Children of Ruin

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  Right about now, however, the attentions of both the aliens and the rest of the octopus crew are not on Paul, because they have company. A warship has come to join them.

  The science vessel Outside Peering In is still accelerating, of course, not having reached the halfway point of its journey. Cushioned within the water, Paul feels the force more as a sense of depth than motion, but by now, after days of this travel, their overall speed through the frictionless void of space is truly incredible compared to… what? In relation to the planet they left, or to the planet their curving course is intended to intercept, they are moving very fast indeed, but neither of those celestial bodies are present for comparison. The warship, Shell That Echoes Only, has effortlessly matched not only their velocity but their acceleration, and so the two ships hang motionless next to one another, weirdly peaceful.

  And “warship” is a misnomer, really. That is its current purpose, but the Shell itself is what Paul thinks of as a Homeship, a place to live now that the place where they all used to live has gone spoiled and rotten. Except that fights happen, between individuals, between groups, between communities. They happen spontaneously and create more fights, so that the roots of them, the scarcity of resources or incompatible ideologies, no longer matter. And so, when the whim took them, in fits and starts, ships began to be converted for war. Now this great orb bristles with weapons between its omnidirectional thrusters, and the science ship has nothing, or nothing that Paul can see. Except these molluscs he has fallen in with are a clever lot, bound together by the precise way their (subconscious) intellect works. Their minds are just as averse to being caged as the rest of their kind but those minds apply the same will to escape and manipulate and pry to the universe and its laws. There has always been such a current amongst the octopuses, from the very start, and it has always flowed about on the fringe, frequently pushed down by more conservative elements whipped into sudden anxiety by the threat of this or that experiment. In better days such a suppression was perhaps no more than a forced dismantling of equipment or a heated exchange of skin tones. Now, with their entire civilization clinging to the brink of dissolution, the stakes are higher and the violence deadlier.

  And yet, they are not savages. That they can be very quick to fight does not mean that violence is their first resort. Instead, the group in current command of the warship is deploying an appeal. Colours begin to spill over the vast curved hull of the vessel, easily visible at this distance. Paul jets over to his console and receives the rest of the message, cold calculations of threat and entreaty, but the colours are more important. The numbers are mere sterile capability; the colours are intent. The warship faction are making an impassioned plea that nobody should venture to that cursed planet again—the fear, the horror! The scientists are starting to mix their own response, the various spheres of their chain-ship tinting different colours, a collection of slightly varying voices raised in protest. From the relatively relaxed stances of all concerned—and the distance to their destination—Paul knows this posturing will go on for some time. He has a sudden inspiration. The interplay between the neural centres of his Reach has been working on the problem ever since he felt the desire, and now it has found a solution. All Paul knows is that he wants to talk to the aliens now.

  Helena almost misses the window on a landmark interspecies contact because of her understandable focus on the colossal ship outside. Perhaps for intimidation purposes, the warship has drawn so close that she can see moving motes in some clear parts of it that might be individual cephalopods thronging the windows to get a look at their soon-to-be-destroyed prey. She can see the weapons, too; the common roots of their technology leave little to the imagination on that score. Colours begin to spread across the enormous curved canvas, translucent filters washing and intermingling as the warship begins broadcasting a dozen different threats and demands all at once, on a scale so large that her software, her mere Human eyes, simply cannot process it. All she can do is stare at the colours and know them as angry and belligerent.

  Then Portia, blessed with a wider field of vision, plucks at Helena’s sleeve with her palps. “The ambassador one is signalling you.”

  “Now?” Helena demands, because the wretched creature had just floated there obliviously for an age during the tedium of the long flight. Now they are about to be smashed into atoms, though, it has turned chatty. Or perhaps it is formally telling them that they are about to be handed over for summary execution.

  The juncture point between their spherical chambers has changed, becoming a magnifying lens so that the colours of the octopus are very clear. It broadcasts slowly—a whirl of agitation dances at the edge of its mantle, up and down its arms and around its eyes, but at the centre it is practically plodding, one shade shifting slowly to another as it tries to spell something out for her. Three or four tentacles coil about its console as though trying to pry the device from its housing.

  “Helena, transmissions,” Portia notes. “Very different format.”

  Helena accesses them, finds them at first to be nonsense, a series of chopped-up files, split seconds of visual data, audio recordings, numbers: quite unlike the usual semi-comprehensible data the creatures usually broadcast. A wave of despair surges over her. Have I not understood anything at all? And she looks at the ambassador and sees a kindred feeling in the half-suppressed flickering that keeps attempting to erupt across its skin. They are both up against the comprehension gap. It is trying to get through to her for the first time.

  Then Portia finds the sequence: the jumbled pieces on the data channel were sent out of order, as though plucked from a great archive by a half-dozen separate whims and thrown together. There are sequencing indicators tagged to them, though. The puzzle can be reassembled. Helena looks over the resulting whole, briefly despairing again at the chaos, then realizes what she is looking at. She has seen these fragments before. They are pieces of Senkovi, his recordings, words, expressions. They are out of context now, strung together without any respect for their original order, but she plays through them in the new sequence: Senkovi teaching, crying, laughing, speaking to off-camera colleagues, eating, most of all conversing with his pets, the distant forebears of this bizarre spacefaring civilization. It should just be a mess, and she knows there is no “Senkovi” behind it, but she comes to the end with the impression of a coherent message, even though none of the exact words made sense. She plays it again, letting Senkovi stutter and jump from second to second, seeing his face, his expressions that are human yet not Human, separated from her by an age of time and loss.

  He is talking about struggle, about experiment, unwise perhaps, condemned perhaps; resistance from others, pressing on regardless, a moment of wild maniac enthusiasm for the project of the moment, a moment of crushing depression because everything seems about to fail. A storm of feeling, but translated into human emotions, tagged with odd words that condense the denotations, polished until she can… see her face in it, a human face giving human import. And all the while the Octopus stares at her features, her eyes, everything visible within her mask, and perhaps it has magnified its view of that, looking for expression even as she tries to watch its colours.

  And a part of her sits back, somewhat mulishly, and thinks: You couldn’t have done this before?

  So far, so good. Now she has to speak back to it. Portia is already feeding her useful data flags to let her identify their own ship, the warship, the planets, the abstract concept of beyond to indicate their own origin. Helena takes it and begins speaking colours back to the ambassador. Repeating herself, mostly, save that this time it is watching her intently. This time she feels a connection—not just of one living thing recognizing another, which she had felt from their first meeting, but of another sentient mind fumbling with the same puzzle, trying to cooperate with her in the solving.

  We come in peace. We need to speak with our friends. We need to help them.

  And all the while the greater debate flashes in a thousand hues fr
om the hulls of both vessels.

  11.

  Zaine is awake, but in pain. Fabian has some medical knowledge of Humans, but it is mostly neurology. The library of Understandings they would normally rely on is inaccessible, possibly gone for good unless they can get back to the Voyager. The synthesizing equipment that should produce things as basic as on-demand analgesics is not functioning, nor does it appear on the list of systems Kern is working on. Kern’s communications with the downed crew are steadily dwindling. It has been some time since anyone heard the familiar thrum of her voice through their feet. Viola has ordered and demanded and cajoled and even, when she thought Fabian was otherwise occupied, pleaded with the computer. Kern now communicates only through the consoles, giving brief, functional reports stripped of all personality. When Viola attempts a system-wide survey she discovers that, far from the minimal functioning she expects, Kern’s entire array is in furious activity, organic and inorganic both. Her electronic centres are running to capacity, slowly edging out the tasks required to maintain the crashed Lightfoot. Her ants, which deal with breadth of thought and parallel problem solving, are undergoing some kind of a crisis. The insects are in frenetic motion, constantly communing with each other as they shuttle data from antennae to antennae, each ant devoting its little collection of neurons to tiny subsets of reasoning, then recombining these with its neighbours, surveying, coming to decisions, going away to recalculate. The lightning speed of her electronic elements is Kern’s forebrain, making decisions and presiding over a vast and distributed decision-making engine housed in the various ant-colonies she commands. To Kern, it is all Kern, the illusion of a unified whole. To Viola, it is not clear how much of Kern is left, if any, but whatever is there is busy. She fears it is merely spinning the wheels, helplessly out of control. The ants are so ferociously active they have ceased to conduct their own regular maintenance. Dead workers are beginning to pile up, and that leads only to a dead colony (and the lobotomizing of Kern) if not remedied. And none of the crew can remedy it, only Kern.

  Viola is a pragmatist, though. She is isolating sections of the computer architecture, stealing neurons from Kern’s frenzy. In this way she is hoping to sustain life support, hull integrity and their meagre repair efforts. She knows that if Kern—or some dysfunctional chaos currently occupying Kern’s place—notices then things may get ugly, because Kern may take it all back with extreme prejudice.

  Working away, Viola remarks one conclusion to Fabian. Whatever the computer is doing is not mere chaos. She can see just enough to guess at patterns, and their comms array has been repeatedly modified to better allow it to transmit—not to the Voyager, but to the orbital drones and station. Kern is shunting a colossal amount of data up and down the gravity well and Viola cannot even begin to guess why.

  Artifabian, the third member of their crew and still blessedly disconnected from Kern, is tending to Zaine. It has retained more vertebrate medical knowledge than either of its living fellows, and continues to behave like a polite, deferential male Portiid, which Viola finds comforting and Fabian annoying.

  And then, unlooked-for, utterly beyond optimism, the comms light up with a signal.

  Lightfoot, Kern, Viola, Fabian, Zaine, Meshner, anyone? A string of names in reassuring Portiid speech.

  Lightfoot crew, he responds. Fabian present. Portia?

  Viola rushes over to jostle knees with him, leaving Zaine across the crew chamber waiting anxiously for news.

  Portia present, the speaker confirms. I don’t know how long we have. Tell me your circumstances.

  Fabian does so, letting Viola dictate the briefest but most informative situation report possible, stressing just how little of everything they have left. And you? he adds at the end.

  Despite her warning about time, Portia hesitates for just enough to set Fabian’s nerves twanging again. We are travelling towards you in a ship controlled by some kind of scientist faction amongst the molluscs. Their purpose is not currently to effect a rescue but Helena and I are attempting to persuade them. Her speech is coming over crudely, shorn of the proper interface that would add character and subtext to it, but Fabian can pick up from the very rhythms that she is not confident about the outcome of such persuasion. There is a complication, also. Another vessel is accompanying us. Its purpose is hostile, and it is linked with the vessel that attacked you. Currently however, there is a dialogue.

  At Viola’s urgent palp-waving, Fabian asks, with creditable calmness, Expand, please.

  Our crew have some manner of scientific purpose that the enemy ship wants to prevent, but thus far it is all… leg measuring. Posturing with colours. If they were not so powerful and their ships so large, it would be amusing. If we were not so helpless. Portia’s frustration is clear through any number of technical limitations. But there is a dialogue.

  And the ship that attacked us?

  Is currently in orbit about the planet’s moon. It appears to be willing to take its cue from the vessel accompanying us. For now. As we have seen, these creatures are inconstant.

  Viola looms at Fabian’s side, about to shoulder him out of the way, but then reconsidering, her stance indicating a strainedly polite request to take the comms console. Fabian surrenders it with equal professionalism.

  What is the cause of their hostility? Viola sends.

  Viola? There is precious little difference to the flat transmission, but Portia has doubtless adjusted her body language to speak female to female. There’s an infection agent present on the planet you’ve come down on. The molluscs are terrified of it. Their whole planet is infested with it and they don’t want it getting anywhere else. Which complicates lifting you from the planet and retrieving our hosts’ science records or whatever they are after.

  Viola gives a shivery little stamping of feet, a wordless expression of excitement and inspiration. Portia, I—We have been working on the station transmission. We have come to a good understanding of that agent. It is a great deal more than you think. It is… a remarkable discovery.

  I’ve seen it at work. It scares me too, Portia tells her flatly, she who is most noted for her recklessness.

  Portia, you have a communications channel to the molluscs? Viola presses.

  Thanks to Helena we do. It is not precise, but we can transmit moderately complex ideas some of the time.

  Viola’s legs brace, as though she is about to make a very risky leap. Then we have leverage. We have the Lante account, and we can work through it freely here. If they have an enemy, we can help them understand it. Perhaps we can even start them towards containing it, disrupting it, anything like that. But they need us. They need us off this planet and safe and cooperating willingly with them. Can you tell them that?

  I can tell the science faction, Portia replies uncertainly. If we can make them understand, they can tell the war faction, but I don’t know if it will help.

  Try, Viola directs her. It’s the only purchase we have on them.

  Viola’s technical Understandings make her best suited to the work with the Lightfoot’s systems, which are constantly threatening them with power loss, life-support malfunction, failure of the food fabricators. Mired in this short-term but essential work she has passed the Lante archive to Fabian, telling him to get to grips with the zoological miscellanea transmitted by the station, or by the thing on the station. Having seen what he saw down in the fake city, Fabian would be absolutely in agreement with her even without the threat of spaceborne destruction and is sifting through the material as best he can, trying to build a picture of an alien biosphere using a source that for all he knows is nine-tenths fiction.

  Some sections are nonsense, just text arranged like Old Empire words but without meaning, an illiterate’s copy. Some sections seem to mesh neatly with the way Fabian would expect an ancient human scientist to write—theirs was a ritualistic and formal presentation he has always found lacking in effect, and the Portiids are very familiar with it because Avrana Kern was one of that class, and still lap
ses into the idiom on occasion. And then there are the other sections, the later sections as far as he can tell. In fact, Fabian is forming a pattern in his mind, as Portiids and humans will do, left to their own devices. He has seen the ancient, curated images from the Old Empire mission to this forsaken world. There was a woman named Lante in them, and she was infected, as were they all. Infected and struck down by her commander, but who knows what happened after Baltiel’s viewpoint moved on?

  And Fabian orders the entries based on Old Empire dating methods and best guess, and finds the anatomy of a transformation in which human intelligence is overwhelmed, dissolved into frothing chaos and then reconstituted like a metamorphosing insect, until something emerges that takes up the diary and tries to do science without understanding what science is or what words are. But eventually it learned, and the last few entries are almost lost in the noise because Fabian initially nests them within the early documents, so lucid do they seem.

  At last, his chronology complete, he scurries up the wall and looks down on the screen where it is all laid out and tries to consider just what the implications are of a woman who died and was made again—and perhaps again and again—but never seemed to acknowledge or realize the fact. He reads of the life of Nod, as Lante called this planet. He reads of radial symmetry, hydrostatic skeletons and all the other ways that Lante translated the alien into biological concepts fit for a human scientist. And the heredity, owing nothing to DNA, information recorded in fine detail in the arrangements of atoms on the inside of membranes, vastly more energy efficient than Earth chromosomes, so that the inheritable material in any cell-analogue of, say, one of those sunbathing starfish takes up less than 0.1 per cent of the space occupied by the genes of an average Portiid or human cell. Except this is where something has gone wrong—either with the record or with evolution—because Lante, in her latter days, is fascinated by a species where that is not true at all, where the inherited instructions passed on to fleeting new generations seem ridiculously abundant.