Children of Ruin

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  “Well, several things have accumulated that probably need a command decision or two,” Senkovi admitted. “Lante wants to talk to you, certainly. She’s got a whole… thing going on.” He saw Baltiel’s face change as the man accessed the initial files on Lante’s “thing”. Lante and Baltiel were going to have an argument soon. Senkovi had warned her it would be a hard sell to the boss. Still, none of his business, and when the main debate had been raging between Lante and Rani about broaching the thing with Baltiel, Senkovi had been deep in designing his beard. “Oh, and there’s the module, that needs a decision.”

  “How’s the refit proceeding?” And even as he asked the question Baltiel was hunting the answers through the system, doubtless tutting over the fact that, in his absence, nobody put data back quite where it should be.

  “Yes, well,” Senkovi said, wringing his beard. “Nobody wants to trust it even though the virus has been flushed out. Floating in a tin can and all that. On the plus side the Nod expedition is mostly good to go, they told me. Even got the cold-sleep system set up planetside if you want to do a longitudinal study or two.”

  Senkovi got an alert to tell him Baltiel was querying the progress on Damascus. At least he had good news there, he felt. Everything proceeding apace, oxygenated zones spreading, and a microbial ecosystem established and apparently stable. He even had a working elevator cable, because the thought of dropping living things from orbit into the sea made him shake and sweat, no matter how he tried to tell himself it wasn’t the same. He couldn’t even airdrop a bacterium these days.

  “I’d better speak to the others,” Baltiel said grimly.

  “Everyone’s up and waiting for you, boss,” Senkovi told him. It was a breach of Baltiel’s rules, of course, to have them all awake at the same time, but not as much as what was about to be proposed.

  Baltiel could see Lante was ready for a fight, and the body language of Rani and Lortisse suggested the three of them were committedly all in it together. The brief walk from the sleep pods to the crew room had been long enough for him to absorb just what extended treachery had been going on while he had been out of it, but Lante had obviously done all the convincing in person rather than conveniently producing a manifesto. If he had time he could trawl the internal sensor suite and maybe find recordings of some of the conversations, but he’d just have to hear it from Lante herself and deal with it on the fly.

  But first things first, and so he was urbane mildness personified as they talked over what had been reinstalled in the orbital module, whether they needed to do anything to stop it falling into Nod’s gravity well, whether they were going to set up shop there or not. Lante subsided and Rani took over with the technical details. Baltiel rubber-stamped all the various proposals, command decisions barely worthy of the name. “Now,” he said, that disposed of. “You’ve been busy.”

  For a moment the tension in the room was almost overtly mutinous. He wondered how far they would go.

  “Nobody’s come,” Lante told him. “I mean, yes, they could still be on the way. They could have set off late. They could be in ships without the same acceleration as the Aegean. Or something. And maybe the reason we’ve not had any comms from them asking if we can put them up and find a bunk for them is because they’re super-paranoid after the viral weapon, or assume we’re paranoid. Or assume we’re dead. But we’ve been sending signals home-ways, and there’s nothing. There’s been…” her hand waved away accuracy, “time for those signals to get all the way to Earth and for Earth to call us back. Nothing. We don’t think anyone’s coming.” And it didn’t prove anything, just as she said. Survivors could be creeping their way between stars under radio silence. Except Lante didn’t think so. She was nailing her colours to: We don’t think anybody made it. What really brought it home was that he knew they’d all stopped counting. The Aegean was technically still running a clock on how long it had been since the Silence and the last words of Earth, but Baltiel could see from the records how long it had been since anyone had even queried it. Their jaunts in and out of cold sleep had given time a rough edge that had finally sawed through their last connections to their home planet. If he asked them now, not one of them would be able to say how long it had been.

  And now this.

  “And so you…” Baltiel was about to say, decided to play God, but that meshed too neatly with his own viewpoint, or maybe the damned religious memes Senkovi had infected him with, and he resorted to plain science. “So you co-opted the genetics lab.”

  “In my spare time, of which we’ve had rather a lot.” And Lante was looking visibly older. Not old, because they all had the kind of cleaned-up genome that lent itself to extended healthy lifespans, but she’d plainly been putting the hours in, and the days and years. “We have genetic samples from most of the crew in store anyway, in case of mishap. It’s all established science.”

  “Banned science.” For most of a century, long before the anti-science mob became a real danger. The creation of artificial human beings had been forbidden for a number of reasons, from divine prerogative through to fending off the return of slavery.

  Lante shrugged. “We all know the arguments, almost none of which apply. Yusuf, you want to study Nod, fine. Senkovi wants to breed his pets and terraform Damascus, also fine. Feel free to add to the store of human knowledge. I—we—want to ensure that human knowledge has a future.”

  “I notice that you’ve sequenced several modified genomes. Not quite the human standard.”

  Lante squared her shoulders. “Adaptation to a low oxygen environment is within human standard range. Originally in high altitude areas, but it will suit Nod well. And I know what you said—you don’t want a bunch of colonists to turn up and ruin the ecosystem there. But these won’t be colonists. They’ll be our people. We can guide them, teach them. We can make a human reservation, Yusuf. Just one part of the planet.”

  And it would never stay that way, not over the generations, not forever, and the purist in him reared its head and bellowed, while the man, the vain man he acknowledged himself to be, thought about that perpetuation of human knowledge, new histories that knew his name.

  “And the rest,” he prompted Lante gently. “Or are gills also human standard somehow?”

  “We’re terraforming a planet that is almost entirely ocean,” Lante pointed out.

  “Hey, what?” Senkovi had been mentally elsewhere, slouching against the wall and ignoring the conversation, but that hooked him. “You want to…?” He looked from Lante to Baltiel and then made a sulky face. “Well, I suppose that’s what it’s for, only I was thinking boats…”

  Baltiel had a good idea what Senkovi was thinking and decided to set up some routines in the Aegean’s systems in case the man went entirely mollusc-native on them, routines that Senkovi hopefully wouldn’t be able to just circumvent. For now, though, he needed a response to Lante and the others.

  I am a jealous god, he thought. That would be his standard party line, and it should have been frozen into him by the years in cold sleep, his attitudes crystallized until he was little more than a parody of himself. And yet, and yet. He examined his knee-jerk rejection of Lante’s mad, bold plan and found it nothing more than that, no substance behind it.

  “We’ll put them on Damascus, as much as we can,” he said, knowing that even if he wasn’t such a jealous god, there was going to come a time when Zeus would go head to head with Poseidon over departmental demarcation. “On boats, as much as we can.” It was an attempt to placate Senkovi, as much as one ever could. “But we’ll be on Nod, so I suppose you’ll be doing the initial work there.”

  They had been so tensed for a scrap over this that Lortisse actually physically staggered, as though leaning against a door unexpectedly open. Baltiel shrugged.

  “Just don’t think about Nod as a colony world. The soil won’t grow anything people can metabolize, the entire biosphere is wrong for us, and we’re not changing that. And I’ve seen your work.” Briefly, on the walk over.
“You can’t make humans who could live there like natives. Low O2 and high grav mods won’t cut it. They wouldn’t be human once you’d finished making all the changes.”

  Lante obviously felt that was defeatist talk, but she recognized the value of taking the victory he offered, rather than risking everything on pushing for more. And Baltiel reckoned he was right. Nodan biochemistry was alien from the ground up, a cocktail of elements hazardous to people and organic molecules that might have arisen on Earth but never did, out-selected by chance and time. There were probably some Earth extremophiles that could scrape a living there, but nothing more complex than that. Earth and Nod biology were ships that passed in the night without signal or hail.

  3.

  Salome is not fond of the elevator and, halfway down, does her best to escape it. Her co-prisoner on the journey down, Paul, feels alarm, jetting towards the top of the capsule and clinging to the plastic sheathing.

  Technically he is Paul 51 and she is Salome 39, as per Senkovi’s notes. His numbering of generations is eclectic, however; unreliable. There have been co-existing Pauls, and of course Pauls 1–3 lived back on Earth in his aquariums. Any guilt he might have felt about poor bookkeeping went the way of the rest of the human race. As long as he understands his notation, nobody else is likely to care.

  Paul has gone almost white, with black and purple patterns flickering and dancing at the edge of his mantle. Externally, he is much the same as the earliest Pauls, a football-sized body that is mostly stomach and brain; eight muscular tentacles ridged with suckers on the underside, surrounding a remarkably powerful beak. Internally he is a melange of ancestral genetics and the tweaks of the Rus-Califi virus. The virus, it will be remembered, was intended as an uplift tool. Califi and Rus started with the assumption that any sane researcher would want to tentatively nudge a mammalian species closer to human cognition. Senkovi has, therefore, not simply been dosing the tanks with it and hoping to wake up to vaguely tentacled humanoids able to discuss the nature of existence. Instead, he has used minimal and selected nanoviral samples to tweak, with his best guess, certain parameters of his subject species’ worldview. His belief has always been that he has merely assisted the clock of nature into moving a little faster, but Disra Senkovi is not the best for unbiased introspection.

  In this case, though, it is impossible for such a self-focused man to create in his own image. Take Paul’s alarmed state. Paul is connected to the elevator systems, which contain the information—organized pictorially in a code Senkovi has painstakingly worked out as being something his pets can usually grasp—that if Salome succeeds in overriding the safeties then they will both find themselves outside, meaning miles over the surface of Damascus along with the rapidly dispersing watery environment currently sustaining them, and with about the same chance of survival as a bowl of petunias placed in the same predicament. Hence Paul’s alarm, but Paul himself—the brain that is the centre of Paul—is in no position to appreciate the cause-and-effect physics of this. He just knows that he is frightened, and that Salome’s actions are the cause. His fear is written across his skin for her to read—and she does—but not as a signal he consciously intends to send. His skin is the chalkboard of his brain, where he doodles his thoughts and feelings from moment to moment. If he wished to be deceptive he could fight himself for control of his own canvas, but right now he is more than happy for Salome to know just how stressed she is making him.

  So where does the understanding lie, of their impending doom? Within the wider network of his nerves, perhaps; within and between the individual sub-centres of neurology that control his arms, a semi-autonomous battery of processing power that Paul’s brain lives in partnership with, and that makes his subconscious—insofar as he has anything humans would recognize as one—a powerful and world-affecting thing.

  In just such a way, Salome—mottled red and angry purple, her skin pricked up into thorns and daggers—just knows she wants out. This is not her tank. Where are her games? Where are Great Large Entity and Calm Large Entity (system ID tags: Senkovi, Lortisse respectively)? What is this sense of motion and fluctuation of pressure within the water? Her brain proposes, her arms dispose. She is linked to the schematics of the capsule herself. The sub-minds of her arms grapple with the shape of it, turning it about and seeing where pressure can be applied to crack it open. She begins assaying commands; and though all of her, taken in aggregate, has the entire picture of her predicament, her active understanding is simply that she wants out, and here and here represent a way she can accomplish this. The greater drop outside eludes her, irrelevant to her priorities.

  Paul, then: his own arm-driven undermind (his Reach, as opposed to the Crown of his central brain or the Guise of his skin) understands that to remove the fear he must prevent Salome from accomplishing her own goals. At first he simply signals this automatically, initially broadcasting a directionless fear but then adding qualifiers of colour and texture so that Salome understands she is the source of his anxiety. Normally this would be in response to her threatening him and indicate capitulation, but the raised whorls and darts of Paul’s malleable skin show that he means anything but.

  Salome cocks an eye at him, reading his intent very clearly, and doesn’t really care. She is bigger than Paul; what is he going to do?

  What he does, against millions of years of instinct, is try to attack her. He flushes his skin dark with angry courage, raises a hundred jagged crests across his body and jets towards her. They wrestle furiously, a boneless strangler’s writhing. Unlike vertebrates they have no proprioception, no mental picture of where all the parts of their bodies are. Eight arms that can bend in any direction at any point would tax the processing power of the Aegean, let alone an octopus brain. The Crown sets strategy, but battlefield tactics are the province of the Reach, those sub-nodes that run the arms.

  A fight like this would usually end with a submission, one combatant jetting away, perhaps with an arm less. Alternatively, a death: they are quite capable of strangling or devouring one another. The Califi and Rus meddling has had one effect, though: they are a more social species than they were, and societies are built on shared signals and information.

  Abruptly they break apart by mutual agreement, retreating to the far ends of the capsule. Salome starts work on circumventing the safeties again, then stops, starts and then stops. She has a new idea, relating to the physics of what happens if a space elevator car unexpectedly burst open at high altitudes. Her Crown’s grasp of this is limited, simply that now the idea of breaking out triggers a burst of chemical signals flagging up danger. In her mind, the consequence of breaking out is like a shark circling the descending capsule, a threat waiting to get her. Her Reach would have a more concrete understanding of the issue, feeling out the shape of it until the variables were all known, but the Reach has limited agency of its own and its reasoning is not apparent to the part of her that considers itself the individual that is Salome.

  She reconsiders her course of action and sulks at the bottom of the capsule. Clinging to the top again, Paul slowly regains healthier shades.

  4.

  The vast wealth of data on the Nod biosphere, collected over so long by the orbiting module, had been lost in the Silence. The virus had devoured it; those far-off fanatics who had coded the monster had not dreamt of what their spite would erase. Probably they wouldn’t have cared.

  A piecemeal copy had survived on the Aegean, buried in the comms record between the two installations, although Senkovi had only uncovered this after the work had begun anew. Baltiel knew, intellectually, that time was the one thing they had, but the loss of knowledge remained profoundly frustrating.

  But they were down, now, he and the others. They were down with a new shuttle (the other vessel having been dismantled by remotes, with its systems incinerated in a fit of caution) and firmly based on the ground. Lante was already talking about how to go about farming new people: she could mix up viable genetic signatures by randomly recombining
the genomes she had, but now she was wrestling with how to actually raise the resulting infants. It wasn’t as though they would spring up like magical warriors of myth, ready to start being fully-formed humans. She was working on tutelary programmes, but Baltiel kept dropping “socialization” into the conversation, and Lante, for all her drive to continue the species, didn’t want to actually play mother to it. The surviving terraformers were not a good representative cross-section of humanity. After all, they had volunteered for a mission that would take them light years from home and sever them from human society for a lifetime. None of them were stay-at-home family types.

  Which didn’t mean that Lante, Lortisse and Rani weren’t having some three-way fun time when they thought he wasn’t looking, but Baltiel didn’t care about that, if it helped them stay stable and happy. If he’d wanted, possibly they’d have made it a four-way, but for most of his life, he had focused on forming close work bonds that paid no heed to gender and never became possessive or physical. He suspected that it was that attitude that had recommended him for Overall Command.

  They had remotes out, aerial and ground, taking fresh samples of the salt marsh fauna, and he was helping the new habitat computer integrate the data with Senkovi’s recovered archive, eliminating repetition and making new connections they had missed the first time round. For her part, Lante was acting as his hands in the habitat’s laboratory, dissecting those select specimens he deemed necessary in order to try and understand even the basics of the Nodan biology.

  They had already marked several unearthly characteristics of the alien world, notably the radial symmetry. Evolutionary theorists on Earth had assumed that a front and a back were on the cards for a complex animal; apparently Nod was the exception to that rule. Baltiel paged between archive sections, navigating from the big-picture bauplan category to more specific topics.