Children of Ruin (Children of Time #2)

Lortisse felt oddly sanguine when Lante sat him down in the isolation lab and explained the problem. He even caught himself smiling slightly. It can’t be true, he told himself. It can’t be real. He nodded politely through Lante’s scans and images, but that box of bone, those crenulations of grey matter, that wasn’t him, surely. That dark blotch in the centre of a brain. That’s not us.

And at the same time, it seemed entirely true and real, as if he had two opposing opinions overlaid on one of those brain images. Yes, of course he hadn’t escaped the dangers of Nod. What had he been thinking? To walk about on an alien world picking out specimens like someone gathering seashells on the beach? Of course there was an inescapable fate for such men, or what was hubris for?

“You’re taking this very well,” Lante said uncertainly. Of course she would be monitoring his life signs, ready for all manner of panic. Lortisse found himself with a remarkably clear mental image of his heart and lungs and the rest of it, all just pulsing and pounding away like normal, just as though they were discussing the quality of the fabricated food.

“I feel fine,” he told Lante, smiling. “Everything feels good in here.”

“But it might—”

“Let’s not jump to conclusions. Nothing might happen,” he told her reasonably. Let’s be adult about this.

“I’ve prepared some possible means to attack the encysted organism,” Lante continued. “After all, its biochemistry is sufficiently different to yours that what kills it won’t attack your cells at all. We’re going to have to pretty much put your immune system on ice, though, because otherwise it’s just the same foreign body problem we had when it got into your system in the first place.”

“This sounds like an unacceptable risk,” Lortisse heard himself say, his main focus on the various prescriptions Lante had concocted and her models of how they would interact with the organism and his own brain chemistry. “This is… in our brain, Erma. Do we really want to start putting more things into my brain?”

“Gav, this could start eating your brain,” she pointed out.

“You said yourself it can’t interact with our body chemistry,” Lortisse said, still the soul of reason.

“It can still cause huge tissue trauma if it starts to grow or hatch or something,” she said stubbornly.

Lortisse grinned again. The whole conversation seemed weirdly funny, but perhaps that was just a defence mechanism. “Erma, I… let’s not be hasty. Let us… not.” He became aware the smile was still on his face, and he couldn’t turn it off. The world seemed to be going slightly yellow around the edges, but at the same time he felt a sense of tremendous wellbeing. “It’s fine, it’s fine, we shouldn’t do anything to… upset the balance now, should we? What if this course of action brings about the thing that is wished to prevent?” The words sounded strange to him, though he wasn’t quite sure where the problem lay. Strange to Lante, too, because she was frowning at him. He was suddenly very aware of the space and distance around them and between them, as though it was huge, as though he was huge. He laughed, feeling vertigo spike momentarily and then simmer down.

Something must be wrong because Lante was looking at him with more concern, not less. He laughed again, trying for reassuring. She wasn’t reassured, patently, but he couldn’t rein in the smile, despite the ache in his face.

“Gav…?” Lante had a syringe in her hands, the first of her remedies to attack the encysted parasite in his brain. That would be a good thing, surely. In the long run. Lortisse found himself unsure. He was fine now, obviously. He had seen Lante’s projections. There was a small but real danger of damage to his brain, either from the chemical cocktail or his own system’s overreaction to it. The chance that it would actually affect the organism was far greater but still short of twenty-five per cent. Lante was going carefully.

Good, surely. And yet it seemed too much of a risk. He was averse to it. They should not risk the tenuous stability they had built within him. He looked into Lante’s eyes. “You see,” he told her. “You see, I feel fine, good, okay. I don’t want any of this. Just leave us as I am. It’s all good, Erma. I’m even better than I was, recovered, out of convalescence. Look.” And he did a little skip and hop for her, to show her just how much he was in control of his motor skills. “But it’s more than that, see, see, I feel… space, so much space. We didn’t understand how vast it all was. Look how far out we came, Erma! Distances we never even conceived of, contact with such an alien environment! You can’t just wipe that away with medicine. We’re seeing such things here.” The smile was wider now, painful, hard to talk around and yet the words kept coming. “Such structure and complexity we never imagined, all these imaginary places.” He began adding and taking away from Lante’s treatment plans on the shared virtual display, enjoying the smooth way elements just disappeared, banished back to the make-believe. “Don’t try to take this away from us, now we finally understand how it all works.” His voice trembled with sincerity, or with something. “We understand so much, Erma, it’s incredible, unbelievable, barely comprehensible, and yet we managed, and now we see everything, all these spaces, playgrounds, modes of being, and beyond them all there’s you and Yusuf and Kalveen and beyond them there are more and more spaces and there’s no end to it and we can fill all of them and be all of them such such such.”

Lante twitched. He saw the syringe jab forward, seeking contact with his skin. He flowed away from her, feeling the delight of pain in his joints as he made them do unfamiliar things, trying to find a more efficient mode of movement than this rough stilting. “Let us not be interfered with by this,” he said, and tried to delete the treatment plan on the system but she’d locked the file now. And yet she was keeping her distance from him and he could feel a curious hunger, or perhaps a sickness, his mouth flooding with it. He eased back until he felt the medical cabinets behind him, sending a brief command via his implants so that an empty syringe fell into his own hand. Lante was talking, the tone of her voice soothing but an edge of alarm growing behind it no matter how she tried. She was coming closer, one hand up in a calming gesture, the other still proffering the syringe. Her actual words seemed to be breaking up in the air and Lortisse understood this was because he was concentrating so very hard on configuring his own syringe. He kept nodding, though, and that seemed to be enough to keep a distance between them.

He had set the syringe to extract a sample and lifted it to face level to show Lante what he’d done. He felt obscurely proud, as though to do it he’d navigated a vastly complicated logical maze. “Look,” he told her, and inserted the needle into his right tear duct, in and in and in—there was a lot of pain but it seemed like a second-hand sensation now, barely worth bothering with. The needle extended to the length the vessel had calculated and for a moment it just bobbed its head as they fought for a suddenly fragile control over their body. Then all was well and they withdrew the syringe, which now contained some small quantity of Us and was reconfiguring itself to inject.

There was an expression on Lante’s face but they had to work hard to identify it because the vessel had not had to process horror recently. Lortisse felt this was untoward. She had a syringe and so did he. This contributed to a pleasing symmetry in the situation that he found desirable, but it was plain Lante didn’t understand and there was only one way they were going to make her understand, so he advanced on her, holding the syringe up so she could see what they meant. She backed up against the wall of the room and they noticed they’d got between her and the door, which seemed opportune. Her mouth was open, and they realized that in the heat of all this movement and calculation they’d disconnected from those parts of the vessel’s core that processed some of the senses, mostly to override the pain signals which had become distracting.

In case audible communication would make things right, they turned their smile on Lante and let Lortisse explain, “We’re going on an adventure.”

She went for them with her syringe and it pierced their sleeve and got some of the material into the vessel’s bloodstream, too little to make any difference or so the consensus hoped. Such an adventure! Now he had Lante’s wrist but abruptly they weren’t alone. For a moment Lortisse swayed, trying to process the multiplication of external entities that had abruptly occurred. The vessel’s own archives helpfully supplied names for the newcomers but then went on to supply a vast amount of supplementary data that We-in-Lortisse could not process quickly or understand, a whole tide of emotional content, likes, gripes, histories, issues. They lost control momentarily, the vessel swaying and the space beyond becoming an impenetrable chaos of motion and light and garbled information. The vessel was being pushed and pulled. Auditory information was a clashing row of contradictory noises and the vessel itself was filled with the chemicals of distress and hurt. A threat seemed imminent and they had none of the usual recourses because this vessel was of such an unorthodox substance and organization.

Lortisse blinked, finding Baltiel and Rani gamely trying to pinion his arms as Lante programmed a fresh syringe. “What…?” He hurt, every part of him hurt, joints and skull and guts. “What are you doing?” His words were lost in the noise of their voices, yelling at him to stay still.

“Erma?” he got out.

“Hold him still,” Lante instructed.

Lortisse twitched, trying to hold himself still, and a generation of thought rose and fell in the centre of his brain. He lunged forwards as Lante came at him with the syringe, feeling his joints pop, muscles tear, the pain abruptly an ecstasy of freedom. His teeth closed snap on Lante’s hand, ripping into her flesh, grinding bone. Baltiel was trying to force the vessel’s face into one of the medical cabinets but they were more familiar with the geometry of these large spaces now and any kind of control over the vessel was predicated on causing it pain and on its limbs retaining their original configuration. They let the vessel bend and twist until Baltiel and Rani had no hold on it, and then used one hand to take Rani by the throat. Baltiel was striking the vessel about the sensory organs, and in time that would prove an inconvenience. Consensus amongst We-in-Lortisse was that the vessel was damaged beyond salvage and appropriate measures were taken to encrypt experience and history in suitably durable archival form for later retrieval and present dispersal.

Lortisse was still watching out of his eyes, still grinning, in fact, though Baltiel had knocked loose several teeth from his bloodied gums. His body sung with adrenaline and an ecstatic mix of hormones. He felt a scale of cosmic vastness that was at the same time bounded in the smallest nutshell. He felt an incomparable, religious rightness as the muscles of his hand clenched explosively, far beyond their tolerances, tearing loose from their anchor points even as he rammed a splintering thumb into Rani’s neck, letting his blood become her blood. Baltiel struck him again, and then something impacted on the vessel far harder. Lante had a tool in her intact hand. That part of him that retained access to his memories recognized that it was used to cut wreckage but Lante had used it to carve deeply into his vessel, into their body, and now a great deal of that body was coming out, great gouts and pieces of it.

The others detached Rani from their ruined grip but they were already shutting down and withdrawing from the control centres of Lortisse’s mind by then. Shortly afterwards the vessel started screaming, alone on the floor of the quarantine lab, and after that, it stopped and lay still.