Senkovi was going to change how he went about that. He would still have the system flag up problem predictions, mostly in the form of warnings about negative conditions. The macro-terraforming of Damascus was mostly complete now, and there were robust ecosystems in place with multiple redundancies and diversity, all those little lives spawned from the genetic library aboard the Aegean. The fine work remained to be done, though. “Ocean world” covered such a wide range of different environments, many of them inhospitable to both humanity and octopi. The tools to tweak and mould were all down there, along with mobile hatcheries to continue elaborating on the food chain, but there came a point where he couldn’t just do it himself. Why? So he would show them why. He had spent almost a hundred and fifty hours with the Aegean’s computer now, drugging himself to the eyeballs to do away with sleep and hogging a remarkable amount of the ship’s attention in order to model it all. He was giving his pets the world in miniature, a complete picture of the Damascus project, showing them what they could have, and how they could shape it, if they wanted. And, in moulding the world for their own protean purposes, they would be finalizing the terraforming of a human-habitable world, but in his mind it was first and foremost for them.
He had already begun to roll out sections of the code, broadening the world that Paul and the others looked on to. Instruments were recording the busy activity of the octopi in the Aegean’s tanks as they flickered and pulsed with colours, or clasped in brief, violent fights that broke apart almost instantly. Virtually they were exploring. He could track their presence within the system he was building for them. What they actually understood—if they understood anything—he could never know. There would forever be that barrier between them. He could not know how it was, for them. If a lion could speak, as the man said, we could not understand it.
And yet Paul had spoken, and he had chosen to assign meaning to those words. Why?
Senkovi was aware that, by now, he was not acting entirely rationally. The obsessive part of his nature, never that far from the surface, had been riding him through the streets at midnight.
The system was still pulling everything together, but at last he had to accept that his own input was finished. He could review the completed simulation, but he set the computer to keep feeding new sections to his pets, broadening their submarine horizons. It was all he felt he could do, in the end. He had reached the Seventh Day and the drugs couldn’t manage it any more.
Just as he broke away from the system, though, dialling up a new pharmaceutical cocktail that would bring him down far enough to actually let sleep happen, he saw that he had some seventeen outstanding messages from Baltiel, all of which were marked with a level of urgency he shouldn’t have been able to shunt into the background, but apparently had done. Somewhat tentatively, with the feeling of being in trouble, he checked the first one and discovered something had happened to Lortisse.
2.
Nobody had any answers for why the tortoise had stabbed Lortisse. By the time they got him back to the habitat he was already in profound shock; Lante spent four hours working their medical lab to its limits just to stop his body shutting down, mostly by taking over failing parts of his nervous system and practically running them by hand until they found their feet again. After that, “stable” was not the word for his condition, but the constant attentions of the medical systems sufficed to keep his brain, heart and body all within the tolerances they required to ensure that he lived, and that what lived would still be Lortisse.
The unexpected answer Lante did have was just what the alien had injected him with.
She met with Baltiel once Lortisse’s condition no longer required her constant intervention. By then she had managed to extract a small sample of the material from his bloodstream and cross-reference it to the database.
“You remember the tortoise graveyard.” She was hauling up files almost carelessly, dumping them in the common virtual area for Baltiel to pick over: dissection recordings, her spoken logs, half-complete entries on alien life that were an exercise in speculation.
Baltiel revised the facts quickly: a collection of a dozen tortoises apparently dead or in some deep torpid state; Lortisse had hauled them all back for study because it looked like some other odd behaviour that might perhaps have led to more. Except it hadn’t. They had been inactive, and the very low level biological activity Lante had detected might count as “dead” on Nod. The boundary wasn’t quite that clear-cut even in Earth biology. What Lante had gone on to investigate—what had seemed quite the rabbit hole at the time—was that three of the twelve contained a thick opaque fluid in their central sac, which was normally filled simply with a fluid close enough to the brackish water of the marsh. Her interest, as Baltiel saw, had been a flight of fancy that she’d found some differentiation of sexes in Nodan life, but that had gone nowhere. All the studied species appeared to practice sexual reproduction without genders, just exchanging identical gametes equably (cue Lante writing about “the parasitic gender of the male” in Earth evolution and various other hobby horses). She hadn’t been able to show that the liquid had anything to do with reproduction, but it had been very dense compared to most Nodan cellular material, the interior of its cell walls maze-like with complex molecular structures. This was Nodan genetics, as far as Lante could tell, but if so, the stuff had either a very complex or a profoundly inefficient genome.
That was what the tortoise had shot into Lortisse, more of the same. Baltiel had a headachy moment when he thought Lante was going to talk about mating rituals and imply the damned thing had been after the equivalent of humping the man’s leg, but Lante had gone on to grimmer areas of speculation.
“I think they were diseased, the tortoises,” she explained flatly. “I think this stuff is an infection, some sort of fungal or bacterial equivalent found in the tortoise population. And maybe it spreads by having them stab one another. Its injection went through Lortisse’s suit like it was tissue paper, but that’s not surprising if it was expecting to have to get into a shell. Having gone over my data, I’m thinking maybe even something like a slime mould—a collection of cells that can act in unison. Clots of it seem to be holding together within Lortisse’s body, at least.”
“So what’s it doing to him?” Baltiel asked her. “It’s… infecting him?”
“It can’t,” Lante insisted. “It can’t possibly. Because there’s nothing in Lortisse’s body that it can have evolved to use. His proteins, his structures and organs, it’s as alien to this stuff as Nod is to us. But what it can do is trigger a massive reaction across his whole system, because his immune system is in overdrive. I’m not able to do anything about the stuff in him. I’ve just spent hours stopping Lortisse killing himself through self-induced anaphylactic shock, basically, and the fight’s not over. This stuff is travelling around his system, and not just where his circulation takes it, either. I think it’s trying to do whatever it normally does in a new host, and obviously it can’t get that done, but it spreads and moves about and… and changes its external structures I think, so that Lortisse keeps reacting to it again. It is taking everything we have just to keep his body temperature from cooking him, his tissues from swelling until they burst and—oh God, his pulmonary tract—I’ve rebuilt that from scratch twice now, because he’s swelling up like…” And Lante broke off and just stared at Baltiel for a moment, a great weight of weariness skating by her, doubtless greased on its way by the same drugs he knew Senkovi was even then playing with. “Anyway, I’ll record a full report, but it’s there, all we have.”
“Prognosis?”
“Fuck knows,” Lante said frankly. “I think the invasive material is suffering attrition from Lortisse’s immune reaction, so at least he’s not only killing himself. Best result: he whittles it down, he calms down, he comes back to us. Cerebral records suggest no brain damage yet at least. That may change.” She kept that level, haggard stare on him. “This changes everything, Yusuf.”
“It’s a setb
ack.”
“This planet has attacked us,” she pointed out. “And yes, I’m not imbuing this act with some malign intent, but it’s happened. We’ve taken this place for granted—its primitive-looking creatures, its simple-seeming ecosystems. And we didn’t know half of what we needed to.”
“Perhaps we would if you’d followed up on researching this stuff when you first found it,” Baltiel told her before he could stop himself.
Lante blinked, taking that in remarkably placidly, though perhaps that was just the comedown from the drugs. “I am going to sleep now. Rani is in medical and she can hold the fort if things kick off before you can get me back up. I will then record a full report.” She stood, swaying slightly. “And if that is where your vaunted leadership takes you in times of stress, Yusuf, then you had better think about what the point of you is.”
In her absence, after she had left, Yusuf considered that she was right, but found no acceptable way to take the words back. At around that point Senkovi finally responded to one of his many messages, so at least he had someone to be justifiably angry at other than himself.
3.
We
Have discovered
Such hostile environments, and yet
So complex and elaborate and strange, unlike
Anything we have explored before. Geometries of the universe expressed in these branching turns and interlocking engines. What a world is this we have stumbled across.
What a world, and yet it seeks to kill us. It burns, it boils, it chokes, it traps. We change and change to find a structure and a shape that will endure this realm.
We
Travel always ahead of the violent weather of this place, the structures that are and are not life. We fight to survive and simultaneously to understand where we have found ourselves. The world we left is rendered down to atomics written within us, knowledge These-of-We no longer need to know. A new universe requires new laws.
We
Divide and divide, expeditions sent into the far reaches of the infinite to feel out its edges. We die in a thousand ways but always there is a survivor, laden with knowledge written within One-of-We so that The-Rest-of-We might learn and grow. We war with this complex, obstructed cosmos. Its war is to destroy us, render down our structure into some smooth slag that it can whirl away to destruction. Our war is to understand for with understanding comes mastery.
And at last These-of-We, the survivors, the explorers, find a calm eye within the storm. Others-of-We have followed other paths and they are gone now, just their final records dispatched through the rushing rivers of this immensity to come to us, inscribed with the warnings of the dead: do not go here, it is too hot to retain cohesion; do not go here, it will bury you.
But These-of-We, these survivors, have followed the lightning of this place, the rush of its iron-heavy fluids, as far as we can go. Have we found the source? Is that the task the universe has set for Such-of-We as were bold enough to cross into this realm?
We
Have found the source of the lightning, and in the pulse and shock of that great hub of energy and fire These-of-We have discovered something that makes all the complexities of this new realm into old, dull ideas.
We
Sit.
We
Sense.
Slowly, over a thousand generations, These-of-We write our histories within us and grow to understand.
4.
The habitat hadn’t needed an infirmary, but Lante already had procedures in place. Lortisse had been dragged through in his suit, puncture included, and hauled out of that for emergency treatment, so the quarantine she had imposed later was probably worthless, but for now the patient was entirely cut off from the rest of them, on his own filtered air supply, and Lante only went in suited up, and disinfected afterwards. Even then it fell short of what an infectious diseases ward should have been. They just didn’t have power and raw materials for the constant destruction of components. From her studies of the invasive fluid, Lante was confident that it was too dense to travel by air.
Baltiel was well aware of the gaps in those studies, the fact that they were encountering an alien threat. The damn stuff might shift to some spore-like form without warning. It might become something their filters couldn’t detect. They didn’t know. His fascination with the alien ecosystem at their doorstep had soured in an instant when Lortisse was hauled in.
But now Lortisse was awake.
With the virtual eye of his cybernetic HUD, Baltiel watched the suited Lante speaking to him. Lortisse’s skin made him look like a burn victim who’d been beaten with sticks, from the heat of his fevers and the extreme tissue swelling he’d undergone at the height of his allergic reaction, his body clenching cell against cell until the walls burst. And yet they could fix that. He was pumped full of regenerative catalysts and nanomachines. The mere physical trauma was eminently repairable now he wasn’t in danger of death at any moment.
Lortisse’s eyes moved, and his mouth, his tongue seeming too large. The ends of his fingers twitched. Grander movements were beyond him, especially with the ruin of the leg that had been ground zero for the attack. Baltiel tried to sift meaning from his slurred replies. Lante was going over an inventory of how he felt, hunting errant symptoms. And obviously Lortisse felt like hell, but Lante seemed to be satisfied that all his actual complaints were attributable to damage done, not damage still underway. Eventually she finished up, gave Lortisse some brisk bedside manner about being back on his feet in ten days, and came out.
The wait for decontamination was frustrating then, because Lante refused to be interviewed while she was about it. It was safe to say that Yusuf Baltiel was not her favourite person since the whole business had kicked off. Out of her makeshift ward space she regarded him without love.
“You’ve seen the checklist. You’ve seen the prognosis,” she told him.
“I have,” Baltiel agreed. Ten days was not just sugar for the patient. Even with the habitat’s limited medical technology they’d have major tissue function restored, though Lortisse would be confined to a powered exoskeleton for a while after that. “Well done for saving him.”
Lante’s sour expression did not brighten. “Well done Lortisse’s body for kicking the damn stuff while I kept him steady,” she said.
“So he’s…”
“Some of it came out in fluids and solids during the ordeal, all of it in a broken form, the individual cells no longer intact or apparently active.” She had sealed everything up, though, just in case. Alien meant you couldn’t know how dead it was, and doubly so for some kind of microorganism. “The rest I think he must just have broken down and buried somewhere. I’m going to keep a monitor on his liver and kidneys for unusual element concentrations, because most likely that’s where everything will end up. Even if the actual organism has gone, the chemical balance of Nodan life is toxic to us, so I’m anticipating some knock-on effects as his body works through it.” She rubbed at her hands as though still trying to disinfect herself. “The truth, Yusuf? I thought that would probably be the end of it. I was all ready to scrub out every litre of his blood, to take out organs one by one and repair them. Because even whatever was left in him after the organism died should have been lethally toxic. But so far…”
Baltiel was going over the blood tests in his mind’s eye. “Seriously, nothing of it?”
“Not after he sweated and pissed out the last lot,” Lante said flatly. “His blood’s clean, of the thing itself and any lingering traces it might leave behind. He’s in more danger right now from what we pumped into him. That’s where most of my work is going, cleaning up my own mess.”
“And his verbal responses…?”
Lante grimaced. “Too early to say for sure but there are no obvious signs of decreased function. He seems sharp. We have had a very narrow escape, Yusuf.”
Baltiel nodded. “Let me know if anything changes.” The words came out even as he was instructing the habitat system to do exactly the sam
e thing, and Lante would know that, but it seemed like treading on her toes if he didn’t at least say it in person.
She nodded curtly. “I’m going to tell Kalveen. She wanted to hear it from me.”
Baltiel blinked at her for just too long before recalling that the three of them had a physical relationship going. “Of course,” he said. The thought suddenly made him feel excluded and oddly lonely—not that he wanted to be part of their couplings and/or triplings, but that nobody had asked, expressed an interest. It wasn’t usually something that got to him: he could indulge his body himself efficiently enough. It made him think of Senkovi, though, for whom he had harboured the odd pang, on a purely physical level. Except Senkovi was entirely asexual, a man whose dealings with his fellow human beings simply did not extend on that axis in any direction. It had made him an ideal long-range terraformer, and Baltiel had often watched him and wondered at the man’s ability to simply not feel any part of that turmoil and conflict. Lucky Senkovi. Unless he’s pining for the unrequited love of one of his molluscs, or something.
Lante had gone, and Baltiel noted, not for the first time, that his internal trains of thought were pulling in at dark stations, meaning he had lost track of the world around him for valuable seconds or even minutes. I should up my prescriptions. Lante had him on a set of meds to keep anxiety and stress in their cupboards, but she’d warned him that the pressure would start to leak out in other ways. He composed a brief note to her, asking her to review the situation, but marked it non-urgent to show he was a reasonable man.
Children of Ruin Page 19
