Children of Ruin

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  “Lante has some medication for you,” he tried. “It’ll make you feel better.”

  Senkovi didn’t want medication. Probably he didn’t want to feel better. The shame and blame were jealous, unwilling to admit any chemical interlopers into his mental state. Baltiel could override the door lock and get Lortisse to drag Senkovi down to medical, but he didn’t want to be that kind of commander, and a resentful, mutinous Senkovi would be considerably more problematic than a sullen one.

  So he had one card to play, not one he was proud of, but he’d read through the man’s psych evaluations and Lante agreed with him.

  “I’m going to jettison the octopodes,” he told the door.

  There was a pause, but he heard Senkovi moving around, and then abruptly there the man was, unshaven, red-eyed and haggard.

  “Why would you do that?” Senkovi asked him.

  Because nobody else has any love for the damned things but you, was the true answer, but would not represent good Senkovi-management. “I wouldn’t, of course,” he lied. “But they need you, and we need you. The human race needs you, Disra.”

  For a moment Senkovi just stared at him, and Baltiel thought he would retreat back inside and close the door. Then he twitched, and the twitch kept going until his whole body was shaking, and without warning he was crying, Baltiel holding him like a child, Senkovi’s salt tears staining the thermoregulatory fabric of his shirt.

  When they broke apart, Senkovi gave a shuddering sigh. “Nobody needs anybody,” he got out, in stark contradiction to what had just happened. “But I’ll try.”

  Of course, there was no magic cure for depression. Baltiel still sometimes saw the man just sitting and staring, but he was working with his damn cephalopods again, and that seemed the best therapy for him. Baltiel watched, sometimes, through the ship’s cameras: Senkovi sitting at the makeshift workstation he’d set up in the central hub, wires and devices floating about him and his hair (longer and longer these days) a crazy Medusa’s crown about his face. Or perhaps the waving tendrils of his hair made him somehow more relatable to his test subjects. Disra would sit, hunched over his screen, and in the tank beside him three or four octopodes would be working with the rubbery terminals the man had designed. They always seemed to be desultory about it, to watch them: they would descend on the controller and appear to feel it out, or to wrestle with it in a sudden bout of energy, and then slink off to hang in the water or cling to the wall. He had seen that one or two tentacles tended to remain connected, though, pulsing and shifting across the controls even though the rest of the creature was ostensibly oblivious. Then Baltiel would call up a display of the virtual space they were accessing, watching octopodes accomplishing complex multi-stage tasks in fits and starts, making unheralded breakthroughs, then cycling through the same fruitless steps over and over, then another abrupt leap forwards. He assumed that Disra was trying to get them to follow regimented orders. That was the Overall Command in him breeding assumptions. Later he discovered that actually telling the damned molluscs to do things was something Disra had given up on even before he left Earth. Instead he was giving them long goals, identifying ends by flagging the conditions up with colours and patterns that apparently meant good things if you were an octopus. The methods were worked out by the test subjects themselves. When they seemed distracted, Senkovi claimed, they were employing something like abstract reasoning, free association of ideas. The individual arms still at work were their subconscious. He was unable to provide any academic literature to support such contentions, but he could provide results. He even staged a demonstration for the crew—a simulation of a crashed drone, its damage determined randomly by the system. Three octopodes were given free rein to work out what to do with it. Baltiel had watched with fascination as they had explored the wreck, accessed its simulated systems, repaired some damage while cannibalizing other functioning systems. None of them seemed to be coordinating with each other—indeed there were several apparent squabbles between subjects where they left off their controllers and wrestled in the tank—and yet a plan somehow emerged from the chaos, as though deeper parts of their strategy had been agreed on invisibly at the outset. Or perhaps visibly, given the constant shift and glimmer of colours and patterns across their skins. The end result had not been anything that a human salvager would have come up with, less time efficient, but perhaps more sparing with resources. As Disra pointed out, time was the thing they had.

  At the outset, while he had dearly wanted to space every damned octopus the man had bred, Baltiel had kept them around because they were plainly good for Senkovi’s wellbeing. Now he was conceding the key point. They could be used. They weren’t predictable like machines, but they would get a job done without oversight. Senkovi was already talking about future generations having the cognitive ability to set their own goals as well as carry them out. Baltiel would believe it when he saw it. There would be future generations, though only within the artificial fishponds of the Aegean for now. Damascus’s expanding seas were carpeted with thick algal scum voraciously photosynthesizing, but the oxygen in the water was far too diffuse for the octopuses just yet, and not even Disra was talking about fitting cephalopods with—what?—hydrolungs? But when the water was sufficiently habitable, presumably his mollusc workforce would be ready.

  Human life on Damascus still had a theoretical future. The “theory” element of that calculation had shifted, though. Once it referred to Disra’s ability to bring the desired conditions about on a planet colder and damper than anyone had thought worth bothering about. Now it referred to the colonists from Earth, whose nature had become very, very theoretical indeed.

  There were no signals from Earth. That was what everyone had to face up to in the end. Seven days after the disaster, Baltiel called everyone into the same room. The Aegean’s systems would allow virtual teleconferencing from anywhere, but they had all begun to value the immediate presence of fellow humans. Only Disra was absent, and he was at least actively linked in from his zero gravity webbing in the centre of the ship. Baltiel specifically checked to make sure none of his little friends were listening in, too. He had a mad thought of one of the octopodes diligently taking the minutes of the meeting.

  He only told them what they already knew, of course. They were all bright minds, more than capable of having asked the same questions of the ship. Baltiel had let them have access to the information, even though some commandery part of him told him to embargo it. Still, he wanted to tell them face to face, because until he did so it would remain something questionable. Overall Command needed to set out its position on the subject.

  There were no signals from Earth, he confirmed. Nor were they receiving anything from any of the established solar colonies. The great radiosphere of human endeavour had once been a constantly repopulated expanse. Now it was a hollow shell, expanding past them into the further reaches of the universe. They would never catch up with all those lost words and, even if they could, the damned virus would be the first thing waiting for them, the last thing ever sent from Earth by someone who, Baltiel was sure, had been losing the war and was going to take everyone else with them.

  They very nearly had. Skai and the four others in the module had died, locked in an unresponsive orbital tomb that had been reclaimed, hour on hour, by the supremely hostile non-environment around it. Running out of air, running out of heat; the remotes sent from the Aegean had cut through the hull but found only rigid, frost-limned bodies, still huddled about the equipment they had not been able to restore. Han and her team had crashed into Damascus. Baltiel, Lante, Lortisse and Rani would probably have died had Senkovi not come for them—not of suffocation but likely of starvation, allergic reactions, poisoning. Or, if he was being dramatic, some hitherto unknown Nodan super-predator with an inexplicable yearning for inedible human meat.

  So perhaps Senkovi’s molluscs had earned their keep already, by whose mischief these last few dregs of humanity had been saved.

  That was the othe
r reason he had called them in, face to face, to tell them old, old news. Because they needed to be there for each other. Because they needed not to be alone. Alone meant too much time to think about what had happened. There was not one of them who wasn’t reeling. Baltiel could feel the echo of the news still resounding inside himself. It was too big to understand. And so he turned to his work and sought there the meaning that the rest of the universe was abruptly missing, and he would bring the rest along with him if they’d let him.

  Senkovi still expected refugees, shiploads of them, and if such fugitives appeared then the terraforming project would need somewhere to put them. In thirty years’ time, Earth standard, according to Senkovi’s projections, they would have the Damascan seas and atmosphere sufficiently oxygenated. They would have a makeshift biosphere installed, based on the stable ecology webs from back home that were the late-stage terraformer’s sacred text. Senkovi was keen to show how his octopodes would be invaluable at every turn, and Baltiel didn’t ask the obvious question. What happens when the people turn up and take over? Where does your tentacled construction crew take itself off to? Baltiel knew Disra was aware of this problem, but they had time to negotiate a solution, so long as one of them mentioned that common knowledge to the other before the end.

  And Baltiel wanted to return to Nod. He was already programming their shuttle and remote fleet with a salvage program for the module, to see what could be recovered. The Aegean’s workshops were fabricating a new habitat, a working one. He had started sounding out the others. Lante was creeped out by the octopodes (and possibly Senkovi as well), Lortisse and Rani were both sick for the feel of something solid beneath them, and leery of some new catastrophe that might kill off the Aegean’s systems for good. They would go where he led, he knew, and Senkovi wouldn’t much miss them.

  Ever since Senkovi’s naming of the planets, Baltiel’s mind had sporadically spun up religious imagery for what they were about—or maybe it was the fundamentalist end of the trouble back home that put him in mind of it. The anti-science side of the argument had made Kern their Satan and the terraformers her attendant demons. And now those detractors were silenced, or had silenced themselves. And Kern, too, that remarkable, incredible, insufferable woman, one more voice stilled amongst so many. How she would have hated that. He could almost imagine her refusing to accept it, demanding a bespoke fate appropriate for her genius.

  So where did that leave Baltiel and his crew? All they had was their work. He had to get them back to Nod. He would be a chapter in human history if he could, but if not, he might be a prologue in an alien one. And perhaps there would be human ears listening, in a year or a decade or a century. There was no reason to believe the virus had been just one horseman of some final apocalypse.

  Except there was every reason, of course. He could remember enough of the prior transmissions to know just how much escalation his far-off kin had got in before the end. But in the absence of knowledge he could avoid thinking about it and just go back to pick up where he’d left off.

  Prepping for a return to Nod would take time, however, just like Senkovi’s work would take time. They were stuck on the Aegean pending mechanical, biological, even geological processes. The cold-sleep pods yawned for them like the grave. Baltiel had a rota, making sure at least one person was on watch at all times. And unless I want to wake up to his desiccated bones I need to drag Disra away from his pets somehow.

  Nobody had suggested firing up the drives and heading back to Earth.

  2.

  In his own mind, Senkovi was known for his sense of humour, an organ that in truth amused only himself. Still, the others would have to admit this was a good one. After all, he’d had his fill of being yanked out of dreams at the whim of Overall Command. Now he had an excuse to do the yanking. Time for Baltiel to know what it felt like.

  The others were busy with Lante’s malarkey, a plan that Baltiel wouldn’t approve of and that Senkovi himself wasn’t convinced about. It didn’t impinge on his work with Damascus, though, which meant he could put off caring about it indefinitely. They still invited him to the meetings—virtual attendance only, but that was by far everyone’s preferred option—which suggested that his myopic disinterest had been taken as tacit approval. Or they just felt that keeping twenty-five per cent of their non-command colleagues (and fellow humans) out of the loop was bad form.

  There had been a regimented schedule of sleep and wake to pass them hand over hand through the years since the Silence. Which was apparently what they were calling it. Senkovi felt that was overly dramatic, but Rani had a poetic streak in her. The idea was that Senkovi would pop in and out on schedule based on the terraforming stages that needed executive oversight, and the others would wake in shifts at the same time in an overlapping pattern so that three out of five humans were awake at any given time. The brief for the others was: (1) oversee salvage of the module and reconstruction of the Nod expedition; (2) help Senkovi. And they had helped and, even more to his surprise, he had been profoundly glad to have other humans to occasionally complain to. What you don’t know you’ll miss until it’s gone, number 153: the Human Race. Lante in particular was something of a whizz with ecostructure, and Rani was a better pilot, shuttle or remote, than anyone else (the best in the universe, perhaps). Lortisse, for his part, was good with the octopi. They liked him and, unlike the others, didn’t squirt water at him when he approached the open tanks up in the rotating ring. He even went diving with them, the only one other than Senkovi, and acted as a stooge in their training sessions. Senkovi wished sometimes he could actually talk to the man about it, about their evolving relationship with the evolving octopi. Lortisse wasn’t a man who opened up about his feelings, though, and for Senkovi’s part, he found it easier to communicate with the cephalopods. And that was saying something, because actual conversation was proving elusive. He could encourage them towards tasks and goals, visually flagging up things for them to be curious about and then letting them grasp the problem and solve it with minimal assistance. He saw them talking to each other constantly, skin strobing at skin, tentacles touching, fighting, intertwining. At the same time he couldn’t be sure they were saying anything. How much was meant, and how much of that riot of activity was just a byproduct of cognition?

  He stood by the tanks sometimes, watching his pets, his creations at work, at play. They watched him back: they knew him and he felt they liked him. Even unmodified octopi could tell individual humans apart, and these were smarter than their forebears and only had five faces to recognize.

  He was depressingly aware that he was trying to wring something from his pets that would be available for free from his fellow humans, but a lifetime of habits died hard, and he hadn’t been able to cross that barrier even when he shared a planet with billions. It hardly seemed worth it on a ship with only four others, and two of them asleep at any one time. And the octopi slept, too, when Senkovi took to his cold bed. He didn’t have the apparatus to properly suspend them, he could only cool and drug them into an unreliable hibernation. Mortality in the cold dark between had been sixty per cent at first, and he’d massaged it down to forty. It broke his heart every time his time was up. Doing something long term about that particular issue was one of his biggest goals, perhaps soon to be realized.

  Thoughts of sleep and waking brought him back to Baltiel. The wake-up sequence was already advanced; Senkovi had looked into the files and discovered that his boss liked to be awoken by soft music, gradually swelling to a tear-jerkingly magnificent crescendo. Senkovi found that mawkish, but others would probably not be delighted by his own maritime imagery and so each to his own. He watched the man’s eyelids twitch, his muscles flickering in tiny spasms as the sleep chamber went through all the necessary checks and adjustments for a shock-free reanimation. Which was a shame because the designer hadn’t allowed for Senkovi.

  Baltiel woke, stepping from his symphony into the Aegean’s warm light, sitting up and seeing he was not alone.

&nbs
p; Senkovi had to hand it to him. Baltiel almost masked the horror and panic of that moment. His Overall Command face slammed down, but not quite fast enough and the eyes couldn’t lie. Baltiel clutched too hard at the edge of his pod and said nothing, looking over Senkovi’s withered face, the wild tufts of his white beard, his liver-spotted scalp, warty and draped with a few brittle hairs.

  They stared at each other for a long time, and Senkovi wondered if Lante or Lortisse were watching on the cameras and killing themselves with laughter. Or unable to believe his bad taste. But if you couldn’t laugh, what could you do?

  “You…” Baltiel’s voice had a shake to it, at the start, but the man clamped down and made it sound strong. “What happened?” A suspicious squint started about Baltiel’s eyes, and Senkovi could hold the grin back no longer. Seeing the boss about to beat him to the punch, Senkovi ripped the beard off, and began peeling away the skullcap and wrinkled skin sections, snickering to himself.

  Baltiel must have interrogated the ship by then and found out that he’d been under for eleven years, in the increasingly meaningless way the ship told time. “How long did you…?” he asked.

  “Thirty-four days.” Senkovi picked at one stubborn scrap of fake wrinkle. “The skin was the easy bit. Getting the workshops to spin a realistic beard was remarkably difficult.”

  “You’ve amused yourself sufficiently?” Baltiel obviously wanted to shout at him but was restraining himself masterfully.

  “I’m amused. Aren’t you amused?”

  “In hysterics.” The boss rubbed at his neck and rolled his shoulders—things that shouldn’t have been necessary, but they were relying too much on the cold sleep and it was beginning to show. “I assume you had some real reason for dredging me up, beyond trying to kill me with shock?”