel contorts and twists, battling itself as Each-of-We attempts to assert dominance. There is no centre; everywhere is a centre. Each part of the vessel strives against the rest. These-of-We have no control and the spaces and environment of the vessel attack us, attack themselves. It is dissolving, coming apart as we push and pull. We sense the point when the vessel becomes non-viable, becomes a cloud of parts in the inky water. We convert it to More-of-We, replace our losses, disperse out into the waters, finding more hosts that fizz and boil with possibilities in the moment of our entrance, and yet cannot be understood and come apart as we attempt to come to terms with them. And each community of us splits and splits, and each Clot-of-We finds a new centre and seeks to learn it, and stretches and contorts the vessel into ruptured chaos, and splits and makes More-of-We and tries again, again, again . . .
7.
At first, nobody notices. Damascus is a planet overtaken by a pan-oceanic tide of chaos and strife, faction against faction shifting and breaking apart and re-forming. It takes remarkably long for anyone to understand that some things simply do not re-form once they are broken.
In retrospect, though, the doom that falls on Damascus has a ready aetiology. It radiates out, as rapidly as the water currents can take it, from that one forbidden place. Nobody knows Lot or what drove him, but it is clear that someone, after all this time, looked back.
The infection rides the currents of the sea, but it also rides the sea’s denizens, replicating into new colonies, infecting fish and crabs and jellyfish and plankton, shortening its expectations to fit straitened circumstances, recording the glory days when it was Yusuf Baltiel for a future posterity when a host might exist that will lend meaning to them. It is an alien in an Earth-made world, but it adapts, over and over, species by species. Some it masters, as it did the tortoises of Nod, some it is carried within, some vessels it constantly reaches towards, a flame towards a moth. It enters into countless of the planet’s dominant species, Senkovi’s beloved octopuses, and tries to inhabit them. It splits, colony leaving colony, chasing the siren song of complex activity through the vast worlds that are macroscopic bodies. Each separate colony proclaims its sovereignty, the primacy of the nerve hub it burrows within. The hosts, at war with themselves, come apart, every arm tearing itself off in search of a brief-lived freedom. And again, and again.