Children of Ruin (Children of Time #2)

These days, Senkovi didn’t leave the tank.

The Aegean’s crew sections no longer rotated, but they were empty now anyway, a drifting mess of loose fragments, clothes, personal effects. Nobody went there any more, but then, he was the lone human being left in the cosmos. If Disra Senkovi considered a place out of fashion, the universe itself turned its back. He was the lone arbiter of what was in and what was out. For the last eight years or so, “in” had been the flooded section in the heart of the ship, that had once housed his tanks and the progenitors of all the many inheritors of Damascus. At last count there were… too many octopi to count, given that they themselves seemed supremely disinterested in holding a census. Thousands; tens of thousands, spread by their weirdly social/antisocial nature into hundreds of communities across the shallower portions of the sea, and now making inroads deeper. And here was Senkovi, who had never dipped his toes into the world whose transformation he had overseen. Here was Senkovi, one hundred and eighty-nine years of age, floating in his own private fishpond.

He’d had grand plans. He would go into suspension and come out again, fifty, a hundred, five hundred years later. Except the Aegean would not last, and the octopi would not repair it, or at least he could rely on neither. And Paul’s children, the busy molluscs below, were always doing something new, alien, fascinating. And he never quite got round to it, and then, older and more peevish, he would not trust the cold-sleep chamber to wake him, would not trust the Aegean’s increasingly distributed computer network (so much of it now looping through the baffling tangle of connections on the planet). He had wandered the great empty spaces of the ship, poked through the possessions of dead men and women, let their voices play from the archival recordings so that echoing ghosts followed his bare footsteps as he padded in circles around the ring of vacant rooms.

There had been a time when he had listened out for signals, abruptly convinced he was not alone, that other humans were out there and they wanted to talk to him. He had spent hours trying to sift gold dust from the clay of universal static. Had there been faint scratchings from other terraforming sites? Had there been a hiss and a whisper from Old Earth? He had realized eventually that he could no longer tell, and the Aegean could not distinguish signal from noise. If he listened to the background murmur of the universe for long enough it became a song to which he could fit any words he wanted.

And eventually he knew that the one meaningful thing his life was orbiting around was the thing his life was actually orbiting around; the one thing he had built; the thing that would survive him, miraculously stable, evolving, growing. Somehow he, Disra Senkovi—trickster, wastrel, bored misanthrope—had bequeathed something beautiful to the universe.

And it might not last. By the time he came to that revelation he had watched the spread of his cephalopod progeny for decades and neither he nor they nor the Aegean could detect any snowballing catastrophe that would unmake it all. But decades were nothing in geological time. The terraforming seemed stable, but some invisible error might still become a world-ender a century down the line, or the octopi themselves could upset it all, or some outside force could hurtle in from the uncaring cosmos and dash them all to dust. In the end, that was really why he eschewed the cold-sleep chambers. He could not abide the thought of waking, centuries later, and finding a cold, dead world below him, the jewel of his achievement turned to dross while he slumbered.

And so he had stayed awake and watched, and had grown old even for the stretched lifespan of the technologically privileged.

And they knew him; they came to visit sometimes, up the gravity well on the elevator that was now the Aegean’s permanent, geostationary dock. They made channels of water within the old ship’s bowels that led to the central tank, and floated before Senkovi, staring at this vertebrate prodigy. Their skins flickered and flashed and they adopted coiled, deliberate poses as though they were dancing for him. His eyes—ah, well, not his eyes, not any more, but the lenses of the Aegean’s systems that had outlived such ephemeral organs—followed their displays, and the ship’s voice in his mind whispered meanings to him, fragmentary, elliptical, won by many decades of hard translation algorithms and Senkovi’s own gut instinct from a lifetime of living alongside cephalopods. There was a common language between them, incomplete as torn netting: not the words of a human son of Earth nor yet the colours and coiling of Paul’s kindred, but a compromise mediated within the ship’s systems, grown organically because the octopi wanted to talk to their creator.

He never quite understood them, not where it mattered. He could liaise with them on technical details, collaborate on models and diagrams, flowcharts and patterns. He laid all the groundwork for those who would come later—those he never believed in—but he could not quite communicate with the octopi as individuals. He confessed to them, sometimes—either in person or in long, rambling communiques to the planet below. He talked about Earth, although he felt his own memories of it decompose a little more every time he took them from their box to examine them. Had all that really been true, those triumphs, that despair? And how had such an edifice of progress brought about its own downfall so swiftly? He couched his recollections as cautionary tales, or at least he hoped the octopi would receive them as such.

And they responded: sometimes with that meticulous technical fore-planning that leapt ahead of his own ability to innovate and predict, at other times with complex utterances that the Aegean’s systems made into a kind of song. He could not grasp the precise meanings there, but filled the gaps in with emotional tones that were surely as much in his head as in theirs.

His current visitor was one of the Salomes—Senkovi had taken to thinking of all of them as Paul or Salome these days, after his long-gone original experiments, frequently irrespective of gender. Salome was dancing for him, the system struggling to keep up with the fluid patterns and shapes. Was this a new thing? Senkovi’s mind’s eye was his only functioning eye, and he let the ship show him three views of the complex attitudes Salome was adopting. There was more repetition than he was used to, broader gestures, as though the octopus was speaking slowly for a deaf foreigner.

Home glass wonder fright alert Senkovi home voyage light Senkovi attendance home. He let the ship’s systems keep chewing over the sequence long after Salome left, refining its translations, but in the end his organic brain had one last flare of its old sharpness and he awoke, floating in the tank, with the thought that Salome had been asking him to travel to the planet, to go home with his creations this once, to immerse himself in the world he had been instrumental in creating.

And he had seen that world, through the eyes of the remotes. He had seen the spreading cities the octopi were building, no longer just accretions of debris but purpose-built spiral mazes and leaning towers, weirdly-angled chaoses of grown stone that fulfilled some aesthetic he could not comprehend. He had seen the octopi in their thousands, squabbling and displaying for one another, working on machines that he could not quite understand, pushing back the frontiers of their own understanding, leaving him behind.

He gave up trying to rule them, save for one thing.

These days, thoughts led incontinently to commands, so that even thinking of that secret called up the view from the drone he kept near the shuttle. The drone’s battery was dying now, even though it had done nothing more than rest upon the seabed for years. He should fabricate a new spy, but tomorrow, he thought. Or tomorrow. And perhaps, the tomorrow after that, he would no longer be around to desire it.

They had made the damn shuttles to last, in the Aegean’s workshops. The engines had been torn apart and the powerless box flung into the witless grasp of Damascus’s gravity well. On the way down, tumbling, the already bubbling outsides had turned molten until the vehicle had struck the sea like a meteor, sending shockwaves through the water, killing seven of Paul’s kin luckless enough to be nearby, rolling waves across the world. And yet it had not broken open. The superheated outer layers had set into a fantastical gothic skin, all ridges and whorls like the hide of some hallucinogenic monster. Or an octopus intent on threat and warning, and perhaps that was just as well. The impact with the water had shunted the entire shuttle out of shape, the pressure had done more, and yet the re-formed outer layer had not breached. It kept its secrets, even now.

Nothing human could have survived the focused attention of the orbital mirrors; nothing human could have survived re-entry or the crash. But Senkovi knew that, while some part of the shuttle’s occupant had been human, there had been something malign and alien as well, and he believed wholeheartedly that it was still there, a prisoner of the shuttle, a threat to his world.

And so he told his people, over and over; he marked up their virtual maps with every sigil for danger he could think of. He told them stories about a dreadful plague, a sickness, a death that would come from that sealed box. He did not mean to give them myths, but perhaps that was what his words became. They must have become something because, in all those years, no octopi ventured near the crash site. A whole expanse of virgin seabed had been left vacant. Somehow, despite the curiosity they carried along from their native state, he had reached them in this one vital matter. Now the only presence that troubled that sunken tomb was the remote vigilance of Senkovi himself.

He knew Baltiel was still there, on the inside of that half-melted, half-crushed box. The certainty crept up on him over the years. Ask his younger self and he’d have laughed at the thought, but now Senkovi found the ghost of Baltiel all too often in his mind. I killed him, he thought, and even though it was not entirely true, he could not escape the accusation. He thought of the others, too: those who had died on Nod, those who died in orbit around it, or who perished in that other shuttle. He found that wreck, of course, or rather the octopi did. That ship had burst, striking the waves at the wrong angle, and the human remains of Han and the others were just scattered bones, devoured by the very ecosystem they had been installing. He thought about all of them, but it was Baltiel whose unseen presence stopped him sleeping.

Sometimes he went over the recordings Baltiel had sent, of the last days of the Nodan habitat. Sometimes he wondered if he needed to do something about Nod. The octopi would surely go there, some day, even though he had surrounded it on their charts with the same warnings of quarantine and danger. He had linked to the remotes that still functioned over there, sending them gliding over the alien deserts, over the dark seas, under the red-orange sun. He needed to do something, but there was an entire world out there, placid and self-contained; a world that had seduced Baltiel with its inhuman wonders and then infected him somehow. He, Disra Senkovi, had spoken with a denizen of that world, a thing whose evolution had followed an unfathomably different path to anything on Earth, yet which had been able to live in the brain of Senkovi’s friend and pull his strings.

We’re going on an adventure. The words tormented him. Asleep in the tank, he thrashed, clawing at the water with his withered hands, blind eyes staring. The octopi there reached out timid tentacles to touch him, but he was beyond any comfort they could give him. We’re going on an adventure. Perhaps, that night, he met Baltiel in his dreams, the Baltiel he believed dwelt in darkness in the sunken shuttle wreck, a thing half man, half crawling alien chaos. The eyes that fixed him, in that dream, were swarming with motes of life; the breath from those jaws was infectious, rotten with the decay that births monsters. In the dream, perhaps, he could not escape; he was there in the crushed wreck himself as the oozing and re-forming hands reached for him. Come on, Disra, we’re going on an adventure. The voice the only part of Baltiel not transformed, familiar as a knife.

Or perhaps it was nothing of the sort; unlike the octopi, his subconscious was severed entirely from the electronic systems that surrounded him and nothing of its deliberations was recorded. Perhaps he went peacefully, in the end. Regardless, he did not wake. Disra Senkovi, to his knowledge the last human being in the universe, passed away and left the watery world of Damascus to his adopted progeny, for better or for worse.