Children of Ruin

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  Home glass wonder fright alert Senkovi home voyage light Senkovi attendance home. He let the ship’s systems keep chewing over the sequence long after Salome left, refining its translations, but in the end his organic brain had one last flare of its old sharpness and he awoke, floating in the tank, with the thought that Salome had been asking him to travel to the planet, to go home with his creations this once, to immerse himself in the world he had been instrumental in creating.

  And he had seen that world, through the eyes of the remotes. He had seen the spreading cities the octopi were building, no longer just accretions of debris but purpose-built spiral mazes and leaning towers, weirdly-angled chaoses of grown stone that fulfilled some aesthetic he could not comprehend. He had seen the octopi in their thousands, squabbling and displaying for one another, working on machines that he could not quite understand, pushing back the frontiers of their own understanding, leaving him behind.

  He gave up trying to rule them, save for one thing.

  These days, thoughts led incontinently to commands, so that even thinking of that secret called up the view from the drone he kept near the shuttle. The drone’s battery was dying now, even though it had done nothing more than rest upon the seabed for years. He should fabricate a new spy, but tomorrow, he thought. Or tomorrow. And perhaps, the tomorrow after that, he would no longer be around to desire it.

  They had made the damn shuttles to last, in the Aegean’s workshops. The engines had been torn apart and the powerless box flung into the witless grasp of Damascus’s gravity well. On the way down, tumbling, the already bubbling outsides had turned molten until the vehicle had struck the sea like a meteor, sending shockwaves through the water, killing seven of Paul’s kin luckless enough to be nearby, rolling waves across the world. And yet it had not broken open. The superheated outer layers had set into a fantastical gothic skin, all ridges and whorls like the hide of some hallucinogenic monster. Or an octopus intent on threat and warning, and perhaps that was just as well. The impact with the water had shunted the entire shuttle out of shape, the pressure had done more, and yet the re-formed outer layer had not breached. It kept its secrets, even now.

  Nothing human could have survived the focused attention of the orbital mirrors; nothing human could have survived re-entry or the crash. But Senkovi knew that, while some part of the shuttle’s occupant had been human, there had been something malign and alien as well, and he believed wholeheartedly that it was still there, a prisoner of the shuttle, a threat to his world.

  And so he told his people, over and over; he marked up their virtual maps with every sigil for danger he could think of. He told them stories about a dreadful plague, a sickness, a death that would come from that sealed box. He did not mean to give them myths, but perhaps that was what his words became. They must have become something because, in all those years, no octopi ventured near the crash site. A whole expanse of virgin seabed had been left vacant. Somehow, despite the curiosity they carried along from their native state, he had reached them in this one vital matter. Now the only presence that troubled that sunken tomb was the remote vigilance of Senkovi himself.

  He knew Baltiel was still there, on the inside of that half-melted, half-crushed box. The certainty crept up on him over the years. Ask his younger self and he’d have laughed at the thought, but now Senkovi found the ghost of Baltiel all too often in his mind. I killed him, he thought, and even though it was not entirely true, he could not escape the accusation. He thought of the others, too: those who had died on Nod, those who died in orbit around it, or who perished in that other shuttle. He found that wreck, of course, or rather the octopi did. That ship had burst, striking the waves at the wrong angle, and the human remains of Han and the others were just scattered bones, devoured by the very ecosystem they had been installing. He thought about all of them, but it was Baltiel whose unseen presence stopped him sleeping.

  Sometimes he went over the recordings Baltiel had sent, of the last days of the Nodan habitat. Sometimes he wondered if he needed to do something about Nod. The octopi would surely go there, some day, even though he had surrounded it on their charts with the same warnings of quarantine and danger. He had linked to the remotes that still functioned over there, sending them gliding over the alien deserts, over the dark seas, under the red-orange sun. He needed to do something, but there was an entire world out there, placid and self-contained; a world that had seduced Baltiel with its inhuman wonders and then infected him somehow. He, Disra Senkovi, had spoken with a denizen of that world, a thing whose evolution had followed an unfathomably different path to anything on Earth, yet which had been able to live in the brain of Senkovi’s friend and pull his strings.

  We’re going on an adventure. The words tormented him. Asleep in the tank, he thrashed, clawing at the water with his withered hands, blind eyes staring. The octopi there reached out timid tentacles to touch him, but he was beyond any comfort they could give him. We’re going on an adventure. Perhaps, that night, he met Baltiel in his dreams, the Baltiel he believed dwelt in darkness in the sunken shuttle wreck, a thing half man, half crawling alien chaos. The eyes that fixed him, in that dream, were swarming with motes of life; the breath from those jaws was infectious, rotten with the decay that births monsters. In the dream, perhaps, he could not escape; he was there in the crushed wreck himself as the oozing and re-forming hands reached for him. Come on, Disra, we’re going on an adventure. The voice the only part of Baltiel not transformed, familiar as a knife.

  Or perhaps it was nothing of the sort; unlike the octopi, his subconscious was severed entirely from the electronic systems that surrounded him and nothing of its deliberations was recorded. Perhaps he went peacefully, in the end. Regardless, he did not wake. Disra Senkovi, to his knowledge the last human being in the universe, passed away and left the watery world of Damascus to his adopted progeny, for better or for worse.

  2.

  The city sprawls over several kilometres of shallow sea floor. To the casual human eye it would seem to be nothing but chaos, a great dumping ground of angular blocks and pipes from which crooked spires protrude at irregular intervals, like stairways to nowhere. There are no human eyes, however, not even by proxy. Senkovi has been dead for twice as long as he was ever alive. The city belongs to its builders: no shadowy father-figures, no creator-gods, no orders from orbit.

  And yet, if a human were there to see it, and if that eye were less casual, there would be an underlying order, a mathematics. The colours that are streaked and pooled about the place (that are, in reality, encoded into the moulded plastics and grown-stone of the city’s construction) would look less like the daubings of an infant and more like the offerings of some latter-day Jackson Pollock, interacting with the geometry of the city in strange ways, as though it is all language just beyond the human capacity to grasp. And it is.

  Or perhaps it is like graffiti or gang signs, marking territory. Paul’s people are still ambivalent about the virtues of social living.

  Paul himself feels anxious a great deal of the time. He is an old male octopus whose solitary den is in one of the central districts of the city. He lives within tentacle reach of too many of his kin, some related to him, others not. On a good day, when the sunlight filters warm through the shallow water above, he can connect with them. They each have their individual beauty. Their skins—their Guises—shine with their unfiltered thoughts as they ghost overhead, as though everyone is singing all the time. In moments of harmony Paul can recline at the heart of his little empire and know not mere animal contentment but a true appreciation of the beauty of the world. It is not quite the human feeling Senkovi might have experienced, back when there were humans to experience it, but something analogous, something Paul could have spoken about to that long-gone mentor, and perhaps, just perhaps, the intermediary computer systems might have been able to bridge the gap between them.

  On bad days, which are more and more common, every other octopus in his sight, within reach of his irritable,
questing tentacles, is a potential threat and rival, and he fights. Paul has a deep well of aggression when he needs it. He is the major player in his little playground. In his mind—his Crown—this is because he is large and swift to fight and bully others, carrying all before him on a wave of violent emotion. At the same time, the distributed neurons of his Reach, that give precision to his many arms to put into motion the desires of his Crown, are rigorously logical, an organic calculating engine with few peers across the city. Paul has no idea about this, no clue as to the concepts being passed from Reach to Reach when he grapples with his political rivals.

  Right now, the city is in crisis. Large as it is, it is far too populous. Everyone is living on top of everyone else. There are fights that turn into cannibalistic orgies. The crooked, spiralling thoroughfares are rife with factions, each against the others. Those good days of quiet contentment are growing fewer and fewer. The language of Paul’s neighbours as they jet from nook to nook is increasingly ugly, their skins shouting with war paint.

  Paul was originally master just of a small stretch, dominating a score of his kind. If his Crown was truly the governing force it takes itself to be then that would be all: a mollusc gangmaster lording it over whoever he could intimidate. His Reach makes him more, though. There are other lords and ladies of the sunken city, his neighbouring magnates. He has fought each of them, in person, which means he has engaged in a free and frank exchange of views even as he strangled and nipped at them. Uneasy alliances are the common result, the brawling leaders breaking apart, gifted with a new appreciation of the virtues of their opponent. To Paul, to all of his kind, this unsought inspiration is entirely natural. It is the right and proper way of intelligence to be blown on the winds of subconscious whimsy. He does not need to know the deeper workings of his own mind, indeed he cannot, any more than he can know the precise positioning of his arms: the data is simply too complex to be consciously grasped.

  Paul has travelled towards the city outskirts, trailing an entourage of some of his people, while other little cliques swarm below him or drift through the water, flashing complex, elegant threats at each other, poised and posturing by the very nature of their being. They are a species for whom to exist is to broadcast their mood and thoughts, barring a conscious effort to shut down their skins. Some elevate this to an artform, so that even their enemies pause to watch them hang in the water column and emote the complex poetry of war and anger. One such is Salome, at whose behest this grand meeting, or perhaps battle, is being held.

  The city is breaking. Something must change. The machinery that stirs the water and keeps it fresh cannot keep up with the increasing concentration of citizens. The emotional state of the inhabitants is growing steadily darker, and they are a people for whom to act on emotion is a natural, instinctive thing and a cultural virtue. The hero-figures of Paul’s society are characterized by their grand gestures, their great sufferings, their capricious and reckless acts. Perhaps Senkovi would have approved; he who had once seen himself as the trickster god of the pantheon, before there were no more gods left to trick. Perhaps Senkovi would have recalled ancient human myth figures whose outsize griefs and loves and rages were applauded by ancient audiences as noble, right and true.

  Salome wants resources to build a new city elsewhere, just start afresh and let those who feel the whim drift over. Paul and his fellows, the shifting alliance of the city centre, want those same resources—the factories, the power, the access to the ageing Aegean’s computers, for their own needs, to continue their stranglehold on the slowly disintegrating city, so that when everything does fall apart they will remain in control. It is an age-old struggle, another octopus trope that would translate well into human history. And of course—and perhaps unlike his human analogues—Paul does not think of it in such terms. He simply knows the rightness of his stance, of his controlling position. The detailed and self-serving logic that underlies it is invisible, yet drives the tides that motivate him.

  This, then, is octopus governance: an assembly of whoever feels inclined to turn up, organized into dozens of factions whose boundaries are infinitely permeable—literal floating voters moving from one allegiance to another constantly without their disloyalty being seen as anything exceptional or worthy of shame. Paul and his kin are each true to themselves, while knowing that “self” is a thing as boneless and malleable as they are. When Paul and his more influential peers rise up above the rest to give their declamatory displays they might seem like human politicians taking the podium to tubthump and spout rhetoric, but so much of human rhetoric is based on creating a false certainty—weaving fictions together so closely they can be presented as contiguous fact. Paul and his kin know there are no certainties, not even within their own minds. Paul simply follows the flutter of his emotions, letting his sense of what is right be tugged and stretched by the buried coils of his distributed subconscious.

  Soon, Salome and her supporters are engaging in similar flag-waving, and below them the less influential citizens shift and crawl and flicker their messages of support or disagreement, so that, from his elevated viewpoint, Paul can see tides and eddies of public opinion ebb and flow. He and his peers are leaders, but at the same time he feels he is a banner above an army, a signifier of its cause without necessarily being in command.

  Tempers are riding high—there are a dozen separate squirming melees already, nothing unusual for this sort of meeting. Paul drifts closer to Salome, his colours darkening into reds and blacks, his Guise spiking up into angry warning textures. She follows suit. She is a large female, slightly smaller than he but a known fighter. They let their skins advertise their intentions, united in this one thing.

  They clash, full of fury, skins shouting out their campaign slogans. Around them the others watch, echoing the colours of their champions. To a human eye it would seem barbaric, settling a civic dispute by way of a gladiatorial spectacle. And Paul means business: he wants to humble and defeat his opponent, instincts that have not changed since the long-ago days in the oceans of Earth. He has a territory, even if it is an intellectual territory as much as a physical one. There is an intruder who he has not been able to cow or drive away. Violence is the last resort but it is a resort and all others have been exhausted. And his are a passionate, mercurial people.

  And of course as their Crowns trumpet their defiance of each other, their Reaches interlock and fight for dominance, eight separate calculating engines per octopus running in networked parallel, expressing pure maths and logistics by way not just of tentacles but the muscles of individual suction cups, a perfectly evolved engine of rational expression serving the tumultuous whims of the brain. Paul only knows he is stronger, out-wrestling his opponent until Salome can only show her pale colours of surrender and hope he spares her. And yet when he releases his hold, triumphant, letting Salome jet away into the crowd below, Paul’s own messages are different. He has switched sides seamlessly, now a champion of the very cause he had come to break apart. Below, the tides shift once more, seeing his defection. Now Paul must fight some of his former allies. All this is perfectly normal, understood by all present. Rigid certainty is anathema to their mind; they would never trust a leader who nailed his or herself to any one issue or belief. Such dogmatism would be truly alien to them.

  Far, far away, unknown to the masters of Damascus, a species of spider is undergoing an accelerated evolution that, nonetheless, follows a path that might possibly have been arrived at, in time, without the help of the Rus-Califi virus. The octopuses have a very different start, a leg up, so to speak. They inherited the human technology that Senkovi left behind. They have the multitude of terraforming engines used to turn their planet from iceball to ocean paradise. They have the space elevator to take their heavy, water-filled capsules into orbit. They have the Aegean, its computer systems in full working order, crammed with knowledge of Old Earth that they will never properly understand; crammed, more to the point, with technical know-how that they can partway decipher.
Not for them the slow crawl from the Stone Age. They begin in space, as much as beneath the waves. They are aware, in their own way, that they are a chosen breed, and they have been gifted a world and all the keys to its secrets.

  And they are aware of Senkovi, as the generations march away from the moment of his last breath. In Paul’s city, that is even now undergoing a division of resources and population, there is a monument to their creator and patron. Senkovi, had he survived to lay eyes on it, would never have known that was what he was looking at, but he would have seen it as art, and that the citizens touched it and swam about it with an unusual tenderness and respect. It is a thing of glass and plastic, standing tall in the water, its tip almost high enough to be troubled by the roiling surface above. Its outline is irregular, curved in upon itself. The octopuses do not produce representational art of living things, for to live is to change and be in constant motion. The monument reflects the sculptor’s emotional response upon Senkovi’s death, described in cold numbers by her many arms, fed into the factories to produce a single crystal moment of remembrance that will stand above the city for centuries.

  The seas are rich with life they can catch and eat, and they have shellfish farms that practically run themselves. Overpopulation is a local difficulty but, right now, the entire planet is unclaimed real estate. Octopus townships spread across the sea floor—deep water, shallow water, even on the slopes of mountains that practically breach the surface. The speed of their spread is governed only by the speed that machines and housing can be manufactured, and resources can be extracted from the planet itself. They have no predators and few pressures, and while that might not stop them fighting each other, that is merely a part of their social interaction, as natural as small talk.