There has been sporadic radio contact across the gulf between Nod and Damascus, not consciously governed, but the three scientists’ Reaches have sought data and sometimes processing power from the fragmentary city orbiting the water world. Someone has noticed and decided that their activities constitute an unacceptable risk. Forbidden is forbidden.
In fact there was considerable debate, as usual, and no one opinion prevailed, but one faction has worked themselves up into a righteous crusade. Now here they are, in a ship bristling with weapons and seething with fighter craft, determined to unilaterally bring an end to whatever abomination is being perpetrated out in Nod’s orbit.
Ruth and Abigail initiate communications and attempt to negotiate. On the screens of the warship a kaleidoscope of scientific rationale flashes, their hopes of reclaiming the planet, their progress, their preliminary findings, anything to stave off the hammer. Noah notes that they are obfuscating: no mention of their new-found experimental subject. They know that would be impossible to square with these crusaders. Noah himself continues working with his device, because it is his whim to do so even under threat of annihilation, and because he is afraid and frustrated and wants to strike back, and his Reach interprets that in a very specific way.
The females’ pleas and promises flash and coil within the warship, and they waver, they do waver. Certainty of cause or purpose has never been an octopus trait. A single clear voice can win over a mob or an army. But not this time.
The tide ebbs but then returns, stronger than ever, as the individual viewpoints within the warship mingle and turn to angry colours. The fighters detach from their mother ship. The weapons charge.
Abigail and Ruth have not been idle while their enemies debated. They are scientists after all, and they and Noah have, in their more paranoid moments, prepared for this. The hybrid station’s power plants are given over to fields that bend light, dissipating and diverting the lasers, foxing the missile tracking, confusing the fighters so that they attack each other or go spinning off into empty space seeking phantom targets. To the warship all this becomes instant proof that their suddenly potent enemy must be expunged. The Reaches that man the weapons decide that railgun pellets are the surest way and send a deadly salvo at the station, metal slugs accelerated to incredible speeds by electromagnetic pulses. The energy shielding of the station will deflect a few but not most. Despite the speeds involved, the distances in space are such that Ruth, Abigail and Noah are fully aware of what is coming. They have time to react, but no ability to save themselves.
Noah reacts. His Crown is seething with rage. He has an answer for the warship and, to the emotional hotbed that is an octopus mind, mutual destruction has a dramatic satisfaction to it that calm acceptance of death lacks. His arms lock about the interface of his invention, the beautiful doomed thing that will not, now, be the salvation of his people.
He triggers it. The result is instantaneous. Before its projectiles impact on the station, the warship and its closer fighters are gone. To Noah’s Crown they are simply obliterated, his enemies defeated in a wash of power he can only revel in. To his Reach, noting the instrument feedback and reports, they are still in existence, albeit smeared in a vanishingly thin cloud of atoms between here and a star system seven light years away, or so his calculations suggest.
A successful test of the equipment, is close to the sentiment that Noah dies with, and he is not unhappy at his personal achievement.
Then the projectiles tear through the station, sending lethal shockwaves through the water-filled spaces, venting ice and organic material.
And then? No more, not for many years until new, alien visitors come to disturb the unquiet tomb with their incautious tread.
PRESENT 4
THE FACE OF THE WATERS
1.
Paul is fiercely unhappy. Confinement is seldom a positive thing, but his species was never content to live in a cage even back when they were just semi-sentient molluscs and the pets of one Disra Senkovi. To keep an octopus was all too often a constant battle of the captor’s technology against the captive’s ingenuity. That love of freedom—the knowledge, perhaps, that if danger looms there is always a way out—runs deep in the species. As a captive, of his own kind no less, Paul cycles through feelings of despair, anger, misery, confusion and bitter betrayal—or at least emotions akin to such human feelings. His implants have limited access to the wider system and without the tactile company of his own kind his logical subconscious is starved of information and unable to contribute and express itself. He is left only with the whirl of his dominant id, making demands of the universe that the rest of his neural structure cannot fulfil.
And he fears. He does not quite know why he fears: he is living a nightmare where his impenetrable cell contains a horror he cannot see but feels the shadow of always. It is a horror his fellow cephalopods entirely share, which is why he is quarantine to this cell. The aliens—the humans in particular—are inextricably linked to the plague that stole their world from them. And, should anyone be inclined to forget, that world hangs below them, visible from any porthole and screen, writhing with remembrance.
The others have gone, now. He is left only with the unkind light, with few hiding places, with the aliens crouching in the next cell, all angles and muteness on the floor of their sterile, waterless chamber.
Paul had hidden himself from them at first, not wanting to attract their attention because of an instinctive aversion for making things worse. He understands by now that the aliens are as helpless as he is; moreover his courage is beginning to return as the spectre of infection recedes: he would know by now if he were sick with it.
And so he flicks himself into the truncated water column of his cell and gives the aliens a piece of his mind, squirming at the transparent barrier between their chambers, his skin flickering and glaring with angry colours that still contain an undercurrent of fear and bewilderment. Whilst back on his ship he had been a volunteer diplomat, filled with mercurial temerity; all that is forgotten now and he only knows that these ugly, static creatures are the source of his discomfort.
They watch him display—his colours, his skin drawn up into creases and jags, the threatening attitudes of his arms as the rest of his scattered brain does what it can to enforce his strangling desires. Then the human-looking one is holding up its device again, showing colours and shapes that are like slurred, mumbling speech. It signals peace, friendship, unhappiness, submission—that last as close to an apology as an octopus can really make. Paul is not swayed, only emboldened, finding a victim he can truly vent his spleen on without fear of repercussion. He has never been the strongest or most charismatic of his kind, and now these aliens will hear him out, for all the good it will do.
And midway through his theatrically furious display, Paul sees something recognizable and familiar happen to the human alien. It snaps. It has a temper—something Paul would have said was a natural prerequisite for intelligence if he could form such an analytical thought. The human has apparently been restraining itself (an alien activity for an alien creature) but now it snaps. Its skin tone is darker, blotchy, which at least indicates some manner of internal emotional life Paul can relate to. Its mouth (is that slack hole a mouth?) opens and shuts and there is wet on its face. Its awkward limbs spasm into recognizable threat postures and it strikes the barrier between them. The colour device is often not properly angled for Paul to see it, but when he catches glimpses, the colours are very angry, very sad.
It is grieving. Paul has been out of the loop but now he realizes that its fellows have died or undergone a misfortune. This is something he understands.
Actually receiving meaningful communication from the alien is profoundly disconcerting. It makes Paul think of the creature as a fellow living thing in a way he hadn’t before. And can he be blamed for such prejudice? What is this creature, after all? It shows speech through a machine, and that is appropriate because everything about it is mechanical and ungainly. Its skin i
s dark and mute, its movements sharp and graceless, stupid as a crab or a fish, nothing of its outer show speaking of intelligence or beauty.
But in the throes of its rage, overtaken by its emotions, it becomes real to Paul.
The other one, the crab one, is watching, and now it begins to move, its many legs shuffling and dancing in a most un-crab-like manner. Paul understands it is trying to show attitudes, as though those jointed legs are its Reach. The meaning comes through poorly, but it is plainly coordinating with its human fellow, and between them there is almost half a mind talking to him.
He calms, feeling himself the master of this situation, less estranged from his fellow prisoners. They calm, too—such heights of emotion are alien to the aliens, they cannot sustain them like a real mind can. Paul essays a few calming colours and gestures of his own, attaching to the barrier and eyeing the pair of them. They respond in kind. The human one puts a limb against the glass, little jointed appendages splayed. The gesture is oddly familiar, almost comforting, though Paul does not consciously register it as something his arch-great-creator Senkovi used to do.
With a start he realizes they are not alone. An observer has descended stealthily into the far chamber. Feeling a curious solidarity with the aliens now, Paul unleashes a storm of angry demands towards her, leading the attention of the aliens to the newcomer.
She ghosts back and forth in the observation tank, her skin strumming with muted, thoughtful colours. Something about her attitude unsettles Paul. When she descends to the console and begins making demands of the aliens, her Guise seems furtive, sly. He does not receive what her Reach transmits but she is plainly someone who has a use for these aliens. She is asking questions relating to… forbidden things. Forbidden places. The things the humans are always linked to, and most likely the things that had brought doom to these aliens’ friends.
But the aliens seem eager, and Paul’s ill-feeling towards the newcomer intensifies. He cannot put the feeling into concrete words, but Paul’s social life is one of constantly shifting factions, and there is one such faction he has never been a part of—a group that is ostracized, excised, but which never quite goes away. The octopuses eschew inflexible labels for anything, but the closest human concept might be the Extreme Science Party.
Paul feels only profound misgivings about the Extreme Science Party, but at the same time he is in a cage and wants to be free, and if anyone will overturn the order sufficient to procure his release, it might be those anarchist heretic experimenters. He watches the newcomer closely.
2.
Helena has now spent her rage and grief, and it bought her nothing, as far as she can see. Octopus interrogators have come and gone, flashed and flickered and undulated at her, and she began to hate the machines in her head that imparted meaning to any of it, even the tenuous meaning her programs could wring from all that fluid posturing and display.
Portia tried to help her as she made her futile demands. She wanted a rescue mission. She wanted a search for signals. She wanted reparations. She wanted… what she wanted was for it not to have happened, but no technology was advanced enough to grant that wish. She raged her temper into her slate and Portia danced, following the postural cues she had picked up that formed a part of the under-language, the data-channel. Portia’s jointed body merely aped their communication, a crippled caper to their endless ballet, but it was something. She had tried to help. And now Helena sits on the floor of their cell with the slate on her knees, and Portia’s forelegs stroke her leg hesitantly, trying to impart interspecial comfort. And it is not quite enough, Helena finds. It should be; she has lived amongst the Portiids all her life, they are friends and colleagues whom she understands. But it is not Human contact and, before now, she did not realize just how much that meant to her.
The other octopus, the prisoner, had been engaged in some manner of face-off with a lone observer who had drifted in. Now it is back to goggling at Helena, but she has no more words. The currency of their discourse is emotion and it has exhausted her.
At last Portia taps her thigh more urgently and she looks up to see an exit iris open. Her hair twitches and lifts as invisible forces shift around her. Beyond the circular opening is blue-lit water. A pail-full dashes out onto the floor of the cell in an almost contemptuous spout, as though the element is mocking her, but the rest remains contained by nothing at all. She recalls the bubble membrane the locals formed in space, as the theatre for her ill-fated diplomacy. Probably the technology would be exorbitantly inefficient within a stronger gravitic pull, but here in orbit the molluscs can apparently generate fields to overcome the pressure differential and the station’s own weak attraction, keeping air (or vacuum) out and the water in.
Portia approaches the portal suspiciously. “If they mean we can go, they’ve not thought it through.”
But the locals are not finished. Something eye-watering is happening at the water’s surface, the field deforming until a half-sphere of air dents into the water. Two or three of the cephalopods have come to watch her and she can see, even with the unassisted eye, that their colours are striating in related patterns. Her algorithms catch up and suggest they are asking or ordering or suggesting that she go in.
Neither she nor Portia like the idea much, but at the same time, they have nothing to bargain with and, if their captors want to drown or crush or vivisect them, there is nothing in this solar system that could stop them. Helena wants to tell herself that the octopuses are sentient, reasoning creatures, and surely to butcher or just dispose of alien ambassadors is unthinkable. Except who knows what they might do? And shouldn’t she stop relying on anthropomorphism as a yardstick of what alien minds can conceive of?
“The other prisoner has gone,” Portia reports. “Or perhaps it wasn’t a prisoner.” She stamps a little more and raises her front two pairs of legs at the doorway, a threat display born of pure frustration at their helplessness.
“We have to go,” Helena decides heavily. Their hosts must know that this airy bubble is not necessary for their survival, so perhaps it indicates an attempt at hospitality? She kicks off to the iris, scrabbling at the wall to stop herself just sailing through. Portia makes a better job of it, landing neatly on the very rim, one palp extended into the cavity beyond.
“Hold on to me,” Helena suggests. “Please.” She doesn’t want to be separated from her one surviving crewmate, her lifelong friend. She replaces her helmet and Portia re-seals her own suit with a fussy busying of her palps. Then the spider’s comforting weight transfers to Helena’s shoulder and back, and Helena herself hooks the opening with two fingers and gives herself just enough forward momentum to drift in.
The air bubble moves ahead of her, closing up behind, Helena’s legs kicking awkwardly at the water through the membrane to keep up, sending clashing ranks of ripples across its surface that scatter the dull blue light. Within twenty metres Helena knows she is in trouble. Life in low gravity isn’t condusive to strong muscle growth, even with all the supplements in the world, nor has it offered many opportunities to hone her swimming technique. She has some reserves in her suit jets, but not the skill to deploy them properly. Inevitably she loses the bubble, tumbling end over end in the water, hoping that this won’t be seen as an escape attempt or a violation of some other nebulous boundary. She feels the random aggression of their hosts like an almost physical pressure—surely anything might set them off, or nothing at all, prompting them to obliterate her. Perhaps she is already on her way to some pointless execution.
Why are they like this? How can they even have survived, if they are like this? Or are they loving gentleness with each other and xenophobia personified to the rest of creation?
The water begins surging more swiftly, rolling them over and over until they are hurtling through a windowless pipe, conveyed from here to there by impatient, absent masters, then slowing, the water pressure building ahead of them to shunt them to a stop so they can be decanted, almost gently, into a bubble barely large enough
for the pair of them, one with hard, clear walls of plastic. We’re still in quarantine. Behind her, the pipe itself is sealed, withdrawing, no doubt to be sterilized. We are still infected, in their eyes, or they won’t risk the possibility. Helena tries to right herself, but the air pocket has not come with them and in the water she has no sense of up or down. Their little capsule hangs unsupported in a great spherical chamber and a hundred cephalopods drift on every side, or else cling to crooked spires and pillars that jut from the walls. Portia is scratching at her shoulder, dragging her attention round to their one reference point: one third of the chamber is window, a vast curved expanse that gives out onto the stars, onto other fragments of sun-touched detritus, onto chains and conglomerations of crystal-walled orbs rotating about each other like a maniac’s orrery collection, strung out as far as her Human eyes can discern.
“Oh,” she says, staring. For a moment the sight banishes everything else, her loss, her captors. If only she could put into words the wonder of it, what colours might her slate speak to the watching throng? But she is mute and the moment passes.
“Talking to us?” Portia cannot communicate freely in the water, without a surface to stand on. She laboriously inputs messages with her palps, letting her implants translate. Helena glances from her round, reflective eyes to the drifting, squabbling host all around them. There is a lot of talk going on between the octopuses, certainly, but she isn’t sure if any of it is directed at them. They just talk, or perhaps they just feel, and the feelings become speech without truly being pinned down into meaning… Helena the linguist is almost in tears with frustration. We had it so easy, with Kern and the Portiids. We never knew.
Still, she is a scholar by vocation. She engages her software, trying to draw patterns from the crowd around her: like sifting meaningful sentences from a thousand people all clamouring at the top of their lungs.
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