Children of Ruin

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  “But Yusuf’s right,” he went on, making a nervous, fidgety gesture in Baltiel’s direction. “We can’t do the mission, not like we’re s’posed to. But we can do it anyway. Look.” And he began bringing up his diagrams and data, which he could hide behind enough that his voice gained strength as he soldiered on. “The next planet out, Tess 834g—it’s mostly an iceball, right on the very limit of the liquid water zone, but it’s geologically active, and terraforming 101 says we can precision-bomb the faultlines to set it all off at once and then it won’t be an iceball for long, and the gas we get out of that will kill off the albedo, and after that it’ll be warm enough for the water to stay water. And there’s a little land. Just a little. And there’ll be more once the ice has slimmed down to liquid.”

  “Not much more,” Han pointed out. “I get 2.1 per cent of total surface area, all small island chains.” She threw her own scratch calculations into the communal virtual display for everyone to look at. Lea Han was the oldest of them, Baltiel’s senior by two years, and her maths was faultless at very short notice. Nobody was heckling the other guy, Senkovi thought, but Han was at least playing the game.

  “So the colonists live on boats,” he suggested. “It’s that or they go live alongside your aliens, and how’s that going to go in three or four generations? You think everyone’s going to be a responsible neighbour?”

  “That’s a very pessimistic appraisal of the human spirit,” objected someone—Senkovi chased down the name and got “Sparke”, and an assessment record that spoke of reliable competence without brilliance.

  “One I happen to agree with.” Baltiel killed off the topic effortlessly. “We don’t know what the political milieu will be, amongst any colonists.” And people’s faces showed that the old news they’d had from Earth was front and centre in most minds. Any new arrivals could be a wave of ideological maniacs, come to practice their mania out of the reach of their foes on Earth. “We don’t know what their priorities will be,” Baltiel went on. “Mine is to conserve what we’ve discovered here, and to study it. I will be taking an independent module from the Aegean to remain in orbit around 834h. I’m looking for volunteers for that team. Mr. Senkovi has my support to attempt a terraforming of Tess 834g, and he’ll retain the lion’s share of the ship’s resources to do so. He will, likewise, be looking for volunteers, and I can guarantee that, when we do finally get word to or from Earth, it’ll be his team that has a future in the terraforming business.”

  Still not as interesting as studying flying medusae, though, Senkovi concluded, but he couldn’t say Baltiel hadn’t given him a fair crack of the whip. For himself, he was already considering the technical challenges of bringing the ice-world to life.

  In the end he got Maylem, Poullister and Han, with Lortisse defying Senkovi’s assessment of him to join Team Alien. Three co-workers was, by his estimation, probably two more than he really needed. The machines would be doing the heavy lifting, after all.

  “One question,” bright Sparke piped up, just as everything had been decided. “What if you find life under the ice on 834g?”

  Senkovi shrugged. “Then, unless it has radio capacity and is a very quick learner, it’s probably fucked,” he said.

  3.

  There might have been life. That was what he had to live with. Actually, there might still be life. Initial probes on Damascus (Senkovi had taken the liberty of installing his pet name like a squatter and daring Baltiel to evict) had picked up complex chemistry along deep-sea vents, but precious little beyond. The water column itself was barren. That chemistry was still there in places, and in fact two decades of colossally accelerated volcanism had perhaps even benefited it, spreading its habitat across the sea floor. Was it life? Results were inconclusive. Whatever was going on there seemed to be more about clay matrices than cell membranes, and relied on a toxic balance of chemicals that would be anathema to natives both of Earth and Tess 834h—which Senkovi had privately named “Nod”, because it was notionally east (or at least sunward) of the Eden that he himself was creating.

  He had downplayed the possible biochemistry aspect in his reports to Baltiel, while simultaneously knowing that the man would not be fooled. It created a convenient fiction between them that they could show to later auditors. Baltiel was sharper than Senkovi had initially thought. After his big presentation about 834g, Senkovi had asked the man, “How did you get through all that fast enough to make the decision?” and Baltiel had just said, “I’ve seen your appraisals and tolerances. You wouldn’t stake your career on a bad bet. All I needed to see was that you were staying the hell off my planet.” And he had smiled blandly, and Senkovi had learned a lot about his boss from that expression. An inclination to play God was part and parcel of wanting to go out and terraform other worlds, but good practice was to at least play nicely with the rest of the pantheon. Senkovi had met Avrana Kern once—it had been hard to avoid her—and there was a woman who was her own Zeus, Odin and Yahweh all in one. Baltiel’s role had only ever been intended as a subordinate Vulcan, but now he had found a new lease of divinity, a project Kern could not reach across the abyss to dictate.

  All very wearying, Senkovi thought. He had been out of storage for six months, this time round, because after a couple of years of targeted bombardment the primary volcanic phase was reaching completion and he and his people needed to set the next set of wheels in motion. Han was skimming drones over the surface of Damascus right now, mapping the new borders of the ice, which was confined to around a quarter of the surface and split between the poles. Still pretty damn cold by Earth standards, but the greenhouse gases were building nicely and they’d installed a set of solar collectors to funnel even more heat in.

  The atmosphere of Damascus was fairly dense and mostly inert. The vast quantities of water had gifted the place with a little oxygen even without anything actively metabolizing it, which was a huge timesaving for Senkovi, as it allowed him to install more complex oxygenators which needed a bit of the O2 already present to bootstrap them. He was about to turn the seas green, clogging them with the sort of algal slick that would horrify a beachful of tourists. That would set the oxygen meter creeping upwards, but, of course, that in itself would be robbing the planet of heat-retaining CO2, meaning the whole volcanism and greenhouse gassery would need to be kicked up a notch, and the equilibrium of the atmosphere kept balanced like a spun plate that couldn’t be allowed to so much as wobble for year upon year. And then there would come some more waiting, and he’d sleep out most of it. Except the current bout of watch-and-wait had tested his patience enough to set him on some side-projects, and now they were sufficiently advanced that he was contemplating spending another year of his life on them rather than saving it for the actual terraforming.

  He glanced at his companion, who had come out to stare through the glass at him. “Hungry, yet?” he asked, but he didn’t think so. Paul was just curious. Curiosity was something Senkovi had bred into him, building on his work back on Earth. Really this had been no more than a hobby, no more out of order than Han’s painting or Poullister’s tedious logic puzzles. Except it had turned into a sufficient sink of mission resources that Senkovi had begun to think of ways to make it work for him.

  Just about on time, Baltiel checked in, the signal coming at a staggered delay from the relay satellite orbiting Nod. Senkovi judged the time apt for revelation and opened a visual channel.

  Baltiel had been taking things slowly on Nod. They were still flying carefully disinfected drones over the planet, trying to inventory the biomes and their contents, sleeping on ice while the systems generated hypothetical taxonomies. Senkovi looked it over every month or so, impressed with the man’s restraint. He knew that boots on the ground was the plan, in a hermetically-sealed biodome. Baltiel would be the first man to walk with aliens, but only with a heavy-duty hazard suit between him and them, for everyone’s protection.

  “Hola, boss.” Senkovi composed his best smile. “We’re seeding now. Algal spring
comes to Damascus.”

  “I saw.” Because obviously Baltiel returned the courtesy and checked Senkovi’s working on a regular basis. “You’re ahead of schedule, even.”

  “You’re behind,” Senkovi couldn’t stop himself saying. To his surprise, Baltiel grimaced.

  “I…”

  And of course some of the given reasons for the man dragging his feet had been that he wanted Senkovi’s operation established and stable, so that the crew remaining on the Aegean could charge over to mount a rescue if something went wrong, or vice versa. Senkovi had already dismantled that logic, and decided there were deeper and more personal bonds holding Baltiel back. The man’s face now confirmed it.

  “You want to make a good first impression,” Senkovi completed. “And you only get the one chance.”

  “That’s it.” A gentler smile than any expression Senkovi had seen on Baltiel’s face before. “We’re going down there. It’s all planned. But I check and check again. I’ve had samples in the lab up here exposed to every microbe in the human body, to every Earth molecule.”

  “And vice versa I hope.”

  “It should be safe,” Baltiel said, surely for his own benefit as much as anyone’s. “There’s some negative interaction at the molecular level, and there’s more arsenic down there than we’d normally like. But biological interaction? None. They don’t have our DNA, our cell chemistry, any of it. Nothing’s going to get killed by the common cold. Nobody’s going to catch the Martian flu. And we’ll still be suited up, sealed away.” He sounded like someone looking for a second opinion, so Senkovi nodded amiably.

  “I’ve given your proposal the once-over. I don’t see any gaps.” He might have said more, but Paul chose that point to detach from the corner of his tank and come forward to goggle out at the screen.

  “What the hell is that?” Baltiel demanded.

  “Yusuf, meet Paul. Say hi, Paul.”

  Understandably, Paul said nothing.

  “What is it?”

  Senkovi frowned. “He’s a Pacific striped octopus.” He sent over a data dump of files on cephalopods of all kinds in case Baltiel was criminally underinformed on the subject.

  “But you must be way off seeding complex life.” Baltiel’s brief eye-twitch showed him searching through the mission plan.

  “Well yes, but—”

  “Disra, is this a pet? Have you been using mission resources to breed domestic… octopodes?” Another brief twitch and Senkovi knew his superior had been looking up the plural and settled on the most awkward-sounding one.

  Time for the long con. “It’s like this. We have an unprecedented level of underwater work on this project. Because, obviously, the planet is almost all underwater. Now while we have drones and remotes and the like, it won’t be enough if we want to keep to schedule.”

  “So you won’t be ahead of schedule for long?”

  Senkovi decided he could throw his past self under the bus for the benefit of his future self. “Sure. I was optimistic. However, I’ve got a solution. Paul can help.”

  Baltiel raised an eyebrow, a reaction sent over minutes between planets, but Senkovi felt it was worth waiting for.

  “Do you know the work Califi and Rus were doing for Doctor Kern?”

  Baltiel’s eyebrow ratcheted up further, because right now everyone knew about that work—certainly everyone back on Earth had an opinion about it thirty-one years ago, and the most recently received opinions were extremely vocal. It had been a cause celebre for the reactionaries, a justification for terrorism, bombed out labs and brutalized monkeys. “The viral work,” he said flatly.

  “It wasn’t finished when we set out, not quite, but I have a lot of their research. I was even co-author for one of the papers.” Senkovi was not looking Baltiel in the eye now, his attention shifting to Paul instead. “I mean, I’m not talking actual uplift, not like they did it, but a little tweaking, a little acceleration”—not to mention improving lifespan and post-egg laying survival but I’m not saying that because you’d want to know why—“so that when the sea is sufficiently habitable we could have a workforce to help us…?”

  Baltiel said nothing for a long time, enough that Senkovi checked twice to ensure the link was still open. “What’s he going to do? He’s on a different planet. He has his own obsessions. Is he calling Han to tell her to replace me? So I bred a better octopus. Is that so wrong?”

  “Submit a proper plan, at least, before you start meddling with them.” The words jolted Senkovi into eye contact again and for a moment the two of them just stared at each other across the thousands of kilometres. We are both off our briefs, Senkovi realized. We’re rebel angels, and by the time God—meaning Avrana Kern—realizes what we’re up to, it’ll be too late.

  “I will,” he promised, blithely sidestepping the fact that he’d already started. From his tank, Paul watched him with one slit-pupiled eye, tentacles curling in elaborate arabesques.

  4.

  Terraforming gave them all time to think. Yes, they were hurrying the planet’s changes along at a ludicrous rate, compared to geological time: from iceball to ocean within a small slice of a human lifetime. Still, humans had evolved to live with days and months and seasons. The waiting was hard. Nobody wanted to just fall back into cold sleep the moment the opportunity arose, telling the Aegean to wake them in a decade. They wanted to see the world below them start to germinate before they closed their eyes. And so they practised art, music, read the ship’s stored library front to back, played procedurally generated strategy games advertised never to repeat themselves. And almost everyone became obsessive, now and then. The Earth link was what got most of them. Poullister, Han, Maylem, they had all spent time trying to discuss what was happening back home. People were fighting. There were localized war zones—mostly the traditional sort where the big players’ soldiers got to go play in the back yards of their neighbours, to minimize the property damage of friendly allies. Proxy wars, and keeping it clean so far, but everyone knew that there were stocks of chemical and biological agents just sitting around waiting for someone to lose patience with polite and limited wars. And the news was old, of course, over three decades. They were out here on the edge of humanity’s sphere of influence, their ability to communicate with home crippled by the insuperable laws of relativity.

  Senkovi had heard Poullister and Maylem in full-blown argument—one of those pointless rows where both of them were effectively arguing the same case, where the argument itself was the point, not the winning of it. He hadn’t realized, before then, just how riled up everyone was about Earth and the growing conflict they were hearing about, a generation late. And probably it was all settled now, peace and harmony, but that old demon relativity brought an end to any difference in acceleration between good news and bad, truth and rumour. None of it could get to them faster than the light of their home world’s distant sun, leaving them to endlessly speculate about how bad things might have got.

  Senkovi himself kept out of the discussion and kept out of their way. He was already obsessive, a trait he had proudly smuggled onto the Aegean long before it had become de rigueur, and he was using the waiting time to indulge in his own personal schemes.

  When Han came to see him—this was months after his brittle détente with Baltiel over Paul—her first comment was, “You’re supposed to be in the freezer by now.”

  “Don’t wanna,” Senkovi told her, sticking out his bottom lip because he’d learned that with some people a veneer of feigned childishness could transform his peculiarities from obnoxiously antisocial to charming. “Busy.”

  “Busy keeping us out of here,” she noted. “This was Payload Bay Seven, wasn’t it? Only none of this looks like payload, Disra.”

  “It is payload. Of a sort.” He was already being defensive, and he’d hoped to keep that in reserve when charmingly childish wore thin. “I filed a plan with Baltiel. He’s all over this like a rash, believe me.”

  “Disra, I saw the plan you filed. It
was… thin. And you must have pushed past its parameters an age ago. Preliminary testing, it said.”

  “And it went very well, so I made an executive decision. Baltiel will back me.”

  Han was a tall, slender woman who looked as though she should be an aesthete, all impromptu haiku and abstract paintings. In fact her paintings were all of robots, fantastical, impractical metal humanoids lit by industrial fires or explosions, as though she had a window onto a world where cybernetics had gone in very different directions. On top of that, perhaps despite that, she was the best engineer on the terraforming team, a genius mathematician and a pilot. And all of that, Senkovi had thought, should have been enough to keep her busy and not send her snooping around here. He felt like a boy caught doing something untoward after lights out, sitting on the floor of Bay Seven with a half-gutted virtual console, lit by the azure radiance of the big tank he’d had constructed.

  Han put a hand to the transparent plastic, seeing the occupants detach from the fake coral and rocks he’d given them, drifting towards her fingers to see if they would give any entertainment value. “I’m guessing you’re not sending them planetside any time soon,” she noted. “Unless you’ve engineered the fuck out of them to not need oxygen or Earth-style temperatures or pH.”