“How big are they, do we think?” Zaine asks warily, because although the new globe is dwarfed by its parent ship, it is still a lot of water.
No larger than I am, Portia replies promptly. She flags the dimensions of the connecting umbilical, which a Portiid would just be able to crawl into. They must just like the open sea.
“There is a problem,” Kern puts in. Her human voice is flat, suggesting she has reassigned processing power from trying to sound like her old self. Helena catches subtext in the Portiid vibrations she gives out, though: warning, anxiety and an odd sense of confession, clarified by her saying, “I have been working on a weapon to deploy against the enemy. Only if things went wrong, obviously.”
“Let’s not call them ‘the enemy,’” Helena says quietly.
“I had hoped that an electromagnetic pulse would impair their systems and allow us to escape, as we are far less vulnerable to such weapons,” the computer explains primly. “However, this globe exists only by virtue of a magnetic field, which might not survive such an attack. Hence, our ambassadors enter very much at their own risk.”
It was always going to be that way, Portia puts in immediately.
“I have prepared your suits, then,” says Kern, somewhat mulishly. “Suitable for water or vacuum, for what it’s worth.”
“Good luck,” Meshner says, not sounding terribly optimistic. Helena manages to meet his bloodshot gaze and smile.
4.
Let us call this one Paul, in honour of Disra Senkovi’s nomenclature. Just as Portia does not think of herself as Portia, but instead a sequence of vibrational pulses (modified by palp motions to indicate mood and relative status), Paul does not think of himself in human terms. Unlike Portia he has no fixed designation at all. He has an I, an ego that looks upon itself and recognizes its separation from the rest of the universe, just as it recognizes distinct parts of that universe which are its kin, rivals, potential mates, entities to be admired or avoided. Simultaneously Paul recognizes that these other entities are not fixed, and a rival one day may be a friend the next. He recognizes that he himself is a protean being, psychologically as well as physically.
He emerges from the umbilical cautiously. Parts of him are alive with anticipated danger, but the rest of him is pure curiosity and a desire to explore and discover. His people have been presented with a new challenge to investigate. Under other circumstances there would have been none of the violence Paul recently witnessed and took part in, but his people are facing a great many challenges right now, enough that they are becoming challenges for each other. When the alien intruders sent that message, the first comprehensible signal they had produced, it flipped the perspectives of a number of Paul’s people into full defensive mode. And why? Paul doesn’t ask the question, because he accepts that these feelings and shifts just are. There was a sudden danger attached to that anthropoid silhouette and some of his fellows interpreted it as a threat. They—their Crowns—recoiled and knew that they must defend themselves, which led to the various nodes of their Reach signalling the ship systems that act as an extended nervous system and body. Paul and his confederates in the meantime, had come to different conclusions, a desire to understand and investigate overcoming the sense of danger, and their reaction was to protect the New Thing from impending destruction. Hence the unpleasantness between ships that left twenty-six of Paul’s people dead. These days it is an all-too-common occurrence. His people live on the knife-edge handed to them by history.
But the makeshift alliance for the defence won out, making a fierce enough display that the attacking party re-evaluated its priorities and became instantly of a different opinion, abandoning their hostile action against the aliens without a second thought. Which has led Paul’s ship out here to create an arena where he, of all of them, can encounter these visitors.
The umbilical is narrow, but Paul is malleable and rolls his soft body through it easily, even his brain compressing when necessary. Flowering out into open water he feels a need to observe from a safer position before moving forwards. An arm reaches out, of its own accord, to touch the shelter his people created here and he oozes into its gaps, navigating the irregular spaces within, until his eyes push their way up through a hole so he can observe them.
There are two of them. Paul sees that one is something crab-like—smaller than Paul but larger than he feels comfortable hunting. The other is humanoid. Paul recognizes the shape even though he has no memories of such a thing: he is linked to his ship and the ship’s databanks have a lot of old detritus they are even now dredging up. The shape of a human being haunts the octopus records like a ghost, a bogeyman, a god of elder days. Paul’s skin fluctuates as he tries to process this subconscious knowledge, his emotions racing: awe, fear, threat, wonder.
And yet it is just the shape. He has a sense of constraint, of barriers between him and the aliens even though there is just the water. The ship’s sensors understand the visitors are completely covered in material that is not endemic to them: suits, devices. Paul cannot see them, which means he cannot receive the information from them that he is used to. They are like shadows in his mind. His mood worsens, more trepidation eating away at the optimistic curiosity. For a moment he is about to go back into his ship and abandon the entire venture. After all, the newcomers are just hanging there in the water, a stance of dominance a predator might take, rather than making use of their own shelter to show prudence and humility.
And yet he wants to know, and that curiosity is sent as an imperative, Crown to Reach, jetting him out of his nook and into the water before them. He is perhaps half the mass of the human-shape but seems larger because of the great trail of his tentacles. Time and Senkovi’s original refusal to introduce octopus-eating predators have allowed his species to grow considerably.
The human-shape is holding something flat and rectangular before it: a screen, because colours and shapes are displaying there. For a moment Paul is considering the screen itself as the intelligence, but then he shifts perspective and connects with the aliens mentally for the first time, understanding an attempt to communicate. The actual content seems meaningless at first sight, lacking the basic content even a hatchling’s emotional outbursts would demonstrate. A moment later, he re-evaluates, because the undercurrent of data received by the ship and his Reach grants a limited context. He understands that they come in peace. He understands that they wish to talk, even if they cannot actually talk. Paul’s mood wavers. He feels an intense excitement at this New Thing and drifts forwards to investigate. At the same time, his Reach informed by more information from the deep databanks, he feels a growing current of disquiet. It is as though he is remembering a Very Bad Thing that he has never consciously known.
The aliens are making no moves towards him, and he decides this is preferable, allowing him to control the contact. As he approaches them, maintaining his position in the water column with occasional jets of his siphon, he speaks to them as eloquently as possible. Even as his Reach is signalling its agreement to Peace and Communication, Paul extemporizes a speech along the same lines, an elegant performance poem written on his skin and in the coiling attitudes of his many arms. His confederates, watching from the ship, send him strong approval and admiration; some are moved to higher emotional states, and his internal eye sees a cascade of performances derived from his own, individual interpretations, inversions, replies. Paul is overwhelmed by the beauty of it and ensures the entire sequence is stored in the ship’s memory for later consideration. He feels very positive, because his Reach is processing constant messages from the Reaches of his peers, confirming their own upbeat emotional states. He is about to do something great! He is expanding the world of his species by meeting these humans and/or aliens.
The alien device spills over with more colours that coalesce into simple shapes. They indicate contradictory things about the mood-state of these visitors: they are calm; they are excited; they are vigilant; they are filled with carnal desire. Paul understands that th
is momentous meeting has overwhelmed them. His own Guise is displaying a similarly diverse range of moods, after all. Then, following translation via the processing centres of his arms, he understands that perhaps the aliens are simply not good at communicating. Still, they show neither aggression nor fear, and Paul has a sudden leap of cognition—a moment when all his parts contribute to the whole—and sees that there is a germ of commonality there. They are trying, and why would they, if they were just destructive monsters?
Paul gathers himself and, with conscious effort, takes control of his Guise, flooding his skin with a pleasant, diplomatic pattern of greys and greens, an ambassador’s polite poker face that suppresses any outward sign of his inner turmoil. He approaches the aliens carefully, even though his arms are twitching to touch the stuff of their outer layers and see what it might have to say.
His link to his ship excites various visual parts of his brain: his crewmates are in a constant chromatic babble of wonder at this first contact. The recordings of this moment will be pored over for centuries, assuming any of Paul’s people survive that long, which is currently by no means guaranteed. A proper attitude is required, he decides. He must serenade these aliens, even if they cannot understand him. Like most things his conscious mind does, he acts in the moment and for his own appreciation. Paul dances.
He is a good dancer: he has precise control over the colour centres of his skin, and his Reach translates the thoughts and emotions he wishes to convey and converts them into elegant attitudes and coils, so that one moment he is undulating through the water like loose cloth on the currents, the next he is spread like horned coral or clasped tight like a snail’s shell. The two aliens, the humanoid and the crab-like one, watch him, at least. Probably the beauty of his performance is utterly lost on them, but it is keenly felt by him, and by most of his crewmates who are not incurable philistines. It is, for Paul, the proper thing to do at this moment, and so he acts out his impulses until he is close enough to the aliens to touch them.
The humanoid alien, the one of that troubling ancestral shape, has its tablet up again, and the tablet has a happy, contented colour scheme on it. The invisible message accompanying it, that his Reach decodes, is a standard Old Empire ship code confirming receipt of assistance and Paul knows this means something like Thank you. He feels a great sense of accomplishment that he cannot keep off his skin.
He reaches out to touch the human-shaped one, and instantly knows this was a mistake. For a moment the crab-one jerks into a different position that he can read quite clearly as threat, and he understands: these creatures cover themselves entirely. They do not touch. Paul goes white at the thought, then deep purple tones of remorse and pity. How can they live like that? But then the moment has passed. Three of his arms are still suckered to the alien (for his arms have decided this is what they are going to do) and the aliens have calmed themselves. Perhaps they are open to new experiences. Perhaps they can bring themselves to touch each other, to explore the shapes and textures of their own world, now Paul has brought this new sense to them.
Their outer layers are fascinating: hardness, softness, strange tastes and textures, something like skin, something like stone, odd alloys, curious shapes. The human one permits the exploration. The crab one waits, plainly tense and armed, Paul sees, with a pair of wicked-looking beaks instead of pincers. His arms decide they should not venture in that direction just yet and the rest of him agrees.
This is all going so well! Paul is going to be admired for this, and part of his Crown is already thinking forwards to a composition he can perform, to demonstrate just how it felt to be first in such an endeavour.
Even as he thinks this, a change comes over the entire crew of his ship. It is not a conscious understanding, but information has come to the vessel’s sensors and thence to the Reaches of the crew. When it reaches their conscious minds it becomes simply Danger. Danger now. Danger attached to the aliens. Danger, betrayal, fear!
Paul jets away from them instantly, corkscrewing backwards through the water, leaving an obscuring cloud of ink behind him. Emergency protocols, his crewmates are saying, and he desperately tries to get out of the bubble before it is too late. He is too late. The aliens, with no idea of what is going on, have no chance to react at all.
5.
Avrana Kern, or her facsimile, is keeping an eye on activity within the bubble, partly visually through the transparent wall (which nonetheless is filtering out harmful radiation through a structure or composition she does not quite appreciate). Partly she is relying on the life support feedback from Helena and Portia’s internal implants and suit systems, because if they become anxious, she will know it, and that is a more efficient way of reading the situation than trying to analyse it herself. Being human, for the operating system that knows itself as Doctor Avrana Kern, is often a matter of such short-cuts. She is only wires and ants and some notional business that arises from their interactions, after all. And I was only neural impulses once. She suspects that would seem qualitatively different to her, if she could become complex enough, but right now it is merely a statement of fact.
Keeping tabs on the diplomatic party is not consuming much of her attention—and in the region of multitasking she is far in excess of her anthropoid exemplar; the Portiids’ ant colony computing systems excel at parallel trains of calculation. She is devoting more time to studying the signals of the alien civilization—especially those coming from the three ships, in case this is a trap.
The ships are constantly broadcasting to each other, a never-ending stream of visual junk supported by low-level mechanical status reports, or so Kern translates them. She has hunted for meaning, using Helena’s notes and her own problem-solving capability, but has come down to a simple conclusion: They just never shut up. She considers this in light of the alien visitor who has joined Helena and Portia in the pool. If colour is its language then it, too, is constantly blathering, but does that mean it cannot obfuscate; is that epilepsy-inducing colour show unconscious display? Insufficient data. Kern picks over signals from further afield, fragmentary transmissions from the distant planet rolling towards them along its Newtonian track. She is already working on sources, all of which have been orbital. Perhaps this constant chatter is a primal response to these marine astronauts finding themselves in space.
There is another signal.
Kern processes it, and then more of her processes it, and then an alarm is tripped because she is trying to deal with this one input, amongst so many, and it is hogging a disproportionate amount of her attention. For a moment she remembers that there was, back in the last days (day?) of her own civilization, a virus that killed all the toys and machines and electronic minds of her time, all except her.
But such an attack would be useless against her now, because she does not run on a platform the old virus would even recognize, and if these aliens have devised such a vector to infect her so swiftly, their capabilities must be little short of godlike. She bristles, readying herself for a new fight. But her enemy is nothing of the sort. Her enemy is herself. And not even some rogue Kern fragment but her own understanding of who she is.
There is a single signal. She had not noticed it before because of all the rest of the chaos, and because it comes from neither the ships nor that watery planet they apparently originate from. It comes from further in-system. It is being broadcast from another world entirely, rising to prominence only because the combined orbits of the two orbs are bringing them towards their mutual closest point, so that the signal waxes until its very familiarity makes it leap out from the general alien chatter.
Kern runs some quick and dirty scans and her best guess is that the next world in is somewhat Earth-like in general composition. Arguably more so than the water world these molluscs come from, so why did her ancient kin not go there? Answer: they did. Answer: they may still be there. The signal she is receiving is unambiguous in its coding and signature, instantly translatable because it is in her native language, that th
ese johnny-come-lately Humans call “Imperial C”. And it is not a distress call; it is not a simple automatic transmission, though nor is it a targeted attempt to communicate with her.
And she tries to react. She, Avrana Kern, feels a void within her that should contain an emotional response. She has found her people, after so long (and her “so long” encompasses the rise of entire sentient species). She has found her peers, insofar as she ever admitted to any—a survival from the otherwise extinct civilization whose culmination and high point was the production of one Doctor Avrana Kern. She is aware of the impact this discovery should have, and yet she is cheated of it. What she can muster, in comparison to what she should be feeling, is what a child’s open-mouthed drawing of a face is to real surprise. She feels the lack twice over, once that she is only a poor splinter-instance of her master copy, but once again because even the best version of Avrana Kern now available to the universe has lost so much that those human depths are no longer present in her.
She is, of course, a computer, and so it shouldn’t matter. But she is a computer that believes itself human, and so it does, like an insoluble logic problem gnawing away at her capacity to deal with anything else. She devotes more and more of her capacity towards attempting to recapture some sense of genuine shock, surprise, delight, the rattling thesaurus of genuine experience that she didn’t realize she was missing until now.
More internal alarms get tripped, and thankfully she is sophisticated enough—as a computer or a genuine intelligence, and who’s drawing lines in the sand anyway?—to stop herself before she decides the ship can do without life support or anything vital. But she cannot forget, the emotional void like a subroutine she can’t abandon: she cannot know what should fill it, and yet she knows something should be there.
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