Children of Ruin (Children of Time #2)

Salome is not fond of the elevator and, halfway down, does her best to escape it. Her co-prisoner on the journey down, Paul, feels alarm, jetting towards the top of the capsule and clinging to the plastic sheathing.

Technically he is Paul 51 and she is Salome 39, as per Senkovi’s notes. His numbering of generations is eclectic, however; unreliable. There have been co-existing Pauls, and of course Pauls 1–3 lived back on Earth in his aquariums. Any guilt he might have felt about poor bookkeeping went the way of the rest of the human race. As long as he understands his notation, nobody else is likely to care.

Paul has gone almost white, with black and purple patterns flickering and dancing at the edge of his mantle. Externally, he is much the same as the earliest Pauls, a football-sized body that is mostly stomach and brain; eight muscular tentacles ridged with suckers on the underside, surrounding a remarkably powerful beak. Internally he is a melange of ancestral genetics and the tweaks of the Rus-Califi virus. The virus, it will be remembered, was intended as an uplift tool. Califi and Rus started with the assumption that any sane researcher would want to tentatively nudge a mammalian species closer to human cognition. Senkovi has, therefore, not simply been dosing the tanks with it and hoping to wake up to vaguely tentacled humanoids able to discuss the nature of existence. Instead, he has used minimal and selected nanoviral samples to tweak, with his best guess, certain parameters of his subject species’ worldview. His belief has always been that he has merely assisted the clock of nature into moving a little faster, but Disra Senkovi is not the best for unbiased introspection.

In this case, though, it is impossible for such a self-focused man to create in his own image. Take Paul’s alarmed state. Paul is connected to the elevator systems, which contain the information—organized pictorially in a code Senkovi has painstakingly worked out as being something his pets can usually grasp—that if Salome succeeds in overriding the safeties then they will both find themselves outside, meaning miles over the surface of Damascus along with the rapidly dispersing watery environment currently sustaining them, and with about the same chance of survival as a bowl of petunias placed in the same predicament. Hence Paul’s alarm, but Paul himself—the brain that is the centre of Paul—is in no position to appreciate the cause-and-effect physics of this. He just knows that he is frightened, and that Salome’s actions are the cause. His fear is written across his skin for her to read—and she does—but not as a signal he consciously intends to send. His skin is the chalkboard of his brain, where he doodles his thoughts and feelings from moment to moment. If he wished to be deceptive he could fight himself for control of his own canvas, but right now he is more than happy for Salome to know just how stressed she is making him.

So where does the understanding lie, of their impending doom? Within the wider network of his nerves, perhaps; within and between the individual sub-centres of neurology that control his arms, a semi-autonomous battery of processing power that Paul’s brain lives in partnership with, and that makes his subconscious—insofar as he has anything humans would recognize as one—a powerful and world-affecting thing.

In just such a way, Salome—mottled red and angry purple, her skin pricked up into thorns and daggers—just knows she wants out. This is not her tank. Where are her games? Where are Great Large Entity and Calm Large Entity (system ID tags: Senkovi, Lortisse respectively)? What is this sense of motion and fluctuation of pressure within the water? Her brain proposes, her arms dispose. She is linked to the schematics of the capsule herself. The sub-minds of her arms grapple with the shape of it, turning it about and seeing where pressure can be applied to crack it open. She begins assaying commands; and though all of her, taken in aggregate, has the entire picture of her predicament, her active understanding is simply that she wants out, and here and here represent a way she can accomplish this. The greater drop outside eludes her, irrelevant to her priorities.

Paul, then: his own arm-driven undermind (his Reach, as opposed to the Crown of his central brain or the Guise of his skin) understands that to remove the fear he must prevent Salome from accomplishing her own goals. At first he simply signals this automatically, initially broadcasting a directionless fear but then adding qualifiers of colour and texture so that Salome understands she is the source of his anxiety. Normally this would be in response to her threatening him and indicate capitulation, but the raised whorls and darts of Paul’s malleable skin show that he means anything but.

Salome cocks an eye at him, reading his intent very clearly, and doesn’t really care. She is bigger than Paul; what is he going to do?

What he does, against millions of years of instinct, is try to attack her. He flushes his skin dark with angry courage, raises a hundred jagged crests across his body and jets towards her. They wrestle furiously, a boneless strangler’s writhing. Unlike vertebrates they have no proprioception, no mental picture of where all the parts of their bodies are. Eight arms that can bend in any direction at any point would tax the processing power of the Aegean, let alone an octopus brain. The Crown sets strategy, but battlefield tactics are the province of the Reach, those sub-nodes that run the arms.

A fight like this would usually end with a submission, one combatant jetting away, perhaps with an arm less. Alternatively, a death: they are quite capable of strangling or devouring one another. The Califi and Rus meddling has had one effect, though: they are a more social species than they were, and societies are built on shared signals and information.

Abruptly they break apart by mutual agreement, retreating to the far ends of the capsule. Salome starts work on circumventing the safeties again, then stops, starts and then stops. She has a new idea, relating to the physics of what happens if a space elevator car unexpectedly burst open at high altitudes. Her Crown’s grasp of this is limited, simply that now the idea of breaking out triggers a burst of chemical signals flagging up danger. In her mind, the consequence of breaking out is like a shark circling the descending capsule, a threat waiting to get her. Her Reach would have a more concrete understanding of the issue, feeling out the shape of it until the variables were all known, but the Reach has limited agency of its own and its reasoning is not apparent to the part of her that considers itself the individual that is Salome.

She reconsiders her course of action and sulks at the bottom of the capsule. Clinging to the top again, Paul slowly regains healthier shades.