Children of Ruin (Children of Time #2)

The vast wealth of data on the Nod biosphere, collected over so long by the orbiting module, had been lost in the Silence. The virus had devoured it; those far-off fanatics who had coded the monster had not dreamt of what their spite would erase. Probably they wouldn’t have cared.

A piecemeal copy had survived on the Aegean, buried in the comms record between the two installations, although Senkovi had only uncovered this after the work had begun anew. Baltiel knew, intellectually, that time was the one thing they had, but the loss of knowledge remained profoundly frustrating.

But they were down, now, he and the others. They were down with a new shuttle (the other vessel having been dismantled by remotes, with its systems incinerated in a fit of caution) and firmly based on the ground. Lante was already talking about how to go about farming new people: she could mix up viable genetic signatures by randomly recombining the genomes she had, but now she was wrestling with how to actually raise the resulting infants. It wasn’t as though they would spring up like magical warriors of myth, ready to start being fully-formed humans. She was working on tutelary programmes, but Baltiel kept dropping “socialization” into the conversation, and Lante, for all her drive to continue the species, didn’t want to actually play mother to it. The surviving terraformers were not a good representative cross-section of humanity. After all, they had volunteered for a mission that would take them light years from home and sever them from human society for a lifetime. None of them were stay-at-home family types.

Which didn’t mean that Lante, Lortisse and Rani weren’t having some three-way fun time when they thought he wasn’t looking, but Baltiel didn’t care about that, if it helped them stay stable and happy. If he’d wanted, possibly they’d have made it a four-way, but for most of his life, he had focused on forming close work bonds that paid no heed to gender and never became possessive or physical. He suspected that it was that attitude that had recommended him for Overall Command.

They had remotes out, aerial and ground, taking fresh samples of the salt marsh fauna, and he was helping the new habitat computer integrate the data with Senkovi’s recovered archive, eliminating repetition and making new connections they had missed the first time round. For her part, Lante was acting as his hands in the habitat’s laboratory, dissecting those select specimens he deemed necessary in order to try and understand even the basics of the Nodan biology.

They had already marked several unearthly characteristics of the alien world, notably the radial symmetry. Evolutionary theorists on Earth had assumed that a front and a back were on the cards for a complex animal; apparently Nod was the exception to that rule. Baltiel paged between archive sections, navigating from the big-picture bauplan category to more specific topics.

Nod>bio>neurology>overview was next on his list, a topic curated by Lante. He skimmed the abstract:

Based on imaging of live specimens of species 1, 3, 5, 6, 11, 19 and dissection of species 3, 6 and 19. All analysed species show a distributed ring-shaped system of nerve analogues with transmission of signals from cell to cell accomplished by way of a mechanism involving concentration of polarized Calcium ions, not currently fully understood. Sensory processing must somehow take place across the neural net; the closest analogue to a brain in most species is a concentrated band but the whole nervous system is more homogenous than that of Earth species and possibly the entire system acts as a single brain, or none of it does. Experimental procedures for testing the limits of specimen response to complex stimuli under review pending proposals for appropriate meaningful stimuli.

Nod was perhaps never destined to be graced by native intelligence even if it remained unspoiled by a wider human populace. Baltiel’s money was on the swift fliers, but they weren’t common and capturing one intact was a tricky prospect. Presumably they must come to land somewhere, but thus far they hadn’t tracked one to its roost. Other than that, even the complex environment of the tidal marsh seemed to have produced only dull creatures of insensate instinct.

And yet there had been the tortoise dance. It was a recording Lortisse had made when he went out with a repair unit to recover a glitchy remote. Nine of the three-foot tall shelled creatures—listed as species 3 in their database and a major part of Lante’s neurology study—had been standing in a ring, their rims almost touching. They had swayed—one way, then the other, coordinated, their arms emerging from within their carapaces to wave and twine together and then withdraw. Was it a mating ritual? Were they diseased? The bizarre display had brought the lumbering things to Baltiel’s attention, anyway. They were the giants of the marsh, relatively speaking, but he had seen them as sedate grazers, the snails of an alien shore. Now, and in the absence of a flier to study, they had become a point of particular interest.

He sorted through the submitted pages of the neurology archive, tidying up where the automatic librarian systems had made errors, some of which were the result of shoddy coding and tagging by his colleagues. Next up was—

Next up was a signal from Senkovi, the first in days. Baltiel opened a channel, knowing the signal delay would let him keep working in the gaps of their conversation.

“Hey boss.” Senkovi sounded manic, which was probably a good sign.

“Disra.”

“So, those sensors along the faultline we were having trouble with…” Senkovi opened with.

Baltiel sent back a noncommittal sound, having found a narrative of a flyby over the inner desert that had somehow been logged by Lortisse as biochemistry. The Damascus project had run into a series of technical hitches, mostly because nobody had tried to regulate the chemistry and ecology of just that much virgin ocean before, and Senkovi had ended up turning out kit from the workshops that was a little on the cheap and cheerful side. Now that kit had been in place long enough for the cracks to show and he was frantically trying to get everything repaired or replaced before whole sections of the planet stopped reporting to him.

“Ha, yes. Half-fixed, the rest on their way, so that’s all right.” Senkovi had obviously worked out that a noncommittal noise was all he was getting.

“That’s good.” Senkovi really must be in a manic mood. “Does that mean you don’t need Rani to help with the remote work?” And then, speaking over Senkovi’s response as the delay tripped him up, “Does that mean your mollusc diagnostics worked out?”

Senkovi was silent for longer than the signal gap as he worked out what to answer, and then silent a little longer, so that Baltiel was already cued to pick up the twitchiness in his voice when he finally spoke. “Actually, no remotes needed. They… they fixed it, Yusuf.”

Baltiel paused, about to delve into the murky depths of the Nodan reproduction archive. “What?” Because that had been the plan, of course; to use the damn octopodes as aquatic crew, because Senkovi had sworn it was possible. Only he had tried and failed to demonstrate any such thing in the Aegean’s tanks. He had called everyone, full of his own prowess, presenting his molluscs with a virtual simulation of the trashed equipment they would be working with. Baltiel remembered the event with exquisite embarrassment. The molluscs had investigated the interface, moving things around in virtual space in a desultory manner, but there had been not a hint that anything Senkovi taught them had stuck. The whole exercise had dragged on unnecessarily until Baltiel had overruled the man and brought an end to the entire sorry affair. The little monsters had been sent down fitted with surveillance gear and hopefully trained to be curious about the malfunctioning kit so they would go take a look at it.

“I, er…” And now Baltiel was beginning to process the mixture of unease and elation in his colleague’s voice. “Yes, they went down and just… did it. Diagnosed the faults, patched them. Everything’s working again, for how long I don’t know. I mean, not all of them actually got to work but… fifty per cent of the pairs I sent down. They just… Yusuf, I’m going to admit something now. I don’t really understand it.” He didn’t seem distressed by the admission. “In the lab… I gave them every chance to show that they understood the job, you know. And nothing. It was like they’d forgotten the first thing about learning anything. But now they’re down there and… they’re fixing things. As though all that technical stuff was in there somewhere, but…” An exasperated noise. “We’ve got sixty per cent restored coverage along the fault. I’m trying them with new instructions.”

Baltiel had been running over the repair data. The work on the faultline kit had been erratic, unorthodox, not what a human with a remote would have turned out. Senkovi would doubtless sell it as his little pets devising their own solutions to the problem, which Baltiel was unwilling to accept. Not that he had a better explanation. Then something else snagged his attention. “Hold on, pairs? Why pairs?” He brought up the specifics of just which pets Senkovi had been sending down the line to Damascus. “Disra, I can’t help noticing these are male-female pairings you’ve been sending down.”

Now it was Senkovi’s turn to make a noncommittal noise, and Baltiel ground his teeth at the distance between them. So Damascus had its first long-term residents, did it? Breeding pairs of octopodes sent down by Disra Senkovi, patron saint of all things tentacled.

“It’s not as if anyone’s coming,” Senkovi muttered after another long span of dead air.

“Lante’s coming, with her goddamned chimera babies,” Baltiel shot back, not as tactfully as he might.

“Tell them to build boats,” Senkovi said, and closed the connection.

After that, Baltiel felt he’d played cataloguer for long enough and moved on to Lortisse’s latest recordings of the fliers. It was a weakness, Baltiel knew. They had a whole alien ecosystem, every part of it novel and baffling. Focusing on a large dynamic carnivore was old-style human thinking, the same idolatry that put lions and eagles on so many old flags. Yet there was a strange malaise taking hold of him, and Lortisse and Rani as well. Now they were here, now this was it, they found themselves faced with a great absence in their work. Lante had her breeding programme, but the rest of them had an alien world filled with brainless, docile beasts. In the absence of the balance of the human race, they felt a lack of meaning to it all. The universe was no longer watching them. The data they were collecting was for no eyes but their own. And those who come after? Lante’s work was becoming more and more of a good idea, for all that she was still wrestling with the practicalities. We will understand this world and its life, but its life will never understand us. And that hurts, somehow. Because we need to feel ourselves important to our environs, and Nod has no way of knowing us. And so, unspoken, they had begun to concentrate on species whose behaviour showed complexities that might indicate a greater intelligence, some level of awareness of self, even if there was no brain to house it. It was a dreadfully anthropomorphic desire, but none of them could shake it. Humanity justified its premier position on Earth by its intelligence. But here was a vast and complex world that seemed to lack anything with thoughts as complex as a goldfish’s.

Lortisse had set remotes to shadow any fliers that overflew the marsh. The creatures were certainly active predators with a high-energy lifestyle, something that seemed vanishingly rare on Nod. Baltiel settled back to review the latest footage

… . Fliers powered through the air high over the marsh with that frenzied flapping sequence of theirs. The “up” pole of their radial anatomy had shifted until it was “forwards” and their flight was born of three pairs of hydrostatic wings being inflated in turn, a motion utterly unlike anything that had ever flown on Earth. The remote focused in on a trio of them, and Baltiel tried to read some social interaction between them, but for all his human eyes could tell they were simply sharing the same camera’s width of sky

… . A flier stooped abruptly, dropping from the air to tackle a mid-sized tortoise. Its descent was steep enough that its prey was unable to hunker down like a limpet, and the flier’s wings were repurposed as grasping, levering arms to get its victim onto its back, whereupon it flensed the luckless creature from its shell with a half-dozen claw-tipped tentacles. Lortisse had filmed a dozen of these attacks, plainly impressed by the savagery of the attack compared to the sedate pace of everything else on Nod.

… and then, the last recording, an attack that went wrong. The flier dived on its shelled prey but broke off, floundering desperately in the air as though its placid target had become suddenly toxic. The aborted dive left the predator on the ground, flapping and shouldering through the rock pools as it fought to get airborne again. There was no obvious reason for it.

Complex behaviour, of a kind, Baltiel thought, clutching at straws. Behaviour they couldn’t fathom, though. Alien behaviour. What had they expected?

He stared at the wall. In truth he was staring further, out past the horizon, out into the alienness of Nod. Notice me, he thought irrationally. Acknowledge that I’m here, before it’s too late.