Grail - Elizabeth Bear [124]
Tristen cleared his throat. “I think it says hello.”
Cynric’s caryatid expression remained unchanged, except for the lift of her brow and the answering quirk of one lip corner. “Generally speaking,” she said, “when one finds life anywhere, does it ask salient questions?”
He’d been joking about it talking, but Cynric wasn’t. Danilaw hadn’t said anything about the native fauna having sapience. That, too, Tristen realized with a sickening twinge, limited the availability of Grail’s resources to him and his people. Swallowing barbed disappointment, he said, “They’re talking to you?”
“Well,” she said, as if explaining to a child, “they don’t use words. Not even Language, which suggests a neurology not at all like ours.”
“Not at all like ours as modified by the symbionts, you mean,” he said. “Not at all like what you and the Leviathan’s get have made us into. We are a hybrid creature, and you know these Means are right to call us alien.”
“Earth octopi were supposed to be quite intelligent.” Cynric pressed one hand to the glass, fingers whitening at the tips, the nail beds flushing cerulean. “We have some DNA. I could build one.”
“What good does that do us if there’s nobody to teach it to speak its own language? Besides, what are the odds, similarity of morphology and habitat aside, that an octopus will speak an alien creature’s language any better than we will? It’s not like we ever learned to talk octopus.”
A change in Perceval’s breathing told Tristen she was awake. Cynric would know it, too, but so long as Perceval did not choose to announce herself, neither of her elders would embarrass her.
Cynric said, “In assuming that it has a language at all, you are commiting an error of cognition. We’re pack animals. We have to talk to survive. What does a solitary intelligence need language for?”
He’d never considered it. Evidence of his own egocentrism etched a path through him; he wondered if it changed anything as it passed. “Some things are just too alien.”
Cynric’s half smile turned inside out and came back up as a sardonic smirk. “Fortunately, so am I.”
“Too alien?”
“You say we are half Leviathan, Brother, and you do not say untrue.” She pressed a hand to the glass, and the creature beyond—mutilated by the attack of some predator, Tristen could now see—glided an appendage across the outside of the bubble to greet her. “And perhaps I am more than half. I say it has no language, and that is true. It’s not using words. But I hear it in my head. In my own voice—not my speaking voice, you understand.”
“Of course not,” he said. “The voice you hear your thoughts in.”
“Some people see their thoughts, you know.”
“Sure,” he said, and touched her shoulder lightly, surprised as always to find her warm and yielding, not statue-hard. “But not us. What is it saying?”
She laughed, moving away from his hand. He let it fall.
“It seems amused,” she said. “It has been watching us—Danilaw’s people, I imagine—for a long time. It doesn’t have a good concept of individuals, per se. It thinks it’s funny how we have to label and categorize everything, and seems to think this is indicative of some moral or intellectual failing of endoskeletal air breathers.”
“It might be right,” Tristen said. “Are you going to tell anyone it’s sentient?”
She moved her hand against the glass. The dodecapus coiled tighter, then swapped sides again. The span of its legs, even curled, was almost as broad as Cynric was tall. A few moments passed, and then it peeled its suckery legs from the observation port and vanished into the water, slipping away on jets of water pumped from flaring valves in its underside.
“I don’t know yet,” she said, seeming curiously unwilling to step back from the port and turn away. “Are the Fisher King’s folk concealing from us that there’s a native intelligence here, and if so, why? What will help us most?”
Tristen had no answer. But he stood beside her until she at