Children of Ruin

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  Even as he thinks it, another part of his brain seizes on a lifeline, the only thing here that comes from outside other than his own lost consciousness. He is linked to the ship, to Kern. The implant gives him access to her somehow, far beyond a crewmember’s regular comms. He feels dizzy for a moment at the thought that he is participating in a neural link with a computer, something nobody had done before without Old Empire technology, and not terribly successfully even then.

  He follows the breadcrumbs of Kern’s link and abruptly the sunset turns off, leaving him in dimness. Before him is a spider, huge beyond the dreams of Portiids, save that of course he views it from the low-slung perspective of Fabian. Meshner’s mind floods with raw emotional input, some of it translated into base urges he can name: fear and desire inextricably linked, the ragged raw edge of excitement, desperation, a dread of failure. Other information batters at his brain looking for somewhere to roost, square-peg emotions ramming themselves at the round holes of his mind, trying to make themselves known. He asked for something that would be unmistakably arachnid, and surely this matches his specifications: Portiids doing Portiid things to one another, incomprehensible, alien. The Understanding he has been given is visually simple, but that is just a thin skin riding on a great sea of experiential data. And I will drown unless I get clear.

  Again he follows the link of Kern until he finds himself in another place.

  Space.

  A frozen moment. He stands in the void (although he is not standing, not really, but his viewpoint suggests a presence and he goes with it; otherwise madness awaits), gazing down on the stretched silvery shimmer of the Lightfoot, looking buckled as it is caught midway through shifting its hull profile to cushion against another high-speed manoeuvre. Now the image pulls out: there are the enemy fighters, tiny spheres within a net of thrust and weapons systems. One is just erupting open into loose matter as Kern’s lasers finally pinpoint it, the firing solution courtesy of Portia and Viola having predicted the next way it would jink. Beyond are the larger vessels, their formation now a cluttered mess, their own weapons systems quite busy. And the Lightfoot is coming back that way, because that is the best path to avoid the worst of the fighter barrage.

  “This is intolerable,” a sharp female voice tells him, and he flinches with an instinct still held over from the Portiid historical male deference to the female.

  Kern manifests herself in space on the far side of the Lightfoot, her chosen scale making the ships seem like toys floating at the level of her waist. Meshner sees a tall, severe woman, grey hair tied back, wearing an ornate one-piece garment that might perhaps be what Old Empire shipsuits looked like, back when such things were more than tatters and dust. He wonders how authentic the simulacra is, because surely Avrana Kern does not really hold an accurate self-image after so many millennia?

  “You are occupying too much space,” she snaps at him, for all that she has a virtual body twice the size of the largest alien ship and he has a notional point of view that could dance upon the head of a pin. “You are draining my resources. Who or what are you?” Without a half-second’s pause she seems to catch up with that fragment of herself he encountered a moment before, “Meshner Osten Oslam, the self-made lab animal,” and he reflects that answering her own questions is probably a large part of her stock in trade these days. “Why are you here?”

  He stammers out that she led him here, but perhaps that part that left the breadcrumbs is only a subroutine that Kern herself disowns. He has a sense that somewhere, somehow, a kind of communication is being attempted, but it isn’t reaching Kern. She stalks about the sluggishly-moving display, simultaneously looking at all the spaceborne vessels and at him, giving everything her full attention all the time. Parts of his brain grind against each other trying to force this ersatz visual stimulus to conform to the laws of physical space.

  Which it needn’t, he reminds himself. So: and he calls up information, arraying it in virtual space just as he did when testing out the implant the first time he awoke with it. For a split second he is back with the sunset and the ocean but then Kern bodily yanks him back to the battle map, the little dart of the Lightfoot; to the spreading formation of enemy ships (and his mind is processing, processing, still trying to do its job now he has this spectacular visual representation of the sky outside, and something has snagged his attention that surely Kern has already seen…).

  And his information has got through, or else Kern looked past the battle to what his body was/is working on and has seen his meagre role in all of this.

  “Your cognitive functions are overflowing into ship systems,” she tells him—still severe, but with a thoughtful edge; she is a scientist first and foremost, after all. “Your implant needs limiting functions. It is trying to process a fat bolus of sensory data and it’s just eating up all the processing power it can handle. I’m having to hold it off from rampaging through my own memory, and in holding it off I’m suffering a further drain on my capabilities. Idiot monkey.” Her expression—or that facet of it she spares him—is appraising. “Still, at any other time, an interesting toy. You have come somewhere close to an upload facility in the most backwards manner possible, creating an extended virtual simulation of your own cognitive functions in order to process a recorded medium not in any way intended for a Human.”

  Wait—a virtual simulation? Is that all I am? This all feels entirely real to me. Again, he has no way of saying it, but it manages to reach Kern. He expects derision, but the look on her face is solemn, even sympathetic.

  “It does, doesn’t it?” she agrees. “No matter how they peel you down. Even when you’re stripped down to something that can’t think, can’t feel, some pissant little shard of yourself that’s barely good for anything but calculating square roots and prime numbers, it still feels like you, until you try to do something and find that part of you is missing. I’m limiting you, Meshner Osten Oslam. I am fencing you off so you don’t cripple the ship with your existential crisis. And that way, this experience may end up repatriated with the rest of your mind and bring it out of the grand mal seizure you are currently experiencing.”

  I… what?

  “Your brain is a complicated toy. When you play carelessly with it, you might lose some pieces,” she says, and that sardonic edge is back, her sympathy apparently exhausted. “I’ve devised a solution to purge you from the system for now. I really do need all my wits about me. If you have the chance, there are ways to have your implant recalibrate its internal architecture to make your simulations far more resource-efficient, and thus get more done without involving me. Let me know if any of this stays with you.”

  Wait! Meshner’s perspective lurches. He can feel reality ascending to meet him like the ground reaches for a falling man—either Kern’s doing or the fit he is apparently undergoing—and he tries to force more information up the pipe than mere words. He has a course for her, not frantic flight into the black but an approach to the enemy ships. It is threading the needle sideways and backwards and upside down, entirely beyond the parameters of the task he had been set, and yet perfect.

  “Nonsense,” Kern snaps. “This exposes us to the weapons of three of the large vessels in sequence at extreme close range, one after another. Unacceptable.”

  You have set the wrong limits on our search, he insists. The ocean returns briefly, pulsing like a slow heartbeat, so that he gains and loses Kern, gains and loses the battle. See their attacks. It is so obvious, and yet Kern hasn’t seen it because, in the final analysis, she is a self-regulating computer trying to maximize her limited computational power. She set herself a narrow task, and that task became her world. They are fighting each other, he manages at last, flagging up various of the combatants in different colours, some hostile, some at least neutral, deploying weapons on their fellows in an apparent attempt to defend the Lightfoot. Each ship has angles and arcs that are being used for countermeasures, casting vast shadows where their attentions pick the void clean of the ordnance of t
heir neighbours. Space is abruptly not a desert, or at least it is a desert with a few rocks for shade. Enough cover, perhaps, to get up enough speed to outrange the enemy.

  Kern stares at him, going in and out of his mind’s eye, but he sees her smile before he loses her.

  Then he is arching his back, fingers clutching at the fabric of the cabin floor as Zaine clamps a medical scanner to his head, jarring his implant agonizingly. There is a great deal of chaos, and he feels his heart stop and get jolted back into action by Helena applying a muscle override. There is blood in his mouth and his vision glitters with ephemeral stars.

  2.

  Abruptly they have left the fighters spinning in their wake, the Lightfoot accelerating with all its power. Only the spiders, Portia, Viola and Fabian, remain at the controls. Helena and Zaine are doing their best to save the life of their fellow Human, Meshner, fighting cerebral inflammation and calming his spiking neural activity until at last he opens his eyes.

  Helena isn’t sure they still have him, despite everything. There is a moment when nothing of Meshner stares out at her. Then expression falls back onto his face and he says, “They’re fighting,” which seems the most fatuous observation in the world until Fabian starts tapping and scraping at his console and she puts a gloved hand down to catch his meaning

  … . being screened by three of the vessels. One of the others is damaged—there’s ice bleeding from it! They are at war! He is practically bouncing at his post, hanging head-down up the wall. A moment later he jumps down and runs around Meshner’s prone form, because Portiids have great trouble keeping still when they are excited.

  Helena checks the medical monitors: Meshner seems stable now, though he has apparently lapsed back into unconsciousness. She sits back, feeling exasperated at him. Some feedback from his implant struck him down, nothing of the fight at all. She isn’t the only one to be thinking it. Fabian’s skittering progress comes to an abrupt end as Viola jumps down in front of him, her forelegs raised in threat. The male instantly adopts a submissive posture and she hoists herself higher for a moment, displaying her utmost anger with him, before stalking off to Bianca’s station.

  Fabian’s palps lift and twitch, which Helena reads automatically as What did I do?

  You made this happen, Portia signals, creeping over to hunker down by Helena. You experimented on him.

  The male makes a few stuttering motions, not a complete sentence but the equivalent of a Human muttering to themselves, How was I to know?

  Curtail your activities, Portia tells him. We are all in danger.

  Fabian’s clenched legs suggest he wants to ask how he could have foreseen that, either, and Helena has some sympathy there. One moment the aliens were happy to communicate, the next—the moment they saw a human form, in fact—one group were driven to some furious rage, while others were equally vehement about defending the Lightfoot, both factions springing to instant all-out aggression without any sign or warning. And does that make them human? Not in Helena’s book. Admittedly the Humans of Kern’s World are unusually pacifistic, based on Kern’s dark references to the long past of the species, but she reckons that people would still need to steel themselves for something like that, to justify it to themselves. Unless the whole thing was a trap from the start, already primed to devolve into murderous intent, but that doesn’t explain the ships that apparently took the Lightfoot’s side in the quarrel.

  None of it makes sense, she tells Portia through her gloves.

  We are being contacted, comes a general announcement from Viola, with Kern’s spoken translation following a moment after. Three large ships, following our course. The vessels that covered our escape.

  “At least we’re faster,” Zaine says, doubtless remembering the ponderous manoeuvring of the alien vessels.

  We are not, Viola says pedantically. We are merely able to accelerate more rapidly for now. They are signalling us as before, although with a greater proportion on the technical channel. More coordinates.

  Everyone exchanges looks: Human heads turn, Portiids cant bodies towards each other.

  “A trap?” Zaine suggests, but she doesn’t sound convinced.

  Potentially a trap if these are simply enemies that want enough of us left to study, Viola puts in. The subtext of her palp-waving means Bad things multiply, implying that just because the alien factions are fighting does not mean they are neatly divided into “friend” and “foe”.

  “Can we speak to the Voyager?” Helena asks.

  Kern’s own voice breaks in, transmitting through the air and floor simultaneously. “We simply don’t know the capabilities of these ships, now they are paying such close attention to us. At the very least we would be alerting them to the presence of the Voyager if we sent a transmission. We must hope our comrades are watching.”

  We can just flee outwards, Fabian suggests. We can change course faster than they can.

  And then what? Portia demands. Helena waggles a thumb to get her attention and then signals, Easy, calm, because her colleague tends to become the arch-traditionalist in times of stress, a female’s female. With obvious effort, Portia de-escalates her body language from threat to conversational, saying, If we flee now, even if we escape them, what have we gained? What has Bianca died for? We came all this way riding the line of their signals. There is a mystery here we need new perspectives to understand. Are they enemies that will threaten us back at our home one day? We have seen their technology is as complex as ours, or more so. If we can travel between the stars, so can they. Are they allies? Do they need our help? Why fight each other? Why attack us? If there is any chance of learning more of them, and especially of making peaceful contact, we must take it. Converted to Human terms, she is a passionate speaker, embodying the Portiid virtue of intrepid curiosity.

  Zaine has plotted the new coordinates. “They’re taking us in-system, past the orbit of the next planet. That gives us around two months, more than enough time to reconfigure the ship and prepare.”

  “I am seeking a meeting of minds on defensive strategy,” Kern throws out. The odd wording is a best-fit translation of the spider concept: everyone sitting around a web, plucking out ideas as they occur.

  Helena feels she would have little to contribute. Instead she has the Lightfoot’s records line up a large sampling of the alien transmissions, especially the visual elements. She is, after all, the doyenne of translation software, even if her efforts have been focused on an entirely different communication system. She has time on her hands, now, if she is happy to burn her own personal allotment of it by staying out of cold sleep. Adapting her goggles and gloves and rejigging her internal software is a long and delicate process, but with Portia’s help she has the opportunity to do it now. And hopefully not screw over my brain like Meshner did.

  One of her mentors back on Kern’s World had warned of exactly that—the potential for alien thought and language to cause damage to the Human brain simply through exposure. The woman had been paranoid about some hypothetical “true aliens” whose simple cognition would be anathema for any Humans (or Portiids) who tried to understand it. Helena suspects that mentor was someone whose psychology had problems coping with living on a planet full of spiders. Some of the original Gilgamesh survivors had simply never adjusted, living on a Human reservation where Portiid presence was minimal and covert. Helena’s mentor, when positing that lethal alien race, had been externalizing an internal fear she had lived with all her life, or so Helena came to believe.

  And there are Portiids who find Humans impossible to be around, she knows. Sometimes it is the sheer scale, sometimes they simply can’t tune out the crashing of Human footfalls in the way most spiders do. The two species rub along with some rough edges, even after all this time.

  Portia strokes her arm gently; a gesture of solidarity evolved independently by two very different species.

  Remember what we said about males, Helena tells her, ruffling the tufted brows over Portia’s main eyes.

&nbs
p; Fabian is not a typical male, Portia shuffles, doubtless keeping at least one other eye on the subject of her ire. He crouches and dances neatly enough, but he doesn’t mean it. He bears grudges, that one.

  And you give him reason to, Helena points out. On her screen, the computer has coded five hundred separate alien signals, visual and informational. This is ant-work, performed by the Lightfoot’s live-in colony rather than Kern’s consciousness or the electronic systems. It is the sort of qualitative analysis at which Portiid ants beat Human computers every time.

  Helena frowns, used to finding patterns in signals, in speech; so much of her Portiid language work is finding the correlations between meaning, stance, palp qualifiers, even scent chemicals, all the different facets of communication. Here she sees alien transmissions invariably sent out as two distinct formats, and yet there is no immediate correlation at all. Or if there is, it lies in some part of the data she is not analysing properly. She goes back to the source and taxes Kern about possible other channels, separate elements of the message that haven’t come through to her.

  Many days later, and with Kern threatening to throttle her systems access, all she has is absence of evidence for any pattern between visual and numerical signals. Which isn’t evidence of absence, but still… “What if there are two separate species in their ships, too?” she wonders. “What if the number signals are… hidden within the main transmission by some sort of fifth column?”

  So instead of giving us a rendezvous, some spy was telling us where they were going? Portia shivers, signalling her discontent with the idea. They were acting on it, though. And we have signals here not meant for us. Every one is split the same way, to a greater or lesser extent. The data-heavy visual information, the more compact Old Empire format numbers. And the proportion changed—look, there’s a pattern.

  And she is right. The correlation is not with content but with split. Certain combinations of colour and shape match where the visual information comes close to edging out the numbers altogether. As though they were shouting. And indeed the colours and shapes for those periods seem distinctly less friendly. Black, red, white, spikes and sharp angles. Perhaps universal symbols of threat to anything with an Earth origin. And they are looking at something that came from distant Earth, without a doubt. The technology being used to send these baffling signals is a close cousin to tech the Gilgamesh found in Old Empire facilities, or the tech used to preserve Avrana Kern in orbit about the world that bore her name. Closer to us than whoever’s sending the signals.