Children of Ruin

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  Senkovi set his virtual agents in motion again, trying to hide their tracks and watching Baltiel hunt them down. And it was him, or they were using that part of him. Senkovi’s stock of belief was already stretched to breaking, but it wouldn’t permit him to credit some alien consciousness that could rifle Baltiel’s mind and make use of his knowledge and his skills without the engagement of the man’s own judgement. This was Baltiel, Overall Command of the Aegean, save that his mind was dancing to the tune of a new master. What does it feel like to be him? Does he even know? Is he happy? And, the grim sequel to those thoughts: I guess I’ll find out soon enough.

  “Just the ship, not the planet, please,” he whispered, but Baltiel—the Baltiel whose face he saw on the screen—didn’t react.

  He checked for signals from Damascus, but the octopus colonies seldom contacted him direct. He placed ideas and information into their shared virtual space and they did with that data whatever their own weird thought processes dictated. He had given up trying to train and limit them long ago, and everything had worked so much more smoothly after that. Each generation was more inventive, more ingenious in its subversion of the technology he had given them. Recently he had seen signs that they were replicating machines they didn’t have enough of (or had decided for their own unknown reasons they wanted more of). They had repurposed some of the factory machines to produce parts and were assembling them in novel combinations. He had no idea what they were building most of the time, and now he would never find out. They are on the very brink of seizing their own destiny, and they won’t be given the chance.

  Sometimes they did contact him, some of them. About a dozen, across the planet, sent him messages. Not prayers, of course. Certainly not technical reports or anything so comprehensible. They were patterns that shifted and danced, changing hues and shapes with a fluidity that made him giddy. Some of them came tagged with error codes and data sets, identification markers, access codes. He had the impression they were trying to make their missives intelligible to a human, but the gap between his outstretched fingers and their tentacles was just too wide, still.

  He wondered if they were sending him poetry.

  Now he looked over the data from Damascus in case he had any last word from his doomed people. They were working away, still—all the machines on the planet were diligently informing him about the unorthodox uses they were being put to, even those in orbit.

  Even those in orbit.

  He let his enquiries brush past the data without delving, because Baltiel was still in the system and Senkovi suddenly felt like someone in an old house with a murderer, trying not to breathe and listening for the floorboard’s fatal creak. Baltiel hadn’t cut him off from the planet, of course. Baltiel didn’t really care about the octopi and what they were doing. And if Baltiel would overlook it, so would this hybrid thing that sat behind his eyes.

  Senkovi let his sweep go past the same points again, downloading a great haystack of data to obscure that one sharp needle. He followed the logic of what he could see happening, did some calculations in his head and, for the rest, decided he would have to trust the vision of Paul and the other octopi.

  “Baltiel. Yusuf,” he said over the line to the shuttle. “Are you in there, really? Is there anything of you that hears this?”

  “Of course we know you, Disra. We are all the knowledge and memory and information of ourselves your good friend, but greater, of wider understanding.”

  Does it know what personality is? It’s there in Yusuf’s memories, his relationships with me and the others, his opinions of us, his quirks. But perhaps those just seem to be inefficient imperfections to it.

  “We are glad you have accepted matters,” Baltiel added, and Senkovi realized he’d stopped trying to hack the command codes a while ago. He let the Baltiel-thing draw what conclusions it would and just watched the movement of vast shapes around Damascus, inferring their shifts from the shadows they cast in the data.

  The orbital mirrors, all of them: they had been built about the planet to focus sunlight in the early days, where it would be trapped by the smog of volcanic and microbial emissions, greenhousing the planet to life. Later they had been ferried about Damascus to break up ice in key areas, starting chain reactions of warming and currents, stirring the oceans, diffusing oxygen. Another decade and they would probably have been dismantled, unnecessary. After all, the point of terraforming was to create something stable that didn’t need such toys.

  Now they were shifting in a great ponderous dance, changing their facing, cupping the sun in their silvery hands and focusing that light and heat towards a single blistering point. They were flexing, concentrating and concentrating, bringing heat enough to melt an ice age down to a narrow region in the shuttle’s flight path. Senkovi had never dreamt such a thing was possible, but the new rulers of Damascus had seen his Gordian Knot and found a blade to cut it apart.

  The focal point was necessarily near the planet. The maths was imprecise, hurried even, if the octopi felt hurry as a human did. Senkovi watched the shuttle cruise obliviously into the crosshairs and take the full brunt of the system’s sun, magnified and magnified until even the re-entry plates peeled away like flayed skin, until the reactor cracked open, the explosive force shunting the shuttle wildly out of the neat approach it had been attempting, the contents of the crew compartment surely boiling like spoiled soup.

  And then the shuttle, nosediving, plunged like a white-hot meteorite into the atmosphere and burned all the way down until it met the sea.

  PRESENT 3

  ROLLING BACK THE STONE

  1.

  Helena dreams of her grandfather.

  He’d been a tough old man, that’s how she remembers him. One of the oldest off the Gilgamesh, both in years lived and most especially in objective time elapsed since his birth. He remembered Old Earth, as almost nobody did—not Kern’s Old Old Earth, but the ruin of it that the second human civilization had clawed its way out of, when there was no other alternative to escape but starve and sicken.

  A tough old man, and he outlived many of his juniors amongst that first generation. After Old Man Karst died by misadventure out in space and Vitas never quite adjusted to the new landlords and so many of the others had passed on, Grandad had just clung in there, increasingly gnarled, looked on by the next generation (and the next after that, Helena’s own) as a kind of living monument. Aside from his own stories of How It Had Been, he was the last connection anyone had to Isa Lain, who had guided the humans all the way to where they could finally become Humans.

  But Grandad had declined, in his last years. Helena just remembered, from when she was perhaps five or six, how he had woken screaming and shouting, inconsolable, rattling the walls with Lain’s stick. The winters brought it on: not just the inkling of mortality that cold always brings with it to the old, but his own memories of icy awakenings past. And, at his age, even the equator got too cold at night. She remembered his stories—or possibly she was remembering recordings of him telling it, or even recordings from the Gil’s archives, from when he was younger and still in space. His life had been punctuated by horrible awakenings, in and out of cold sleep as the ark ship conducted its centuries-long odyssey. Each time he had found himself in another time, another world, less fit for human habitation. That was what the nightmares were about: not the cold itself, which was only a trigger. Not even that he might not wake, though that had been a real possibility with the Gilgamesh’s failing life support. He feared waking once more into a world he didn’t understand, where everyone else had rushed ahead and left him behind. Adjusting to the hospitality of the Portiids had been hard on all the shipbound survivors—Grandad had lived most of his planetbound later life in a human reservation as people learned the ways of their hosts. He had taken it in his stride, though, because they were all in it together, all moving through time at the same pace. He reserved his dread for losing touch once again with his kin, his species. And yet, ageing in a society undergoing constan
t mutation as its members established a collective détente with the spiders, that was always going to be his fate. No wonder, then, that his last few winters were plagued with nightly terrors of waking into a world where nobody made sense to him any more.

  In the dream she now wrestles clear of, he had been fighting his blankets (silk, of course), hollering and lashing out as he did, and she couldn’t wake him or console him, and all around her the ice had been growing on the walls as it never had on Kern’s World, splintering out into fantastical trees and growths, encroaching on them until the chill of it rooted deep in her bones, and she knew that if she could not snap the old man from his dreams then they would both freeze, because he was bringing the cold of the sleep chambers to them, hauled hand over hand out of his tormented memories.

  The dream felt as though it went on forever, but it could only have had purchase on her mind for the last few moments before she woke, passing from suspension to deep sleep through the reach of scattered brain activity and into full consciousness, so cold she feels she is being burned.

  She is half out of her suit—or at least one arm, shoulder and breast are bared, as though she embarked on a provocative striptease as she was frozen. The pull that holds her lazily against the metallic floor is partly a weak gravity, mostly an electromagnetic field acting on her equipment. Her exposed skin is clammy and numb, ringed by weirdly fractal bruising, spirals of circles from thumbprint- to freckle-sized in whorls all over. Every joint feels as though it has been wrenched backwards. Sitting up proves a task beyond her capability. She sags back to the freezing metal and her mind drifts again.

  Great chunks of memory are still slotting into place in her head but some of them are plainly irrelevant or even invented, and she has difficulty assigning import to any given recollection. This leads to a fragmentary new dream sequence where she fights her way through a corrupted file archive trying to assemble her own mind from the archive’s contents and constantly finds that vital bridging sections of data are missing or misfiled or translated into garbage. The data itself exists only as emotional or sensory information, which seems maddeningly relevant but is also a common feature of her regular dreams, which just tangles her up further between things happening now and things that happened in the past. By now, though, lucidity is kicking in and she knows that the whole exercise is little more than letting her imagination off the leash to run around and make a nuisance of itself. From long experience she insists on seeing the file data in terms of legible characters, engaging parts of her brain incompatible with dreaming and bootstrapping herself back into wakefulness. She opens her eyes again—to stay awake this time—feeling odd elements of the dream still clinging to her as though that great database is still hanging from her mind by a thread, waiting for her to catalogue it.

  She is in a room of metal and clear plastic. At first its dimensions are hard to make out, because three of the walls are windows looking onto other similar chambers, save that those chambers are floored with what looks like oddly sculpted rubble. And weirdly lit: one oppressively bruise-coloured, two bright blue-gold as though illuminated by an otherwise invisible sun shining through the…

  Water. And she has everything back, all the context, because she is still mostly in her survival suit that Kern prepared for the water. She and Portia had—

  She looks around, already cursing herself. Portia is behind her, on her back and still almost entirely in her suit. As Helena watches, one leg-tip twitches.

  She runs a quick diagnostic of her gloves, finding them none the worse for wear, and lays one on Portia’s abdomen—the flank, rather than the exposed ventral side, because the main Portiid nerves run down the belly and they don’t like to be touched there. She sends some test vibrations through without eliciting a response, but on her back Portia is not best placed to receive communications or to reply. At last Helena tries a direct link, implants to implants, and receives an acknowledgement followed by medical diagnostic data. Portia is conscious but very slow coming back to control of her body. The cold was harder on her than on Helena, and she reckons she has lost several leg joints altogether. The freezing caused some damaging expansion within the cavity of her body, and she will probably have some long-term organ damage that will require repair or replacement should the opportunity arise. Meaning, if we ever get back to the Voyager, Helena knows, because of course they are prisoners of the locals, octopuses, whatever they are.

  With Portia’s blessing she connects to her colleague’s suit systems and sorts out some accelerated heating, which will hopefully get the spider back on her feet more swiftly. She wonders if she can call out for medical assistance, but she has the firm suspicion that their captors wouldn’t know what to do with a human, let alone a Portiid.

  Still, the knee-jerk reaction is there: call out to the local system to request assistance. It is something she has been able to do since she was seventeen, when she finally received the basic implants that would become universal amongst Humans within five years. There was always some manner of system listening, whether it was Portiid ant-architecture or home-built human electronics or the superior hybrids hived off from Kern herself.

  There is an answering ping. She twitches in surprise and nearly elbows Portia in the cephalothorax. Something heard her, something weirdly familiar. It feels a little like interfacing with the ancient Gilgamesh systems, a little like trying to get sense out of a low-grade Kern node that doesn’t really want to talk to you. Something is out there, receiving.

  Portia shudders then, legs flexing and clenching, and she sends Helena a request for assistance. Knowing her friend, Helena knows how much that must cost her. Portia is always the dynamic driving force in their relationship, after all, ploughing through spider society and dragging her Human companion in her wake. Helena totters over and does her best to right the spider, rolling her onto her legs on the fourth attempt and exhausting every jot of energy she has left in the process. Portia crouches there, trembling and twitching randomly as she fights to regain use of her limbs.

  Watched, she gets out eventually, after a half-dozen slurred shuffles are lost on Helena’s translation gear. Her palps’ palsied shudders describe a direction: one of the adjoining chambers.

  Helena looks, and fails to see, looks and fails and then finally understands that part of the weird concrete-seeming jumble pushed up against the window is actually an octopus, its skin the colour and texture of the material it clings to.

  She scrabbles about, finding her slate discarded on the ground but apparently intact. What can she say? Functionally, nothing of use, but she keys up some colours she hopes are friendly and shows these to the creature.

  One protruding eye regards her distantly, and then the creature’s body shifts slowly from its greyness into lemon and rose pink, kindred hues to those she chose. The blossoming of the shades is hypnotic, arising imperceptibly from all over its body, and then fading back into monochrome camouflage.

  Is it an observer, or is it a fellow prisoner? She remembers the maybe-diplomat that had come to meet them, and its sudden attempt at escape. Had it got out? She thought it hadn’t, so perhaps it is now their neighbour in the cells.

  Quarantine.

  She shrugs back into her suit and does what she can with the internal heaters. The room is still icy cold, but at least her and Portia’s batteries seem to be… full. That is unexpected. Built-in clocks tell her they have been out for days, likely some coma state before the locals cared to trigger their awakening. She tracks down the logs, worried that the readings are corrupted and she might abruptly lose all power.

  They have a charging field, Portia stutters out, following her enquiries. Suit called out, received remote recharge. Protocols like Old Empire.

  Enough to be compatible, Helena agrees. A slow burn of excitement rises in her, optimism she would not have looked for five minutes ago given their situation. She follows up that link she detected before, waiting to be slapped down by security protocols or just ignored. At first s
he gets nothing: the system is familiar enough to register her handshake, but no more. She tries access at a variety of levels, scaling back the complexity of her contacts until she is running the sort of maintenance queries normally reserved for when things are well and truly screwed.

  The sensation is like shouldering into a door already open. Abruptly a colossal information architecture is laid out before her, so much her limited internal systems can only focus on small segments of it, arrayed in bizarre clumps and conglomerations of data. Almost everything is incomprehensible—numbers and data shorn of any context or familiar formats. And yet she follows the rabbit hole down and down, attempting to wrestle the thing into giving her any kind of coherent information, sending it ancient protocols the Portiids—through Kern—still use in the hope it might echo something back to her. She uses what she has, which in her case is mostly carved from her translation software. Do you have anything like this? she asks the system. How about this? She feels as though she is creeping through some vast, endless, unsafe ruin, searching for doors that might fit the verdigrised keys chance has given her.

  And one does: some dog-end of her interpretation programming abruptly accepted by the host system, recognized and identified, and she finds doors slamming open, archive contents spilling out until there is more than she can handle and she has to pull back layer after layer, further and further from the meat until she can get an idea of what she is actually looking at.

  Everything is filed under a nested set of headings, and most of those are incomprehensible to her, data never meant for human cataloguing. Deep under those layers, though, she discovers a name, a recognizably human name: Disra Senkovi.

  2.

  Avrana Kern has only limited and artificial emotional responses, being dead and a computer composed at least partially of ants. She considers: do the ants have emotional responses? Probably they are individually too simple for much more than primal fight/flight/pain responses. Their world is limited to the internal architecture of the colony, and the deeper architecture of the conditioning the Portiids have trained them to follow. They do not know they form the substrate for a grander mind, any more than the cells of a Portiid or Human body do.