Children of Ruin

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

He lumbered back and entered the airlock, which he’d left open because, well, why not, exactly? He’d left his helmet outside. Perhaps some alien crab would creep out and claim it as a home. He wished the hypothetical creature well.

  The others looked in through the airlock hatch with no expression he could name. They would watch him like a hawk now, to see if something poisoned him, or if there was a planetwide plague that could somehow jump not just species but entire evolutionary trees. Working slowly, feeling the gravity twisting his joints, he stripped off his suit entire, letting the dead weight of the thing fold to the ground as though he was shedding a cocoon and entering a new stage of his life cycle.

  He was going to try to sleep, there in the airlock and open to the elements, but then Lortisse was banging on the window, miming a winch. They wanted him to close the outer door. He couldn’t see why but, apparently, they were going to let him in early and that was a clear breach of his orders. Something else had obviously gone wrong.

  Baltiel didn’t want to be commander, just then. He wanted to be a castaway without any hopes or cares at all, and just enjoy the alienness of the air. A spark lit in his mind at the banging, though. He was responsible, after all. It was his mission, even in defeat. He signalled his understanding and laboured away at the little winch until the outer door was shut and sealed, then stood there as they pumped Earth air in and Nod air out. The Earth air smelled worse, filled with bad odours his body was all too ready to identify.

  “What?” he demanded. The others all had their helmets off, suit tanks empty, the last of the emergency supply slowly going stale between them.

  He didn’t need to ask any more. He heard it. Rani’s makeshift radio had a signal. It was tinny and crimped by static, but there was a human voice out there.

  “Hello? Someone say something, won’t you? I know I screwed up, but come on!” A tiny, far-off Disra Senkovi, coming to them from one planet away on a ship he had only now brought back to life. “Hey, boss, what the hell? Han, you can come back now. Hello?”

  There were other shuttles on the Aegean. Not close enough that the Earth air would last, but Baltiel had taken his life in his hands to prove that wasn’t the end of the world. He held on a moment longer, trying to do the maths, but eventually he just smiled and shunted Rani out of her seat so he could speak to the expedition’s prodigal son.

  6.

  We

  have

  sampled strange molecules.

  These-of-We taste stuff never known, break it down, build it up, nothing like anything, toxic, energy-rich, fascinating.

  These-of-We recreate these stimuli for Others-of-We as we meet, interchanging ideas and selves.

  None-of-We have encountered any-such, not anywhere.

  Something new has come into the world.

  PRESENT 1

  ROAD TO DAMASCUS

  1.

  Once upon a time there was a civilization on a distant planet. The people of this civilization knew many things, including how to travel to other stars and remake the planets they found there, within tolerance, into places where they could walk and breathe the air.

  But they were fractious, and just as they had reached up to seize the stars, they fell upon one another and all their work was destroyed. Almost all.

  One of their scientists, the greatest mind of her age—

  Or so she says.

  She does, and I am not in the mood to measure legs with her over it. You have decades enough, but Portiid life is too short.

  She was named Avrana Kern, and she had a plan to exalt the beasts of her world so that they would know and adore their creator. She made a world for them, and released a virus that would expedite their evolution towards such a state of adulation, and she had a consignment of monkeys, and of all of these things, that last failed in its delivery, for the wicked who made war on their fellows on her home also brought the war to her. So Kern was left in her tiny capsule, awaiting the call from the world below, which was devoid of monkeys but rich in many other forms of life. For many thousands of years she orbited, so that what was left was not, deny it as she might, much of Avrana Kern at all, as opposed to the computer systems she had bargained with for eternal life.

  And when the call came, it came from that world’s new mistresses, the most intelligent, the most emotionally sophisticated, the most elegant of all its many beings.

  Now you’re just bragging.

  We must assume that any life we meet will value sophistication, intelligence and elegance, or what is life for? Anyway, I continue.

  Unknown to the Portiids, for as such they would come to be known, visitors were coming to their world. The civilization that had given rise to them had fallen and risen again, and at last, on the brink of extinction from their own vices—

  I’m going to put my foot down.

  And if you do, it will only prove my point. It will sound like a hundred thousand ants in confusion. And I continue—

  Will you at least preserve some dignity for the human species?

  (A small fiddling of the palps to express resignation, like a sigh.)

  Those who could, set out in a desperate vessel chasing their knowledge of the places their ancestors had walked so very long ago, and so they came to the world under the stewardship of Avrana Kern, or what was left of her. At first, they came in need, and at last they came in war, for they could not understand the Portiids and saw them as monsters, and neither side could communicate with each other, and the remnant of Avrana Kern was mistrustful and remembered only how her great project had been betrayed.

  That is a very diplomatic way of putting it.

  I count diplomacy amongst my many Understandings.

  The Portiids took the virus that had aided their evolution, which had allowed them to know one another and come together rather than living out their lives as single hunters, and introduced it to their creators, who were also the virus’s creators, gifting them with the understanding that here, too, were minds who looked out and sought to know the universe. And so it was that peace was made between the humans and the Portiids, and a new golden age dawned, and the humans would forever after be not just humans but Humans, which is a far better thing.

  And so it was, later, that the combined knowledge of these peoples would lead to a vessel setting out from Avrana Kern’s world to voyage to other distant places where once humans had set foot and remade worlds, for faint signals had been detected from such places, and they were eager to know new intelligences and meet with them in peace.

  Helena Holsten Lain regards her companion, now crouching in an attitude Helena knows to read as “expectant”. Portiid spider communications, being a combination of eight stamping feet and the waving of two fuzzy palps, are always something of a performance. Helena feels quite mute in comparison, her body language coarse and huge, her lone voice lacking nuance. She was born into a civilization where her people were a tiny minority, a curiosity, surrounded by a vast population of spiders who speak to senses Humans barely even have. She was a mere child when she began working on that barrier between the intelligent species of Kern’s World—to overcome it in a way that the mere sharing of an engineered virus could not. The journey has a few more steps in it, true, but she has just listened to Portia tell an imaginative, biased account of their world’s history, and her gloves and optical and cerebral implants translated most of it in real time, complete with subtext, personality and humour. Possibly a fair chunk of what she received was best guesses and gaps filled with human-equivalents that were square pegs for round holes, but it was leaps and bounds beyond anything she had grown up with.

  “Still,” she says, “you’re going to have to find some way to not make us sound so awful.” She subvocalizes into her own implants, her fingers resting ever-so-lightly on the deck, and her gloves patter out what she hopes is a good approximation of her meaning direct to the listening feet of her colleague.

  “But you are awful,” comes the translated response, and Helena feels a le
ap of triumph, because, even if some meaning is lost along the way, she’s talking, even chatting with a Portiid spider in a way no Human has ever been able to save the sainted (and mostly artificial) Avrana Kern herself.

  There is an itch at the back of his head. Not the itch of the surgical scars, which an interesting cocktail of medication is keeping at a respectable distance, but something inside his skull. Meshner concentrates on it, trying to draw it out, his own eyes sightless and dark because seeing actual real things is too much of a distraction and his eyelid discipline suffers when he’s distracted.

  “Not coming,” he announces. “Give me a clue.” He hears the tinny little sound of his lab assistant relaying his words to his partner in experimentation, and then that unique exhalation which is Fabian, said partner, going into a spectacular arachnid convulsion for the specific purpose of telling his Human confederate, Meshner, just how frustrated he is right now. Portiid spiders are a long way from their ancestral state, both in size and biology. The original diminutive jumping spider did not engage in active respiration, whereas the current model funds its life by expanding its abdomen to drag air in over the elegant filigree of its book-lungs. What they don’t do, as a rule, is sigh. By dint of great effort, however, Fabian has learned how to breathe in precisely such a way as to convey a Human emotion. Fabian and Meshner have been partners in crime, scientifically speaking, for a very long time. Despite the barriers to communication, they have developed an idiolect of their own, mostly devoted to complaining.

  Then comes the rustle-shuffle of Fabian’s response to the translating lab assistant, and the assistant’s uncanny-valley voice saying, “Picture the ocean.” The assistant was designed and embodied as part of Avrana Kern’s experiments in relating more closely to her chosen people, the Portiids. Coded to act as a spider male, it also speaks to Meshner in a male version of Kern’s usual tones, which he continues to find disconcerting.

  The ocean… The idea passes deeper into Meshner’s mind in search of that spectral itch, and for a moment he has it: sunlight—dawn?—gleaming on water. He gets the impression of structure, wood and webbing, perhaps a pier? Shadows loom at the brink of his vision, hard-edged.

  A faint rustle comes to him, Fabian making notes on Meshner’s brain activity and the data transfer from the ugly blocky implants that now make up a band around the back of Meshner’s head.

  The brief moment of vision is gone, and Meshner knows his own excitement, and then frustration, conspired to drive it away. There is information waiting to feed into his brain, but his mind is an unruly mess and so it cannot find a way to its proper neurological targets.

  Ocean, ocean… Images are there, but he knows them for his own memories and clears his mind again, using mindfulness techniques developed from scratch. What if I suppressed my own memory-accessing ability? he wonders. Could that work? There will be drugs that could render him an amnesiac for the duration, surely. Perhaps in that void, the alien impressions will come more naturally.

  “Couldn’t you give me something more… individual?” he murmurs. “I don’t know if I’m getting anything through of yours.”

  Again Fabian skitters in terse communication, and their assistant’s off-male voice reports, “I wanted you to have something that would fit naturally with Human experience, to make it easy.”

  “It’s not working…” But even as he says it, his mind whirling with annoyance and resentment and the thought of another session wasted, he has a clear sight: a sea of a million blues—no, not even blues, a whole spectrum of colours that simply do not plug into the visual range he is familiar with. A sky that shimmers with the sun’s radiation. A ground beneath his feet that breathes softly with the traffic of a whole city at his back. Except his feet, his feet were in all directions, his back, his eyes, his eyes—

  Meshner feels a sudden wave of nausea. The image, the sensory feedback, is gone in an instant, and yet his regular body has not come back to him. His proprioception goes haywire, all sense of where his body is, what shape it is, utterly deserting him. He opens his mouth to speak and his limbs spasm with palsy, sending him toppling backwards—had he been sitting, standing?—thrashing on the ground. His teeth snap and a sharp jolt of pain shoots through him as he bites his tongue.

  Then a sudden rush of flattening artificial calm bullies its way into his mind like a thug, beating down the rush of panic and cooling his blood. Meshner opens his eyes, knowing that he’ll have a killer headache when the drugs wear off, and also that he might just have irreparably damaged his brain.

  His colleagues regard him anxiously, or at least the fidget of Fabian’s palps conveys anxiety in a manner even a Human can understand. Fabian is a brindled black and grey spider with a body about the size of Meshner’s head, currently hunched over a spindle-shaped console with four legs making jerky adjustments to the program as he tries to mitigate whatever damage has just been done to Meshner’s mind. Beside him is the lab assistant he has taken to calling Artifabian. It has the general shape of a small Portiid spider, much like Fabian himself, but constructed entirely out of plastic, alternatively russet, transparent and iridescent. It is a robot of sorts with a dumbed-down copy of Avrana Kern’s personality inside it, splintered off from the ship’s. If it is genuinely concerned, there is no way of knowing.

  Meshner stares at them, waiting for his eyes to focus properly. The headaches are starting now, the ones the medication never seems to touch. He suspects it’s all psychosomatic, his mind deciding that he damn well should be in pain given the stunt he just pulled. That doesn’t make it better, it only means he can’t actually use anything to get the pain to stop.

  “How’s my head?” he asks, and Artifabian translates for him. They could just use the ship, but having this one servitor dedicated to their partnership means it learns their figures of speech and mannerisms, its approximations closer and closer to conveying the complexities of each other’s language. Meshner is fascinated by the way the device mimics Portiid attitudes. With Fabian it is plainly one rung down on the ladder, its stance polite without being quite deferential. When a female Portiid turns up, it is instantly obsequious, more so than Fabian, who is something of a boundary-pusher as far as his gender is concerned. Meshner has read simplified children’s histories of the spider civilization, vocal in explaining that, these days, everything is fine and male spiders are allowed to play a full role in society. In practice, even Human eyes can see it isn’t quite as advertised. He has no doubt today’s Fabian has far better prospects than the Fabian of a century ago, but the playing field still needs some rolling before it is level.

  “I’m seeing inflammation along the neural pathways, some small swelling around the occipital lobe,” come the relayed conclusions of Fabian. “Not good, Meshner.” His name becomes a cavalier little flick of the spider’s left palp, as though the creature is tossing a hat at a peg without looking at it. Portiid communications are short on those distinct meaning-to-movement correspondences but names are an exception.

  “Explains why I still can’t see straight,” Meshner complains. “There was something there, though. I had a sniff of it.” He eyes the spider. “Hmm?”

  He recognizes the gesture Fabian makes, because it is the spider imitating him biting his knuckles, a piece of Human body language the Portiid had picked up on. It means that he, Meshner, is obfuscating and Fabian knows it.

  “We’ll go again next dawn,” he decides stubbornly. “Dawn” is a shipwide fiction, of course, but Portiids like their day/night cycles even more than Humans do. “I saw the sea,” he adds, although he can’t say, in his heart of hearts, whether the sea had been truly from Fabian’s memories. “Can’t you give me something… more Portiid? Something I’ll know is definitely yours?”

  Fabian taps his palps together with an audible tok, a gesture Meshner has seen no other spiders make. It means he’s thinking. The ship’s archives have a whole library of what the best translation renders as Understandings, a cornerstone of the Portiid civili
zation. They are genetic memories, Meshner knows, rendered into something that can be inherited, copied and implanted by a fluke of the pervasive nanovirus that guided the spiders’ evolution. If Fabian needs knowledge or a skill, he can simply have it introduced to his brain and, very shortly, be an expert. Meshner covets the facility, both for the way it could make any individual into a polymath, and for the bridge it could build between humanity and their new best friends. He knows that Helena and the linguistics crowd are going about the same task by very different and non-invasive means, but his way is better. If he can only get it to work. If he doesn’t scramble his brains trying. He is lucky to have a lab partner like Fabian who isn’t averse to risk-taking. But then Fabian covets whatever academic success looks like to a spider and, as he’s a male, that means he has to go twice as far on half the support. Fabian is doubtless delighted he found such an obliging test subject.

  Then Artifabian’s meek pose changes to something bold and dominant, so that Fabian himself instinctively gives ground. The spirit of Avrana Kern—or at least the dominant facet that inhabits the ship’s complex computer system—has seized control of this errant splinter in order to interact with its crew.

  “The Ship’s Mistress has sent out a general alarm,” comes that female voice from Artifabian’s speakers, even as the machine’s feet tap out an analogous message to Fabian. “All crew to the bridge, apparently. We have made a discovery.”

  Waking the crew had begun in measured stages after the Voyager passed by the barren outer planets of the new system, homing in on the busy buzz of the signals coming from closer to the star. It had begun with Kern—or the semi-biological computer system that identified as Kern—bootstrapping herself up from basic functions into her full and ascerbic personality, then progressed through the crew roster based on the ship’s requirements: maintenance, medical, command, then everyone else. Both Helena Holsten Lain and Meshner Osten Oslam should have been in this last category, but both had employed special pleading to be woken early to work on their personal projects while the Voyager decelerated.