Children of Ruin

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  It is possible that we are still being recorded and that the recording will eventually reach the Voyager, Viola tells him primly. I recommend dignity, therefore.

  Fabian had a great many things to say in the certain assurance none of it would ever be heard by the wider world, and so that puts the kybosh on that. Some of those things were about Viola, others about the matriarchy and his experience of it and his great bitterness about not achieving his potential, and being driven onto this ludicrously dangerous mission as the only way he could pursue his researches unimpeded. And probably something regretful about Meshner but, right now, that is far down the list. Now Viola has introduced the threat of posterity and he feels the clamp of social pressure again, even looking death in the piecemeal face.

  For death is here, come through the wall after all that cutting, squeezing its body through too small a slit, its casing bulging and rippling to fit, giving the lie to any suggestion of humanity. Fabian sees parts of it vibrate, buzzing into motion so rapid he can barely see it. Zaine chokes and shudders, and Fabian guesses the monster has said something human ears can hear, because to speak like a human is part of its sham, even though it lacks anything like the requisite organs and parts.

  Probably it was something about an adventure.

  Artifabian charges in, legs flailing, and scales the monster’s irregular surface, trying to tear in with palps and fangs. The entity does not acknowledge the robot’s attempt at all, even when parts of it are ripped loose. Instead it takes one slumping step and then another, and something like an arm unfurls from its side to reach for them, almost a comradely gesture, almost a gentlemanly offer to help Zaine to her feet.

  I really wish I hadn’t come. It’s not exactly the searing diatribe about social injustice he had planned, but it is from the heart.

  I share those feelings, Viola says. I would rather spend my last moments with a female who was my intellectual peer. At his furious twitch, his legs raised in raging, impotent threat, she clarifies: Humour, Fabian. You are adequate as companionship goes. And a competent researcher, if that is what you are seeking.

  Zaine starts again, kicking herself up to half stand, half lean against the curved wall. She is looking up and around, not at the slowly approaching creature. Her mouth moves, but Artifabian is too busy to translate.

  A heartbeat later the message is repeated for Portiid senses. Do nothing rash. A flat pronouncement from the ship itself.

  Kern? Viola demands. Where have you been?

  Too complex to tell you. Make no contact. Wait. No, wait, I said. Fabian, are you well? Are you hurt?

  Fabian does not like Kern singling him out. It seems a likely prelude to being commanded to do something dangerous. And yet the voice is filling out now, little taps and scraps of character jolting along with the words. It doesn’t seem like Kern to him, though. She had a very definite, forceful, female manner. This Kern seems almost… male.

  What’s that? There is a roaring sound outside and something passes over the ship, a shadow against the pale translucence of the ceiling. Fabian sees a flare from outside, the Lightfoot’s hull shrivelling slightly in a wash of heat. Something metal is coming down, gleaming in the sun, glowing slightly from a hurried re-entry. It is a drone, not his little eye-in-the-sky but one of the space exploration drones they deployed to look at the orbital. For a moment he’d thought that it was another missile come to make an end of them all.

  This is more difficult than I’d anticipated. Kern, saying un-Kernish things in an un-Kernish way, but a voice more and more familiar as Fabian receives it.

  The drone lands badly, falls over and rolls against one of the starfish, which withers away from the hot metal.

  Artifabian, I need… please… take this and apply directly to the organism. The drone’s casing pops even with the words, and something is ejected, to rattle against the stone of the altiplano. Artifabian leaps on it, a single predatory motion, then patters hurriedly back. Fabian can make out a drill-head, part of the drone’s regular arsenal.

  The monster, by that time, is standing right before them. Its faceplate now is a spiral, segmented shell like a centipede at rest, like a single compound eye. It seems to regard them, and Fabian shuffles left and Viola right, trying to split its attention. Zaine is its focus, though, and she is in no physical state to get away from it. Her face is twitching like something caught in a web, her eyes very wide.

  Artifabian leaps, driving the drill-piece into the gap already torn in the creature’s outer shell. For a moment it seems a magnificently pointless gesture to Fabian. Then Viola is at a console, having shuffled considerably further than he did, and is receiving data from Kern, or from whoever is sitting in Kern’s place.

  A makeshift syringe, that drill: containing… more of the same. Viola cannot understand it. Artifabian has just injected the creature with a shot of the same organism, the specimen from the orbital.

  Just wait, the computer’s voice tells them, still filling out with personality. It’ll be fine. We’re golden, Fabian. There’s so much I need to tell you.

  Meshner…? Fabian asks timidly.

  Partly. I’ve assumed Kern’s functions, or I’m trying to. She put me in here, but none of it runs as easily as she said it would.

  And where is Kern? Viola demanded.

  She withdrew to the implant, Meshner says. She… This is her plan. I’m just doing my part.

  What’s it doing? This is Artifabian, translating for Zaine, because the creature has not moved since the robot struck. It might as well be an ungainly statue, one arm outstretched towards nothing.

  It’s receiving an ambassador, Meshner tells them. It is hearing a revelation. It’s like religion, really. And if we’re right, it’s not a threat, any more. And just maybe it’s an opportunity.

  Meshner does his best to keep the Lightfoot in repair over the next several days, enough that none of them starve or run out of power or are forced to trust the vagaries of the local atmosphere. Staying suited is a profound inconvenience for everyone concerned but, even if the parasitic entity is not airborne, nobody wants to risk there being something else with which no diplomatic treaties have been drawn up.

  The thing itself, the humanoid thing of rock and shell and slime-mould ooze, has gone but not far. It squats out on the plateau, and the starfish have laboriously crept away from it because they can sense what it is. To Fabian it has a weirdly tragic air, a thing rejected even by its own world. Meshner has explained what Kern did, by then; what she made the parasite understand. And what one sample understands can be instantly assumed by any other colony it comes into contact with. The organism is many, but it is also one, microscopic cells trading encoded understandings like Earth bacteria exchange immunity genes. The parasite will be different going forwards, Meshner claims. It will not seek to come as a devourer, but as a co-traveller. Viola is already considering how such a thing might be of use, how its Understandings might be put in service of the Portiid drive for knowledge and discovery. Fabian has already decided that this is one branch of science she can have sole dominion over, as far as he’s concerned.

  And at last the cavalry arrives. One day they glance at the sky above and there is something there, like a second moon. Not the science vessel, nor its military escort; certainly not the Voyager which still lurks in the outer system, too far to ever tender aid. Instead, Meshner introduces his crew to the Profundity of Depth, the curved hull of which shimmers with colours as though it is shouting insults at the planet below. Insults perhaps, but no warheads.

  The rescue comes soon after, a spherical vessel tumbling from orbit, unmanned, to scream like a banshee on jets of superheated steam as it hovers over the altiplano, spooling out tendrils to gather up the Lightfoot entire and repatriate it to space rather than just snatch up the individual crew—which, from Meshner’s disembodied point of view, is just as well. They will be kept in strict quarantine for some time, but time is what they have regained now they have escaped being stranded on an inho
spitable alien world.

  Eventually, the science vessel and its escort arrive, and the Lightfoot crew are reunited with Helena and Portia. The scientists themselves have already lost interest in their new allies. They are going over the orbital with great enthusiasm, dismantling a great clutter of mechanisms for further study. They have come after their scion, Noah, whose work was so rudely interrupted. For them, the fate of the parasite and the alien ambassadors was only ever a sideline, a gambit to keep the warmongers away while they worked, and one that has paid off.

  20.

  By the time the Voyager finally arrives, after crossing all the great empty reaches between the outer solar system and the shores of Damascus, Helena is at the level of ordering creature comforts from the octopus orbitals’ fabricators: Human and Portiid food constructed from spare molecules; furniture, laboratory equipment. They have a little enclave, the Lightfoot’s structure worked into a section of one of the Homeship globes, the one bubble of air in the great watery necklace Damascus wears. A year and more as guests of the octopuses and they are still not exactly trusted, yet. Whichever shifting alliance of cephalopods considers the alien visitors its business on any given day is doubtless keeping a few protuberant eyes on them, but in the absence of evident betrayal or a political convulsion amongst their hosts, an amicable interspecies peace has slowly incubated. Each day Helena can communicate a little more precisely, refining her software, finding shortcuts in the mess of Old-Empire-derived computer architecture the molluscs use, trusting to her gut feeling and the shifting hues of the bodysuit she had devised.

  Portia is the happiest to see the Voyager. She is bored, cooped up on the orbitals. How do you think the octopuses feel? Helena asks her, but Portia is too fractious to show much empathy. She wants new horizons, or why else go to space? She’d even started drumming about going to Nod, setting foot on the alien world. She is the greatest explorer of her people, after all, in her own humble opinion, and it rankles with her that Fabian and Viola beat her to it.

  Zaine is also more than happy that the mothership is due. She has healed as best she can by now, but human medical care is not something their hosts ever felt a need to research after Senkovi died, and the relevant Understandings were lost in the attack on the Lightfoot. She has a dozen kinks and imperfectly-healed breaks that have left her on a diet of painkillers and frustration, longing for corrective work in the Voyager’s infirmary.

  If not for Zaine, Viola could have put off the Voyager’s arrival for another year or so, engrossed as she has been in building a virtual model for interface with the parasite on even terms. Helena feels this is a step too far, and in this she is in the majority, but Viola is looking beyond all the new horizons. Every so often one of the octopuses comes to speak with her, pressing Helena into awkward translations of neurological and biochemical concepts she does not truly follow herself. The transient nature of the cephalopods’ opinions mean they can very quickly enter into temporary cahoots with their alien guests. Viola claims she is holding her own on the science front, despite the technological disparity, but Helena suspects she is still playing catch-up. Helena has seen what the science faction retrieved from the Nod orbital, after all, and watched Paul the ambassador’s attempts to describe its capabilities. This is Noah’s project, his means by which he and his people might escape their ruined world. The science faction has rescued and resurrected it at last, and they will test it soon. She and Portia have been invited to witness it. She has also come to a sufficiently refined understanding of the octopus mind to understand that their hosts themselves do not know what they have built. They only know what they want it to do, and so descriptions of their work are like those of mystics describing their visions. The logical donkey-work goes on elsewhere, inaccessible to the minds that benefit from it. At first she was baffled and almost offended: this is not, after all, how sentience should work. Humans and Portiids agree on these things. Now, after enough time to reflect, she wonders if the octopuses are not happier: free to feel, free to wave a commanding tentacle at the cosmos and demand that it open for them like a clam.

  Fabian is also engrossed in his work, which has shifted emphasis since its inception. He is designing Implant 2.0 with the help of his former research assistant/laboratory test subject. Implant 2.0 may turn out to be a better medium for non-Portiids to experience and internalize the spider Understandings, but that will be something of a sideshow to the main circus. Recent events demonstrated that the implant architecture is capable of being pushed beyond its original purpose, allowing a remarkable kind of neural neutral ground—between the organic and the inorganic, and between species. Fabian is going to be the father—horrified gasps from the Portiid scientific orthodoxy!—of a new technology, and that technology may just unlock a very different future for everyone.

  Lost in action, then: Bianca, killed in the initial confused engagement and still mourned; Avrana Kern, or that part of her formerly in control of the Lightfoot. And Meshner Osten Oslam of course, or at least his mortal remains. That loss may be a temporary affair; his body is currently walking around down on Nod after being shuttled there remotely from the orbital. It is not clear if the parasite could evacuate his brain and leave it whole and still Meshner, and negotiations with the parasite are more difficult by an order of magnitude than Helena’s chats with the octopuses. Meshner the fledgling AI is philosophical. He is still finding his feet, now that he is wearing Kern’s shoes.

  Helena speaks to him about Kern, finding him oddly evasive. Is Kern still present somewhere, on the orbital, in the implant? Meshner doesn’t know, but he thinks the expanding presence of the parasite would pare down the computer intelligence until whatever remained was no longer Avrana Kern, and unlike Lante or Meshner himself, the parasite’s own recollections will not include a simulation of Kern, only memories of its interactions with her. Certainly there is no Kern personality present within the Lightfoot: no space in that damaged housing for two human-complex intelligences. She overwrote herself to preserve Meshner. Helena wonders what the Kern instance on the Voyager will make of it, and whether Meshner will make a fuller confession of precisely what went on between him and Kern within the implant, before the end.

  And how Kern as a whole will feel, now that she is no longer unique. Will she be a jealous goddess, where Meshner is concerned? Or will she find that she has been lonely all this time?

  Long before the Voyager’s arrival, multi-species diplomacy arrived at a plan for what Fabian coined as The Insertion, a description that sounds better to the Portiids (who inject venom, after all, and fertilize their eggs externally) than to a Human. The Insertion, when it took place, was not much of a spectator event: a single missile shot from an isolated orbital into the waters of Damascus, requiring magnification even to see it from Helena’s vantage point. Results are inconclusive as yet: nobody knows whether the plan will have its desired effects. What seemed like a thousand octopus factions had been wrangling over whether to even go ahead with the attempt. And then some of them just went ahead and did it, because that, apparently, is how decisions are made in this part of the galaxy. Helena tracked the projectile until it broke open against the waves. Contained within, unleashed upon the world, was a sample of the parasite from the Nod orbital, complete with its memories of Avrana Kern and her argument and the truce that had been formulated between them. Just as with the Nod planetside parasite, it is hoped that a conversion might spread out across the contaminated planet: an awareness of the parasite, its place and its potential. Perhaps one day the cephalopods will have their planet back, in some shape or form, although probably they will never have it wholly to themselves. Right now, the only practical response is to wait and to watch.

  Which leaves one thing before the reunited Voyager crew make their final decisions and farewells.

  The science faction are going to test the Noah device, now repaired and improved. That they feel the need to take it outside the orbit of either Damascus or Nod in order to deploy it is unsett
ling, but Helena and Portia want to see, finding themselves in quarters very like their previous incarceration on the rescue mission.

  The device itself is surprisingly small, an overarching framework fit around a single, unmanned sphere-ship, far enough out that Helena must take it on faith and instrumentation that it is there at all.

  She doesn’t understand the full science behind the thing, only what it is supposed to do. She doesn’t really believe that, either. The octopuses are erratic engineers, after all, plagued by factionalism and short attention spans. It’s all impossible, isn’t it? And true, Old Empire humans conceived of such a loophole in the universe, but even for them the energy requirements were ludicrously out of reach. Generations of octopus scientists have been tantalized by the thought, though, and have desired to make it real, subconsciously telling their Reaches, Find a way, cheating physics, paring away at the problem until… this. And still she does not believe it, and her scepticism is tiny compared to Portia’s.

  And yet the two of them were sent for, and they came; bit parts in the triumph or tragedy of greater players.

  A wise man once said that space is not an ocean, despite the temptation to think in terms of battlecruisers and naval ranks and war-fleets exchanging broadsides as they pass, graceful and leisurely, through the night. To the octopuses, however, space is an ocean—save that the concept of “ocean” is a very different thing to them than it is to humanity: a great many-dimensional canvas that surrounds them, and that they can manipulate and open up, to see if anything edible can be found within. Taking things apart out of idle curiosity has always been part of their mental toolkit and why should the universe itself be an exception?

  Once there was an octopus, call him Noah, whose people had suffered a cataclysm of far more than Biblical proportions, billions lost to a raging infection that tore them apart, broke them down, remade them as a sentient sludge that coated their entire world, only a remnant population left on the orbitals to stare down at what they had lost. And while some sought to rebuild a new stability in orbit, many others felt that the infection would jump to them eventually, quarantine how they might. Factions, infighting, open war sprang up in a ring around Damascus and out into the wider solar system. And Noah saw it and despaired.