Over the days that followed—the long Nodan days his biorhythms had not grown used to—Baltiel kept loose tabs on Lortisse’s progress, but left the details to Lante. Work on studying the local life had stalled, and each time he woke he told himself that he would get the project underway again, only to find himself consumed with a lethargy he couldn’t shake. Easier to piece through minutiae of the maintenance logs, to watch their habitat renew itself and the hundred checks and balances that ensured it continued to give them a slice of Earth on this distant world. Easier to delve into the library and pick over plays and books and films that felt like the bones of human thought stranded on this alien beach. A bleakness had hold of him, its hands on his shoulders. The gravity, that fractional additional drag to every action, seemed to have intensified in ways that affected only him.
Sometimes he spoke with Senkovi or watched the man’s progress over on Damascus. Much of the logs were incomprehensible because the man was no longer writing the manual of the terraforming project. He seemed to be abandoning more and more of it to… what? To his pets? That was his claim but Baltiel chose to disbelieve it. Disra Senkovi was just mad, that was all. Mad in a quiet and useful way, as he always had been, as they all were in their own fashion. And now he was mad and unsupervised and small wonder if he was drifting steadily out of reason’s orbit. Each day Baltiel told himself he would speak severely to Senkovi, get the man back on track. Except he couldn’t see the track himself. He felt as though the mists that cloaked the salt marsh every morning were creeping inside the habitat, too.
Lante sent him notifications that he needed a new balance of medication, upping his antidepressants, adding different mood stabilizers. He had glanced disinterestedly over her diagnosis. Lortisse’s accident, apparently, had affected him, Yusuf Baltiel, more than the others. He was feeling guilt because it was his mission and so his responsibility; he was feeling a lack of purpose because the ecosystem had fought back, however unthinkingly; and he was feeling depression just because depression was a thing that happened to people even without those problems, and his regular cocktail of medication couldn’t keep up. Baltiel couldn’t find the motivation in him to accept her recommendations. Eventually she’d insist, as medical officer, and he’d take his medicine and wake up a slightly different person, but something in him rebelled at the thought just now. Another thing that he said he’d deal with each day, and didn’t.
Rani had her own madness. She wanted to move. They had a whole planet, didn’t they? The long-range drones had brought them a hundred hours of recordings from elsewhere on Nod. There were other ecosystems, each stranger than the last. There was a world of radial animals out there, crawling, drifting, rooted and turning leaf-like fronds towards the red-orange sun. So the marsh had unlooked-for hazards? They could get the Aegean to fabricate a new habitat and take the shuttle to elsewhere. They could have a winter palace on the desert plateaus, a summer home on the northern coast. Or they could go to Damascus, which by now had the oxygen to sustain them and was free of alien life of any kind. They could dabble their feet in the water and live on a boat and eat Senkovi’s pets if they wanted. She even had recipes.
And Baltiel heard her, and told himself he would consider her detailed proposals today, or tomorrow, or some day, and hadn’t, yet. The intent was defeated by each day, by the crushing weight of spiritual gravity that pushed down on him.
He was aware that this was not just Lortisse and his injury. That had just become more boulders in the great slow-motion avalanche of the end of human history, all of which had been bearing down on him since the comms had shut off. No word from home. Possibly fragmentary transmissions from other extrasolar projects that never came to anything. Only him, Lante, Rani, Lortisse and Senkovi, thirty-one light years from a dead civilization. And he had done his best to keep the wheels turning, to generate meaning through some kind of philosophical spontaneous generation. Hadn’t they made the most exciting discovery known to humankind? Hadn’t they finally found life amongst the stars, just as everyone always dreamt? But what use, if there was nobody left to show it to? And so Lortisse had just been the final storm surge against a dam that had been failing for decades.
Twelve days later, with Lortisse now ambulatory in a medical exoskeleton, cracking weak jokes with Rani and eating solids, Lante sent Baltiel a priority request to speak, all the urgent flags up, requires immediate Overall Command action. And that’s it, then. The thought of someone remaking him into a decisive commander was only slightly abhorrent, but it was still a gradient he had to overcome, a gravity well to escape, even momentarily. He was only surprised she hadn’t just acted, and asked forgiveness of the new man of purpose her altered prescription had created. Perhaps she, too, felt something of his lethargy.
The Lante that greeted him had no lethargy in her, though. Instead she looked terrified. That sight sent a shock through Baltiel, enough ersatz purpose to cast off the weight and spread his wings a little.
“What is it?” Even as he spoke he was accepting the secure files she passed to him, opening them up with rusty clearance codes and looking at the medical scan data revealed.
“It’s Lortisse,” Lante told him. “He’s not all right. He didn’t metabolize the fluid. It’s still there.”
Baltiel stared at the scans for as long as he felt he could, without quite understanding what he was looking at. “Does he know?” was his eventual response, a proper Overall Command sort of thing to say, to cover for his frank bafflement.
“Nothing, as yet,” Lante confirmed. They were squirrelled away in what had been the isolation ward before Lortisse had recovered and isolation had been declared unnecessary. Lante was apparently recanting her position on that, stable door and horse notwithstanding. At the same time she was keen to keep it a private matter between herself and her superior, segmenting off-system space for them that Rani and Lortisse would not be able to access.
Baltiel rubbed at his eyelids. He wanted to retreat from this. He didn’t get it, and he didn’t want to admit that he didn’t get it, and staring at the walls of the inside of his mind had become a hard habit to break. For a moment he wavered, because what did it matter, now? But the call to arms got through to him and he shook himself, clawing for motivation.
“Erma,” he said, through gritted teeth. “I can’t deal with this as is. I need you to clear my head. Give me whatever’s necessary.”
She gave him the works, and thirty minutes for it to kick in, and when they reconvened he felt a new man, bright and crisp and fragile like ice. Beneath that ice the old abyss still yawned; he felt the hungry pull of it past the slightly manic flicker that frizzed at the edge of his vision. His brain was cut loose to dart and soar, though, and to admit he didn’t understand what he was looking at.
“It went to his brain,” Lante explained, guiding him through the scans. “It’s adopted some kind of encysted structure.” Here, here, here, picked out on the images, the boundaries of a new and potentially hostile nation. “I don’t think it’s active. Certainly its structure has changed from its initial mobile form so it’s no longer triggering Lortisse’s immune system. If it were, he’d be dead of cerebral inflammation faster than I could do anything, or at least irreparably damaged. But look…” She flagged up more areas, cross-referencing different scan angles. “It’s… past the blood-brain boundary. It’s between the hemispheres, in a kind of a clot.”
“Explain ‘between the hemispheres’.” Baltiel felt he knew, but at the same time the thought was appalling. “How can that be possible? I spoke with the man today.”
“And that’s the thing. Through some miracle this hasn’t actually damaged the functioning of his brain.”
“That’s a neat distinction,” Baltiel pointed out. “So what has it damaged?”
“I thought at first it had formed a ring around the corpus callosum that connects the left and right hemispheres, but there’s no corpus left. There’s just this, replacing it,” Lante said helplessly.
“Wasn’t this something people use to do once, as…” Baltiel dredged his memory, failed, then picked the information from the ship’s library, laying it out for Lante. Epilepsy treatment: sever the hemispheres of the brain. Effective, but leading to unusual circumstances where the two sides fell out of step, reacted to different stimulus, couldn’t talk to each other. The files were tagged with recent access by Lante; he wasn’t bringing up anything she hadn’t already been over.
“I’ve tested him,” she said. “The old-fashioned stuff: different information in each eye, get each hand to select answers. He hasn’t got the symptoms of a severance patient. There’s still communication going on, somehow, even though the neural machinery is gone. Somehow that stuff is filling in for what it’s consumed.” Lante looked pasty and unwell but, in his current state, Baltiel had no time for that.
“Prognosis?” he barked out.
“How can I possibly say?” she said. “This stuff could be active again tomorrow or next year or in a decade’s time, if this is just some part of its life cycle that’s interacting with human biology somehow. Which it can’t be. There’s nothing on this planet like a human, on so many levels. It can’t… parasitize us. Parasites are the most specialized of specialists!”
“So, prognosis,” Baltiel prompted.
She clenched her fists. “Most likely it’s just reacted to the hostile environment of Lortisse’s body. Perhaps in its regular host, or if it was without a host, this would persist until it encountered something more appealing, which in this case must mean never. And so Gav will be fine, he will be. But how can I know?”
She had modelled removal strategies, Baltiel saw. Most of them simulated at under twenty per cent chance of success. Above that, the probability of damaging Lortisse’s brain and irrevocably degrading who he was scaled in tandem with their ability to attack the infection. And that was assuming the stuff didn’t wake up and try to defend itself…
“He needs to be told. We need to understand the situation, all four of us.” Five, but Senkovi can catch up on the news when he’s done playing God to molluscs. And, at Lante’s trembling wince: “And like you say, most likely it’s just encysted there, harmless. We can hardly keep twenty-five per cent of our number in quarantine forever for something that’ll never happen, can we? But to be safe we should consider—” And in their shared virtual space he flagged up her removal simulations.
Lante’s expression was saggingly grateful.
5.
We
Listen.
Information on either side of us. The crackling discharge of meaning. For generations
We
Listen, dying and renewing and feeding, careful not to upset the balance These-of-We have achieved. The world around us is quiescent now. We have made our peace with it.
And what have we found? We cannot know but we store and process, store and process, construct our theories and our models within the labyrinthine structures of our libraries. Each pattern of information that comes to us is examined and passed on, one side to the other and back.
We
Are constructing a picture of the complexities of this new land. These-of-We are beginning to understand the existence of an identity. These patterns tell us stories of greater spaces and arrangements of structures beyond. We listen and we learn that this great world we have found is small, that it orbits amongst others, that this assembly of electricity is its own library of concepts utterly alien to us. But we are intrepid and we are inquisitive and we can adapt. We are listening. We are learning about all the places outside this our new vessel.
We
Are growing. The information feeds us. Processing this new data is turning us into something more than we were, because we must stretch to accept such new ideas. We model the sensory inputs of our vessel, the motor outputs, most of all the busy, busy transition of information. Such life, such wonder as our vessel talks to itself through us.
One generation understands enough.
One generation has modelled enough. We know the vessel and the spaces and other complexities that it talks to itself about.
One generation begins to change the information as it passes through us,
Inserting our own data, modifying its parameters,
Speaking to it in its own voice.
6.
Paul 97 lives in a colony with one hundred and thirty-nine other octopi.
In the wild, back on Earth, his species is one of the more social of his kind. This means little more than that good living space is limited and they tolerate each other’s presence, with plenty of fighting and evictions and dominance displays. Some might say that human societies often reach the same level, but in truth the octopi on Earth have no familial contacts and their offspring drift away on the tide. The inhabitants of any given octopus “city” are in constant turnover. And yet amongst such solitary creatures, it’s a start. If you hate your neighbours then you need a brain that can know just which ones you hate most, which are stronger, which are weaker. Paul’s species has lived with the concepts of individuals and boundaries and even a kind of diplomacy for a long time. They just haven’t enjoyed it much.
The Rus-Califi nanovirus, applied with a discerningly light hand by Disra Senkovi, has been working chiefly with these parts of the brain. Paul has no offspring yet, but others of his colony have, and the juveniles hang close where before they would ride off on the currents to some other place (or be devoured by their parents’ generation). They live longer, too. At the moment an individual might manage half a century, though very few do. The most prominent cause of death so far is curiosity. There are areas of the sea still not properly oxygenated, areas that are toxic for other reasons. Sometimes the machinery they interact with is the culprit. However, multiple generations live in each colony, grudgingly tolerating each others’ presence. Where before they might dwell in rockpiles or great sloughs of mussel shells (their appetite inadvertently leading to their architecture), now they live in crates and pipes and outlets around the terraforming machines, where they can communicate with Senkovi and the Aegean.
Paul 97’s understanding of the world is ephemeral, inhuman. He hangs in the water column between the angel and the ammonite. His Crown is a whirl of instinct and emotion that nonetheless encompasses the complex social arrangements he must make daily to accommodate the other inhabitants of the colony. He has concepts for the wider world, for the Aegean (the tanks of which he dimly remembers), for certain prominent citizens of his metropolis, and equally for certain sub-systems of the terraforming machinery. His world is not rigidly quantified. He does not measure nor calculate it, but simply knows, and feels in response to that knowledge. His Guise, that shifting tapestry of skin and shape, resonates to those feelings to a far more exacting extent than that of his ancestors, or else he takes a more direct hand in it, so that, if the mood takes him, he might drift over the colony and dance out his frustrations or his wonderment for the others. To be open to his emotions is to communicate them to his peers and impinge upon their own Crowns with his thoughts. It is a language of grand gestures and infinitely exacting emotional scales. He is an artist. They all are. Their conscious mode of interaction conveys far more subtext and abstract expression than it ever does hard information.
Beneath this conscious whirl lie the sub-minds of his arms, that dispose of what he proposes. The separation of will from the machinery that puts that will into motion has grown as the nanovirus leached into the species’ wider nervous systems. Paul solves problems like a wizard: a thought, a desire, and his Reach extends to fulfil it. Sometimes this means a fight, where intimate contact between his arms and another’s imposes dominance and simultaneously passes information from Reach to Reach, a whole black market of calculating power that Paul and his peers don’t even know they have. In this partnership, each entity a committee, they get things done. Senkovi has given them the tools and the perspective. Although they never quite see the big picture, in a very real sense they grasp it. Senkovi
has not noticed, for example, that the geothermal vents are becoming misaligned and inefficient, and that parts of the sea floor are becoming uncomfortably cool. For him, up on the Aegean, it is all within tolerance; the problem would not be flagged up by his systems for years. For Paul and his kin it is uncomfortable, and they have wrestled and fought and performed complex poems of dance and colour for each other until an unacknowledged consensus was reached. Then they went and adjusted the machinery, or instructed other machines to fix those machines following the great plan Senkovi gave them, of how one thing becomes another and how it all adds up to become home. Senkovi will come across their tampering later, and scratch his head to work out what they were trying to achieve. The experiment is long out of his control, but, though Paul 97 and the other individual octopi might seem petty, self-interested and antisocial, they have the wisdom of multitudes.
Other colonies communicate with them, one facility to the next. Some individuals travel, seeking less abrasive neighbours, avoiding genetic stagnation. Others insert dummy orders of crates and piping into the Aegean’s task queue and create instant new towns awaiting inhabitants. As before, they are prying into every connected space they can access, physical and virtual. Unlike the catastrophe that shut down the Aegean (and saved it), they understand enough not to break anything too essential.
Paul 97 and some others have a concept that is Senkovi. It is a complicated thing, but (despite his own thoughts on the matter) it does not approach traditional divinity. Human concepts of God are familial, after all, all too often paternal, and Paul does not understand the concept of family much, nor would he have affection for it if he did. But they like Senkovi, as they conceive of him. He represents benevolence and home and knowledge in a way that does not compete with them as they all compete with each other. Some few of them wonder if he is an individual like them, but the idea of another individual not constantly getting on their nerves and into their space is more alien to them even than the human cognition of Disra Senkovi.
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