Children of Ruin

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  The Voyager has changed since they left their mutual home in search of a voice among the stars. Unlike the ancestral ships humans had travelled in, it has a fluid structure, forged from materials that can stretch and grow at Kern’s whim. On departure it had still mimicked what Kern remembered spaceships looking like, long and dynamic with a ring section for the crew’s waking moments. Now it is something more like a manta ray, its delicate wings extended and fitted out as organic solar panels for when they near the star. The crew assembles in a set of bolas-like structures Kern grew for them, that whirl in an orbit just ahead of the wingspan as though they are specimens in a centrifuge. Despite the best Human-Portiid medical tech, everyone is finding the resumed gravity onerous.

  Helena and Portia arrive just in time for the ship’s commander to address them. The Voyager’s leader is old now—Portiids don’t live more than about three decades and Helena knows the commander kept herself awake longer than was her due, in order to watch over her crew. She is an angular spider with great tufted plumes over her main eyes that give her an owlish look. She is also a Portia, or at least her name is so similar to Helena’s friend that a mere Human has difficulty in distinguishing between them.

  A lot of the other Humans there are looking more than a little groggy, woken more recently or slower to recover. Helena remembers her grandfather complaining about coming out of cold sleep on the old Gilgamesh, that had brought humans to Kern’s World. To hear him tell it, it had all been waking up and then mad chaos and then going back to sleep again. Duly cautioned, Helena put more time into modifying her biochemistry and training her body, and practically bounced out of cold storage the moment they woke her. Portia herself confessed that waking for the spiders was a profoundly uncomfortable process. She was only able to work with Helena because Kern had given them a head start and only come to the Humans later. The Understandings that the Portiids rely on so heavily became disconnected during long periods of sleep, to return haphazardly days after waking. It was, Portia tried to explain, like constantly forgetting who you were, forever reaching for knowledge that was not there.

  Helena shuffles to her place, sure-footed in the padded socks all the Human crew use because shod footsteps on the springy floors sound like shouting to the Portiids’ vibrational hearing. She wears the standard crew uniform that Kern fabricated: a shirt and trousers of pale green, the cloth filmy and thin because the ship is warm and humid just like the planet they left behind.

  Portia is already signalling and chatting with a pair of spiders on the Receiving team who have been up longer than anyone, cataloguing the rich signals from within the system and trying to make sense of them whilst keeping a few eyes on the active and passive sensors to ensure that the locals don’t sneak up on anybody. The literal translation of their department is “alarmed feet”, which still makes Helena giggle. It is also a salutary lesson that there are different layers of translation, and literal is not always the most useful.

  She crouches and puts her hands to the floor, letting her gloves intercept the vibrational chatter between the Portiids, and her implants turn that into something resembling speech. Portia asks the two operators what’s up; they are bursting with the knowledge that they have detected an approaching object, almost certainly artificial. They are about to get their first look at the handiwork of the locals.

  By then Old Portia, the ship’s mistress, is speaking. “I’m sure you’ve all been waiting for a gathering such as this. Anyone with any curiosity will understand that this is a heavily active, populated system. The volume and complexity of signals demonstrates that there is an advanced civilization based here, and the character of them shows a great many hallmarks of pre-collapse Earth technology and protocols. We may have here the secondmost direct line of descent from our founding culture.” That is the spoken translation of the captain’s message, as relayed by the artificial ghost of Avrana Kern. With her fingers touching the floor, however, and her eyes on the flicking palps of the captain, Helena simultaneously receives the original. Her cybernetics and her organic brain provide her with, What this is, we have contact as you will have all expected. Signal traffic from in-system is dense and diverse enough to suggest a space-faring civilization that is still using Old Empire structure for the basis of its communications. Kern is both wordier and considerably free in how she passes on the concepts, and that sort of thing is exactly why Helena is working on her pet project. She feels a stab of annoyance at the coda the computer decided to add for its Human audience, to remind them just who was the first line of descent, in Kern’s own view, whilst feeling some bleak amusement that the utterly inaccurate phrase “Old Empire” that her ancestors used to describe their own lost ancestors survives as a spider term of reference even after Kern hunted it to extinction amongst Humans.

  “We are about to have our first look at an artifact of this inner-world’s culture,” Old Portia continues crisply. “Our instruments have detected a fellow-traveller in these reaches, an artificial body moving outwards at a considerable rate.” Around them, tightly-furled plastic roses open up into screens showing enhanced views of the interplanetary traveller they are closing on. There is notation in the neat letters of Imperial C, which is the written lingua franca amongst the colonists, and in the slipshod and chaotic-looking spider notation, but the floor also buzzes with technical data for those members of the crew with the feet to receive it, and for Helena. Perhaps because they had their Understandings to lean on, Portiid writing systems are considerably less efficient than human. For new information, they prefer directly informative interfaces where possible.

  Helena assumes at first she has mistranslated what she is receiving, and double-checks against the screens.

  How big? Portia scratches out, soft enough that it is for Helena’s hands only. An error, do you think?

  The Voyager has made quite a sharp diversion to get closer to the oncoming object’s trajectory, ever since initial readings showed something other than a mere errant asteroid. Kern has husbanded their energy and fuel all the way through the cold dark between solar systems, but the ship’s scoops have replenished their stores from the rich cloud of ice, gas and dust that formed the edge of their destination system’s orbiting disc, allowing all manner of costly manoeuvres. She constructed remote probes in her internal factories and sent them ahead on one-way journeys, each with a tiny splinter of herself copied into their cores. Now the data comes back, and nobody can quite understand what they are looking at.

  The approaching artifact is mostly spherical, with one very obvious exception. The outer surface is studded with a regular net of nodes that might have been sensors or engines or even weapons once, but are now little more than scarred, ice-frosted stumps and pits. One side of it has ruptured, and the innards have come out in a vast, jagged spray that flowers into fantastical spines and curling tentacles as though some unthinkable oceanic horror has been killed halfway through hatching out of an egg twenty-seven kilometres across.

  Ice, the probes confirm. Its eruption from the interior of the object might be the result of a fissure in the unknown surface material, or else the freezing of a liquid centre might have burst the membrane open with its expansion. Either way the colossal, frozen eruption threw the entire object’s centre of gravity so that the sphere and its miles-long plume now spin about one another with ponderous grace.

  The ice is opaque white over most of its surface, but the keen eyes of the probes find shadows within. Under magnification, some seem to be recognizably fish, others are of a more uncertain shape, although that might also be the work of the expansion.

  An artificial moon. A moon of water, Portia suggests. Ornamental perhaps? And is that damage we see from after it was flung into space or the cause of it?

  Helena lets her palms touch the deck and subvocalizes, “Don’t let speculation run away with you,” letting the mechanisms in her gloves make their best translation in precisely calibrated touch-speak, while the white dots on her thumbs add palp-emp
hasis. It is halting at best, and Portia says she sounds as though she is “giddy with sweet sap,” but progress is progress.

  The probes get the best look they can at the whirling planetoid, but they lack the ability to reverse their course and follow it, and soon it is on its endless way, heading along the plane of the solar system on a course that will one day see it vanish forever in the great beyond.

  Curious, says one of the Alarmed Feet operators.

  Uninformative, the other complains, with a twitch of her palps that conveyed the subtext, and I had better things to be doing with my time.

  The captain calls up the relevant figures, wavering over whether to pursue the ruined object or let it vanish away: relative momentum, energy consumption… probably these quoditian elements don’t sway her as much as the clear radio evidence that there is a great deal more of interest further into the system. Her very silence and stillness is her decision, as physics whisks the object beyond their reach. They are going onwards. And yet…

  If we push on, we will pluck so many strings we can expect a response by the locals, she addresses them. Analysis of energy signatures leaves open the possibility that they may be more technologically advanced, and also that they may either be fighting a war amongst themselves or be naturally exuberant and wasteful in the way they burn energy. Helena is having difficulty keeping up with the rapid speech of the captain and words from Kern’s version keep creeping in. She fights to concentrate.

  Caution dictates we not risk the entire mission by proceeding further as a whole or broadcasting our position. I’m having us move into the shadow of the closest outer planet. The screens begin to display the relevant telemetry. However, we cannot come all this way and not make contact. I’ve ordered a segment of the ship be prepared as an independent scout fitted for a small crew. I’d prefer a crew made up entirely of Portiids. The captain is using the Portiid’s own name for themselves, of course, meaning something like We who know best, and Kern’s translation omits this digression entirely. However, there is a small chance that the civilization is both human and unaugmented by the Unity infection, in which case Human ambassadors will be essential.

  Small chance? Helena throws in, through her palms.

  One of the sensor operators cocks a cephalothorax to eye her sidelong. There are no human representations within the decoded visual data that forms a large part of the signals we have intercepted, she explains. Mostly it is just rapidly changing colours and irregular 3D shapes. Very fascinating!

  The captain continues, The scout will have a facet of the Avrana Kern construct but this will have necessarily fewer resources to draw upon. I am selecting crew and Human companions who have demonstrated their ability to interact with each other independently. This will be high-risk. No guarantee that we will be able to assist if things go wrong. Participation is therefore voluntary. This is said with a brief rearing motion, the captain’s first two pairs of legs held high for just a second. It suggests that anyone backing out will lose status with the captain—hence with the mission as a whole. Portiids place great value on boldness, an archetypal female trait for them with a whole dictionary of social expectations spilling out from it. The captain probably didn’t mean to qualify her words like that, but some mannerisms are too deeply ingrained to shake.

  Helena’s name tops the list of Humans, but then this is exactly the sort of opportunity she has worked so hard to open up. The others are Zaine Alpash Vannix and Meshner Osten Oslam, also working on Human-Portiid relations. Portia is the next chosen—not just Helena’s closest liaison but exactly the sort of over-bold all-rounder that a female Portiid is supposed to be. Also on the crew are two other females, Bianca and Viola, who have been working with Zaine for years, plus Fabian, a male, with Bianca having overall authority. Helena listens to the susurrus of those around her, happy or unhappy to be out of the running. Unsurprisingly, nobody turns the honour down.

  Meshner had very much wanted to turn the honour down. Being part of a scouting mission will not keep him from his research, but it is hardly conducive. The captain’s announcement fills him with a peevish annoyance he is entirely too prone to. He had assumed that Fabian was all for the posting, and only when they are installed in the outgrowth of the Voyager that will become the scout ship do the two of them have a chance to discuss it.

  Fabian, too, is not keen, the spider explains through the medium of Artifabian. For his part, it is the potential danger of the business that he objects to.

  “Let them leap into the fire,” Artifabian translates, them meaning female Portiids in general. “This is not a good use of my talents. Or your talents.” That last tacked on awkwardly afterwards, because Fabian, being a creature of easily bruised ego, recognizes Meshner as a kindred spirit.

  “Well, we work closely together,” Meshner points out weakly. The walls of the chamber around them deform as Kern—the chief Kern of the Voyager—manipulates the tensions in the ship’s hull fabric to create the appropriate structure for the scout. “So if they were looking for that…”

  “Pchah!” the drone articulates, its reading of a little stamping tantrum Fabian has just indulged in. “This is a punishment detail.”

  “Punishment?”

  “Our research is not approved of,” Fabian declares. He crouches with his abdomen on the ground, tapping with his front legs only as he faces Meshner, so that his words will not spread to the others filing in.

  “Nobody told us to stop,” Meshner points out.

  Fabian’s palps strike each other, tok! “Well, no. But you’ve been spoken to. And so have I.”

  In actual fact there were quite a few words from Humans and Portiids, both about the accelerated pace of their work and just what it might be doing to Meshner’s brain, but nobody took their toys away. He explains this and Fabian scuttles closer, rapping out a hard little rhythm.

  “But that’s how it is. Isn’t it the same for Humans? That’s how it is for social species. The disapproval.” The drone gives the word a peculiar emphasis, like a maiden aunt being vulgar. Meshner knows that Portiid society is far less formally structured than humans’ had been, but then pre-Human humans had been the crew of a ship in emergency conditions. And humans were always more sensitive to their children getting killed doing stupid things, whilst the spider society seems to thrive on a kind of harsh Darwinism, because they have a lot of young and no real parenting instincts. He hadn’t considered it before, but the spiders don’t really force each other to do or not do things, they just express, as Fabian says, disapproval.

  “We can still continue the work,” he says, now feeling very rebellious. “I mean, we’ll have at least a year in transit to the inner solar system. We don’t have to spend it all on ice. We can refine the experiment.”

  “We will.” Fabian rears up, legs high in a threat pose as though daring the universe to stop him. A moment later a couple of female Portiids come in with the lean woman Zaine, and Fabian is instantly all humility and submissive body language just in case they feel punchy.

  Males have the chance to excel in Portiid society, Meshner knows, but they have to work damned hard at it. Scientific advancement is one proven route, a path cut through the social thickets by Fabians past. Oh, female Portiids still comprise the majority of their great thinkers, but the precedent is at least there. And we’ll make it happen, he knows. His eyes flick over to where Helena Lain is coming in with her research confederate, Portia. The pair are also working on the final closure of the gap between spider and monkey, at a very procedural, unimaginative level. They use technology to simply understand and translate signals and impulses, little more than having an Artifabian in your skull. Meshner and Fabian’s approach is bolder by a factor of ten: bring the Portiid Understandings to Humans, find a way to translate them so that the anthropoid brain can grasp what it is like to be a spider, learn the skills, absorb all that stored knowledge.

  Outside the chamber the superstructure of the scout ship is being moved into position and connec
ted up, cables and flexible struts writhing their way across the taut hull like strange writing. A seething movement signifies the controlling computer’s biological element being decanted: a ball of ants rapidly spreading out to explore and master their new environment. They carry with them, between them and as the sum of their parts, another copy of Avrana Kern, who has made herself a third species in this strange partnership.

  The scout vessel is duly christened Lightfoot, to represent the first tentative contact between the peoples of Kern’s World and whoever calls this new system home. Their first stop will be the next planet in, the biggest gas giant, because long-range investigation has detected activity around its moons.

  2.

  “My interpretation of inner-system signal traffic and activity supports the hypothesis that they are at war,” Avrana Kern’s precise, always-slightly-disapproving voice informs them. The Lightfoot’s control system isn’t all of her, of course, only a pared-down version, but Avrana Kern tends to expand to fit the computational space available. Helena wonders if she possessed similar qualities when alive and in her human body.

  Portia, beside her, scrapes and shuffles, the words coming through Helena’s gloves as, What are we even looking at here? War with what? Another waking, this, after the long step in-system, and Portia is irritable and restless at the enforced inactivity.

  The Lightfoot has come in towards one of the gas giant’s larger moons to find it… under deconstruction, is the only way Helena can think about it. The ball of ice and rock had once been about forty per cent of the size of Kern’s World (and, therefore, of Old Earth as well) but has lost at least three per cent of its initial mass. Closer drone viewing shows its outer surface riddled with holes and grooves. Burrows. It is crawling with life; all the more remarkable because it has no atmosphere to speak of, any appropriate gas-forming elements either making up part of its frozen surface or having long ago evaporated into space. Surface temperature is, by Kern’s scale, 250 below zero at the very sunniest. And yet it lives and, apparently, makes war on its inner-system neighbours.