Children of Ruin (Children of Time #2)

Our ship has spread its wings to the light of a fierce red star, great sails drinking in the nuclear light as half our crew run a brief survey of an interesting-looking moon. There is nothing habitable in this zone—planets three times the mass of Old Earth with a hundred atmospheres of pressure on the ground. Not that the pressure alone is insuperable. The octopuses can adapt themselves to that kind of environment readily enough—just like being a kilometre down on the ocean floor—and they could even take me with them, if I asked nicely, but it’s mostly fire and acid down there and we didn’t detect anything on our shopping list, and so why bother? We have the whole universe, after all.

A couple of the outer planets’ moons are another matter. Organic chemistry on one, and some odd little energy traces on another that might be something inorganic but also theoretically alive. Life is always the big prize, sweeter than the rarest element, although usually it’s something right on that boundary between life and complex chemistry. Or something best studied under the microscope.

Although I know better than most that just being microscopic doesn’t mean simple.

Every ship is different, depending on who got the building rights. Ours is cephalopod-made, meaning that our non-aquatic crewmembers traded their lungs for gills for the trip. Swapping back is easy enough these days, after all. We have five different species aboard, plus myself and the other two interlocutors. We are all children of Earth, one way or another, products of the terraforming programme and the Rus-Califi virus and, in one case, a wholly unexpected collision between a corvid genome and an alien molecular catalyst. And we have the artificial intelligences too, and those that are neither one thing nor another. And some of us are children of Nod, as well, either lifelong or just renting space.

The first reports of the survey crew suggest that they have found life, but barely. They will take samples, expand our archives. We might walk the cold surfaces of those moons or swim their subterranean oceans, but we won’t interfere. Some day we’ll be back, a thousand, a hundred thousand revolutions later, to see how they’re getting on. But there is always that slight dissatisfaction, that they cannot know us; that they cannot join us in our endless journey.

Messages are coming in from other ships. The oldest crawl to us at the speed of light, ancient news telling us what our ancestors did, what our cousins found. We mark out some worlds worth revisiting, other hotbeds of nascent evolution that might even now be lifting sensory organs towards the starry sky. We note the passing of our kin and friends; the birthing of new ships; songs and stories and jokes that travel between the stars. Some we appreciate, some are grown so far from us that we cannot follow their meaning. If we met them, though, those other travellers, we would be able to look each other in the eye and see our own reflection. What else is an interlocutor for?

Then the real news comes in.

This is a rapid dispatch, an unmanned probe arriving in-system by wave, crunching space ahead of it, stretching space behind to skip across the interstellar gulfs so fast its own image is left trailing behind it. The energy demands of wave travel mean only the most urgent news gets sent this way and this probe has gone to where its makers knew we last were, then followed our beacons, wave-crest to wave-crest, until it found us.

What can be so urgent? Some of the crew always think of war, when it comes down to this, but what war? What is there to fight over, in a universe that is bigger than even we can ever exhaust, with more of anything than we could ever need? There are no empires in space. If space is an ocean, it is one without shores.

And it is not war. It is discovery.

On a far world, about a far sun, a small ship of our cousins has found something remarkable. Unequipped to properly explore, they have sent for their kin, who can do the site justice: us.

We send for the survey team in a fever of excitement. In a year they finish up their work and return to us, data in hand. What is a year, after all, save an obsolete Earth measure of time? We have all the time the universe has to offer.

The ship is charged by then, and we make our own waves, riding the negative mass across a hundred light years. The process is almost energy efficient now, compared to the early cephalopod experiments.

And we arrive, a century or so after the original pioneers sent off their message probe and went on their way. What is a century, after all, in the eye of the universe? On the fifth planet of this system there is a beacon for us, and in the heart of the beacon is something left just for me.

In orbit, we see exactly why the call went out. Most likely it went to others, too. We’ll have a proper family get together here in a few decades, all the gang back together again; anyone with the interest and the means will be rolling up the fabric of space-time to get here. The more the merrier.

I look at it, and the human in me calls it a fortress seven kilometres across and a kilometre high, a huge star-shaped structure of serrated walls where the indentations carry their own dents, teeth all the way down to the atomic level in fractal profusion. It is dead: no power signatures and the planet itself has lost most of whatever atmosphere it had. It is not native, either. The rest of the world shows no sign of a civilization that might have thrown this up. Someone came here a million years ago and left their mark, and died or departed. Or, just possibly, left something of themselves behind.

We have found someone else, or at least their footprints in the dust. It is the first time, and it gives us hope that it will not be the last.

Down below, our pioneer kin have left a gift and that is where I come in. Their interlocutor wanted to be there for the excavation, whilst being unable to abandon their comrades. Thankfully, for us, that is no hard barrier.

They bring the cryptobiote to me, the dormant culture that they decanted from themselves, that is everything they ever were, all the different lives that have gone into them. When I pour them into me, I am them and they are me, an expansion of my personal history written neatly in the archive of my cells. I have been human, I have been Human; I have been Portiid and octopus and stomatopod and corvid. Now I am another forty-three individuals. I am Yusuf Baltiel and Erma Lante and Meshner Osten Oslam and Viola and Salome. I am many.

We are splitting the ship. Some of us will carry on with our travels. Others will remain here to study as the newly budded ship-child swells and grows. I will decant myself for those who will leave; I will leave with them, and I will stay, and perhaps one day I will meet myself and tell myself about what I learned.

Those who stay prepare for a respectful exhumation of the dead, an investigation of this vast alien ruin. Perhaps we will learn where they came from. Perhaps they are still here. One day we will meet living intelligences, and that day the interlocutors will be ready to learn them and learn how to speak with them, and invite them on the journey, if they wish to come.