Children of Ruin (Children of Time #2)

And now we come to something more like yesterday, a mere century or two before the Portiids and their Humans arrive to make ripples.

Civilization on Damascus has not advanced dynamically over the centuries, nor over the millennia. The philosophers among the octopuses would find the idea of historical inevitability absurd. History winds and pools, gathers itself and then makes sudden lunges, but just as often retreats to old ground. The lack of pressure, the gift of technology, the abstract nature of cephalopod thought, these things act against any great drive for organized advancement. Similarly, their approach to records is very different to humanity. The Aegean and its systems failed long ago, but before they did they were replicated and improved upon. There are dozens of elevator cables spread around the waist of their world, tethered to the deep reaches of the sea and stretching out towards the cosmos like reaching arms. Something like the old Aegean can be found beyond the waning edge of the atmosphere at each one: like but improved, in the Damascans’ haphazard, intuitive manner. They maintain a worldwide communications net, and they have, after many failures, approximated the cybernetic implants that their human predecessors took for granted. At least ten per cent of the population is constantly engaged in the virtual space their network generates, using it for design, for art, for amusement. Their technical language, that underlies all their interactions with the machines their planet is so busy with, is still built on the skeleton of the old human systems, modified for octopus ease of use but remaining something that would be recognizable to a ship from old Earth.

They have no other written script. Language and communication is spontaneous to them, impossible to fossilize in sterile representations of their thoughts and ideas. Their only records are cinematic; the dances, fights and debates of centuries recorded as performance art, not historical document. Their culture exists as a shifting zeitgeist even as their technology is rigorously documented back thousands of years.

They have ebbed and flowed their way through time. Sometimes vast quantities of them have lived for generations like the simple molluscs their Earth ancestors were, while a fragile handful maintained the machines or lived a life of technocracy in orbit. At other times flashes of mad inspiration crackled through the populace, every octopus was a scientist, rediscovering what their ancestors had been given, jetting off into a hundred dead-end areas of speculation, making new discoveries that the builders of the Aegean would never have dreamt of. Then, a century later, half that knowledge would be gathering dust in the databases, the fleeting interest of its creator civilization gone on to other things. The high-water mark of their scientific development has crept up over the generations, but the tide goes out as well as in. Human historians, somehow able to observe over such grand periods of time, would tear their hair out at the lack of historical narrative, the weirdly amorphous shamble of the Damascan cultures.

Other historians might also remark that, despite springing into being, like Athena from the head of Zeus, fully armed with a technology that could unmake their world entirely, they have persisted all this time, constantly wrestling and skirmishing and yet never destroying themselves.

But all good things must come to an end, and this is how it happens. Despite this long shift back and forth, the sway of their culture has been leading to a point of crisis, and just like human crises it is the result of their being too successful.

The liveable area of Damascus is huge compared to Old Earth. No continents and islands for them; they have the whole seabed to colonize, and they have done so. The population of the planet now stands at some thirty-nine billion octopuses. They reached the load-bearing capacity of their ecosystem a long time ago, but cephalopod ingenuity stepped up its game over and over, reaching out into the solar system and devising new ways to harvest what they found there, building in orbit for yet more space, stopgap after stopgap; and, just like humans, they are unable to fully confront the problem or take measures to curb it. That same ingenuity, though, is now compounding the situation. Broken machines, waste products, failed experiments, all of them are cordoning off areas of sea floor that might otherwise provide a living for the crawling hordes. Whole populations are on the move, or else are fighting to the death over ever-reducing living space. A million genius intellects wrestling with the problem on any given day, a hundred innovations and a dozen revolutionary scientific plans, always the promise of The Solution just around the corner, but everyone is living in each other’s personal space, and that is never something the octopuses have been able to put up with for long.

They look to space, just as their progenitors did. Around the equator, growing outward from every elevator terminus, there is a ring of habitats that grows and grows. Most of the planetside octopuses find the idea of living in the sky disconcerting, but there is a whole separate culture growing up there, each submerged city claiming some part of the sky to call its own and make its colony. The orbital habitats are without even rotational gravity, but gravity is something the free-swimming molluscs have little need of, and long-term exposure to zero-G leads to far fewer health problems than a human might suffer—no brittle bones for them.

Damascan orbit is by no means the extent of their ambitions, either. They have sent probes to their sister-planet, Nod, but only to swing by, not to land. The prohibitions of Senkovi hold, there. Some octopus adventurer or other is always on the point of testing that forbiddance, but they are either prevented, or some internal warden steps in to change their flexible mind. Their Reach, the subconscious reasoning part of their cognition, accesses the records carried forwards faithfully from the dawn of their age and understands the danger of the world of Nod. They let it sleep.

Instead, their focus is the outer solar system. There is a great asteroid belt there, between Damascus and the gas giants, and they have been mining it for centuries, first with machines, then manned stations that all too often met a disastrous end, and now with bioengineered agents uplifted from the humble tardigrades that share their oceans. The octopuses have become patrons of new life in their turn, although their living miners lack anything approaching true intellect. But perhaps that might change in the future, or might have changed, before things went so wrong.

And even before they went Wrong, they were going wrong. The conflicts below had begun to spread to the orbital settlements. There were a hundred factions at any given time, and any individual or clique might shift its allegiance on a whim, without warning. A war that no side could win, because there were never the same sides from day to day.

Paul, this new Paul of the last days, dwells in one of the greater cities, a drowned conurbation that sprang up a century ago on a deep ridge, the water there metallic with volcanism but at least clear of jostling neighbours. Now there are a million octopuses living there and conditions are becoming intolerable. In Paul’s district, one of the oldest, the original haphazard holes and pipes and boxes already built over by a reef of fresh construction, the water is thick with effluent, and waves of anoxia prowl the streets and reach into dens to asphyxiate the occupants. It is not the old geological processes that kill, but poor water circulation leading to build-ups of toxicity. Too many, all living too close, and the city was founded hurriedly, without proper planning. The conditions are worst on the young. A certain level of parental feeling is part of the cephalopod mindset, a germ of maternal egg care taken by the Rus-Califi virus and turned into at least a residual loyalty towards one’s offspring, and the young in general.

Paul has seen his spawn die, drifting lifeless in the cloudy water, their bodies’ decay only worsening the conditions that killed them. He has seen too many generations of hatchlings perish, too many eggs that never hatched. Other youngsters are killed young, because everyone is hungry now and another ancestral trait, one that breaks free of the virus’s shackles under stress, is cannibalism.

Other parts of the city are better off, so say the dark, angry skins of his neighbours. He has fought those neighbours for scraps, for the cleanest water and the best dens. Today he unravels from his meagre home and feels different. Perhaps the poisons have touched his brain a particular way today, Perhaps inspiration has come to him.

He lets himself rise up to where his seething host of neighbours can see him. Usually this invites attack and the desperate and impoverished spend their lives hiding and creeping, but Paul the downtrodden beggar lets his Guise flash bright and unlocks the floodgates of his emotions so that his Reach shivers and twists in its attempts to turn his feelings into meaning. A thousand slot-pupiled eyes are on him as he hangs there, rippling his mantle, strobing rage and desperation in stark patterns across his lesioned skin. Where has this come from? Only within. Today Paul has had enough, is sick of his life, sick of the foul water, sick of being sick. The undulations of his body are a savage call to arms. One by one the watchers jet up to join in, taking on his colours and his posturing, enemies become allies without any hard border being crossed. Within an hour there are hundreds, a thousand, all united and flooding like a rubbery carpet over the city, gone to attack those to whom privilege has dealt even a single extra card, gone to tear things down, to redistribute the substance of the city across the sea floor. Because of desperation, because of loss, because of residual heavy metal poisoning.

It is a scene replicated in cities all over Damascus. They are a passionate breed, these cephalopods. They have limits, and sometimes the poetry of destruction is the only art form left to them. This Paul will die. Thousands will die in this city alone, as though the entire metropolis is a single beast turning its countless arms against itself until it is torn apart by its own fervour for life. Paul flows ahead of his newfound followers, tentacles rippling as though he is the banner of their army. In his mind, set against the backdrop of deprivation and misery he has known, this is the most beautiful act he has ever accomplished.