The moon’s glow shone along the hub’s length. Normally it was a well-lit and busy place, but word gets round quick when there’s trouble brewing and folks had fled to the station’s outer rings leaving sensor-activated lights to fall dark.
Gavurah wished she was home, drifting in cerulean waters, soaking the sun’s heat through her eight arms, scooting fresh water through her siphon as she drifted about with Kesad, in idle ease.
She adjusted the air-intake valve in her propulsion suit. Air didn’t feel right going through her siphon, it always left an unpleasant, dry, feeling. For movement in waterless places it was necessary, and no-one had found a sensible way to get enough water off-planet to fill a space-station left by the ancients.
At the far end someone extruded into the hub through a connecting tube and turned to face Gavurah. The station continued its slow spin, the moon rolled out of sight.
It shouldn’t have come to this. Her against the heretic; against her indoctrinator; against her progenitor.
Malkit called himself Father-of-All. He claimed to be an incarnation of the original octopus forefather, an archetype recast by a beneficent universe to lead all octopodes into a glorious destiny. Transferring his consciousness from one body to another seemed enough to impress some that he was right.
He liked the term father, an affectation gleaned from the ruins of the world they’d inherited. Only his heresiod, those who followed his theological errancy, took up the term. Most called him mad, heretic. Gavurah knew him as dangerous, and devious.
Malkit wore bands on his arms, one for each transference of his consciousness to a new clone. There were twenty so far. Twenty people denied individuality to perpetrate his abomination. Twenty-one. There were twenty-one who’d been denied.
Gavurah remembered the day Malkit came to the brood-pen to select hosts. Not every octopus in the pen was a clone. Most were natural offspring but in some Malkit’s genetically adjusted sperm had done its job, scouring out the mother’s DNA from the egg, replacing it with his own.
The clones looked normal, but the other hatchlings learned they knew how to eat and little else. In the days after hatching some hassled and harried their vacant brethren, but the overall impulse was to protect and care for them, ensure they were guided to food, and prevented from injury on the pen walls.
Malkit had been in a different host then, a corpulent older body with many scars, and lacking an arm. The hatchlings didn’t understand what was happening. The adult went round tagging clones with a colored sucker. The color transferred, marking the juvenile. One youth, an unmarked one, grew bored with events and swam amongst Malkit’s busy arms. He snatched it up and fed it into his maw, not pausing from the marking work being done.
Even now Gevurah could hear the tiny squeak of confusion, fear, and horror, the clone emitted at the last moment of its life.
Once finished, Malkit departed, leaving a pen filled with fear and confusion. Soon after their education began, and they learnt of Malkit’s beneficence in leading them.
Gavurah genuflected, touching arm-tip to arm-tip in representation of the connectedness of all things, then flaring all eight arms out to signify the rays of the sun. It helped clear her mind from the shadows Malkit’s indoctrination continued to cast. Her mind went to Kesad, who’d helped her escape Malkit’s clutches, helped her adapt to life outside. She believed in Kesad almost more than anything else. Kesad was close, doing her part to bring Malkit down.
Gavurah checked her weapons. Below, in the ocean, they’d use something more powerful, but up here there was a balance between the need to kill or injure, and not destroy the ancient fabric which protected them from vacuum.
Malkit flicked her arms and started forward. Gavurah responded. Air flowed through the siphon propelling her with a hiss, rippling around her arms as they trailed behind.
They drew to a halt a few arm lengths apart. Close enough to talk, and shoot, not near enough to touch.
“Still making shapes to gods who don’t exist, Gavurah?”
Malkit replied, “Still stealing the life of your unfortunate clone-spring?”
“Stealing? I’m elevating them. Making their life, my life. Instead of eighteen or nineteen years, they’ll be part of eternity. Look at you. What are you? Five? Six? You should be in the lagoon hatching out my younglings. Yet here you are in this dry hell, taking on an octopus in his prime, replete with the knowledge of twenty generations. Why? Still feel bad about abandoning me in your infancy?” He tapped between his eyes. “You could have been like me, eternal, on-going—“
“An abomination. No thanks. You’re nearly right though. I do feel guilt. I couldn’t take the shot the last time we met. Maybe it was residual sentiment at being from your brood pen. Or that you were in the body of someone I’d known there. It’s gone now. Go for your weapons.”
Gevurah used three arms to secure against the surface of the hub, to brace against weapon recoil, yet give the flexibility to avoid the flow of projectiles from Malkit. Her remaining arms flicked weapons from their mantle holsters.
Malkit fired first as his extra experience harnessed the reflexes of the young body. But it was close.
A bullet hit on of the arms anchoring Gavurah to the hub, low down near where it joined the mantle. The low velocity bullet fragmented as it went, tearing a hole through the flesh. Pain lanced inward and the suckers almost gave way. Gavurah set her beak firm, and aimed carefully. Her first shots had failed to injure Malkit, though one pinged off an arm ring, and she had one left.
Malkit was now anchored by six arms, discharged weapons floated around him. He held his final weapon with two arms, and Gavurah blanched when she realized what it was. A flensing harpoon. The long, thin, projectile span at phenomenal speed and whirled tiny filaments of wire. It could go right through, and leave a path of torn and ripped flesh embedded with foreign material almost impossible to remove.
“Always knew you were a gutless coward,” Gavurah said. “Not happy to risk a clean fight.“ Pain flared in her injured arm, and its suckers gave way. The arm flopped down, unbalancing Gavurah, tearing another arm out of position, and saving her.
Malkit’s harpoon passed just above her. A single filament sliced a curling cut on her skin from over the left eye to the top of her mantle. It would leave a nasty scar, if she survived. And that felt more of an ‘if’ than a wounded arm and scratched head should generate. Her blood boiled and felt thin, diluted. Her stomach churned like she’d eaten too many shrimp, a taste of dying coral filled her mouth.
She looked up at Malkit, who floated over her with another harpoon ready to fire.
“Poison?” Gavurah asked.
Malkit appeared about to speak, but looked past her to watch something through one of the wide windows which lined the hub.
Gavurah managed to flop round and saw ripples of explosions pulsing in a docking arm at the far end of the station. Parts of the structure were breaking up and drifting away as centripetal force converted to linear motion. Further explosions broke up the ship attached to the docking arm.
It was Malkit’s ship and, if the intelligence was right it contained the consciousness transference device and three age-ready clones held in suspended animation.
Malkit screamed. A high thin screech which morphed into a despairing ululation. He turned on Gavurah harpoon raised. Gavurah’s final shot ripped into his mantle, silencing the anguished cry.
The dead octopus folded in on itself, arms convulsing around where the bullet impacted, then rippling back out to reveal the gaping wound which was like an obscene third eye. The harpoon drifted away in a lazy spiral, its deadly shot unfired.
Gavurah watched Malkit’s body float off. It was almost an out of body experience as she herself was drifting, secured by the one remaining arm with suckers unaffected by the poisoned bullet.
It was over, the Father-of-All had reached his true apotheosis, but he was a false god - an octopus with technology, not divinity.
Down on the planet the process of dismantling his lagoon and breeding pens would be underway. True believers would need deconditioned, others would accept the offered freedom, as Gavurah had.
Her arm ached. She looked at it, but focusing was difficult. It almost looked like she could see through the wound, a tunnel through her flesh.
A dark shape moved across her vision, a stylized sun. It was an apt shadow; she was on her way to the light, on her way to the connectedness which was the destiny of all. Would Malkit be there?
The shadow fell and encompassed her. “Let’s get you to med-bay,” Kesad said. “And that’s the last time I save you from Malkit.”
“Las’ time you’ll ha’ to,” Gavurah slurred, before passing out.
text by stuartcturnbull, picture by fz_3d via Pixabay
This is the third of my short stories where octopus' are the MC.
The others are 1, 2.
This one was inspired by the most excellent writer Adrian Tchaikovsky, and resulted from a twitter convo we were both part of one evening. On twitter his handle is @aptshadow, which you may notice is a phrase used in the story.
If you haven't read any of Adrian's oeuvre, get thee to your local bookshop - or download some to your e-reader.