Children of Ruin

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

“As it happens they aren’t ready for deployment, no,” Senkovi told her shortly, wishing she’d just go away and, if possible, forget everything she was currently looking at. “I’m still very much in the R&D phase of the project, as you must know if you’ve read—”

  “Why squid?”

  “Not squid. Octopi. Octopuses if you want to be a slave to the dictionary. And why not? What’s wrong with them?”

  Han glanced down at him. “You’ve got a genetic library that’s a good slice of Earth biodiversity, Disra. You’ve got the kit here to hatch out anything, un-extinct it. Poullister was talking about making a dog.”

  Disra, not much of a dog person, shrugged. “Why not? I mean, what would you do? Let me guess, you had a cat, back home? Fish?” He decided Han probably had owned a cat, or had wanted to own a cat but hadn’t lived somewhere she could get a pet permit. Maybe she’d had a robot cat, one of those good little machines that purred and sat on your lap and then its ears fell off the moment its warranty expired.

  “I’d make a tiger,” Han said.

  Senkovi was speechless for a long time, enough that his console began lighting up with frustrated red error messages as his fellow game player got annoyed with his inaction. “Huh,” he managed eventually.

  Han grinned down at him—it was the first time he had ever seen her smile, perhaps. He suddenly found his opinion of her completely revised. She wanted to recreate a tiger, here on the Aegean, where the narrow corridors and enclosed workspaces would lead to an interesting work-life balance for the humans having to share the ship with a large carnivore. And, of course, she’d never go ahead and actually do it. Senkovi was frankly the only person on the ship who would just live the dream and to hell with the opinions or even permissions of others. But the thought was there and Senkovi decided he liked Han a lot better for it.

  “I had a tiger when I was a kid,” she said candidly, and he wondered if that meant a stuffed toy, or if she came from an income bracket considerably above even his own rather privileged one. “But you, you’ve got a whole load of these… octopi. And no tigers.”

  “Ah well, the key failing with tigers is that their performance drops off sharply when you get them to mend coolant pipes a kilometre below the surface of the ocean.”

  Han stared at him for long enough to make him uncomfortable, then the grin was back. “That’s not what this is about,” she pointed out.

  Senkovi thought about keeping up the presence but decided she was too sharp for it. “Oh, well, it is. I mean, that’s the end goal. But I had an octopus when I was a kid.” Rather more than one, but the narrative was simpler that way. Then his console beeped sharply at him and he hurriedly made a move to keep it quiet.

  Too late, though, for Han was crouching down beside him. “Who are you playing against? Is that Poullister? He can’t play worth a damn.” The console was displaying a tile-laying game, a little idealized landscape half-constructed from squares, linking roads, rivers, cities. And it was a mess, pieces all over, roads spiralling to nowhere, the spiky walls of towns clustering like sea urchins.

  “It’s… Not Poullister, no.”

  Han’s eyes were following where the cables from the console led. And yes, he could have just run the whole thing in virtual space on the Aegean’s system, and that was the logical next step. Right now he was trying to keep his games private, because the others would mock.

  Han wasn’t mocking, though. He could see the wheels of her mind turning. “You’re…”

  “Paul,” Senkovi explained. “Well, Paul 5. He’s the most successfully modified. He likes the console and experiencing virtual space. I’d thought… well, there are humans who never really take to a virtuality, but the octopi are all about manipulating space. There’s no tactile element for them yet, and I thought that would be the sticking point, but they get it very quickly, Paul 5 especially. So I’m trying some simple games. With debatable success. He makes moves, and he’s understood the limits the game places on when he can move and what moves can be made, but as far as strategy or points or winning, that seems to be outside his range at the moment.”

  “Tell him he doesn’t get fed if he loses,” Han suggested, staring into the tank.

  Senkovi had tried that. Pavlovian motivation wasn’t terribly useful for training an octopus. Once they were fed, food became a lesser motivator than curiosity. Also, when Senkovi had contrived to communicate that the game hid a shrimp inside it somehow, Paul 2 had broken the game trying to take it apart.

  “We’re going to need this space back for payload sooner rather than later,” Han remarked eventually, even somewhat regretfully.

  “Firstly, this is payload, albeit highly experimental. Secondly, we don’t. Look, I’ve reorganized. We can get by on the other bays. I’ve even gained us some space.” He sent over his changes, which were in fact just as advertised, to the virtual space their mind’s eyes shared. The designers of the Aegean had been slacking somewhat, leaning on their large budget. Senkovi had improved on their work to provide the ship with improved economy of space and movement of matériel, the sort of thing that someone might have achieved genuine commendations for. The entire elaborate operation looked good on paper to anyone who didn’t suspect he’d gone through it solely because he wanted more space for fishtanks.

  After Han had gone, he finished the game and fed his pets, hoping that the rest of the ship wasn’t already tittering behind his back about crazy Senkovi and his performing molluscs. The console was already flashing, though, despite Paul being busy dismantling a crab.

  It was one of the others, Salome. She had been watching Paul, and now she had used her own newly implanted connection to break into the game system. She had moved as much as she could but now needed him to take his own turn before she could continue playing.

  Senkovi suspected he should probably get away from the tanks and go have human contact or something healthy like that. On the other hand, he’d just had an actual conversation, which was quite wearying, and he could hardly disappoint such a keen experimental subject.

  He sat down again, dropping a tile into the virtual space and waiting to see what Salome would do.

  5.

  Siri Skai would be in charge of the orbiting module in Baltiel’s absence. She and four others would have relatively little to do except continue to round off the rough edges of the database the computer was assembling on the Nod biosphere (Senkovi’s joke name having gradually infiltrated the collective consciousness). Of course, technically Baltiel himself should be staying up top and delegating the ground party, but he was damned if he was going to. This was the day he had been waiting for, in and out of sleep over the years since their arrival here. He would not only be on the shuttle down, he would be the first damned human being to set foot on this world. Nobody was taking that from him.

  Remotes had been down there for a long time now, setting things up. There was a habitat ready to receive them, filled with an atmosphere not vastly different to that outside—a little lower pressure, a little more oxygen. An Earth-ish atmosphere, though, and the gravity would be real, even if a little stronger than they were used to. He had been living in space, sometimes in rotational gravity, sometimes in none, for too long.

  Of course, the plan was purely to run a research mission—the research mission he had invented to replace what they were actually supposed to be up to out on Nod. He shouldn’t be thinking about the place as “home.” It would be a poky little series of interconnected domes, barely more personal space than on the module they’d separated from the Aegean and left in orbit when the rest of the ship went off on the road to Damascus.

  Senkovi and his damn fool names. But they always seemed to stick. No doubt the colonists would have their own sanitized monikers for both planets when they arrived. Or maybe not. That depended on just how badly things actually went back home. Senkovi said they’d get boatloads of desperate refugees turning up at every terraforming station, clamouring to be housed and fed. The great human diaspora, b
ut not how anyone had envisaged it.

  Baltiel had sat down to a meal with all his crew, not long ago—he’d tweaked the rotas especially so that everyone would be awake and ready for the historic launch. The mood had been cautiously optimistic. Earth was very far away, after all, and everyone was sure that things there would sort themselves out. The mysteries of Nod were far more immediate for them.

  Skai had even wondered about harvesting something edible from the planet, because Senkovi was a long way from commercial fisheries over on Damascus. Skai was a geologist, though, and tended not to read the monograms of other specialities. Ninety per cent of Nod proteins were indigestible to humans—not immediately poisonous but just inert stuff that would clog up your gut and probably kill you eventually from the levels of arsenic and mercury the planet seemed to thrive on. The remaining ten per cent were not economical to separate out.

  Baltiel had expected to be the great expert on the land of Nod by now. Instead he felt as though their accumulated knowledge of the planet was to the mind what the alien flesh would be to the stomach, almost impossible to assimilate. It wasn’t that the automated survey had turned up blank, quite the opposite. They had a vast wealth of information about the planet, and no way to readily put it together in any kind of order. He felt like a schoolchild taught history as a list of dates and names of kings, without context to let him draw meaning from the information.

  Nodan organisms were organized into cells, just like Earth creatures, although the cells themselves were very different. They were smaller, for one thing, no bigger than an E. coli bacterium on average. There was no nucleus, but some manner of transmissible organization, incredibly dense, was implanted in the membrane. Lante, wearing her biochemist hat, was talking about atomic-level information storage, more compact than DNA but perhaps more energy-intensive to produce. Every cell seemed to react to light, even the ones buried deep in the bodies of creatures. Why? Nobody had a good theory. Plenty of the organisms they had looked at appeared to be metabolizing sunlight, some sessile-like plants, others highly mobile, suggesting that their mechanism (as yet unknown but there were some fascinating suggestions) was far more efficient than plant photosynthesis—and there appeared to be no hard plant/animal divide on Nod.

  Almost every organism was radially symmetrical, top and bottom but no front or back, save where evolution had twisted them round to let them flap through the skies dorsal-side first. Oh, and many of them were only partially cellular, with large portions of their bodies composed of a plasticky tissue that seemed almost inanimate and which was manipulated and deformed by contracting fibres—the jellyfish, which comprised a significant phylum of Nodan life, were all sail and hardly any actual ship.

  Baltiel wasn’t someone whose mind leapt instantly to thoughts of commercial exploitation, but Nod had already shown him forms of information storage, energy conversion and super-strong, super-light materials that Earth technology could not currently replicate. And yet, at the same time, the Nodan ecosystem felt… young. Aside from some truly colossal medusae-forms nothing on land seemed bigger than a medium-sized dog. There was nothing like a forest (nothing like wood), nothing much like an internal skeleton. Everything sprawled outwards rather than fighting for height. He wondered if this was what Earth would have felt like back in the Devonian era or some such, when life was just encroaching on land.

  What might they become? But he would never know, and he had a bitter certainty that human presence in this solar system meant that nobody would, that the future of life on Nod was going to be brutally curtailed.

  He had not sent anything home about their discoveries. As far as he knew, everyone had respected his orders on that front. But it wouldn’t matter as soon as the next wave of Earthlings arrived, ready to wash away all these fragile marks in the sand prior to building some prime beachfront property on any habitable planet they found. He had daydreamed about putting plague beacons in orbit all over the planet, warning off the future.

  So instead he was indulging himself. He and his crew would do what they could to curate this riot of weirdly unambitious-seeming life while they were still able to. There would be a record for later generations, even if there would be nothing else.

  He sent a call to Skai over the module’s network and she confirmed her readiness, highlighting the green system readouts. He checked to ensure that his ground team had reached the shuttle. Erma Lante (biologist and medic) and Gav Lortisse (geothermal engineer and general technician) were there, and Kalveen Rani (meteorologist and pilot) was just on her way. She had a message pending and he checked it anxiously, expecting something to have arisen to delay his destiny—faults, storms, something. Instead she was recommending he speak to Senkovi. He had some meteorological data for me to analyse but when it came through it was nonsense. He may be having problems.

  Baltiel felt he had plenty of his own problems, to which he really didn’t want to add Senkovi. The man was supposed to be so damned self-sufficient, after all.

  He set his feet on the brief path to the shuttle bay and a sudden rush of excitement seized him, like a child about to go on a much-dreamt-of holiday. He’d been living in this tin can for too long; subjectively for years, objectively (meaning by the ship’s clock) for decades. Like a child, again, but one who’d been staring at the presents under the tree for a generation, not forbidden to open them but exercising inhuman self-restraint.

  Like a child. Nobody on his team would describe him so: he was the man who was always calm, who always had an answer, who could even—miracle of miracles—talk Senkovi up or down or sideways from wherever the man’s thought processes had led him. And yet, inside, Baltiel felt a bubbling, innocent glee. The timing of the mission, however well accounted for in the records, was more to do with him having finally exhausted his iron reserves of patience. Today was Christmas and he was about to tear off the wrapping paper.

  Still, he was Overall Command, and Senkovi’s little fiefdom was still part of Overall, at least nominally, so he had the module signal its other-self, the Aegean.

  “Hi, boss,” came the delayed response, by which time Baltiel was in the shuttle double-checking Lortisse and Rani as they double-checked each others’ pre-flight checks, belt and braces all the way down.

  “Siri’s chasing up some met data from you,” Baltiel prodded.

  “Oh, hum, yes. No, not a priority right now.” By which time everyone on the ground crew had checked everyone else’s sums and Siri Skai had confirmed their launch window and the excited child taking up space in Baltiel’s head was virtually blocking out everything else. And Senkovi sounded off balance, which should have been a huge worry given how the man kept his insides inside, but surely it couldn’t be now that things went catastrophically wrong. Not on the very edge of departure.

  And yet… “Disra, what’s up?”

  “We’re just having a few system glitches, boss, nothing to worry about.” Senkovi’s tone, when it finally came back, was transparent. He’s screwed up somehow and he doesn’t want me to check up. And Baltiel could check up, of course. He could query the Aegean with his command access and then, doubtless, cut through all the baffles and screens Senkovi had festooned the problem data with. Or he could just let Senkovi get on with it and deny the man the chance to rain on Baltiel’s greatest ever parade.

  He made a command decision that, even then, he knew was on the wrong side of cautious. He’d been cautious for twenty years, though. Time for one glorious, reckless act. Cutting the connection, he decided to let Senkovi scoop his own crap without supervision, this one time, and hoped that the man didn’t end up finger-painting it all over the walls.

  He refused to lose the launch window. He couldn’t know, at the time, just what was riding on the decision.

  “Skai?”

  “When you are.” Skai and the rest of the module crew were already settled in to continue the data gathering. Most of them would be back in cold sleep as soon as the shuttle was safely down. He was surprised there hadn’t
been more jostling for a place on the ground, but going to live with the jellyfish didn’t appeal to everyone.

  The shuttle bay was evacuated around them, the air jealously grabbed back before it could be wasted. The bay doors opened, the clamps released and the rotation of the module gently released the shuttle out into space along a perfectly plotted pitch.

  Baltiel had chosen the salt marsh biome for his base because it was more hospitable than the searing inland deserts. Not that their suits didn’t have temperature control, but the less the technology had to work, the longer it would last without maintenance. Of the land biomes it seemed the most populous, too—where an anthropocentric eye could perhaps see evolution striving to produce something more. And that was an illusion, surely. Probably the great fonts of evolutionary activity were elsewhere, and left to their own devices there would have been some great new wave of development from the deep sea, or the floating creatures of the upper atmosphere. But moot, now. We can only observe the present, before we go on to destroy the future. The thought made Baltiel so angry, but unless the commander of the next ship along was also a radical conservationist, how could any of this life have long-term prospects? Oh, surely individual species would survive alongside humans, or be relegated to reserves and zoos, but the ecological history of Earth showed how pitiful such measures were. One of the terraforming programme’s great triumphs was being able to reconstruct whole Earth ecosystems—systems that didn’t exist as anything other than deathbed wounded back on their original planet. Because in a very real way the ecosystem was the basic unit of life: species creating, by their very presence, an environment for other species to work in. We wrecked it all, back home, Baltiel thought. And by the time we understand Nod we’ll have wrecked it here as well. For a moment he’d had a mad dream of an Earth-mimic Damascus and an alien Nod side by side, co-existing. The spiralling bad news from home had ground down that dream into a kind of bleak nihilism. We will learn what we can and record it. I will be able to say, “I walked there.” They can’t take that from me, no matter who comes. Even the thought of Earth, the political rants, the casualty figures, the spiralling insanity, made his gut clench, but he consciously banished the images and medicated the gut reaction, just like they all were doing these days. I will not let a little global war ruin my moment. And it’s all history anyway, by the time it reaches us.