Children of Ruin (Children of Time #2)

Disra Senkovi had barely slept since he came face to face with his pets. Why? If he stopped to consider the situation scientifically, he could scrub the query clean of anthropomorphism and turn it into any glitch or neutral meaning he wanted. Scientific thought had always sought to avoid imparting human meaning to animal expression, a practice Senkovi felt had been convenient when the subject of what to test the cosmetics on came up. He could have taken up the mantle of Skinner and decided that there was no mind behind the slot-pupilled eye Paul had turned on him. The urge to do just that was surprisingly strong, for a man who had always felt octopi had such a wise world within their bodies. Coming face to face with the alien, even the aliens of Earth, was a faith-shaking experience.

But he had overcome. He had decided that there was a line of direct communication, even if it was only in the broadest generalities. He could not know if Paul had just been complaining about the tasks or demanding a purpose of his creator. So he would answer all the questions at once by providing Paul and the others with a full and frank disclosure of what was going on.

Not Earth, not humanity, not Senkovi’s past or the intent of the original mission, but Damascus, the blue planet. Damascus, where a number of Paul’s relatives were already living, drifting through the habitable currents of the sea and occasionally descending on terraforming equipment to modify it, hopefully to Senkovi’s plans.

Senkovi was going to change how he went about that. He would still have the system flag up problem predictions, mostly in the form of warnings about negative conditions. The macro-terraforming of Damascus was mostly complete now, and there were robust ecosystems in place with multiple redundancies and diversity, all those little lives spawned from the genetic library aboard the Aegean. The fine work remained to be done, though. “Ocean world” covered such a wide range of different environments, many of them inhospitable to both humanity and octopi. The tools to tweak and mould were all down there, along with mobile hatcheries to continue elaborating on the food chain, but there came a point where he couldn’t just do it himself. Why? So he would show them why. He had spent almost a hundred and fifty hours with the Aegean’s computer now, drugging himself to the eyeballs to do away with sleep and hogging a remarkable amount of the ship’s attention in order to model it all. He was giving his pets the world in miniature, a complete picture of the Damascus project, showing them what they could have, and how they could shape it, if they wanted. And, in moulding the world for their own protean purposes, they would be finalizing the terraforming of a human-habitable world, but in his mind it was first and foremost for them.

He had already begun to roll out sections of the code, broadening the world that Paul and the others looked on to. Instruments were recording the busy activity of the octopi in the Aegean’s tanks as they flickered and pulsed with colours, or clasped in brief, violent fights that broke apart almost instantly. Virtually they were exploring. He could track their presence within the system he was building for them. What they actually understood—if they understood anything—he could never know. There would forever be that barrier between them. He could not know how it was, for them. If a lion could speak, as the man said, we could not understand it.

And yet Paul had spoken, and he had chosen to assign meaning to those words. Why?

Senkovi was aware that, by now, he was not acting entirely rationally. The obsessive part of his nature, never that far from the surface, had been riding him through the streets at midnight.

The system was still pulling everything together, but at last he had to accept that his own input was finished. He could review the completed simulation, but he set the computer to keep feeding new sections to his pets, broadening their submarine horizons. It was all he felt he could do, in the end. He had reached the Seventh Day and the drugs couldn’t manage it any more.

Just as he broke away from the system, though, dialling up a new pharmaceutical cocktail that would bring him down far enough to actually let sleep happen, he saw that he had some seventeen outstanding messages from Baltiel, all of which were marked with a level of urgency he shouldn’t have been able to shunt into the background, but apparently had done. Somewhat tentatively, with the feeling of being in trouble, he checked the first one and discovered something had happened to Lortisse.