‘Then . . .’ Helena feels a swell of helplessness. ‘They’re right? They just have to destroy whatever they can, make a firebreak to stop any more of it coming over? Is that the only option? Where does that leave us?’
‘That’s not what I’m saying.’ Typical Kern, sharp, impatient with lesser intellects. ‘We are exploring possibilities, Meshner and I. You need to continue to buy us the time to do so.’
‘Meshner’s there? Meshner wasn’t infected?’ A surge of hope beyond any reasonable expectation.
‘He is infected. We are currently confronting the Lante-parasite entity. I will save Meshner. I will save everyone. But I need time.’ The human richness is draining out of Kern’s voice, leaving it flat and strangely desolate. ‘Time, Helena. Buy us time.’ And then, after it seems the conversation is over: ‘I want to make things right.’
‘Time,’ Helena echoes. And of course they are still far from their destination, all the time in the world to chew the fat with the octopuses, except that the Profundity of Depth or whatever it calls itself is right there and might pull the trigger on a whim at any moment.
Fabian and Viola have a lot of data, well ordered and comprehensible to a Human reader. It is shorn of emotional content and simultaneously reliant on anecdote and description, not experimental proofs. Precisely the wrong sort of information to easily pass over to the cephalopods, therefore. But perhaps she doesn’t need to, not yet. She just needs to convince them that she can.
Tell them a story, Portia suggests, and Helena concurs. A story in which something of the tragedies of the past can be mended. A story of hope, because something is keeping the warship from deploying its ordnance and hope is the only thing she can think of – hope that withholding their fire will lead to a better future. The octopuses are changeable creatures; she’s seen that to her cost. But at the same time it means they are not slaves to dogma, not bound to defend traditions right or wrong, or entrench themselves in their positions. The species is the very definition of open-minded. They may unleash hell at any moment, but they are still listening.
Helena begins, not quite with ‘Once upon a time . . .’ but with something like it. There was a world of humans who reached far beyond their home to planets like these. There was a party of terraformers, including a man who loved octopuses. There was alien life, the first ever encountered. There was a woman called Lante, neither a Senkovi nor a Baltiel. She studied the life of Nod. She learned of and fell victim to its most remarkable feat of evolution. Helena speaks to Viola, who feeds her information to weave into the story as Portia expresses in data what can be reduced to numbers, not the dry account of a human scientist but a fable, a legend of discovery and wonder with a tragic second act, and an ending still to be written.
***
She says these things to Paul, who understands at least some of it and passes it to his captor-benefactors to rephrase for their negotiations with the warship. As the process goes on, he finds a new emotion stealing up on him and infecting his reaction and his account. Awe. He feels himself the catalyst of something vast and many-limbed. The aliens on the planet’s surface transmit to the prisoners before him, who speak to him in their way, so he can speak to the scientists and they can paint their theses on the walls of their vessel for the education of the warmongers, those here and those out circling Nod’s moon like a hungry shark. He is the lynchpin, a node in a greater whole, like a single sub-brain of an octopus’s Reach, receiving and transmitting and passing on the information. Or, though Paul cannot know this, like the parasite itself within Meshner’s brain, infiltrating the patterns of Human thought until it can decode and edit and re-encode them so seamlessly that there is no hard line where the Human ends and the alien begins.
14.
‘You must edit your memories to forget this, and we will find some other place to exclude the entity from. We need time,’ Kern says, and Meshner feels a great wave of weariness, and wonders if it is real weariness or just the implant fabricating the sensation the way the Lightfoot’s factory units printed food and machine parts.
‘I can’t do that, Doctor Kern,’ he says, sitting down, his back against one of the abstract lines of the image they are inhabiting. ‘I’m . . . real.’
‘You are a copy, Meshner. You don’t have to be limited to—’
‘How long did it take you, to come to terms with what you became?’ Meshner shoots the words back at her, and Kern’s face – no, the whole of her – freezes for a second. Then she steps back, expressionless, conceding the point. How many thousand years do we have?
‘I feel real,’ he tells the world, or the simulation that is his world now. He looks into the blurred face of the other woman. ‘Do you feel real, you in there? Lante, is it?’
‘Lante. Yes.’ The woman seems to fill out, become more substantial. ‘Terraforming engineer, biologist and medical specialist,’ she reels off, like someone reading notes. ‘The Aegean. The Aegean was my ship.’ She speaks the language Meshner just thinks of as ‘Human’, but he can hear the Imperial C like a ghost underneath it, informing her word choices. So where did it learn my speech? Oh yes, it’s in my brain. I’m not speaking to Lante. I’m speaking to myself.
‘What’s Lante, though?’ he demands, aware of Kern still hovering there. ‘What’s left except the name and a personnel file?’
She crouches down by him – the transition from standing is uncomfortable, the joints not quite working as intended, the form not as immutable as a human body should be, but maybe that is just a glitch in the simulation. The implant must be working overtime, after all.
‘I’m Erma Lante,’ she insists. ‘I came from Earth. We were paving the way for the new colonies. Except everything went wrong. The war . . . and Baltiel, he . . . I wanted to go home, but it would have been decades and the others said home wouldn’t even be there. A radioactive cinder, a toxic wasteland.’ Without intermediate steps she is standing again, and the errant lines and angles of the Portiid image fall away, muscled aside by a landscape cast in shadows and harsh artificial lights, shrouded in twilight and smog – but perhaps that is just to save processing power. Meshner stares at it for a long time before realizing he is looking at a cityscape, tall buildings rising on every side until the sky is just as invisible as it would be from the lowest reaches of a Portiid conurbation. He reaches out a simulation of a hand and the implant returns to him the gritty sensation of cold concrete under the memory of his fingers.
‘Meshner,’ says Kern warningly.
‘This is . . .?’ Not my memory. Certainly not Fabian’s, and not Kern’s from the way she’s acting. ‘Kern, what is Lante? What is she now?’
‘A simulation. A memory.’
‘And this is a memory’s memory? How is that even possible?’ Meshner demands, as Lante stares about them.
‘I’m home now,’ she says. ‘Such complexity.’ Meshner knows that sentiment must come from somewhere beyond Lante, from the puppeteer rather than the puppet. Except perhaps computer and program is a better analogy, because what would be the point of the alien parasite just waddling around in a Lante-suit? Why is it dredging Lante up, and where from?
‘Based on Fabian and Viola’s research,’ Kern says, ‘the individual cells of the organism are capable of encoding and retrieving its whole history. Lante is part of that history. It infested her. It mirrored the firings of her neurons. It . . .’