Children of Ruin

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  “Factions,” Portia offers, still clinging to her back and with the advantage of being able to watch several sides at once. “Fluid.”

  Helena nods, too busy parsing information to reply. The octopuses are divided, but the members of any given party change constantly—winning adherents one moment, haemorrhaging support the next, and yet still continuing forwards even though, over the course of twenty minutes, a given faction might undergo a complete change of shift, with none of its original members remaining and yet its argument—whatever that was—carried forward by whichever individuals now comprise it. We’re watching memes fight. There is an Old Earth phrase Kern used sometimes, about a boat whose every part was replaced, and was it the same boat then? Kern probably feels the philosophical lash of that particular dilemma more than most, but here is an entire society that exuberantly embraces the idea, or so it seems to Helena.

  Beyond that, though, it isn’t hard to see that most of the points of view being expressed around her are angry, full of ugly colours—reds, purples, the white of fear, by far the most readily translatable sentiments she has come across. Likewise, that she and Portia are the target.

  So treat that as the background, she tells herself, and configures her headware to do just that. What else is there?

  Portia is ahead of her, or perhaps she is better at sifting patterns from the chaos. “Some of them are quieter.” Visually quieter, obviously, but she flags up little cliques for Helena’s benefit, sub-systems of different colours moving through the busy throng like veins. When individuals meet, there might be a sudden exchange of grappling or a flicker of complex colours, but they are turned inwards, and many seem to be displaying the angry colours right up until such meetings, then donning them again immediately afterwards. Like a fifth column, she thinks, and that of course raises a whole other level of linguistic difficulty because it suggests these colours can be feigned at need, and does that mean they fake the emotions behind them, or…?

  Helena feels her brain ready to snap. No more revelations. Let me get to grips with what I’ve got.

  The universe is not about to oblige her. She hadn’t realized that her surroundings were rotating. However, just as she feels she can take nothing more aboard without sinking, the planet begins to sail ponderously into view below/above/before her, its leading edge steadily eclipsing the great window. The furious displays of the octopuses seem to calm, somewhat, or perhaps become more uniform. All of them are scared. All of them are filled with revulsion. Any subtleties of mood or communication show only as a flickering about the edges of their mantles.

  Sub-screens begin to spring up, spreading like puddles across the concave surface from points around the window, showing her magnified views of the world below, and she understands that this is some intentional drama they are staging for her. She is being shown something so that they can see how she might react, but not in her cell, not in laboratory conditions. They want to make this a grand opera for her; the fifth act of a tragedy.

  The world below is mottled, its oceans streaked and muddied and slicked over with dark, oily colours. In many of the sub-windows she has a clear view of the surface, tides rolling endlessly, frothy with organic residue, seething with… life? Something moves down there, certainly. There is a frenetic motion at the edge of each wave as though the very sea-foam is animate, and then other windows show her larger things, vast, unformed, like the decaying carcases of leviathans. She tries to understand the scale from the size of the waves, relying on the constancy of liquid physics. Thoughts of huge sea-beasts become thoughts of islands, archipelagos, land-masses. She watches a colossal mud flat writhe and quiver and reach up towards her vantage point with tentacles and limbs that dissolve back into slime even as they form. Then, just for a moment, there is something of a face, a human face, or perhaps several, for the features blur and blend. She sees lips gape, the half-made visage trying to vomit forth meaning before collapsing back into formless nothing.

  Portia has been calculating and sends her over an estimate of scale. Four kilometres from chin to forehead unless there is something wrong with the waves. And of course there is something wrong with the waves. There is something wrong with all of it. The world has been overtaken by a churning pandemic that leaves nothing but itself. That is what they feared; that is what came from the other world. That is what her fellows had gone to find and why the octopuses, or some of them, some proactive faction of wardens, destroyed them. In that moment she can only nod numbly along with the sentiment.

  3.

  Fabian has been in a fugue state. It happens to both genders, although the Portiids still tacitly consider it a male condition despite centuries of social change. There was a great deal of heat, which the spiders cannot shift as quickly as mammals. There was a lot of noise and movement that came to him like the thundering voice of a god. There was fear. All together the sensory load simply overwhelmed his sense of self and he ceased to be Fabian for a while. Some fuguing Portiids run around like mad things but Fabian feels that he has been frozen still, clinging to a wall that is now a ceiling.

  They are down.

  He cannot process what that means quite yet. He feels the fugue hovering nearby, waiting for its moment. It is enough to enjoy the comparative quiet. Enough to consider that there is a slightly uncomfortable amount of gravity that has the distinctive savour of the real thing, and not its rotational stepsister. None of that makes sense but he holds off on too much analysis in case he turns up answers he won’t like. Not that, he considers, any answers to be had are likely to be amiable in any way.

  Meshner, he sends out, finding that he can access the ship’s comms channels. He has no sense of Kern, meaning nothing he has to say would mean anything to his Human confederate.

  And of course Meshner isn’t there. Meshner went onto the orbiting station. Meshner is gone.

  The fugue leaps on him. Fabian hasn’t had an attack for many years before this, but when he was a moult or two off full adulthood he suffered greatly from the fits. Back in the old days, that would have been a death sentence for a male—either killed out of annoyance or for sport, or starving because he could not be useful in the way males were supposed to be. Nowadays the times are more enlightened; a little handicap is recognized as nothing more than that. Even in a male.

  And he fights it off, this time. He goes straight through it and out the other side, because to forget Fabian, comforting though that might be, would be to forget Meshner, and that would be poor service to his colleague and experimental subject.

  He is already wondering if there might possibly be a way to retrieve the implant. Cold, he knows, but… science!

  He builds on that, slowly re-establishing his understanding of what has happened. The fugue has several more goes at him, because (as suspected), nothing he works out is remotely encouraging.

  The crew section of the Lightfoot is considerably rounder than it was, its walls buttressed. He recognizes this from drills back over Kern’s World. Their chamber has been made an emergency capsule, the walls thickened to become strong but yielding and flexible, able to cushion impacts and shed heat. What remains of the rest of the ship is unknown so far. He is not finding Kern on his personal comms menu, and he is not sure how to engage damage control without the computer. It is possible that this capsule, containing two Portiids, is all that is left. The light is bluish, drawn from chemicals mingled from reservoirs broken when the chamber reconfigured into its emergency state. Possibly there is no power, which means that the continued congeniality of the air is going to be a problem.

  Viola is present, bandaging herself, mostly ignoring him even though it’s literally just the two of them. Two of her legs are broken, left three and four, and she is sealing the breaches in her exoskeleton before her internal structure loses too much fluid. Fabian feels a keen need inside himself to ask her what has happened and what must be done, which he irritably rejects as the result of a lifetime of social conditioning. That irritability completes him, ma
kes him fully Fabian again, and he takes stock.

  They were attacked and the Lightfoot’s defensive measures were inadequate to protect them from a long-range barrage that hit them almost on the heels of the first warning they had of it. This raises some uncomfortable implications, including (1) the locals were able to analyse Kern’s evasion and detection ability from the first clash and neutralize it; (2) the locals could effectively have destroyed the Lightfoot at any time after becoming aware of it, and at any distance, and perhaps only their bizarre factionalism left the action so long.

  On the other hand, Fabian and Viola, at least, remain very much alive. Fabian marks that up as a substantial plus.

  On the other, other hand, they are evidently no longer spacebound. In fact the only place they can reasonably be is on the surface of the planet they were formerly orbiting, and Fabian now knows a remarkable amount about the biology of this alien world. What he also knows, although he has no explicable mechanism for it, is that something on this world has the ability to infect Earth-born life.

  We remain inviolate, Viola states, without turning her major eyes on him or pausing in her patient medical attention. Fabian deduces that his feet had been betraying his thoughts.

  Again, he will not simply ask for orders or reassurance. Instead, he tries to coax anything at all out of the panels and consoles despite the universal lack of power. He feels Viola’s disdain through the prickling hairs of his abdomen, but then has a flash of triumph as the ship thrums about them and minimalist readouts sprout dimly on some of the screens.

  Did I do that? he wonders, briefly taken by his own capability, followed by the resignation of: No, it’s Kern.

  For a long, yawning moment there is no more, as though this fragment of the brilliant mind of Doctor Avrana Kern has been reduced to nothing but dumb numbers, but then she speaks to them, directly into their individual comms. To the Portiid senses, Kern’s voice can be a fantastically rich and expressive thing—she has been talking to them for far longer than she ever spoke to her own kind—but right now it is shorn of qualifiers, a mere transmission of information; she is either damaged or occupied in dealing with damage.

  Yes, crew section intact. Quarantine section located, reports damaged. Power minimal but under restoration. Life support adequate but under restoration. External comms minimal but under restoration. Motive ability, none. Fabrication ability, none but investigating.

  Fabian and Viola look sidelong at each other, something they are uniquely designed to do.

  Quarantine section? he asks timidly because, last he checked, the Lightfoot didn’t have one.

  Zaine, Viola states. She hobbles forward: no jumping for this spider for the foreseeable future, until she can get some prosthetics manufactured. And she’s right, of course. Zaine got back to the ship, unlike poor Meshner, but she was put into quarantine for fear of airborne particles of whatever-that-was on her suit. She had been undergoing, or about to undergo, decontamination when the attack hit.

  Quarantine section reports dwindling power and danger of structural integrity loss. Zaine Alpash Vannix alive. Request received for replacement environment suit and retrieval. Artifabian unit not detected. No other mechanical units available.

  Artifabian was, of course, in the quarantined section as well, and that Kern cannot link to it does not bode well for Fabian’s research assistant. Viola is eyeing him, though, and he is aware that she is currently excused the traditional bold and venturesome female’s role. Not that she would likely have taken the chance to prove her valour, in his assessment. Viola is neither bold nor venturesome by temperament, and in the old days she would have had males scuttling about to perform her every whim, especially anything that involved the expenditure of energy or the assumption of risk. Or so his bitter thoughts run now, as he dons the cumbersome all-over hazard suit Viola finds for him. Most Portiid environment suits just focus on those parts of the exoskeleton that give ingress to the innards, but Fabian is more than happy to deny the hostile biosphere outside any access to him.

  By using up most of the energy she has accumulated, Kern reforms a hull section into a cramped airlock and lets him in, and then out the other side. He checks the readouts: yes, probably there will be sufficient power for the reverse transition; yes, probably the atmosphere scrubbers and generators will be able to keep up with attrition if they have to traipse in and out a few times. Probably. Kern is being frighteningly vague on topics where Fabian would prefer a computer to be rigorous and exacting.

  Higher functions restoration? he asks, none-too-tactfully.

  I am very well, thank you. Kern’s reply is acid, a decided taste of her usual manner, and therefore infinitely reassuring. I am working on keeping you all alive. By all means continue to distract me from that.

  Fabian goes outside.

  The readouts from his hazard suit (which has its own power and seems almost painfully cheery in its enthusiastic reporting, compared to dour, wounded Kern) tell him that the atmosphere is thin and oxygen-deficient (a bigger problem to Fabian than to a Human but he has no intention of breathing it anyway), and he attributes this at least in part to altitude, because the Lightfoot’s remnants have come down on a mountainous altiplano, and in one direction the ground simply shears away to distant, hazy valleys. He sends a brief description back and Kern informs him, I selected a landing spot that seemed isolated and was also remote from the location of the earlier human colony on this planet, in the hope that the threat they faced was local. Her use of the concept “landing” is reassuring.

  Within a half-kilometre there is a slumped mess of hull material, partially unspooled into great drifts of filaments, which is the quarantine section. It plainly must have come down attached to the rest of the ship to be so close, either broken loose or intentionally jettisoned on impact. Fabian gives the intervening ground a careful look, because this high plain is not devoid of life. The ground is stippled with hollows, and each hollow holds something like an upturned nine-legged starfish, or perhaps a leathery flower. The face it presents to the wan sunlight is so uniformly black that it gives the impression of a hole into the darkness of space. The sides and underside, where the tendrils have curled up slightly, are dust-orange and rugged. They move very slightly, canting and flexing in extreme slow motion to make the most of the light. Between the hollows, there are groups of far smaller specimens which Fabian decides are juveniles, but which might be vagabond males seeking mates or hive-drones serving their sessile queens for all he truly knows. These little stars inch across the bare rock at a pace a slug would scoff at.

  Fabian does not fancy the trip at all, but a moment later he is skittering madly for the quarantine section, vaulting high over any living thing in his way. When he is almost at his target a shadow ghosts over him and he quails, his upper eyes registering a long, trailing thing like a kite left to its own recognisance, rippling through the sky above. He guesses it is about twenty metres long, more than enough to make a meal of any Portiid or Human should it be so inclined. Like the starfish, though, it pays him no need at all, and perhaps its upper side is also a solar collector and it lives an endless, mindless round of sunbathing, following noon about the planet’s circumference.

  Or perhaps not. He had believed himself fairly knowledgeable about the local biology before setting foot on the surface, given the recorded research diaries of Lante, but there is a world of difference between hearing a scientist’s analyses of protein formation and cellular structure and standing on an alien world, viewing its alien denizens with his own eyes.

  It comes to him, as he reaches the quarantine pod, that this, this, is the Understanding he will bequeath to his species, should he survive. He is the first Portiid to be here, to see these things. His scientific genius may be lost, but this moment of fear and wonder will survive.

  If he had considered that ahead of time, he would have been thinking brave and creditable thoughts throughout, instead of the panicky twitching he has given free rein to.

&nb
sp; He finds an access to the pod, but he needs to know the conditions inside. Hopefully Zaine has been told to expect him. He links to the internal comms.

  Arrived. Your situation?

  Do you have suit?

  He does, of course, and confirms it.

  Will open small lock, comes the next message. No power for more. Put suit in. Wait.

  He is receiving untranslated Portiid communication, he realizes, which seems precocious for Zaine, but the instructions are sound and he follows them.

  Suit applied ready we are coming out.

  Fabian skitters back a little, because he is not sure who or what he is talking to right now. Is it Kern? It doesn’t sound enough like her to inspire confidence. And then the wall of the quarantine section is unseamed and, just before it becomes obvious, he works it out: Artifabian, but an Artifabian that is not linking properly to his comms but operating the manual transmitter in the downed section. Then the slit wall bulges, and a suited figure slumps out: Zaine, but plainly not conscious or well. Fabian finds Human injuries hard to analyse even without a suit in the way—they are so fleshy and unfinished, with all their organs trapped between their hard skeletons and the hazards of the outside world!

  How is she? he taps out for Artifabian, and the robot responds exactly as another male Portiid might, body language and all.

  We were both harmed in the landing. She lives but has sustained injury. We must get her more substantial help.

  Despite the medical emergency, Fabian is fascinated. The robot stands there just like the thing it feigns, moving its palps in a repeated idling pattern because being too still is, for the Portiids, a stance filled with emotional meaning, either predator or prey. Casual fidgeting is their smiling and nodding, a low-level reinforcement of their often-fraught social contracts. And obviously, simulating a Portiid is the point of Kern’s experiment with Artifabian, but it appears to have forgotten to simulate Kern. Its casing is dented in many places and one leg is askew, but there has plainly been some deeper damage with unexpected results. The scientist in Fabian twitches to study, but they have other priorities.