And then there are three of them, standing in that overexposed image, that landmark in Portiid history. Lante stares about herself, and the expression on her face (as poorly rendered as the image of the spider city of Seven Trees around them) captures something of human wonder.
‘What happens now?’ Meshner waits for his sense of self to ebb, for a gnawing inside his mind, for fungal growths to spring from his simulated skin – but the thing, the woman, Lante, she is just standing there in her antiquated encounter suit, breathing in the non-air, looking at the weirdly skewed two-dimensional image stretched out around them. Her lips part.
‘We . . .’ An alien entity simulating a human in the first person plural; Meshner has no idea if the word has meaning for the speaker. As an artificial entity simulating a Human, himself, he cannot escape the assumption that something speaks, rather than just echoes sounds it once heard.
‘Where is the space the geometry the complexity?’ it says. ‘There were worlds . . . We were promised . . . We . . . do not understand.’
13.
‘We have vital information on the infection,’ was easy to say to another Human. Three generations of cohabitation and the presence of Avrana Kern mean it is easy enough for a Human to say to a Portiid. To communicate it to the octopuses is proving problematic. The ambassador watches carefully, but trying to interest it in the infection triggers a great deal of fear-related colouring and a spontaneous change of subject. This thing was their demon, after all. Their entire civilization lives in orbit about a corrupted world, and they only have to look out of the window to be reminded of it. The merest association with that inner planet – Nod, as the old terraforming team called it – led the locals to attack their alien visitors twice and abduct their diplomats, an instant end to any amicable contact. The subject itself is poison.
And the warship’s own colours are no less fierce, scattering in angry rainbows across the immensity of its curved hull, all the universe Helena can see in that direction. She translates the colours in real time, seeing the waves of intent and reaction roll back and forth, an argument she can follow even if she cannot catch the words. They are furious that the aliens have come and awoken the monster; they are even more furious that the science faction, whatever they are after, should ignore the cultural forbiddance that placed Nod forever out of reach. And they are scared. They have a hundred shades of near-white for it, pastels and creams, bone-yellows, chalks and mother-of-pearl tints to express a vast language of terror. Helena can see past the raging reds and purples, the brooding dark hues, to the fear beneath. In her most empathic moments she is amazed they have not simply destroyed it all already, sent a dozen warheads to obliterate the Lightfoot’s crash site, had the Profundity of Depth turn the orbiting station into atoms.
But the scientists continue to advocate. She has a section of the ship’s hull turned inwards towards her now, at her request, permitting her to see both sides of the debate. She half-expects calm reasoning from the academics, but that isn’t how their species works. They are just as passionate, a flood of emotions washing back and forth: outrage, entreaty, enthusiasm, freedom! She never thought of freedom, of the simple fact of being free, as an emotion, but to the cephalopods it is. Freedom from censorship? No, freedom to be, to go. Freedom to do anything. The science faction is giddy with it, and she sees it reflected in errant swirls and shimmers across the warship’s hull.
‘What are they going to do at the planet?’ she asks the ambassador, adding curiosity and anxiety tags as two more emotions that their species seemed to hold very much in common. She has sudden visions of a scientific super-weapon that could obliterate the entire world to rid them of the spectre of infection.
The ambassador is all puzzlement, though. They haven’t let him in on their mission parameters.
Now, though, Helena has ammunition for them, which might buy her friends a little more time to evacuate the planet, if she can get the ambassador to listen.
Portia, still linked to the Lightfoot, keeps flagging up telemetry and equations from the data side of the ship-to-ship exchange. The Profundity of Depth is still lazily orbiting Nod’s moon, updating its allies with its targeting solutions for the crash site as the lunar path brings it inexorably round the planet. Portia has already recommended Viola and Fabian get clear of the downed ship. Neither is willing to risk exposure to the local biosphere if they don’t have to. The infection itself doesn’t seem to be airborne, according to the Lante records, but those aren’t sources they want to trust their lives to, and there might be any number of other flavours of nastiness out there. Although Viola seems to be more and more convinced that the infection is something very special.
Then the ambassador is signalling again and she thinks, It’s too late. They’ve launched. But instead all those abortive queries she sent over have apparently germinated, caught up in the whirl of the octopus’s cognition until some part of its mind has put it all together. She assembles its communications: suspicious, fearful, putting her at arm’s length and yet needful, desperate. Joining the dots using long-range scans of Nod, the orbiting station, recordings of multiplying infection rates from the fall of Damascus, Helena understands.
How are you going to deal with it? they ask her. Their human prisoner has stated it can help them with a plague they associate with humans, a thing humans brought to their planet. Senkovi is a benign creator, in their mythology, but Yusuf Baltiel is the fallen angel, unleashing all evils onto their world. The demand is almost superstitious, acknowledging the status of humanity as passing all understanding.
‘What can we even promise them?’ she asks Portia. ‘Can Viola . . . cure it?’
‘No,’ Portia confirms after an overly optimistic enquiry. ‘Viola is very excited about it. She says it is not a disease.’
‘It’s infected Meshner. You saw what it did to the terraforming crew,’ Helena points out.
‘We saw. Viola is not sure we understood what we saw.’
‘Our hosts are pretty sure they understand.’
Portia signals agreement qualified with a shrug of but-what-can-we-do? ‘Perhaps if we can get this data to them, the molluscs will be able to design an antibody or a cure or something. Their technology exceeds ours.’
‘They will not be able to succeed.’
Helena starts. The voice comes to her direct from her neural implants, and she sees from Portia’s sudden stillness that she wasn’t the only recipient.
‘Kern?’ Because Viola told them, despairing, that Kern was locked in some kind of loop, uncommunicative but burning all the processing resources she could access.
‘You cannot cure this disease.’ Kern’s voice is, for a moment, as arch and sardonic and human as Helena has ever heard. ‘Even Lante underestimated what it was capable of, and that was after she was nothing more than a simulation running on its mainframe. But the truth is there to be read.’
Helena and Portia lock eyes. A flutter of comms indicates Viola wanting to know what is going on and where Kern has been?
‘Explain, please,’ Helena prompts quietly.
‘It is a self-evolving organism. It is completely in control of itself. It was able to go from parasitizing an alien grazing animal to surviving within a human body to interfacing meaningfully with a human brain. I do not believe it would be possible to impose controls on it that it could not circumvent or subvert. It’s all in Lante’s notes, if you read them carefully enough.’