Children of Ruin (Children of Time #2)

And, after that, a coda. A sideshow, almost—save that, of all these seeds of time, this one shall grow.

Another octopus, a male. Perhaps his designation, set down in the old human-style databanks, is Noah. Humans would also call him a scientist, though the designation is inexact and Noah thinks of his chosen avocation as something more like art. His arms do all the hard maths, after all.

After the fall of Damascus, the orbital community of octopuses lurched along just ahead of crisis and extinction. They clung on the very brink of oblivion, but if there’s one thing octopuses are good at it is clinging on. Their Crowns dictated what was needed, the collusion of their Reaches found solutions. They held on. They multiplied. They accelerated their materials-salvaging from the outer system, the asteroids and gas giant moons, dispatching their insensate miners in great clouds of minuscule larvae, that would gnaw and grow and start firing ice and hydrocarbons and metal-rich rock back at them as soon as they struck some solid surface. They built until the orbit of Damascus was one tangled field of habitats, the ice and alloys and plastics and invisible fields of magnetism containing what was left of them. And their antisocial nature, never far from the surface, began to break out, of course, and they fought and factionalized and argued.

And a few, like Noah, were able to see a bigger picture even with their conscious minds. A human psychologist would characterize the octopuses as more id than anything else, with a blind ego subsumed as their subconscious, but some still see further. Noah is haunted by dreams of being the last of his kind, a cephalopod Senkovi surrounded by the drifting wreckage of all there has ever been. The cluttered, quarrelsome orbital civilization he can see making and unmaking itself day to day does not look like longevity to him. He is not the only one.

Amongst their kind, factions arise without contracts or firm agreements, or much thought for the future. He has come together with two females, Ruth and Abigail, each of whom has seen in the shades and poise of the others, a kindred spirit. They have plans for the future, meaning not just tomorrow’s tomorrow but many generations hence, plans that will come to fruition long after their natural deaths. Such foresight is rare amongst their people. Each one of them is something of a genius, insofar as the term has any meaning.

But they cannot work their science surrounded by the constant turnover of the orbital ring. Other factions would take from them or try to stop them, and Abigail and Ruth have plans that require considerable distance between them and their peers. They take a ship and let it fly out of the orbital society, heading inwards. For the two females, orbit around Nod is the only proper place for their research; for Noah, the abandoned orbital station contains data and human science lost in the long millennia of the octopusus’ rise on Damascus—lost when the old Aegean finally fell from orbit. Nothing he could not rediscover, perhaps, but after deducing its existence he wants it to make his plans a reality, and what he wants, his Reach attempts to realize for him. Also, it is the only place he can get the peace and quiet his mind needs to function.

Their departure is marked. Eyes and instruments follow them, but for now they reach their destination unmolested. They have gone where it is forbidden, but Pandora’s Box is open already; how bad can it be? They find themselves in orbit around Nod.

The old orbital station is there, calved off from the ancient Aegean and devoid of life or power. It was effectively abandoned long before Baltiel’s final, fatal discovery on Nod, but they knew how to set an orbit in those days. It will be a few thousand years more before this hulk falls into the arms of the planet below. Taking all due precautions, Noah and his fellows send out drones and then have their onboard factories build the necessary materials to dock with the vacant station and begin to buttress portions of it for aquatic habitation.

Abigail and Ruth are greatly animated, and disposable drones are dispatched to view the planet’s surface. Much of it is an inhospitable hell—dry land, after all. The seas seethe with strange life and they watch, shuddering with strange emotions, as things devour things, or hang in the water like… unlike anything they are used to.

And they find the old habitat, of course, though it is now little more than bones, its inorganic parts brought down by chemical dissolution but its plastics and other organic compounds holding out against an ecosystem that has no way to metabolize them.

Abigail and Ruth plan to isolate the organism that came from Nod to despoil their planet. They intend to discover an antidote, a cure, a global vaccination. To them, there is only one future for their species, and that is to return to Damascus and conquer the sickness that has dissolved or maddened the majority of their kin. They do not think of their intention in quite that way, of course, but the breadth of vision of their Crowns combines with unusual ingenuity in their sub-brains to produce that end result.

Noah disagrees with them. The three of them have plenty of resources to play with, and so he does not feel the need to compete with their plans, but he has given up on Damascus or any attempt to recapture the past. Noah sees only the future; his plan is escape.

They recover the records of the survey team, fragmentary but still readable in part. Abigail and Ruth’s Reaches begin to digest the data; understanding percolates upwards, rendering the alien comprehensible. Samples are brought up from Nod, especially from the salt marsh biome. They find the “tortoises” and other host creatures that carry a certain colonial bacteria-analogue within them. By now the whole orbital is sealed and strengthened to permit experimental chambers with a rigorous quarantine protocol. They experiment.

Noah picks clean the databanks of other morsels—star maps, engineering minutiae, scientific breakthroughs from Old Earth. He is trying to take the technology of his people in a new direction, driven by the desperate straits of his civilization. Humans once looked in that direction too, and though they never made it a reality, their theories feed into his Reach, filling his mind with possibilities. He only knows that he is approaching a breakthrough. He understands that what he wants is a tantalizing possibility, and can almost feel the shape of it within his grasp. The speculation and experiments of long-dead human scientists are filtered through his alien consciousness; his mind finds tangential courses unlike anything a human might propose and his arms enact tests in virtual space, making the numbers fight to the death for his pleasure.

He builds something, or his arms tell his drones to build it, out on the exterior of the merged ship-orbital structure. It is a hideous thing, quite unlike either the human or the octopus architecture it juts from, and yet to Noah it has a certain beauty, a dramatic jagged reach into the infinite.

For the stars are far away, but he understands that those who created his people walked there once. On another distant world, those humans are themselves the last inheritors of a dying planet, and they and Noah have both looked at those same star maps and faced the same problem. Where can we go? Their different solutions are not merely born of the distance between their phyla. Noah’s people have been incrementally building on the technology of their creators, stop-start, for a long time. The Gilgamesh’s architects had to start from scratch, hauling themselves from a second Stone Age. The Gilgamesh itself was ever a crude toy compared to the wonders of the Old Empire, but the pre-collapse Old Empire is the anchor Noah and his predecessors have built up from.

The stars are too far away, and his people are not predisposed to think in terms of generation ships and cold sleep and a thousand years of travel. Noah wants results now, and because of the wealth of technological understanding he has inherited, he can do something about that. Six-eighths of his cerebral capacity, on all levels, are bent towards that one end.

Octopus technological development is simultaneously the lone mad scientist and upon the shoulders of giants. To the Crown, every achievement is a solitary struggle, plucked from the whirling abyss of inspiration. To the Reach, progress is the result of colossal feats of calculation and analysis based on previously gathered data-sets. In their shared vessel, Noah, Ruth and Abigail brought a substantial copy of the work of previous generations, as it relates to their specialities and as it caught at their ephemeral interest at the time. Now they studiously ignore it while simultaneously pillaging it for all it is worth.

Two-eighths of Noah’s attention remains with his colleagues. Much as he would prefer it—much as they all would—he cannot just ignore them. They are constantly in and out of the same systems, their virtual sucker-prints on the data and the electronic architecture. They squabble over the same resources, although such bickering never degenerates into serious conflict. There are days that they spend at opposite ends of their hybrid complex, brooding over grievances, but most of the time they greet one another with cautiously welcoming colours. And the two females keep tabs on his researches, as he does theirs. Thus, he is very aware when something significant happens.

Noah has instituted a certain level of internal quarantine between the females’ labs and his own, implemented by his Reach to ease the nagging worries of his Crown. The triggers he has left in the system alert him when the drones bring something big up out of Nod’s gravity well, far larger than any marsh-crawler or sun-drinking not-quite-plant. He has electronic eyes he can call on. What he sees… makes no sense. What he sees has a familiar shape, one he responds to at a very deep level: it is the shape of God; it is the shape of the past.

There are sufficient accoutrements of human occupation still in the orbital’s shell, and he registers that the females have found the thing containment. He registers that they are now working on a problem not of epidemiology but of communication.

It is not so long after this development that the three of them finally reap the disapproval of their peers.

There has been sporadic radio contact across the gulf between Nod and Damascus, not consciously governed, but the three scientists’ Reaches have sought data and sometimes processing power from the fragmentary city orbiting the water world. Someone has noticed and decided that their activities constitute an unacceptable risk. Forbidden is forbidden.

In fact there was considerable debate, as usual, and no one opinion prevailed, but one faction has worked themselves up into a righteous crusade. Now here they are, in a ship bristling with weapons and seething with fighter craft, determined to unilaterally bring an end to whatever abomination is being perpetrated out in Nod’s orbit.

Ruth and Abigail initiate communications and attempt to negotiate. On the screens of the warship a kaleidoscope of scientific rationale flashes, their hopes of reclaiming the planet, their progress, their preliminary findings, anything to stave off the hammer. Noah notes that they are obfuscating: no mention of their new-found experimental subject. They know that would be impossible to square with these crusaders. Noah himself continues working with his device, because it is his whim to do so even under threat of annihilation, and because he is afraid and frustrated and wants to strike back, and his Reach interprets that in a very specific way.

The females’ pleas and promises flash and coil within the warship, and they waver, they do waver. Certainty of cause or purpose has never been an octopus trait. A single clear voice can win over a mob or an army. But not this time.

The tide ebbs but then returns, stronger than ever, as the individual viewpoints within the warship mingle and turn to angry colours. The fighters detach from their mother ship. The weapons charge.

Abigail and Ruth have not been idle while their enemies debated. They are scientists after all, and they and Noah have, in their more paranoid moments, prepared for this. The hybrid station’s power plants are given over to fields that bend light, dissipating and diverting the lasers, foxing the missile tracking, confusing the fighters so that they attack each other or go spinning off into empty space seeking phantom targets. To the warship all this becomes instant proof that their suddenly potent enemy must be expunged. The Reaches that man the weapons decide that railgun pellets are the surest way and send a deadly salvo at the station, metal slugs accelerated to incredible speeds by electromagnetic pulses. The energy shielding of the station will deflect a few but not most. Despite the speeds involved, the distances in space are such that Ruth, Abigail and Noah are fully aware of what is coming. They have time to react, but no ability to save themselves.

Noah reacts. His Crown is seething with rage. He has an answer for the warship and, to the emotional hotbed that is an octopus mind, mutual destruction has a dramatic satisfaction to it that calm acceptance of death lacks. His arms lock about the interface of his invention, the beautiful doomed thing that will not, now, be the salvation of his people.

He triggers it. The result is instantaneous. Before its projectiles impact on the station, the warship and its closer fighters are gone. To Noah’s Crown they are simply obliterated, his enemies defeated in a wash of power he can only revel in. To his Reach, noting the instrument feedback and reports, they are still in existence, albeit smeared in a vanishingly thin cloud of atoms between here and a star system seven light years away, or so his calculations suggest.

A successful test of the equipment, is close to the sentiment that Noah dies with, and he is not unhappy at his personal achievement.

Then the projectiles tear through the station, sending lethal shockwaves through the water-filled spaces, venting ice and organic material.

And then? No more, not for many years until new, alien visitors come to disturb the unquiet tomb with their incautious tread.