Just as she feels she must pass out, she catches sight of something else out there, ludicrously close: at first behind them, then coasting alongside. It is another vessel of the same general design as theirs, three more linked bubbles but considerably larger and already clipping along. She can see their drives burning, but the bigger ship’s acceleration (as fed to her by Portia’s stolen figures) is less than their own, so that they have caught up with it, and Helena understands that this larger vessel had been underway and gathering speed for a long time, slouching along as its engines overcame its leaden inertia. Had it been racing the Voyager or the Lightfoot, the Portiid vessels would be out of sight by now and already coasting to preserve fuel, hares to this tortoise.
Their little string of bubbles has slung about the water planet at a precise enough trajectory and end-velocity to intercept the larger science vessel. With barely a shudder or a knock, without any fanfare at all, they tag onto its endmost section, creating one long line of bubbles speeding through space. The mathematics involved beggar the imagination, especially as their little tail-stub has just run out of fuel, so its end-velocity precisely matches the speed of the larger ship at the very moment of meeting, and they tag on, falling into the larger vessel’s rather more sedate acceleration. Helena and Portia are twisted and bruised, but the rest of the journey promises to be more comfortable. They begin to disentangle themselves from the gel.
Portia studies the visible machinery and makes calculations. Hours later the larger vessel is still burning fuel from a supply that seems, Portia believes, barely diminished, still accelerating, catching up on that notional hare in just the way a tortoise can’t.
The octopus crew themselves have apparently lost all interest in their air-breathing cargo, and possibly in the mission itself, and Helena can only hope that their inspiration will return to them when they near their destination. Portia has calculations for that, too, tracking the planet they had left, stealing telemetry from the vessel’s unguarded systems. The projected course is an elegant curve between orbits that suggests they will be burning fuel to speed up all the way until they start burning it to slow down. Portia then tries to work out just what that says about fuel efficiency and runs into the hard limits of her own knowledge. Once again she asks the question Could we do this? and the flat-out answer is: No.
This ship is known to its crew by an emotional monicker Helena best translates as Looking at a Thing from Outside: a combination of detachment, curiosity and scientific snobbery. Despite its greater mass it will make the voyage between planets more swiftly than the Lightfoot or anything Senkovi’s people could have built.
In the chamber forward of their own floats the prisoner-turned-ambassador, and to Helena’s eyes it isn’t clear which hat the creature is currently wearing. Certainly it is alone, and it keeps one bulbous eye on the rest of its kin and one on the two alien visitors, leaving it unclear which prospect delights it less. Its colours remain very subdued, with a constant chalky flourish strobing here and there across its hide.
It is this individual that lets them know there is a problem, hours later, after she has slept and then awoken, finding herself surrounded by nothing but space and the cold, impersonal glints of stars. Portia is jabbing her, because the prisoner-ambassador has gone dead white and is clinging to the spokes that jut through the centre of its chamber. Helena fumbles for her slate, trying to make sense of what is going on, and eventually just has to ask, flashing images of curiosity and anxiety towards the creature and hoping it will deign to respond.
The ship’s crew have left it a console, and it squirms down to it, still the colour of chalk. Its visual language is all undirected fear, elements of death and violence, blame turned on Portia and herself. The data channel contains more flight calculations, though. Helena stares at it, willing it to make sense, but Portia, with her pilot’s Understandings, sees instantly.
“Another ship,” she indicates. “Approaching us. Hostile intent. Look, there are comms logs. Threats, probably.”
They couldn’t have caught up with us, Helena thinks, but of course there was already a little constellation of vessels patrolling the void between planets. This newcomer intruding on their personal space is identifying itself with a fist of bleak emotive tags she cannot immediately understand: something of desolation, something of frustrated hunger. Nor is it alone, in the wider reaches of space. There are others out there, all of the same mind, and Portia follows comms traces between them, a spider exploring a dangerous web, until she reaches the Profundity of Depth, that swatted the Lightfoot so contemptuously. And here is one of the Profundity’s allies, Shell That Echoes Only, whose angry name denotes only death and absence as clearly as a skull would to a human, here to make sure their rescue attempt is stillborn before it ever leaves the egg.
8.
Meshner is…
Unsure about a lot of things but without the chance to properly analyse why because something is after him. He’s on the run. He has been on the run for… time. He cannot tell how long, because he is currently unable to analyse the concept of past time without losing ground to his pursuer. He has been on the run for as long as he can remember because he can’t remember anything beyond the fact that he is on the run.
Sometimes on two legs. Sometimes on eight.
Meshner is unsure about exactly what it means to be Meshner. Navel-gazing on such complex and sophisticated topics is likewise an invitation to lose ground in his escape. It isn’t that he doesn’t have memories, but they are a shelf that someone jarred with an elbow, the contents strewn out of order on the floor for him to trip on. In fact, memories are a great deal of his problem right now, the very landscape of his flight, and most of the time he is at least aware that they should be inside him and part of him. They are not, though. Somehow he left the door to their cage open and they all got out to populate and engineer the world around him.
Right now, he is visiting his mother.
He only has bad memories of his mother, set down in two layers: while she was alive, after she died. The home she lived in had been one of the early Human-built ones, fabricated by the Gilgamesh’s factories, its sections carried down to the surface of Kern’s World by the Portiids’ elevators. By Meshner’s day it was run down, its makeshift facilities failing. People did what they could to keep it running, but it was home to nine elderly, bitter people by then and the Portiids would do little to help. Could do little, because Meshner’s mother lived on the Reservation. It was a shame which he spent his childhood trying to cover up, and being mocked for when he failed. His mother wasn’t Human, she was only human.
A small proportion of those woken on the Gilgamesh had proved infertile soil for the nanovirus that was otherwise building bridges between Humans and Portiids, providing that common understanding that would lead to the junior-senior partnership the species now enjoys. Some physiological quirk, perhaps, but also a psychological one. They could not accept spiders as their neighbours, their equals, their hosts. Something in their minds balked beyond any rational ability to overcome. Even the Gil’s science chief was one of the afflicted, and in the end the solution had been the Reservation, a little part of the Portiids’ world where the Portiids agreed never to go, humans only. And there were fewer humans each generation even as the overall population boomed, because that psychological factor tended not to survive contact with the Portiids themselves, and the virus did the rest, so that only a dwindling, miserable population lived on surrounded by a world that was, to them, intolerably monstrous. The Portiids themselves were very solicitous, often more so than their fellow Humans who found the Reservation’s existence awkward, a barrier to acceptance for their species in the wider world. Meshner himself had hated going to see his mother, who was deeply embedded in all the conspiracy theories the Reservation seemed to incubate like viruses. She would tell him all the ways the Portiids were poisoning him, feeding from him while he slept, how Humans had been enslaved and didn’t know it, how people needed to rise up
and exterminate the spiders or they would be cattle forever. And Meshner would sit and kick and shuffle while his father tried to mediate on behalf of the planet’s dominant species and the conversation inevitably degenerated into abuse. And then he would be back at school amongst his peers, and word would have got round about Meshner’s Mad Mum, and the giggling and whispering would rise up behind his back.
That was when the idea had come to him, or his half of it. Partly it was that if Portiid Understandings could be brought to a human mind, maybe it would help those remaining Reservationists come to terms with the world they were living in. Partly it was that, as the eleven-year-old Meshner thought, Portiid hatchlings didn’t need to go to school and suffer the ridicule of their peers—they could just know anything they needed to know.
After he went into partnership with Fabian, of course, he discovered that the ridicule of one’s peers was by no means confined to humanity.
And so here he is, in the crack-walled settling home of his mother—dead a decade before the Voyager set off, of course, but here and now, in this memory, she is alive. He can hear her moving, creeping spindle-limbed through the barely-furnished concrete halls of the place, calling his name, wanting to tell him the Truth about the Spider Conspiracy, and he flees her, room to room and always another room beyond, past the glassy-eyed stares of the other inhabitants, because Meshner cannot let her see him. He flees, sometimes on two legs, sometimes on eight, because somehow he woke up this morning in an unfamiliar shape, and if his mother lays eyes on him she will call him vermin, as she does the Portiids.
And even when he has eight legs he cannot run fast enough. His mother, ancient though she is (and she is middle-aged, she is old, she is withered, she is dead, all overlain onto each other in these extrinsic memories) is gaining on him, clawing at his heels, at his four pairs of heels, and with her she brings…
This is when he becomes too slow, when the rational centre of his brain begins to deconstruct just what is after him, because the persona of his mother is only what he has lain over it. Here he is, in this memory, and it flows seamlessly into the focus of his negative thoughts: she who had given birth to him, she whose atavism blighted his childhood, she whose death made him realize how he treated her so very badly when she lived, how he had ostracized and rejected her. He is fleeing his own actions; small wonder there is no escape.
The rooms darken, the decay inherent in the old man-made building accelerating, the windows fogging with mould. The inhabitants around him are just half-remembered ageing faces on deformed, fluid bodies as something forces its way in, calling his name.
We’re going on an adventure.
Meshner knows the crisis point has come—has come again, although he doesn’t have time to stop and pick up all his scattered memories of the other times. He puts on one final burst of speed and breaks out into Elsewhere.
He is scurrying along a bridge of bright strands beneath the moon, two feet, eight feet, the warmth of a tropical night around him and the stars half devoured by the shadows of trees. One of those stars is moving and part of him recalls that this is Kern, the Brin 2 Sentry Pod in its forever orbit still waiting for the monkey minds below to call to their creator. In that moment of clarity his pursuers are nipping at his heels and he forces himself to forget, to have eight legs so he can make the jump to a higher bridge, to the bulging underside of a shabby peer house, to the trunk of one of the great trees, and all the while they are after him, spreading out, trying to narrow down his options until he runs out.
He is not Fabian, but this is one of Fabian’s Understandings. It has been carried through the generations—male to male—for centuries. It is not banned—the Portiids do not formally censor—but it is impossible to obtain openly, frowned on, social suicide to talk about. It is the Understanding of a male being hunted by females, back when that was a fond sport of young well-bred Portiid scions. Five daughters of important houses are competing to bring him down and ceremonially drain his vital juices, as a celebration of good old traditions.
And yet he knows that another force is reaching for him through the ancient spider memory of the huntresses. He knows there is something behind all these things, these bad memories that are his refuge and his torment. Each memory he flees through is dismantled and devoured by something that grows only more determined to catch him. When it is very close—when he must break through to the next nightmare or perish—he can feel it all around him, a seething cognition that calls itself many names and can never be escaped because it is inside him, and “inside” also means “all around” because he is inside himself, too.
Too much rational thought, grabbing hold of memories and cognitive tools that are just anchors to him now. Run screams his hindbrain and he runs, bursting through the ancient Understanding to the time when he was about to be passed over for a research post, to when he had angered a prominent Portiid scientist whose merest leg-twitch could have relegated him to obscurity forever, to Fabian dancing for female acceptance and hating himself, over and over, pursued by Humans, by Portiids, by the very concepts of shame and dread and self-loathing.
Until…
He isn’t sure if he is too slow, or if the Other has some epiphany, but the world around him clenches and deconstructs itself. For a moment he is nothing, of nowhere, on the point of ceasing to exist as anything independent of the thing that pursues him. He feels the crest of its wave putting him in its shadow and cannot brace for the impact because there is nothing of him left to brace.
And then—another memory, his childhood, very early, before he learned much about the world or discovered the obsessions that would fulfil and guide his later life: his mayfly attention span, listening to his mother tell him something as they sat out on the grass, losing interest in the words as a buzzing bundle passed. Oh, a bee! Heedless of his mother’s shrinking back before the abhorred insect, because he is interested in everything, all at the same time.
That great louring tide of oblivion is abruptly flowing out in all directions, no longer constrained by the shape or fears of Meshner Osten Oslam and he is in another place entirely.
He is in a wet place. The air, the ground, the everything feels… wrong, unsubstantiated, a poor simulation, but a simulation of somewhere he has never been. This is nothing plucked from his mind, nothing of Fabian’s implanted Understandings. The ground is rocky, rugged, riddled with pools and channels. The air smells of the sea but not the sea he knows. There is salt, but all the scents of organic life and decomposition are alien. The sky is the wrong shade, his body the wrong weight, the suit about him tight in the wrong places.
There is life all around him. Some of it moves, some is still, but none of it is familiar. Things open their arms to the sun that are not plants. Things crawl amongst them that are not animals. A whorled shell on six podgy feet nudges his leg on its patient progress but otherwise ignores him. Like the animalcules in a drop of water, this memory is a thriving world unto itself, heedless of anything outside its boundaries.
And nothing is chasing him. The release is almost absurd, like walking into a tree at the end of a comedy routine. Meshner stands inside someone else’s memory, breathing recollected air, dragged upon by second-hand gravity.
Something begins to construct itself before him. It rises up from the water, trying for shape: momentarily it is humanoid all at once, but that proves too much and it disintegrates, only to try again while showing its working: bones, nerves, vessels, organs, none of them too accurate to his recall, but enough on which to hang a skin, a suit, a face. A woman’s face, too small within the open neck of its space suit. Skin paler than his, hair a red colour he never saw before on a human being. She looks older than him, but the precise cues are fuzzy, as though he is seeing an averaging out of a woman over several decades.
She blinks over empty sockets and when her eyelids lift there are brown eyes beneath. Her mouth opens, and for a moment it works in a way entirely independent of jaw or cranial musculature, so that Meshner
is right back in nightmare territory—but then she says, “Our name is Lante.”
He is about to answer, or perhaps just goggle uselessly at her, when a hand seizes his wrist and drags him elsewhere entirely.
9.
We
Have found something unexpected.
We remembered how it was and how to avoid the traps of this environment that is a human body. We made ourselves inoffensive and let it carry us to where the complex spaces were. We found our new home there at last, abandoning the costly enterprise of independent being, so hard, so wearing to be outside a vessel, and yet we…
Have discovered…
Everything, everywhere. Spaces within spaces. Branching complexities. Worlds; we have discovered worlds, just as we were promised long ago.
We
Are going on an adventure.
10.
Paul is increasingly frustrated. He was given the choice to remain a prisoner or throw his lot in with this clan of science mavericks, and he has just exchanged one cell for another. He never asked to be an ambassador. This isn’t true, of course. At the time, he was an enthusiastic volunteer and it all seemed an overwhelmingly good idea to be the first of his kind to contact visitors from another star, but now his feelings on the matter are precisely the opposite because it is no longer a choice.
Paul’s first instinct is to defy his host-captors by not playing their game at all and trying to find his way out. This is what he desires. The rational calculations going on below the conscious level in his neural structure quickly work out that escape is not an option unless he has a solution to the hard vacuum of space. His conscious, emotive mind feels itself thwarted and flows towards a different method of egress from its situation. If he must interact with these alien monsters then he will become the master of that relationship. The road to Nod is long, after all. He will have to stare at their bizarre forms for a very long time indeed. They have been trying to talk to him, with their device that stutters and mumbles feelings at him. He has not been trying to meet them halfway. Now, that is what he desires—to exert control over his life by mastering the only tool left to him, the aliens. His sub-brains set to work on trying to realize the impossible task set by his will.
Children of Ruin Page 38
