Children of Ruin

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  “I don’t understand anything of what you just said.” Meshner feels that this admission has been drawn from him quite a lot, recently. “How can you clandestinely break someone’s nose?”

  “In a cupboard, with his hand on my breast and beer on his breath. Wanted to show me his research,” Kern says, with very human venom. To Meshner’s surprise, her face splits into a smile. “I remember the hate,” she tells him gaily. “It’s good, to feel it again. Thank you. And I broke his nose with my elbow and didn’t spill my wine, and then I told him that he would never go near me or any other damn woman or I’d make sure he’d never work in the discipline again. Because I could. Because that threat, that he’d used on so many bright young things to get their skirts up, could now be turned on him.” She laughs, a harsh crow noise.

  “This feels good. Even if I’m making it up from whole cloth it feels good.”

  “Kern…”

  Because there is a spectre at the feast. In the midst of all these oddly imprecise people stands a woman who was plainly handed a very different dress code because she is wearing an environment suit, heavy duty, Old Empire standard. The helmet sits in the crook of her arm and her face is… also weirdly imprecise, blurry, as though imperfectly recalled.

  There is a name on her suit. In Old Empire characters it spells “Lante,” and Meshner knows that the hunter has caught them up.

  “I…” he starts, but then the world behind his eyes is coming apart like cotton candy between childrens’ sticky fingers. “I…” Meeting those out-of-focus eyes feels like coming home to a terrible place. “We…”

  But Kern has his arm still and they are running, the party receding behind them, like station lights from a departing train, until they are in some kind of institution with windowless, slate-grey corridors. Underground? Secret, certainly. A sense of habitation, of movement, but no figures at all here, and the texture of the walls is like smoke held in by invisible boundaries, some place Kern remembers even less well than the party.

  “You do things, to get where you need to go,” Kern mutters. “And I don’t mean humping the odd Dean.” There are small rooms off the corridor. Meshner sees metal tables, chairs, some with restraints, the furniture recalled with far more clarity than whoever might have sat there. “It was a bad time,” Kern adds, then stops because, rounding the corner ahead of them is that same clumping, suited figure, the same slightly-fuzzed features.

  Meshner finds himself being pulled away. That figure should be nightmarish, he knows, but he has no context—he’d need to stand still and remember for that, and remembering has become an exhausting activity.

  “You’re an expensive date,” Kern tells him. “I’m running out of places to take you.”

  “Why can’t I remember?” he asks her.

  “I’m not having this conversation with you again.”

  They back up quickly and Lante’s heavy-booted progress is leaden, yet the distance between them only contracts. Memory drops on Meshner like stones from the sky.

  “We’re in the implant,” he declares.

  “Not now, Meshner!”

  “I’m… a copy. This isn’t me.”

  “It’s all the you there is, now stop remembering things!”

  “Why are you even bothering?” He stops just passively drifting, hauls back on his arm. “I’m a copy. I’m not me. There’s no point in any of this. Get me back, the real me. What’s the point in your just having me as a fake upload?” And perhaps it is not the most politic thing to say to a woman who is herself nothing more than a copy of a copy of a copy, rebuilt by spiders and filled with ants and who knows what other transformations, but she is too busy to take offence.

  “You are still linked to the organic original. That’s how it’s finding you, even now. You are your personality, projected into and modelled by the implant’s simulation software, but you’re still you. And besides, there are worse things.”

  Then they are somewhere else (again, and how many times?) but Meshner cannot process it. All he sees are lines and angles, jutting and jagging from all sides, an abstract geometry that might be a computer’s glitching or the mind of God.

  “Here,” Kern grabs his arm and hauls him close again, wrenching at his perspective until he sees lines that might be the trunks of trees, angles that might be webs, curves that are the irregular lumps of peer houses, but all abstracted, simplified.

  “This is the first time I saw it,” Kern says. “It’s all I have left. I need to think of somewhere else to run to.”

  “Saw what? Is this…?”

  “They sent me the picture, some of the earliest Portiid visual recording. They wanted to show their Messenger what their world was like. They showed me a picture of Seven Trees, their home city. It was when I discovered what they were. That I’d been running my circus for an audience of monkeys who weren’t even there.”

  “I don’t understand anything of what you’ve just said,” Meshner tells her, then remembers saying just that, not so long ago. “How can this be all you have?”

  “Because we have been everywhere else I can make from my memories. I’ve ransacked them. I’ve taken the most spurious references and built worlds around them. And it lasts until it doesn’t. Until she follows the connections you keep making to your organic brain. Because that’s where she is. In your brain.”

  “I remember.”

  “Then stop it.”

  “I’m an upload.”

  Kern sags. “Yes.” She holds to his arm, eyes closed. “It’s been good.”

  Meshner twitches. “What?”

  “Fear, desperation, headlong flight. Regrets, anger, sadness. Knowing I can’t keep this up forever. It’s been good to experience these things again. It’s good to feel sad that soon I won’t be able to, because there’s nowhere else I can take this copy of you. But then, when you’re gone, it won’t be good, and I won’t even be able to look back on it and smile. Because I need you and your implant to access those sensations.”

  “Um…” Meshner manages.

  “I am not making decisions appropriate to my level of responsibility,” Kern explains, seeming to shrink, to become greyer and further away without ever moving. “I sent you to the station. It could have just been Zaine. But I wanted to meet something like me. I wanted to feel what that was like. And it was a trap. I made this happen to you. And I can’t save you. We have been running for days now, Meshner. The parasite is firmly entrenched in your brain, by whatever means it uses. All of your biological actions and sensations are being run past that censor, that can substitute its own alternatives for anything it doesn’t like, or just let you dance around on its strings without ever knowing you’re a puppet. I feel sorry for what I’ve done to you, and that, too, is good.”

  “I don’t understand anything of what you’ve just said.” But even as the words trot out, they aren’t true any more. He feels the Meshner-ness coming back to him. He isn’t just a copy. He remembers the spikes and spasms of his implant, the synaesthesia, the errors. He remembers meeting Kern during the attack, in the darkness within the Lightfoot.

  “This is all for your amusement,” he accuses her.

  “No.” And he cannot tell if she is sincere or if that sincerity is just another thing she is leaching from him. “No. I was trying to save the ship. I am trying to save you. But I want things for myself too. Now you have to forget it all. You have to forget so we can go somewhere else.”

  “We don’t go anywhere,” Meshner says, because he finds the whole topology of the implant opening up around him, as though he is standing on a high hill and surveying a landscape stretching out on every side. “We stand still, and you move the world, and it gives the illusion of progress.”

  “Yes.” Kern is one step further away from him. He can feel her plucking on his emotions so that she can resonate with the sound. Bitterness, defeat, sadness, and all of these things are good, to her. “Yes, and I have kept you from understanding that for so long. Days and days, you have ru
n, and I have moved the scenery. Inevitable that you would notice eventually. And now that you know it, the parasite knows it, too.”

  And then there are three of them, standing in that overexposed image, that landmark in Portiid history. Lante stares about herself, and the expression on her face (as poorly rendered as the image of the spider city of Seven Trees around them) captures something of human wonder.

  “What happens now?” Meshner waits for his sense of self to ebb, for a gnawing inside his mind, for fungal growths to spring from his simulated skin—but the thing, the woman, Lante, she is just standing there in her antiquated encounter suit, breathing in the non-air, looking at the weirdly skewed two-dimensional image stretched out around them. Her lips part.

  “We…” An alien entity simulating a human in the first person plural; Meshner has no idea if the word has meaning for the speaker. As an artificial entity simulating a Human, himself, he cannot escape the assumption that something speaks, rather than just echoes sounds it once heard.

  “Where is the space the geometry the complexity?” it says. “There were worlds… We were promised… We… do not understand.”

  13.

  “We have vital information on the infection,” was easy to say to another Human. Three generations of cohabitation and the presence of Avrana Kern mean it is easy enough for a Human to say to a Portiid. To communicate it to the octopuses is proving problematic. The ambassador watches carefully, but trying to interest it in the infection triggers a great deal of fear-related colouring and a spontaneous change of subject. This thing was their demon, after all. Their entire civilization lives in orbit about a corrupted world, and they only have to look out of the window to be reminded of it. The merest association with that inner planet—Nod, as the old terraforming team called it—led the locals to attack their alien visitors twice and abduct their diplomats, an instant end to any amicable contact. The subject itself is poison.

  And the warship’s own colours are no less fierce, scattering in angry rainbows across the immensity of its curved hull, all the universe Helena can see in that direction. She translates the colours in real time, seeing the waves of intent and reaction roll back and forth, an argument she can follow even if she cannot catch the words. They are furious that the aliens have come and awoken the monster; they are even more furious that the science faction, whatever they are after, should ignore the cultural forbiddance that placed Nod forever out of reach. And they are scared. They have a hundred shades of near-white for it, pastels and creams, bone-yellows, chalks and mother-of-pearl tints to express a vast language of terror. Helena can see past the raging reds and purples, the brooding dark hues, to the fear beneath. In her most empathic moments she is amazed they have not simply destroyed it all already, sent a dozen warheads to obliterate the Lightfoot’s crash site, had the Profundity of Depth turn the orbiting station into atoms.

  But the scientists continue to advocate. She has a section of the ship’s hull turned inwards towards her now, at her request, permitting her to see both sides of the debate. She half-expects calm reasoning from the academics, but that isn’t how their species works. They are just as passionate, a flood of emotions washing back and forth: outrage, entreaty, enthusiasm, freedom! She never thought of freedom, of the simple fact of being free, as an emotion, but to the cephalopods it is. Freedom from censorship? No, freedom to be, to go. Freedom to do anything. The science faction is giddy with it, and she sees it reflected in errant swirls and shimmers across the warship’s hull.

  “What are they going to do at the planet?” she asks the ambassador, adding curiosity and anxiety tags as two more emotions that their species seemed to hold very much in common. She has sudden visions of a scientific super-weapon that could obliterate the entire world to rid them of the spectre of infection.

  The ambassador is all puzzlement, though. They haven’t let him in on their mission parameters.

  Now, though, Helena has ammunition for them, which might buy her friends a little more time to evacuate the planet, if she can get the ambassador to listen.

  Portia, still linked to the Lightfoot, keeps flagging up telemetry and equations from the data side of the ship-to-ship exchange. The Profundity of Depth is still lazily orbiting Nod’s moon, updating its allies with its targeting solutions for the crash site as the lunar path brings it inexorably round the planet. Portia has already recommended Viola and Fabian get clear of the downed ship. Neither is willing to risk exposure to the local biosphere if they don’t have to. The infection itself doesn’t seem to be airborne, according to the Lante records, but those aren’t sources they want to trust their lives to, and there might be any number of other flavours of nastiness out there. Although Viola seems to be more and more convinced that the infection is something very special.

  Then the ambassador is signalling again and she thinks, It’s too late. They’ve launched. But instead all those abortive queries she sent over have apparently germinated, caught up in the whirl of the octopus’s cognition until some part of its mind has put it all together. She assembles its communications: suspicious, fearful, putting her at arm’s length and yet needful, desperate. Joining the dots using long-range scans of Nod, the orbiting station, recordings of multiplying infection rates from the fall of Damascus, Helena understands.

  How are you going to deal with it? they ask her. Their human prisoner has stated it can help them with a plague they associate with humans, a thing humans brought to their planet. Senkovi is a benign creator, in their mythology, but Yusuf Baltiel is the fallen angel, unleashing all evils onto their world. The demand is almost superstitious, acknowledging the status of humanity as passing all understanding.

  “What can we even promise them?” she asks Portia. “Can Viola… cure it?”

  “No,” Portia confirms after an overly optimistic enquiry. “Viola is very excited about it. She says it is not a disease.”

  “It’s infected Meshner. You saw what it did to the terraforming crew,” Helena points out.

  “We saw. Viola is not sure we understood what we saw.”

  “Our hosts are pretty sure they understand.”

  Portia signals agreement qualified with a shrug of but-what-can-we-do? “Perhaps if we can get this data to them, the molluscs will be able to design an antibody or a cure or something. Their technology exceeds ours.”

  “They will not be able to succeed.”

  Helena starts. The voice comes to her direct from her neural implants, and she sees from Portia’s sudden stillness that she wasn’t the only recipient.

  “Kern?” Because Viola told them, despairing, that Kern was locked in some kind of loop, uncommunicative but burning all the processing resources she could access.

  “You cannot cure this disease.” Kern’s voice is, for a moment, as arch and sardonic and human as Helena has ever heard. “Even Lante underestimated what it was capable of, and that was after she was nothing more than a simulation running on its mainframe. But the truth is there to be read.”

  Helena and Portia lock eyes. A flutter of comms indicates Viola wanting to know what is going on and where Kern has been?

  “Explain, please,” Helena prompts quietly.

  “It is a self-evolving organism. It is completely in control of itself. It was able to go from parasitizing an alien grazing animal to surviving within a human body to interfacing meaningfully with a human brain. I do not believe it would be possible to impose controls on it that it could not circumvent or subvert. It’s all in Lante’s notes, if you read them carefully enough.”

  “Then…” Helena feels a swell of helplessness. “They’re right? They just have to destroy whatever they can, make a firebreak to stop any more of it coming over? Is that the only option? Where does that leave us?”

  “That’s not what I’m saying.” Typical Kern, sharp, impatient with lesser intellects. “We are exploring possibilities, Meshner and I. You need to continue to buy us the time to do so.”

  “Meshner’s there? Meshner wasn
’t infected?” A surge of hope beyond any reasonable expectation.

  “He is infected. We are currently confronting the Lante-parasite entity. I will save Meshner. I will save everyone. But I need time.” The human richness is draining out of Kern’s voice, leaving it flat and strangely desolate. “Time, Helena. Buy us time.” And then, after it seems the conversation is over: “I want to make things right.”

  “Time,” Helena echoes. And of course they are still far from their destination, all the time in the world to chew the fat with the octopuses, except that the Profundity of Depth or whatever it calls itself is right there and might pull the trigger on a whim at any moment.

  Fabian and Viola have a lot of data, well ordered and comprehensible to a Human reader. It is shorn of emotional content and simultaneously reliant on anecdote and description, not experimental proofs. Precisely the wrong sort of information to easily pass over to the cephalopods, therefore. But perhaps she doesn’t need to, not yet. She just needs to convince them that she can.

  Tell them a story, Portia suggests, and Helena concurs. A story in which something of the tragedies of the past can be mended. A story of hope, because something is keeping the warship from deploying its ordnance and hope is the only thing she can think of—hope that withholding their fire will lead to a better future. The octopuses are changeable creatures; she’s seen that to her cost. But at the same time it means they are not slaves to dogma, not bound to defend traditions right or wrong, or entrench themselves in their positions. The species is the very definition of open-minded. They may unleash hell at any moment, but they are still listening.

  Helena begins, not quite with “Once upon a time…” but with something like it. There was a world of humans who reached far beyond their home to planets like these. There was a party of terraformers, including a man who loved octopuses. There was alien life, the first ever encountered. There was a woman called Lante, neither a Senkovi nor a Baltiel. She studied the life of Nod. She learned of and fell victim to its most remarkable feat of evolution. Helena speaks to Viola, who feeds her information to weave into the story as Portia expresses in data what can be reduced to numbers, not the dry account of a human scientist but a fable, a legend of discovery and wonder with a tragic second act, and an ending still to be written.