Children of Ruin (Children of Time #2)

“My interpretation of inner-system signal traffic and activity supports the hypothesis that they are at war,” Avrana Kern’s precise, always-slightly-disapproving voice informs them. The Lightfoot’s control system isn’t all of her, of course, only a pared-down version, but Avrana Kern tends to expand to fit the computational space available. Helena wonders if she possessed similar qualities when alive and in her human body.

Portia, beside her, scrapes and shuffles, the words coming through Helena’s gloves as, What are we even looking at here? War with what? Another waking, this, after the long step in-system, and Portia is irritable and restless at the enforced inactivity.

The Lightfoot has come in towards one of the gas giant’s larger moons to find it… under deconstruction, is the only way Helena can think about it. The ball of ice and rock had once been about forty per cent of the size of Kern’s World (and, therefore, of Old Earth as well) but has lost at least three per cent of its initial mass. Closer drone viewing shows its outer surface riddled with holes and grooves. Burrows. It is crawling with life; all the more remarkable because it has no atmosphere to speak of, any appropriate gas-forming elements either making up part of its frozen surface or having long ago evaporated into space. Surface temperature is, by Kern’s scale, 250 below zero at the very sunniest. And yet it lives and, apparently, makes war on its inner-system neighbours.

The drone moves closer, dangerously close save that the locals do not react to its presence in any way. They are creatures of varying size up to about half a kilometer in length, with the majority of them somewhere near that larger demographic. They have the form of something grublike, but with dozens of stubby legs ending in hooked claws, with which they make a slow but sure progress about the moon. Their heads—or at least the truncated businesses at the anterior end of their bodies—end in a bizarre, machine-looking assemblage that is plainly more than able to chew up whatever they run into. Helena watches them just grind their way into the ground, barely slowing from their waddle on the surface, their fleshy segments bulging and heaving as they work.

“Producing no signals at all,” Kern remarks, “on any wavelength. Their interaction with others in the system is restricted to their bombardment.” Helena can hear her Portiid report, too, which is as close to identical as it can be. Kern is concentrating on what the drones and the ship are doing, meaning she has less computing power to devote to personality.

One of the lumbering monsters emerges from the earth, its grinding mouthparts breaching in a shower of dust and rock shards that tumble and fall silently back through the vacuum to the surface. It seems to stare out into the blackness of the sky, past the curved wall of the gas giant itself, and then tucks its head in, claws digging into the substrate beneath it.

Its whole body contracts, shortening by almost a third, and then by half again in recoil as it spits a huge bolus of rock towards some distant point, enough to clear the planet’s gravity well, flashing away at such a ludicrous velocity that Helena reckons some kind of magnetic acceleration must be involved. Its siblings are doing the same, tunnelling, devouring more of the moon’s structure and then launching what they have mined at their far-off foes, whoever they are. From the state of the moon’s surface, this has been going on for some time.

“The targets are locations within the asteroid belt that lies between this planet and the inner worlds of the system, especially the world from which the bulk of detected signals originate-t-t-te.” Kern pauses over the word, playing with the end of it to show she is reconsidering.

Targeting signals, Bianca announces. There are signals from the belt that the missiles are being directed towards, compensating for celestial movement. Quite some complex maths these mining beasts are capable of. The signals are being directed here specifically, tracking the moon. Bianca throws the telemetry and a string of intricate diagrams up for general consumption on the screens, and Helena reads the Portiid representations from long experience. Spider diagrams tend to be four-dimensional and place as much emphasis on non-physical connection as actual structure, so understanding them is something of an art.

“It’s not a war.” The voice is Meshner’s, and the automaton beside him translates for the Portiids. “It’s too far away. These missiles… by the time they arrive, their targets have had ample opportunity to dodge. Unless they don’t want to. I think that they’re miners, just like you said. And rather than having someone come over here, dig up the stuff and take it back, they’ve seeded the moon with these things to mine for them, and to spit the stuff home for their use.”

“T-t-t,” says Kern, somewhat frostily, but then, “Agreed.” Helena wonders how much of her presupposition of war was based on the belief that the inhabitants of this system might be human-descended, and on Kern’s low opinion of her own species.

Then Meshner’s companion adds something, a little tip-tapping that makes a single word Helena can’t place—a name for something, given without context. Her puzzlement is mirrored in most of the rest until Kern calls up some images of what he means. Helena sees a view—much magnified according to the notation—of a podgy soft-bodied caterpillar-looking creature with a bizarre telescoping head/mouth.

“But that’s just a water bear, a tardigrade,” she says, the words slowing as they come out. The resemblance to the colossal moon-miners is persuasive.

Fabian, Meshner’s colleague, expounds now that he has everyone’s attention, in that slightly nervous, always-ready-to-retreat manner that Portiid males have when speaking publicly. They are notably resilient. They can survive hard vacuum in their native state, though not like this, only in a cryptobiotic form. But if you wanted base stock to manipulate towards this end, you could do worse.

For the next half hour or so, everyone pores over the data collected by the drones, until at last Kern sends one in for a tissue sample. As the distant robot darts in to cut a strip from one labouring monstrosity, Helena holds her breath and waits for the angry retaliation. There is nothing, though. The creature seems not to notice, just grinding and spitting in an endless round. They must use some of what they mine to make body mass, she thinks. They must breed, probably parthenogenetically, to have this many of them. By then, cursory inspection of other moons around the gas giant has shown similar infestations. The civilization further in is greedy for ice and metal and even just rock.

The biopsy confirms Fabian’s guess, though Kern has to send data up to her larger self in the Voyager to cross-check against the DNA banks there. They are looking at a piece of bioengineering simultaneously incredibly sophisticated and brutally functional.

Zaine asks the question most of them must already be thinking: “Could we do this?”

Bianca and Portia are both insistent that Portiid technology would be more than capable, if such a recourse ever became necessary. The others are less strident. Meshner and Fabian bend close to their automaton to discuss, and Helena puts a palm down next to Portia and buzzes out, Really?

I’m not a biotech specialist, of course, Portia shuffles, with a hesitancy that speaks of evasion. There is Portiid optimism—and recklessness—and then there are the hard limits of Human-Portiid science. Helena decides that what they are looking at here—a self-renewing project that must have been ongoing for generations—is far beyond their ability to replicate. And more, it speaks to a frightening sense of purpose in the culture that developed it. Purpose, or desperation.

****

Meshner has Artifabian enclose a section of the scout ship so he and Fabian can get back to their work. The facilities they have brought over are limited compared to what the Voyager offered, but he is determined not to let it stop him, and equally determined not to let the collective disapproval of the ship’s high-ups slow him down. Fabian is of a like mind. The pair of them have been awake longer than most and he is resolved to keep further cold-sleep periods to an absolute minimum. The whole scout mission promises all manner of unpleasantness but until they actually enter a first contact situation, the one resource they will have plenty of is time.

“I have isolated a selection of new Understandings,” the spider explains through his artificial namesake. “These are from my personal store.” Fabian means those he inherited as part of his genome, or that he took into himself from the Voyager’s library before boarding the Lightfoot. The mark of a Portiid genius is not in what one knows or the mechanical skills one can deploy: all of these are part of the common currency of the species; copied, traded and absorbed with ridiculous ease. Genius, to one of the spiders, is either a superior ability to think on their feet—a particularly apt human figure of speech—or else the ability to take on a large number of Understandings at once, and thus find new synergies between multiple skills and memories. Fabian is an Understanding polymath, something that was supposed to be rare in males, but probably isn’t. He has a good list of active Understandings he can distil for Meshner to sample.

“The challenge is,” Fabian goes on, “to find something that you will know to be other, but isn’t so other that you simply cannot process the experience. We want to keep estrangement to a minimum.” He pauses, confers with the automaton over just how his meaning had been communicated, and then adds, “By which, I mean—”

“You don’t want to fry my brain,” Meshner confirms.

“Delicious as that concept is to the imagination,” Fabian agrees, and Meshner can only wonder if this is some peculiar Portiid saying he’s never encountered, or if Fabian is making another venture into human humour.

“Take what precautions you can, but we’re going to do this,” he tells his colleague. “We’re not going to let them stop us.”

“Of course.” Fabian skitters over behind Meshner and begins checking over the node of the ship’s computer currently linked to the Human’s cranial implant.

Ants in my brain, Meshner thinks, though of course it is nothing of the sort; the ants don’t leave the confines of the ship’s network but their calculations create electrical inputs that feed into the chambers of his cybernetics, and thence to his brain. Human and Portiid technologies mesh more readily than their cultures or languages.

And it seems the technologies of these locals follow a similar pattern. The Old Empire is at the root of it all, meaning some common ground at least. If we had met something genuinely alien, we wouldn’t know where to start. Right now, in fact, the Lightfoot is waiting on word from the Voyager, where the language teams have made some sort of breakthrough with the inner system signals. Perhaps everyone will be talking to everyone else any moment, one big interstellar community.

All the comms are between Bianca on the scout and the command crew on the mothership, mediated by the various instances of Kern. The crew of the Lightfoot has nothing to do but wait for the news, which is why Meshner is getting on with his own work rather than just twiddling his thumbs. Theoretically, Artifabian could just have patched back into the network and spilled everything, being an instance of Kern. Meshner has discovered, to his surprise, that this is something the automaton is resistant to. It is its own little fragment of artificial intelligence, and to come too close to the intellectual pull of a larger instance like the Lightfoot’s operating system could see it merged and stripped of its individuality. It values being itself, and what it has become working with Fabian and himself, a unique intelligence. Which sounds terribly rebellious and impressive until Meshner considers that this drive to become separate is part of the initial programming trajectory Kern gave it.

“All ready,” Artifabian informs him, and a moment later he connects that with the tapping on his lower back that is Fabian himself giving the all-clear.

“Go,” he confirms but at the same time the automaton says, “Wait—receiving new information.”

Fabian raps irritably against Meshner’s back and he says, “Just go, start the process.”

The automaton raises its front legs partway, as though about to go into a threat display, but then freezes, apparently weighing its priorities. Meshner feels the familiar uncomfortable prickle at the inside of his skull as his implants begin parsing information. He has gone through their architecture since the last time, streamlining everything he could and adjusting the connections with his various sensory nodes. Now he finds a strange taste in his mouth, sharp and sweet, as though he is about to vomit. He clenches his stomach experimentally, but there is no other symptom.

Abruptly his fingers feel gritty, their skin coarse as he rubs them against his thumbs.

“The Voyager has instructions. Bianca is addressing us,” Artifabian says, momentarily nothing more than a mouthpiece for the wider nation of Kern.

“Let her,” Meshner grumbles. He hears Fabian’s palps tok behind him. A glance shows the spider keeping three feet and a couple of eyes on the instrumentation even as he cants his body to listen.

“Avrana Kern has made a major breakthrough in respect of the communications from the inner system,” the automaton says, translating the jittering of their mission commander. “Concealed within the visual data, which remains impenetrable, there is a second channel of mathematical information based solidly upon old human notation. This has now been at least partially decoded so that we can understand information such as coordinates, flight paths and some technical data, with more waiting to be interpreted. Armed with this knowledge and commonality, joint command sees fit to send us to make initial contact with the local civilization.”

Meshner tries to concentrate on the words, but there is a lot of white noise intruding on them and it seems to carry its own burden of impenetrable meaning. His skin strobes with stripes of heat and cold that pass up and down his spine. “How are my readings?” he croaks.

Fabian sends over a brief report to a sub-screen. There is a riot of new information in Meshner’s sensory foci, especially the olfactory and gustatory regions of his brain. Curiously, Meshner isn’t tasting or smelling much of anything right now, but phantom touches jab at him all over his body. He hears a great ebb and flow like waves of the sea, and bright motes cluster around the edges of his vision.

“This is no good,” he tells Fabian. “It’s runaway synaesthesia. We’ve not synced the information.” He feels frustration, because this is the core of the problem: are spider experience and human experience intrinsically incompatible? It is proving a hurdle that grows with each attempt to leap it.

Terminating, comes the acknowledgement on the sub-screen even as Artifabian continues to relay the mission brief. The Voyager is going into hiding and the Lightfoot is going to say hello to the warring natives, Meshner blearily gathers. It seems like a terrible idea to him. The scout vessel will be utterly without support, but then the locals might be so advanced that all the Voyager would be able to achieve would be to die on the same hill.

“Given the reliance on bare technical detail, Avrana Kern believes there is a strong chance that this is a machine civilization that has outlived its creators,” the automaton explains crisply. Meshner is having trouble processing the idea, but he feels strongly that any such artificial survivors would be less than delighted to find humans on their doorstep after so long.

“Perhaps they’ll think we’re a travelling museum,” he gets out, the physical sensation of lemons and sunlight and blue suffusing his skin, spider-life trying to force itself down all the wrong channels in his brain. Fabian skitters out some sort of message but, before Meshner can read or hear any translation, he feels himself slide sideways and loses consciousness.

****

Zaine takes it on herself to upbraid Meshner when he is finally back with them. Helena watches her tear into the man, while the spider crewmembers stand back and either ignore their Human fellows or badger the ship for translations.

He had been out for a couple of hours, the chief reason being informational overload. Helena knows what he is trying to achieve, and even supports the idea in principle, but Meshner is weirdly competitive, determined to make a breakthrough before some hypothetical rival eclipses him. He doesn’t want assistance from her or Portia. He wants to win, or that is how it comes across.

Zaine’s own Portiid liaison work is practical, working in narrow, task-focused situations and building a gestural code to communicate swift, limited chunks of information. That is as far as she cares to take matters, and Bianca and Viola, who work with her, seem equally happy to leave Human-spider relations to the field of just getting things done. Meshner wants to get inside their heads, or vice versa. Despite his prickly arrogance Helena feels she is more on his side of the argument.

“I didn’t ask for this posting,” Meshner mutters sullenly.

“You could have said no,” Zaine tells him.

“You can never say no. Fabian couldn’t. He needs to show he’s useful, or he’ll get passed over.”

“For what?”

“For everything. And I need him, so here I am.” Meshner’s eyes are bloodshot and the skin about his boxy cranial implant is red and puffy.

“Why were you even on the Voyager?” Zaine demands. Helena glances round at the spiders, but of course they don’t hear like Humans do—speech is barely perceived by their vibrational sense, even Human shouting, keyed as they are to other frequencies a world in which the spoken word is irrelevant.

“Time,” Meshner spits. “Time, in transit. We were awake a lot longer than you, getting this set up.” He jabs a thumb at his own head. “We knew we’d get more done than stuck at home dancing to everyone else’s tune.”

Zaine opens her mouth to lay into him again but then Kern’s voice breaks in from all around them. “Contact!”

Bianca responds immediately. Helena has her gloves to the wall in time to catch the trailing end of her questions, with Kern thrumming back that she has established a connection with an entity located within the asteroid belt that lies beyond the gas giant.

An alien vessel? A machine? Bianca taps out.

I am unable to say, Kern replies through the walls, Human words echoing after for the benefit of those without Helena’s advantages. But it is responding to the basic queries I have sent it, and not merely in the manner of an automated beacon or similar mindless system. I am receiving a battery of enquiries, most of which I lack the familiarity to answer. I believe we have contacted a real intelligence, machine or organic. I am responding as best I can. Kern makes a rapid tapping sound to indicate annoyance, mirroring her exasperated human sigh, artfully reproduced over her speakers. I am still receiving a vast preponderance of visual data. The comprehensible segment of the signal comprises less than five per cent of the information load.

She displays some of what they are receiving: the same bright-patterned, constantly-shifting abstract shapes Helena saw in signals previously intercepted. They are hypnotic, lacking a recognizable rhythm, heedless of geometry, just broad swathes of flowing, shifting patterns, or rapidly shifting non-Euclidian objects whose dimensions, textures and arrangements change apparently at random in bewildering, non-repeating sequences.

Viola suggests that perhaps it is art, mere aesthetic adornment to garnish the functional message. The amount of bandwidth it takes up makes that unlikely, but that is a Human/Portiid judgement. Who knows what the locals believe important? Speculative discussion breaks out, even Meshner making a contribution, but Helena just stares at the patterns, their weird complexity speaking to her with a seductive promise of meaning, of familiarity. She has worked all her life to break out of her own skull—not by drilling holes in it like Meshner, but by expanding her viewpoint. She feels that if she could only push that envelope a little further… but no, nothing. Whatever the message is, she is missing it.

Soon after, everyone is in their acceleration couches as the Lightfoot shifts its angle of approach towards the belt. Kern believes she has arranged a rendezvous through exchange of coordinates in the locals’ notation. They are going to meet the aliens.