Children of Ruin (Children of Time #2)

In his own mind, Senkovi was known for his sense of humour, an organ that in truth amused only himself. Still, the others would have to admit this was a good one. After all, he’d had his fill of being yanked out of dreams at the whim of Overall Command. Now he had an excuse to do the yanking. Time for Baltiel to know what it felt like.

The others were busy with Lante’s malarkey, a plan that Baltiel wouldn’t approve of and that Senkovi himself wasn’t convinced about. It didn’t impinge on his work with Damascus, though, which meant he could put off caring about it indefinitely. They still invited him to the meetings—virtual attendance only, but that was by far everyone’s preferred option—which suggested that his myopic disinterest had been taken as tacit approval. Or they just felt that keeping twenty-five per cent of their non-command colleagues (and fellow humans) out of the loop was bad form.

There had been a regimented schedule of sleep and wake to pass them hand over hand through the years since the Silence. Which was apparently what they were calling it. Senkovi felt that was overly dramatic, but Rani had a poetic streak in her. The idea was that Senkovi would pop in and out on schedule based on the terraforming stages that needed executive oversight, and the others would wake in shifts at the same time in an overlapping pattern so that three out of five humans were awake at any given time. The brief for the others was: (1) oversee salvage of the module and reconstruction of the Nod expedition; (2) help Senkovi. And they had helped and, even more to his surprise, he had been profoundly glad to have other humans to occasionally complain to. What you don’t know you’ll miss until it’s gone, number 153: the Human Race. Lante in particular was something of a whizz with ecostructure, and Rani was a better pilot, shuttle or remote, than anyone else (the best in the universe, perhaps). Lortisse, for his part, was good with the octopi. They liked him and, unlike the others, didn’t squirt water at him when he approached the open tanks up in the rotating ring. He even went diving with them, the only one other than Senkovi, and acted as a stooge in their training sessions. Senkovi wished sometimes he could actually talk to the man about it, about their evolving relationship with the evolving octopi. Lortisse wasn’t a man who opened up about his feelings, though, and for Senkovi’s part, he found it easier to communicate with the cephalopods. And that was saying something, because actual conversation was proving elusive. He could encourage them towards tasks and goals, visually flagging up things for them to be curious about and then letting them grasp the problem and solve it with minimal assistance. He saw them talking to each other constantly, skin strobing at skin, tentacles touching, fighting, intertwining. At the same time he couldn’t be sure they were saying anything. How much was meant, and how much of that riot of activity was just a byproduct of cognition?

He stood by the tanks sometimes, watching his pets, his creations at work, at play. They watched him back: they knew him and he felt they liked him. Even unmodified octopi could tell individual humans apart, and these were smarter than their forebears and only had five faces to recognize.

He was depressingly aware that he was trying to wring something from his pets that would be available for free from his fellow humans, but a lifetime of habits died hard, and he hadn’t been able to cross that barrier even when he shared a planet with billions. It hardly seemed worth it on a ship with only four others, and two of them asleep at any one time. And the octopi slept, too, when Senkovi took to his cold bed. He didn’t have the apparatus to properly suspend them, he could only cool and drug them into an unreliable hibernation. Mortality in the cold dark between had been sixty per cent at first, and he’d massaged it down to forty. It broke his heart every time his time was up. Doing something long term about that particular issue was one of his biggest goals, perhaps soon to be realized.

Thoughts of sleep and waking brought him back to Baltiel. The wake-up sequence was already advanced; Senkovi had looked into the files and discovered that his boss liked to be awoken by soft music, gradually swelling to a tear-jerkingly magnificent crescendo. Senkovi found that mawkish, but others would probably not be delighted by his own maritime imagery and so each to his own. He watched the man’s eyelids twitch, his muscles flickering in tiny spasms as the sleep chamber went through all the necessary checks and adjustments for a shock-free reanimation. Which was a shame because the designer hadn’t allowed for Senkovi.

Baltiel woke, stepping from his symphony into the Aegean’s warm light, sitting up and seeing he was not alone.

Senkovi had to hand it to him. Baltiel almost masked the horror and panic of that moment. His Overall Command face slammed down, but not quite fast enough and the eyes couldn’t lie. Baltiel clutched too hard at the edge of his pod and said nothing, looking over Senkovi’s withered face, the wild tufts of his white beard, his liver-spotted scalp, warty and draped with a few brittle hairs.

They stared at each other for a long time, and Senkovi wondered if Lante or Lortisse were watching on the cameras and killing themselves with laughter. Or unable to believe his bad taste. But if you couldn’t laugh, what could you do?

“You…” Baltiel’s voice had a shake to it, at the start, but the man clamped down and made it sound strong. “What happened?” A suspicious squint started about Baltiel’s eyes, and Senkovi could hold the grin back no longer. Seeing the boss about to beat him to the punch, Senkovi ripped the beard off, and began peeling away the skullcap and wrinkled skin sections, snickering to himself.

Baltiel must have interrogated the ship by then and found out that he’d been under for eleven years, in the increasingly meaningless way the ship told time. “How long did you…?” he asked.

“Thirty-four days.” Senkovi picked at one stubborn scrap of fake wrinkle. “The skin was the easy bit. Getting the workshops to spin a realistic beard was remarkably difficult.”

“You’ve amused yourself sufficiently?” Baltiel obviously wanted to shout at him but was restraining himself masterfully.

“I’m amused. Aren’t you amused?”

“In hysterics.” The boss rubbed at his neck and rolled his shoulders—things that shouldn’t have been necessary, but they were relying too much on the cold sleep and it was beginning to show. “I assume you had some real reason for dredging me up, beyond trying to kill me with shock?”

“Well, several things have accumulated that probably need a command decision or two,” Senkovi admitted. “Lante wants to talk to you, certainly. She’s got a whole… thing going on.” He saw Baltiel’s face change as the man accessed the initial files on Lante’s “thing”. Lante and Baltiel were going to have an argument soon. Senkovi had warned her it would be a hard sell to the boss. Still, none of his business, and when the main debate had been raging between Lante and Rani about broaching the thing with Baltiel, Senkovi had been deep in designing his beard. “Oh, and there’s the module, that needs a decision.”

“How’s the refit proceeding?” And even as he asked the question Baltiel was hunting the answers through the system, doubtless tutting over the fact that, in his absence, nobody put data back quite where it should be.

“Yes, well,” Senkovi said, wringing his beard. “Nobody wants to trust it even though the virus has been flushed out. Floating in a tin can and all that. On the plus side the Nod expedition is mostly good to go, they told me. Even got the cold-sleep system set up planetside if you want to do a longitudinal study or two.”

Senkovi got an alert to tell him Baltiel was querying the progress on Damascus. At least he had good news there, he felt. Everything proceeding apace, oxygenated zones spreading, and a microbial ecosystem established and apparently stable. He even had a working elevator cable, because the thought of dropping living things from orbit into the sea made him shake and sweat, no matter how he tried to tell himself it wasn’t the same. He couldn’t even airdrop a bacterium these days.

“I’d better speak to the others,” Baltiel said grimly.

“Everyone’s up and waiting for you, boss,” Senkovi told him. It was a breach of Baltiel’s rules, of course, to have them all awake at the same time, but not as much as what was about to be proposed.

****

Baltiel could see Lante was ready for a fight, and the body language of Rani and Lortisse suggested the three of them were committedly all in it together. The brief walk from the sleep pods to the crew room had been long enough for him to absorb just what extended treachery had been going on while he had been out of it, but Lante had obviously done all the convincing in person rather than conveniently producing a manifesto. If he had time he could trawl the internal sensor suite and maybe find recordings of some of the conversations, but he’d just have to hear it from Lante herself and deal with it on the fly.

But first things first, and so he was urbane mildness personified as they talked over what had been reinstalled in the orbital module, whether they needed to do anything to stop it falling into Nod’s gravity well, whether they were going to set up shop there or not. Lante subsided and Rani took over with the technical details. Baltiel rubber-stamped all the various proposals, command decisions barely worthy of the name. “Now,” he said, that disposed of. “You’ve been busy.”

For a moment the tension in the room was almost overtly mutinous. He wondered how far they would go.

“Nobody’s come,” Lante told him. “I mean, yes, they could still be on the way. They could have set off late. They could be in ships without the same acceleration as the Aegean. Or something. And maybe the reason we’ve not had any comms from them asking if we can put them up and find a bunk for them is because they’re super-paranoid after the viral weapon, or assume we’re paranoid. Or assume we’re dead. But we’ve been sending signals home-ways, and there’s nothing. There’s been…” her hand waved away accuracy, “time for those signals to get all the way to Earth and for Earth to call us back. Nothing. We don’t think anyone’s coming.” And it didn’t prove anything, just as she said. Survivors could be creeping their way between stars under radio silence. Except Lante didn’t think so. She was nailing her colours to: We don’t think anybody made it. What really brought it home was that he knew they’d all stopped counting. The Aegean was technically still running a clock on how long it had been since the Silence and the last words of Earth, but Baltiel could see from the records how long it had been since anyone had even queried it. Their jaunts in and out of cold sleep had given time a rough edge that had finally sawed through their last connections to their home planet. If he asked them now, not one of them would be able to say how long it had been.

And now this.

“And so you…” Baltiel was about to say, decided to play God, but that meshed too neatly with his own viewpoint, or maybe the damned religious memes Senkovi had infected him with, and he resorted to plain science. “So you co-opted the genetics lab.”

“In my spare time, of which we’ve had rather a lot.” And Lante was looking visibly older. Not old, because they all had the kind of cleaned-up genome that lent itself to extended healthy lifespans, but she’d plainly been putting the hours in, and the days and years. “We have genetic samples from most of the crew in store anyway, in case of mishap. It’s all established science.”

“Banned science.” For most of a century, long before the anti-science mob became a real danger. The creation of artificial human beings had been forbidden for a number of reasons, from divine prerogative through to fending off the return of slavery.

Lante shrugged. “We all know the arguments, almost none of which apply. Yusuf, you want to study Nod, fine. Senkovi wants to breed his pets and terraform Damascus, also fine. Feel free to add to the store of human knowledge. I—we—want to ensure that human knowledge has a future.”

“I notice that you’ve sequenced several modified genomes. Not quite the human standard.”

Lante squared her shoulders. “Adaptation to a low oxygen environment is within human standard range. Originally in high altitude areas, but it will suit Nod well. And I know what you said—you don’t want a bunch of colonists to turn up and ruin the ecosystem there. But these won’t be colonists. They’ll be our people. We can guide them, teach them. We can make a human reservation, Yusuf. Just one part of the planet.”

And it would never stay that way, not over the generations, not forever, and the purist in him reared its head and bellowed, while the man, the vain man he acknowledged himself to be, thought about that perpetuation of human knowledge, new histories that knew his name.

“And the rest,” he prompted Lante gently. “Or are gills also human standard somehow?”

“We’re terraforming a planet that is almost entirely ocean,” Lante pointed out.

“Hey, what?” Senkovi had been mentally elsewhere, slouching against the wall and ignoring the conversation, but that hooked him. “You want to…?” He looked from Lante to Baltiel and then made a sulky face. “Well, I suppose that’s what it’s for, only I was thinking boats…”

Baltiel had a good idea what Senkovi was thinking and decided to set up some routines in the Aegean’s systems in case the man went entirely mollusc-native on them, routines that Senkovi hopefully wouldn’t be able to just circumvent. For now, though, he needed a response to Lante and the others.

I am a jealous god, he thought. That would be his standard party line, and it should have been frozen into him by the years in cold sleep, his attitudes crystallized until he was little more than a parody of himself. And yet, and yet. He examined his knee-jerk rejection of Lante’s mad, bold plan and found it nothing more than that, no substance behind it.

“We’ll put them on Damascus, as much as we can,” he said, knowing that even if he wasn’t such a jealous god, there was going to come a time when Zeus would go head to head with Poseidon over departmental demarcation. “On boats, as much as we can.” It was an attempt to placate Senkovi, as much as one ever could. “But we’ll be on Nod, so I suppose you’ll be doing the initial work there.”

They had been so tensed for a scrap over this that Lortisse actually physically staggered, as though leaning against a door unexpectedly open. Baltiel shrugged.

“Just don’t think about Nod as a colony world. The soil won’t grow anything people can metabolize, the entire biosphere is wrong for us, and we’re not changing that. And I’ve seen your work.” Briefly, on the walk over. “You can’t make humans who could live there like natives. Low O₂ and high grav mods won’t cut it. They wouldn’t be human once you’d finished making all the changes.”

Lante obviously felt that was defeatist talk, but she recognized the value of taking the victory he offered, rather than risking everything on pushing for more. And Baltiel reckoned he was right. Nodan biochemistry was alien from the ground up, a cocktail of elements hazardous to people and organic molecules that might have arisen on Earth but never did, out-selected by chance and time. There were probably some Earth extremophiles that could scrape a living there, but nothing more complex than that. Earth and Nod biology were ships that passed in the night without signal or hail.