Children of Ruin (Children of Time #2)

At first, nobody notices. Damascus is a planet overtaken by a pan-oceanic tide of chaos and strife, faction against faction shifting and breaking apart and re-forming. It takes remarkably long for anyone to understand that some things simply do not re-form once they are broken.

In retrospect, though, the doom that falls on Damascus has a ready aetiology. It radiates out, as rapidly as the water currents can take it, from that one forbidden place. Nobody knows Lot or what drove him, but it is clear that someone, after all this time, looked back.

The infection rides the currents of the sea, but it also rides the sea’s denizens, replicating into new colonies, infecting fish and crabs and jellyfish and plankton, shortening its expectations to fit straitened circumstances, recording the glory days when it was Yusuf Baltiel for a future posterity when a host might exist that will lend meaning to them. It is an alien in an Earth-made world, but it adapts, over and over, species by species. Some it masters, as it did the tortoises of Nod, some it is carried within, some vessels it constantly reaches towards, a flame towards a moth. It enters into countless of the planet’s dominant species, Senkovi’s beloved octopuses, and tries to inhabit them. It splits, colony leaving colony, chasing the siren song of complex activity through the vast worlds that are macroscopic bodies. Each separate colony proclaims its sovereignty, the primacy of the nerve hub it burrows within. The hosts, at war with themselves, come apart, every arm tearing itself off in search of a brief-lived freedom. And again, and again.

On the surface, Damascan scientists try their fragile brilliance against the storm of dissolution overcoming their civilization, but conventional biological controls have no hold on the Nodan chemistry, and wherever inroads are made, the target shifts and adapts. Destroy a thousand clots of seething alien life, enough survive to become the new paradigm that is proof against all efforts, and not merely through lightning-fast replication and mutation, not even through the equitable sharing of genetic material like humble Earth bacteria, but by experimentation and design. The world of Nod has biological controls that have evolved in lockstep with this substance-colony-entity-disease; countless creatures which have developed defences and behaviours to mitigate such infiltration. Even the tortoises live full lives as they carry around their parliaments of parasites. But here, on Damascus: nothing.

Solomon is not on Damascus. He is best described as an orbital engineer, born outside the gravity well and living his whole complex life at the hub of an elevator cable, strung between the planet on the one end and the distant counterweight on the other. Such hubs are massive, larger than the Aegean ever was, designed to be home to thousands. Now they are home to tens of thousands, crowded beyond belief as the inhabitants of the planet below flee their native oceans for the dubious safety of space. They shuttle consignments of squabbling, frightened molluscs to the Homeships and the great artificial worlds that string the orbital roads like beads, and still every canister that arrives from below is full of cephalopods who are starving, desperate and half-dead (or sometimes just dead, suffocated, crushed or killed by sheer shock or misery). Solomon’s Crown is keening a lament for something so large he never considered it before now: not himself, not a faction or a great artist, a spaceship or a scientific endeavour. He is trying to learn how to grieve for a civilization millennia old that is collapsing in real time as he watches.

His Reach, interlocked with the systems of his orbiting city-state, processes the new arrivals, liaises with the clever arms of his fellows, tries and tries and tries to master the fallout of the catastrophe, shorn of the need to understand its ramifications.

All about the equator of Damascus the same scene is played out, Solomon’s fellow administrators trying to string a net between them that will catch some shadow of what their people once were. They are taking thousands out of the gravity well, far more than any of the orbital habitats were designed to take. They are leaving behind not just millions, but billions. Billions more have already fallen victim to the terrible questing dissolution that tries to understand them as a habitat to adapt to, as a vehicle to be driven and, by way of study, only breaks them down into insensible, useless, dying parts. The parts, when all else is lost, are broken down further until the distinction between the molecules of Earth life and Nodan life are moot, then built up into fresh swirling colonies of bold microscopic adventurers that quest anew for that half-forgotten moment when, as Yusuf Baltiel and his colleagues, they understood it all and saw the vastness of the universe.

Solomon works. There are ships arriving all the time from further out, hauled home from their mining and exploring, their research and their wars by the fate of their homeworld. This one fulcrum moment, there is no conflict. The whole of their species is working as one, even if all they can achieve is damage limitation.

The fragile unity dies in fire and vacuum, in explosive steam that becomes an expanding cloud of ice that races about the equatorial line. One of the elevator hubs has opened fire on its neighbour, sending a score of missiles to tear it apart, venting its aqueous contents into the void of space. The crew of the aggressor is bombarded with threats, laments and demands for clarification. The victim was infected, comes the reply. Communications indicated the plague or parasite or whatever the nebulous monster is had been carried aboard, incubated in the bodies of the refugees, and then spread unchecked through everyone it found there. The Nodan invader is growing more complex in its behaviour, incubating longer before its efforts to understand and control result in the violent division of its host. It becomes impossible to know by quick inspection if a body has been infected or not. Nobody has any room for niceties such as quarantine.

Solomon reviews the traffic from the destroyed hub. Emotions pattern his skin as he tries to decide whether what was enacted was heroic self-defence or murder on a grand scale. His Reach consults the electronic data, weighing the tail off of communications, the disturbed last messages, the loss of meaning in the signals. It advises, and Solomon comes to the conclusion that the aggressor was right. Which means none of them is safe. Which means the elevators are compromised.

Solomon weighs his desires, and his judgement is this: I want to live.

He gives his commands, Reach to Reach across the hub’s network. It is not a thing to be done lightly, but his mercurial kind make big decisions more quickly than humans. Reach and Crown in accord become instant action.

Simultaneously, perfectly synchronized, he severs the cables of the elevators. The counterweight, slung far out into space on the end of its tether by the planet’s rotation, flies away, off towards the outer solar system and beyond. The inner cable, that had linked the hub to its anchor point on the Damascan seabed… There was a car carrying hundreds, partway up that cable. Solomon knows it, but by now surely at least some are compromised, and if one then more, if more then all. To cut all ties with the homeworld, literally, was the only way.

Around the girdle of Damascus, other administrators are following suit, severing themselves and jockeying with their engines to retain a stable orbit. There are collisions, occasionally. There are failures from long-unused systems. And for those below, massing in their numberless hordes at the base of the cables, there is only despair.