And midway through his theatrically furious display, Paul sees something recognizable and familiar happen to the human alien. It snaps. It has a temper – something Paul would have said was a natural prerequisite for intelligence if he could form such an analytical thought. The human has apparently been restraining itself (an alien activity for an alien creature) but now it snaps. Its skin tone is darker, blotchy, which at least indicates some manner of internal emotional life Paul can relate to. Its mouth (is that slack hole a mouth?) opens and shuts and there is wet on its face. Its awkward limbs spasm into recognizable threat postures and it strikes the barrier between them. The colour device is often not properly angled for Paul to see it, but when he catches glimpses, the colours are very angry, very sad.
It is grieving. Paul has been out of the loop but now he realizes that its fellows have died or undergone a misfortune. This is something he understands.
Actually receiving meaningful communication from the alien is profoundly disconcerting. It makes Paul think of the creature as a fellow living thing in a way he hadn’t before. And can he be blamed for such prejudice? What is this creature, after all? It shows speech through a machine, and that is appropriate because everything about it is mechanical and ungainly. Its skin is dark and mute, its movements sharp and graceless, stupid as a crab or a fish, nothing of its outer show speaking of intelligence or beauty.
But in the throes of its rage, overtaken by its emotions, it becomes real to Paul.
The other one, the crab one, is watching, and now it begins to move, its many legs shuffling and dancing in a most un-crab-like manner. Paul understands it is trying to show attitudes, as though those jointed legs are its Reach. The meaning comes through poorly, but it is plainly coordinating with its human fellow, and between them there is almost half a mind talking to him.
He calms, feeling himself the master of this situation, less estranged from his fellow prisoners. They calm, too – such heights of emotion are alien to the aliens, they cannot sustain them like a real mind can. Paul essays a few calming colours and gestures of his own, attaching to the barrier and eyeing the pair of them. They respond in kind. The human one puts a limb against the glass, little jointed appendages splayed. The gesture is oddly familiar, almost comforting, though Paul does not consciously register it as something his arch-great-creator Senkovi used to do.
With a start he realizes they are not alone. An observer has descended stealthily into the far chamber. Feeling a curious solidarity with the aliens now, Paul unleashes a storm of angry demands towards her, leading the attention of the aliens to the newcomer.
She ghosts back and forth in the observation tank, her skin strumming with muted, thoughtful colours. Something about her attitude unsettles Paul. When she descends to the console and begins making demands of the aliens, her Guise seems furtive, sly. He does not receive what her Reach transmits but she is plainly someone who has a use for these aliens. She is asking questions relating to . . . forbidden things. Forbidden places. The things the humans are always linked to, and most likely the things that had brought doom to these aliens’ friends.
But the aliens seem eager, and Paul’s ill-feeling towards the newcomer intensifies. He cannot put the feeling into concrete words, but Paul’s social life is one of constantly shifting factions, and there is one such faction he has never been a part of – a group that is ostracized, excised, but which never quite goes away. The octopuses eschew inflexible labels for anything, but the closest human concept might be the Extreme Science Party.
Paul feels only profound misgivings about the Extreme Science Party, but at the same time he is in a cage and wants to be free, and if anyone will overturn the order sufficient to procure his release, it might be those anarchist heretic experimenters. He watches the newcomer closely.
2.
Helena has now spent her rage and grief, and it bought her nothing, as far as she can see. Octopus interrogators have come and gone, flashed and flickered and undulated at her, and she began to hate the machines in her head that imparted meaning to any of it, even the tenuous meaning her programs could wring from all that fluid posturing and display.
Portia tried to help her as she made her futile demands. She wanted a rescue mission. She wanted a search for signals. She wanted reparations. She wanted . . . what she wanted was for it not to have happened, but no technology was advanced enough to grant that wish. She raged her temper into her slate and Portia danced, following the postural cues she had picked up that formed a part of the under-language, the data-channel. Portia’s jointed body merely aped their communication, a crippled caper to their endless ballet, but it was something. She had tried to help. And now Helena sits on the floor of their cell with the slate on her knees, and Portia’s forelegs stroke her leg hesitantly, trying to impart interspecial comfort. And it is not quite enough, Helena finds. It should be; she has lived amongst the Portiids all her life, they are friends and colleagues whom she understands. But it is not Human contact and, before now, she did not realize just how much that meant to her.
The other octopus, the prisoner, had been engaged in some manner of face-off with a lone observer who had drifted in. Now it is back to goggling at Helena, but she has no more words. The currency of their discourse is emotion and it has exhausted her.
At last Portia taps her thigh more urgently and she looks up to see an exit iris open. Her hair twitches and lifts as invisible forces shift around her. Beyond the circular opening is blue-lit water. A pail-full dashes out onto the floor of the cell in an almost contemptuous spout, as though the element is mocking her, but the rest remains contained by nothing at all. She recalls the bubble membrane the locals formed in space, as the theatre for her ill-fated diplomacy. Probably the technology would be exorbitantly inefficient within a stronger gravitic pull, but here in orbit the molluscs can apparently generate fields to overcome the pressure differential and the station’s own weak attraction, keeping air (or vacuum) out and the water in.
Portia approaches the portal suspiciously. ‘If they mean we can go, they’ve not thought it through.’
But the locals are not finished. Something eye-watering is happening at the water’s surface, the field deforming until a half-sphere of air dents into the water. Two or three of the cephalopods have come to watch her and she can see, even with the unassisted eye, that their colours are striating in related patterns. Her algorithms catch up and suggest they are asking or ordering or suggesting that she go in.
Neither she nor Portia like the idea much, but at the same time, they have nothing to bargain with and, if their captors want to drown or crush or vivisect them, there is nothing in this solar system that could stop them. Helena wants to tell herself that the octopuses are sentient, reasoning creatures, and surely to butcher or just dispose of alien ambassadors is unthinkable. Except who knows what they might do? And shouldn’t she stop relying on anthropomorphism as a yardstick of what alien minds can conceive of?
‘The other prisoner has gone,’ Portia reports. ‘Or perhaps it wasn’t a prisoner.’ She stamps a little more and raises her front two pairs of legs at the doorway, a threat display born of pure frustration at their helplessness.
‘We have to go,’ Helena decides heavily. Their hosts must know that this airy bubble is not necessary for their survival, so perhaps it indicates an attempt at hospitality? She kicks off to the iris, scrabbling at the wall to stop herself just sailing through. Portia makes a better job of it, landing neatly on the very rim, one palp extended into the cavity beyond.