Portia’s front legs lift slightly, an echo of her threat display as she contemplates the scale of the task. But you can? she says, with considerable faith in her friend.
I have something he didn’t, Helena says, trying to match the spider’s optimism. I have their current communications, the two-channel ones. Looks like they found their current mode of conversation long after this Senkovi’s day and it gives me an insight into their communications he didn’t have. So I can build on his work and maybe we can start talking. She sincerely hopes, because she is a linguist and talk is all she has.
Portia regards her for long enough that Helena asks, What? and the spider gives a curious little shake of her body.
You have great faith in the ability of communications to solve our problem. What if they are more than happy to keep us here, talk or not?
We cannot afford to believe that, Helena says with desperate faith. But like I say, I need to devote my software to this, which means I can’t keep it configured to translate for you. We’ll have to rely on yours instead.
Portia goes still, at first just thinking but then Helena translates her poise as the equivalent of embarrassment: slightly crouching, hoping to go unnoticed.
I will… configure my jacket and implants, Portia says awkwardly.
Helena feels a curious stab of betrayal. You’ve been relying on my translation all this time? And, yes, she has been eager to speak to Portia in the spider’s own idiom, to listen through her gloves. But she assumed Portia was running a simultaneous facility to understand Humans. For a vertiginous moment she sees the situation from the spider’s point of view. Of course, Humans would make the effort to communicate with the Portiids, to learn their language and imitate their sensory capabilities, but why would the Portiids, the hosts and rulers of Kern’s World, spend all that effort on talking and listening like Humans? It is a melancholy thought that even Portia might not quite see her as an equal, despite their years together. The two species are still building that bridge between them, strand by strand, even two generations on.
And so she turns to that other bridge, the one that is hers to build, working off the rickety scaffolding set down so long before by Disra Senkovi. He had been an erratic researcher; intent and obsessive in some sessions, frustrated in others, and then there were the long gaps between recordings where he had plainly lost the will to go on. The recording sequences are incomplete, some are corrupted. She lacks key milestones and must fill in gaps. But time is what she has.
Sometimes there is food: a kind of fishy slurry that is sour but edible. Sometimes the lights dim, although not to any set pattern she can detect. In the next-door chamber, the solitary octopus comes to the window to stare at her, its colours fluctuating between chalk and ash but making no discernible attempt to tell her anything.
Without Senkovi she could never have made any progress. The octopus communication is equally distant from Portiid speech as it is from human. Senkovi never cracked it, but he made records and tentative lexicons and hours of recordings. She watches him in the tanks, floating alongside his interlocutors; out in the dry, wrestling with multiple screens and a computer system that was slowly failing just as he was. She watches him butt against his limits and not know it: a man of erratic genius trying to apply his personal toolset to a problem he was ill-suited to. Senkovi was a planetary engineer, she understands, and he fell back on pushing for hard solutions and exact answers. Helena, on the other hand, is a linguist, a specialist in non-human language—even if she has only had experience with one such language until now. She takes the dead ends that turned Senkovi around, and she finds a way forward.
Sometimes more octopuses squirm into the other adjoining chambers to watch her and Portia. She takes the opportunity to record them as their skins ripple and dance with colours. Patterns spread from individual to individual, mutate, change; they are constantly talking, or perhaps emoting. They touch often, and sometimes they break abruptly into what looks like fighting—one even loses an arm to such a struggle—but which she begins to think is an inherent part of their communication strategy. She makes notes, observing them just as they observe her.
The lone, pale octopus is kept segregated, she notes, and she is increasingly certain it is their former ambassador, contaminated by contact with aliens. Its own skin flickers hesitantly when its kin arrive, and she sees an interplay between it and them, yet there is also a distinct exclusion in the way they react to it, like humans turning their backs. The interplay within the group is far more dynamic than that between them and the loner. And yet they are still “talking” to it, even as they ignore it. Which makes her ever more sure that what she is watching is something other than “talking” and puts her in mind of the twin channel transmissions the creatures broadcast with.
She sleeps, Portia and she looking out for each other and taking shifts. They eat the tedious fish-smelling paste extruded sloppily into their chamber. She works alongside the long-dead Disra Senkovi, reliving his moods and despair, his moments of manic animation, the cut-off ends of his psychological low points when he abandoned his research and his recording to feed the black dog that constantly followed him.
He lived a long time, alone, she realizes. He spent half a lifetime trying to reach out to his creations, because there was nobody else in his universe he could talk to. And he came so close, negotiated a means of exchanging data and information, yet never made that emotional link. She thinks about herself and Portia, how she can recognize the moods of the spider, even though they are not quite Human moods; and vice versa, she hopes. I am damned lucky, is what I am.
And then she finds one long clip in which Senkovi tells a joke to an octopus. It isn’t a good joke; dreadful, in fact. He finds it hilarious though, being in that part of his mood-cycle, and she watches as the cephalopod’s skin slowly shifts and changes, and then begins to rapidly flicker and dance. Laughter? No, laughter is human. Beyond an appreciation of simple physical pratfalls, Portiids do not find Human humour funny, just as Portia once tried to describe a complex social engagement she plainly considered… something, some word Helena didn’t have, the emotive impact entirely beyond her reach. So here is poor Disra Senkovi, a man a century old and many thousand years dead, telling jokes to sea life and getting a response.
And the reaction delights him. He goes on and on, dredging up puns and wordplay and double entendres, almost splitting his sides with laughter, and the octopus glitters and shimmers with bright, daylight colours, clinging to the glass of the tank and watching the ageing comedian in fascination.
Helena’s notes are sufficient, by then. She can understand what Senkovi never knew. The octopus could not get the joke, but it understood that he, its creator, was happy. Happiness is a universal, perhaps; or at least it was something the octopus read in that cackling face, and married to some state of its own. The octopus knew he was happy, and it loved him, or valued him, or felt something enough that his happiness was important to it. And that in itself is a miracle; that is the grand triumph Senkovi never grasped, that his creatures could empathize, could apply a theory of mind to entities quite unlike themselves, could be great-hearted enough to be happy that someone else was laughing, even if they couldn’t get the joke.
She watches them for a long time, and then she turns the recordings off, lets the data lie fallow. She sits with her arms about her knees and stares at the solitary grey octopus in the next cell and feels unutterably sad.
At last there is a faint touch down her lower back, one leg-tip stroking her tentatively. Portia understands Human emotions, too. Sadness is another universal, maybe, even if different stimuli trigger it.
“He was so lonely,” Helena whispers, hoping Portia has her translation software configured.
Again that stroking touch. Emotional trauma is worse for Humans, Helena knows. Portiids still feel it: for them, shock or frenzy are most common. Portiid brains are more uniform, though; they have more common experience with each other than Humans, and hence
sympathize with each others’ trauma more readily, rather than each becoming a solitary prisoner of their experiences, as Humans so often are.
Helena wonders if the octopuses have it better or worse. Except of course they wear their hearts on their skins, all the time. Perhaps there is simply no such thing as a private trauma, and hence no stigma to it. Perhaps they live their lives like operatic heroes and heroines, broadcasting the grandeur of their melancholies and their rages to all within eyeshot. Thinking of poor Senkovi, that alternative sounds eminently healthy to her.
And one day, after she has thrown her bucket into Senkovi’s well and heard it strike dry, she knows she is as prepared as she will ever be. When the little parliament of molluscs arrives to eyeball her and Portia again, she is ready. She takes her slate, now configured to encode and decode as much of the octopus communication as she has grasped (pitifully little, even now) and presents it to them boldly, and hopes she is saying hello.
4.
No word from Helena; no transmissions from the locals, no ransom note or demands or even threats. Or rather, plenty of incidental transmissions should one choose to turn receivers towards their world, but nothing aimed at the Lightfoot. No communications with the Voyager either, which is still hiding out in case the xenophobia of the aquatic civilization here turns out to be insuperable. And Fabian has the uncomfortable feeling that a timer is inching down the wire somewhere. The locals are technologically advanced and erratically paranoid. Octopoid eyes somewhere are going to be searching the further reaches of their solar system for perceived threat. It’s what Fabian would do, after all. He can only assume these angry molluscs have at least as much common sense as a male Portiid.
All of this makes Fabian very angry, an emotion he shows neither in palp nor footfall. It does not do for male spiders to give rein to that kind of outburst as a female might. He is expected to be meek and deferential, and it eats him up inside like a parasitic larva sometimes.
The Voyager mission had got him out from under the shadow of some particularly dominant females in his peer house, who would have blithely taken the credit for his researches—not necessarily a theft, so much as a kind of intellectual eminent domain: anything he produced would obviously be a product of the peer house itself, with Fabian as mere conduit. After that, and with his work hovering frustratingly near the boundary of success without quite crossing over, all these excursions aboard the Lightfoot came at exactly the wrong time. He resents the risk, because if there is one archetypally male trait Fabian espouses wholesale, it is a regard for an intact exoskeleton. He resents the interruptions. He particularly resents the fact that now, of all times, progress is being made. Why couldn’t this have happened back when they had the opportunity to focus on it?
He is also beginning to resent Meshner, or at least his frailties. Humans are supposed to be robust. How could they not be? They’re huge, and they have that absurdly overcompensatory immune system that makes him wonder how any of them can ever fall ill at all. Except Meshner is not well, and months of research-heavy interplanetary travel cooped up aboard the Lightfoot is not mending him. Fabian has spent no small amount of thought on the subject of how much their researches (“their” when negative, “mine” when positive, and he is fully aware of the mendacity of this and cannot train himself out of it) are to blame and tells himself stridently that it is only a little, and other factors outside his control are more culpable. And he is practically there. Only a little more and Fabian can go happily off and encode his findings for the benefit of future generations. Except that those findings are going to be trapped in the ship with Fabian for the foreseeable future, and may meet an explosive death in the vacuum of space with him. This, he particularly resents.
He has spoken with Kern, or rather he has spoken with Artifabian, in the hope the automaton will act as his go-between with a computer too important and busy to deal with him directly right now. Artifabian has a plan to compress Fabian’s data and transmit it on a broad frequency if it appears the Lightfoot’s destruction is imminent. This is less than satisfactory. The Voyager may not receive the signal; moreover the data will only be the bare bones and what Fabian wants to get out is his own Understanding, because in that memory will be him, set down for all posterity. He will become a part of his species’ legacy for future generations and this has been his goal for most of his life.
He goes and corners Meshner yet again, as well as he can in a crew space without corners. I have the first set of maze tests, he explains. I will download them to your implant now.
Fabian spots that Meshner’s expression is not the eager, tractable one he is used to. He queries Artifabian for translation and apparently his Human co-conspirator is unhappy, possibly traumatized. Fabian does not have time for this. Possibly none of them do. It’s only a maze, he says. The amount of data is considerably less than a full emotive experience. This is not entirely true because every Understanding comes with the innate baggage of she—or, rarely, he—who set it down, but Fabian has attempted to maintain a detached aspect throughout. They have reduced the scope of their experiments by minute increments over the course of their interplanetary journey, giving up the grandeur of their ambitions iota by iota, and this is what they are left with. Fabian has memorized a simple maze, and he wants to make Meshner run through it. Mentally, not physically, although the comparison with the laboratory animals of yore is unavoidable.
Meshner gives in, with poor grace, but he checks with Kern first—apparently she will give him all the time he wants. They are closing with the inner planet, and with the orbiting structure that is sending out the bizarre natural history lesson, but there is time, Kern says.
Fabian accesses the architecture of Meshner’s implants to download his maze Understanding. Things have changed in there, he notes. The complexity of the virtual space has increased by an order of magnitude, indicating that the implant’s algorithms are now vastly better at processing and storing complex data. The rate of change is a little unnerving, in fact, as though the implant is reflecting and copying greater external structures. Fabian has a moment of caution, about to call it all off, but he presses on. This just means that his experiment has a far better substrate on which to run.
The observed changes seem to have had no immediate ill effect on his subject, so Fabian gives Meshner the maze, and things go—not wrong, but unexpectedly, straight out of the gate.
I’m there, comes Artifabian’s translation of the words that Meshner is sending. It’s… where is this? Is this somewhere you saw?
Fabian fidgets nervously. Are you able to trace the path through?
It’s slick. Artifabian is working overtime to convey emotional distress. There’s… weed, sea things. The walls are green-black stone. Fabian, where did you…?
Just concentrate on finding the way out. This test is being timed, Fabian tells him primly.
I know the way.
Four words, but Fabian feels his limbs twitch with excitement. At the same time he is running diagnostic tests on the implant, because there are no walls, there is no weed. The maze is simply a configuration Fabian spun up within the computer, an intellectual exercise, but Meshner appears to be adding his own grotesque content, turning the simple game into a simulation, making use of all that convoluted new architecture. Sure enough the implant is running at capacity, and indeed has created new capacity by further optimizing its structure. More than that, it is drawing on outside resources: unused computational power from the ship plus Meshner’s own cerebral functions.
The process requires some refinement… Fabian tells himself timorously. In truth he is not sure what he’s looking at, except that the experiment is getting away from him. He tells himself that this is not damaging Meshner permanently. He is aware that he lacks the empirical data on which to base such a statement.
Meshner finishes the maze in adequate time, and the next three even faster as he grows used to the medium. He continues to complain about the character of the mazes, which hav
e a ruinous, sunken aspect Fabian attributes to their recent travails with the octopuses. Fabian still has more tests, but by then Meshner has had another episode, a moment in which he loses all proprioception and sense of belonging in his own body. After that the Human seizes the chance to break away from vital research because a distraction has arrived. All that valuable time for experimentation has been used up; at long last they are nearing the orbiting station and everyone (except Fabian) wants to take a look.
Meshner guesses the others also expected something quite different, specifically something more Human—or at least human. Instead, the orbiting station is a bizarre hotchpotch of technologies that suggests the octopus civilization at least extended a tentacle out this way at some point.
The basic frame is certainly consistent with Old Empire technology—very old given the battered and friable look of the thing. The precise original dimensions would be impossible to determine, save that Kern already has them to hand, dredged out of her far-reaching, erratic memory.
“It is, or was, a detachable module from a terraforming ship.” Her voice, reporting, is very flat, all the ants and the wiring of her is devoted elsewhere, but Meshner finds he can’t avoid giving the lack of affect a human interpretation, as though Kern is filled to the brim with suppressed emotion. “The Brin 2 facility had one, identical to this.” Except the Brin 2’s module was presumably destroyed with the rest of the facility, back during Kern’s long-ago lifetime, leaving her the sole survivor. “I’m not seeing any sign of the main station. Presumably that either lost orbital capacity in the intervening time or was deployed elsewhere. I favour the latter as there is no suggestion this planet has been terraformed.” Planetary data unravels down the screen, based on their preliminary scans. Meshner cross-references it to the fragmentary transmissions and joins all the dots: a planet consistent with supporting the supposed biology and ecology the Lante signal claims.
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