Children of Ruin

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  7.

  At first, nobody notices. Damascus is a planet overtaken by a pan-oceanic tide of chaos and strife, faction against faction shifting and breaking apart and re-forming. It takes remarkably long for anyone to understand that some things simply do not re-form once they are broken.

  In retrospect, though, the doom that falls on Damascus has a ready aetiology. It radiates out, as rapidly as the water currents can take it, from that one forbidden place. Nobody knows Lot or what drove him, but it is clear that someone, after all this time, looked back.

  The infection rides the currents of the sea, but it also rides the sea’s denizens, replicating into new colonies, infecting fish and crabs and jellyfish and plankton, shortening its expectations to fit straitened circumstances, recording the glory days when it was Yusuf Baltiel for a future posterity when a host might exist that will lend meaning to them. It is an alien in an Earth-made world, but it adapts, over and over, species by species. Some it masters, as it did the tortoises of Nod, some it is carried within, some vessels it constantly reaches towards, a flame towards a moth. It enters into countless of the planet’s dominant species, Senkovi’s beloved octopuses, and tries to inhabit them. It splits, colony leaving colony, chasing the siren song of complex activity through the vast worlds that are macroscopic bodies. Each separate colony proclaims its sovereignty, the primacy of the nerve hub it burrows within. The hosts, at war with themselves, come apart, every arm tearing itself off in search of a brief-lived freedom. And again, and again.

  On the surface, Damascan scientists try their fragile brilliance against the storm of dissolution overcoming their civilization, but conventional biological controls have no hold on the Nodan chemistry, and wherever inroads are made, the target shifts and adapts. Destroy a thousand clots of seething alien life, enough survive to become the new paradigm that is proof against all efforts, and not merely through lightning-fast replication and mutation, not even through the equitable sharing of genetic material like humble Earth bacteria, but by experimentation and design. The world of Nod has biological controls that have evolved in lockstep with this substance-colony-entity-disease; countless creatures which have developed defences and behaviours to mitigate such infiltration. Even the tortoises live full lives as they carry around their parliaments of parasites. But here, on Damascus: nothing.

  Solomon is not on Damascus. He is best described as an orbital engineer, born outside the gravity well and living his whole complex life at the hub of an elevator cable, strung between the planet on the one end and the distant counterweight on the other. Such hubs are massive, larger than the Aegean ever was, designed to be home to thousands. Now they are home to tens of thousands, crowded beyond belief as the inhabitants of the planet below flee their native oceans for the dubious safety of space. They shuttle consignments of squabbling, frightened molluscs to the Homeships and the great artificial worlds that string the orbital roads like beads, and still every canister that arrives from below is full of cephalopods who are starving, desperate and half-dead (or sometimes just dead, suffocated, crushed or killed by sheer shock or misery). Solomon’s Crown is keening a lament for something so large he never considered it before now: not himself, not a faction or a great artist, a spaceship or a scientific endeavour. He is trying to learn how to grieve for a civilization millennia old that is collapsing in real time as he watches.

  His Reach, interlocked with the systems of his orbiting city-state, processes the new arrivals, liaises with the clever arms of his fellows, tries and tries and tries to master the fallout of the catastrophe, shorn of the need to understand its ramifications.

  All about the equator of Damascus the same scene is played out, Solomon’s fellow administrators trying to string a net between them that will catch some shadow of what their people once were. They are taking thousands out of the gravity well, far more than any of the orbital habitats were designed to take. They are leaving behind not just millions, but billions. Billions more have already fallen victim to the terrible questing dissolution that tries to understand them as a habitat to adapt to, as a vehicle to be driven and, by way of study, only breaks them down into insensible, useless, dying parts. The parts, when all else is lost, are broken down further until the distinction between the molecules of Earth life and Nodan life are moot, then built up into fresh swirling colonies of bold microscopic adventurers that quest anew for that half-forgotten moment when, as Yusuf Baltiel and his colleagues, they understood it all and saw the vastness of the universe.

  Solomon works. There are ships arriving all the time from further out, hauled home from their mining and exploring, their research and their wars by the fate of their homeworld. This one fulcrum moment, there is no conflict. The whole of their species is working as one, even if all they can achieve is damage limitation.

  The fragile unity dies in fire and vacuum, in explosive steam that becomes an expanding cloud of ice that races about the equatorial line. One of the elevator hubs has opened fire on its neighbour, sending a score of missiles to tear it apart, venting its aqueous contents into the void of space. The crew of the aggressor is bombarded with threats, laments and demands for clarification. The victim was infected, comes the reply. Communications indicated the plague or parasite or whatever the nebulous monster is had been carried aboard, incubated in the bodies of the refugees, and then spread unchecked through everyone it found there. The Nodan invader is growing more complex in its behaviour, incubating longer before its efforts to understand and control result in the violent division of its host. It becomes impossible to know by quick inspection if a body has been infected or not. Nobody has any room for niceties such as quarantine.

  Solomon reviews the traffic from the destroyed hub. Emotions pattern his skin as he tries to decide whether what was enacted was heroic self-defence or murder on a grand scale. His Reach consults the electronic data, weighing the tail off of communications, the disturbed last messages, the loss of meaning in the signals. It advises, and Solomon comes to the conclusion that the aggressor was right. Which means none of them is safe. Which means the elevators are compromised.

  Solomon weighs his desires, and his judgement is this: I want to live.

  He gives his commands, Reach to Reach across the hub’s network. It is not a thing to be done lightly, but his mercurial kind make big decisions more quickly than humans. Reach and Crown in accord become instant action.

  Simultaneously, perfectly synchronized, he severs the cables of the elevators. The counterweight, slung far out into space on the end of its tether by the planet’s rotation, flies away, off towards the outer solar system and beyond. The inner cable, that had linked the hub to its anchor point on the Damascan seabed… There was a car carrying hundreds, partway up that cable. Solomon knows it, but by now surely at least some are compromised, and if one then more, if more then all. To cut all ties with the homeworld, literally, was the only way.

  Around the girdle of Damascus, other administrators are following suit, severing themselves and jockeying with their engines to retain a stable orbit. There are collisions, occasionally. There are failures from long-unused systems. And for those below, massing in their numberless hordes at the base of the cables, there is only despair.

  8.

  And, after that, a coda. A sideshow, almost—save that, of all these seeds of time, this one shall grow.

  Another octopus, a male. Perhaps his designation, set down in the old human-style databanks, is Noah. Humans would also call him a scientist, though the designation is inexact and Noah thinks of his chosen avocation as something more like art. His arms do all the hard maths, after all.

  After the fall of Damascus, the orbital community of octopuses lurched along just ahead of crisis and extinction. They clung on the very brink of oblivion, but if there’s one thing octopuses are good at it is clinging on. Their Crowns dictated what was needed, the collusion of their Reaches found solutions. They held on. They multiplied. They accelerated their materials-salvaging from the ou
ter system, the asteroids and gas giant moons, dispatching their insensate miners in great clouds of minuscule larvae, that would gnaw and grow and start firing ice and hydrocarbons and metal-rich rock back at them as soon as they struck some solid surface. They built until the orbit of Damascus was one tangled field of habitats, the ice and alloys and plastics and invisible fields of magnetism containing what was left of them. And their antisocial nature, never far from the surface, began to break out, of course, and they fought and factionalized and argued.

  And a few, like Noah, were able to see a bigger picture even with their conscious minds. A human psychologist would characterize the octopuses as more id than anything else, with a blind ego subsumed as their subconscious, but some still see further. Noah is haunted by dreams of being the last of his kind, a cephalopod Senkovi surrounded by the drifting wreckage of all there has ever been. The cluttered, quarrelsome orbital civilization he can see making and unmaking itself day to day does not look like longevity to him. He is not the only one.

  Amongst their kind, factions arise without contracts or firm agreements, or much thought for the future. He has come together with two females, Ruth and Abigail, each of whom has seen in the shades and poise of the others, a kindred spirit. They have plans for the future, meaning not just tomorrow’s tomorrow but many generations hence, plans that will come to fruition long after their natural deaths. Such foresight is rare amongst their people. Each one of them is something of a genius, insofar as the term has any meaning.

  But they cannot work their science surrounded by the constant turnover of the orbital ring. Other factions would take from them or try to stop them, and Abigail and Ruth have plans that require considerable distance between them and their peers. They take a ship and let it fly out of the orbital society, heading inwards. For the two females, orbit around Nod is the only proper place for their research; for Noah, the abandoned orbital station contains data and human science lost in the long millennia of the octopusus’ rise on Damascus—lost when the old Aegean finally fell from orbit. Nothing he could not rediscover, perhaps, but after deducing its existence he wants it to make his plans a reality, and what he wants, his Reach attempts to realize for him. Also, it is the only place he can get the peace and quiet his mind needs to function.

  Their departure is marked. Eyes and instruments follow them, but for now they reach their destination unmolested. They have gone where it is forbidden, but Pandora’s Box is open already; how bad can it be? They find themselves in orbit around Nod.

  The old orbital station is there, calved off from the ancient Aegean and devoid of life or power. It was effectively abandoned long before Baltiel’s final, fatal discovery on Nod, but they knew how to set an orbit in those days. It will be a few thousand years more before this hulk falls into the arms of the planet below. Taking all due precautions, Noah and his fellows send out drones and then have their onboard factories build the necessary materials to dock with the vacant station and begin to buttress portions of it for aquatic habitation.

  Abigail and Ruth are greatly animated, and disposable drones are dispatched to view the planet’s surface. Much of it is an inhospitable hell—dry land, after all. The seas seethe with strange life and they watch, shuddering with strange emotions, as things devour things, or hang in the water like… unlike anything they are used to.

  And they find the old habitat, of course, though it is now little more than bones, its inorganic parts brought down by chemical dissolution but its plastics and other organic compounds holding out against an ecosystem that has no way to metabolize them.

  Abigail and Ruth plan to isolate the organism that came from Nod to despoil their planet. They intend to discover an antidote, a cure, a global vaccination. To them, there is only one future for their species, and that is to return to Damascus and conquer the sickness that has dissolved or maddened the majority of their kin. They do not think of their intention in quite that way, of course, but the breadth of vision of their Crowns combines with unusual ingenuity in their sub-brains to produce that end result.

  Noah disagrees with them. The three of them have plenty of resources to play with, and so he does not feel the need to compete with their plans, but he has given up on Damascus or any attempt to recapture the past. Noah sees only the future; his plan is escape.

  They recover the records of the survey team, fragmentary but still readable in part. Abigail and Ruth’s Reaches begin to digest the data; understanding percolates upwards, rendering the alien comprehensible. Samples are brought up from Nod, especially from the salt marsh biome. They find the “tortoises” and other host creatures that carry a certain colonial bacteria-analogue within them. By now the whole orbital is sealed and strengthened to permit experimental chambers with a rigorous quarantine protocol. They experiment.

  Noah picks clean the databanks of other morsels—star maps, engineering minutiae, scientific breakthroughs from Old Earth. He is trying to take the technology of his people in a new direction, driven by the desperate straits of his civilization. Humans once looked in that direction too, and though they never made it a reality, their theories feed into his Reach, filling his mind with possibilities. He only knows that he is approaching a breakthrough. He understands that what he wants is a tantalizing possibility, and can almost feel the shape of it within his grasp. The speculation and experiments of long-dead human scientists are filtered through his alien consciousness; his mind finds tangential courses unlike anything a human might propose and his arms enact tests in virtual space, making the numbers fight to the death for his pleasure.

  He builds something, or his arms tell his drones to build it, out on the exterior of the merged ship-orbital structure. It is a hideous thing, quite unlike either the human or the octopus architecture it juts from, and yet to Noah it has a certain beauty, a dramatic jagged reach into the infinite.

  For the stars are far away, but he understands that those who created his people walked there once. On another distant world, those humans are themselves the last inheritors of a dying planet, and they and Noah have both looked at those same star maps and faced the same problem. Where can we go? Their different solutions are not merely born of the distance between their phyla. Noah’s people have been incrementally building on the technology of their creators, stop-start, for a long time. The Gilgamesh’s architects had to start from scratch, hauling themselves from a second Stone Age. The Gilgamesh itself was ever a crude toy compared to the wonders of the Old Empire, but the pre-collapse Old Empire is the anchor Noah and his predecessors have built up from.

  The stars are too far away, and his people are not predisposed to think in terms of generation ships and cold sleep and a thousand years of travel. Noah wants results now, and because of the wealth of technological understanding he has inherited, he can do something about that. Six-eighths of his cerebral capacity, on all levels, are bent towards that one end.

  Octopus technological development is simultaneously the lone mad scientist and upon the shoulders of giants. To the Crown, every achievement is a solitary struggle, plucked from the whirling abyss of inspiration. To the Reach, progress is the result of colossal feats of calculation and analysis based on previously gathered data-sets. In their shared vessel, Noah, Ruth and Abigail brought a substantial copy of the work of previous generations, as it relates to their specialities and as it caught at their ephemeral interest at the time. Now they studiously ignore it while simultaneously pillaging it for all it is worth.

  Two-eighths of Noah’s attention remains with his colleagues. Much as he would prefer it—much as they all would—he cannot just ignore them. They are constantly in and out of the same systems, their virtual sucker-prints on the data and the electronic architecture. They squabble over the same resources, although such bickering never degenerates into serious conflict. There are days that they spend at opposite ends of their hybrid complex, brooding over grievances, but most of the time they greet one another with cautiously welcoming colours. And the two females ke
ep tabs on his researches, as he does theirs. Thus, he is very aware when something significant happens.

  Noah has instituted a certain level of internal quarantine between the females’ labs and his own, implemented by his Reach to ease the nagging worries of his Crown. The triggers he has left in the system alert him when the drones bring something big up out of Nod’s gravity well, far larger than any marsh-crawler or sun-drinking not-quite-plant. He has electronic eyes he can call on. What he sees… makes no sense. What he sees has a familiar shape, one he responds to at a very deep level: it is the shape of God; it is the shape of the past.

  There are sufficient accoutrements of human occupation still in the orbital’s shell, and he registers that the females have found the thing containment. He registers that they are now working on a problem not of epidemiology but of communication.

  It is not so long after this development that the three of them finally reap the disapproval of their peers.