Children of Ruin (Children of Time #2)

Portia feels herself at the hub of a network of threads, stretched taut and vibrating with alarm and excitement. “Alarm and excitement” would probably be the Human translation of her answer, if someone asked her why she had volunteered for the Voyager crew. Of all those on the scout mission, she had no qualms whatsoever at being chosen—not just because she works very well with Humans (well, with Helena, who in her mind is not a particularly representative Human, but good enough), but because the thought of the Unknown, of cosmic mystery, of things to discover, motivates her even more than most Portiids. Her lineage is one of explorers and pioneers. An ancestress of hers stole the Sacred Eye of the Messenger from the ants, back when the ants were the great power in the world and not merely a convenient operating system to run Avrana Kern on. Amongst the myriad contributors to her genetic code are aviatrixes, warriors, astronauts. And others, of course, more commonplace, but Portia’s genetic inheritance skews far more to the daring and the groundbreaking. This is not simply a matter of a predisposition to certain personality types, of course (a trait observed in certain social spiders long ago on Earth), but a curation of Understandings all the way back to the days when those skills and memories could only be passed down by the natural union of sperm and egg. Portia really is the sum of her ancestors, crouching on the cephalothoraxes of giants. She remembers the thrill of striking out into virgin forest where monsters might dwell, contesting with the elements, mastering the technology that opened the doors of the sea and the air, seeing Kern’s World from orbit for the first ever time. And there is tragedy and loss and pain associated with those experiences, of course, but generation on generation such sharp edges tend to get rounded away.

When she was very young she faced her life’s great fear and it nearly destroyed her. It was that there might be no more frontiers, no new branch to leap to, no new prey to puzzle out and conquer. There is a lot in Portia with which her far distant arachnid huntress ancestors might feel a kinship. But she conquered that fear, took it on faith that science and global ambition would conspire to give her the opportunity she craved, to stand and measure legs with her illustrious forebears, and find herself at least their equal.

Now she waits, always hard for her. The crew have been in and out of sleep as their whims take them, but Portia hates the waking, and so she has been staying out longer under the excuse of research. Helena is working on the theoretical side of their communications studies, refining the sensory inputs of her gloves and goggles and training her brain to convert tactile subtext into impressions that make sense to Humans. For her part, Portia is tinkering in a desultory way with the acoustic translators she can wear like panniers, and which give a very basic—and sometimes howlingly inadequate—impression of Human speech. The drive to communicate is mostly the other way, though. After all, there is only a small number of Humans on Kern’s World compared to a billion or so Portiids. There is an implicit suggestion that the newcomers should be the ones to adjust. She has dismantled one pannier and is following some Kern-prompted suggestions on how to refine the outputs for a more intuitive result, but mostly she has her mental legs on those imaginary threads and is waiting for them to twang with activity.

Portia’s ancestors were not web-spinners as a first resort. If there were a species out there uplifted from orb web spiders, its outlook would be very different, evolved to sit at the heart of a far-reaching world of its own creation, where the landscape speaks to it in its own language and it does not need to travel. Portia’s tiny ancestors turned such perspectives against their non-sentient creators, forging the voice of the environment or sometimes even extending those artificial sensory organs into webs of their own that they could lure the original builders onto for ambush. The thought of waiting for that web-borne message is therefore a matter of far greater danger and excitement: in the core of their minds the Portiids know they are not the builders of the universe’s great web, but they dare to walk it and eavesdrop on its messages and turn it on its makers if need be.

Her web now is made of the other crew, each one of them tense as a drawn wire as they close with the coordinates negotiated with the locals. Her web is the ship and its personality-filled operating system and, beyond and into the void of space, the unknown aliens themselves: machines, Humans, something entirely other?

Those who have a mind to are trying to make more of the library of alien signals, especially that baffling preponderance of visual imagery. For her part, the ship’s version of Avrana Kern has sent spies ahead to the meeting point. These are not the same multi-purpose drones she used with the tardigrades, but tiny things, shot out from the Lightfoot at enormous speed and containing nothing but the ability to detect and report. Everyone hopes this will not seem like hostile action to the locals, but if the locals are already hostile then the entire arrangement could be a trap. Yes, this is why the Voyager budded off the Lightfoot, in case of such a betrayal, but that doesn’t mean the crew of the Lightfoot can’t do their best to avoid becoming such a sacrifice.

Portia doesn’t feel fear yet, and when she does she will feed off it, buoyed by all those ancestral memories in which fearful things were overcome by courage and resourcefulness (and luck, but she tends to downplay its importance). She is well aware that some of her crewmates are less sanguine about the prospect. Viola agrees with the theory that the locals are machines, and believes that without organic entities to give them perspective, machines can never be good neighbours, as what can they want, if not to make new machines? Viola is most concerned about a fleet of self-replicating machine probes descending on Kern’s World in the future, led there by what the locals here discover after dissecting the Lightfoot and its contents, crew included. Portia is frustrated with her caution—shy away from every twitch and vibration and you’ll never catch anything at all. On the other hand, the lack of enthusiasm from the two males on board seems altogether more natural, and she actually has more time for their naysaying. Fabian and the Human Meshner have been winkled from their private research and are combing the alien signals for any sign of threat. They are both intelligent in their way, and being cautious and shrinking from danger is an archetypal male trait. Portia is well aware that to think in such terms—as most of her ancestresses have done without ever examining the thoughts—is unhelpful and atavistic of her, but it does mean she will accept a warning from a male far more readily than from another female, from whom any attempt to rein her in feels like a challenge.

Attend, comes the instruction from Bianca, whose own personality sits somewhere midway between Viola and Portia, neither too hot nor too cold on the intrepid scale. We have sight of them.

The threads are twanging, in Portia’s mind. She calls up the images greedily. Kern has done her best with the limited imaging properties of her tiny spies but Portia doesn’t expect too much.

Her expectations are shattered, to her joy. In that moment everyone is staring and nobody is speaking. Not a spider foot or palp moves, not a Human mouth flaps.

There are seven vessels converging on the rendezvous point. Five of them are spheres, radiant with an inner light that silhouettes a complex internal architecture like shadows on the face of the moon. One, the smallest, is a long teardrop that even now is tumbling—seemingly out of control but, as Kern’s commentary explains, actually in the process of commencing deceleration. The last is a fat torus shape, spinning, edge-on towards its direction of travel like a runaway tyre. All of them are festooned with nodules and nodes that suggest only the teardrop ship has a “facing” and the rest are entirely ambivalent about front, back, port or starboard. Kern’s information—her longer-than-long-range scans with which she has kept an eye on these objects—suggests they have been decelerating for a remarkably long time and to very little effect, reducing their speed ridiculously slowly rather than (as the Lightfoot will) waiting to get close to the meeting point before making that irrevocable decision. Some of the crew are suggesting that this shows a confidence in their hosts, perhaps even a trust. Portia has a feeling the practice has a mechanical imperative behind it.

The smallest ship, the teardrop, is half the average volume of the Voyager (given that volume is variable depending on what Kern is doing with it). The largest of the spheres is not much short of the frozen ruin they discovered on the way in. Huge, and they apparently manoeuvre as though they’re even larger, given that gradual deceleration. Portia is intrigued.

Behind those oncoming vessels, the asteroid belt is strung out across a vast region of space, far denser than any such feature in Portia’s home system or long lost Earth, which still means that it is mostly empty space where the odds of any two objects connecting with each other is vanishingly small. Kern’s best guess is that a huge icy body met its doom here, either a fugitive flung from another solar system entirely or a world that formed further out in this one, and was then dragged in towards the sun until it met the grinding teeth of the gas giant’s gravity and was torn apart. It left a great field of nothing, then: scattered rock and ice smeared thinly in a ring around the sun, but extreme magnification shows that later years have added some jewels to this plain setting. There are artificial worlds there. Kern’s best guess at enhancing the images suggests a scatter of pale bodies, like the spherical ships but bigger. The asteroid belt has been colonized. Elsewhere, less radiant, there are installations that must be acting as spittoons for the distant tardigrades’ mining expectorations, catching the missiles and processing them or sending them on.

Could we do this? Portia echoes the past question from Zaine and, to herself, admits that they could not. And yet we have come to them, not they to us. Always better to be the explorer than the explored.

There is a buzz of communication now amongst the crew. As the Lightfoot and the aliens close, the signal density increases, both the background hum of them, from the belt installations and especially from the next planet in the system—their homeworld?—and direct queries sent by the oncoming ships, which seem more and more insistent about something. Kern is communicating on the technical channel still, but the character of those enquiries is changing. The visual element, which means nothing to anyone, is edging out the mathematical data until there is barely anything comprehensible in the barrage of demands. The only numerical information left over seems to be nothing more than sender ID.

At about this time, Meshner completes a structural study of the alien vessels, identifying a variety of installations on their exteriors that might be weapons systems of different types. Of course the aliens are far closer now, so that the Lightfoot can assist him with its own direct analysis. They are closing on the meeting place and it is evident that the visitors are not speaking to the locals in the manner they have come to expect. Portia notes that the characteristics of the visual chatter are shifting. The colours are becoming starker, with fewer blues, greens and yellows and more blacks, whites and reds. The shapes are sharper, spiky with harsh textures. To Human and Portiid eyes there is an implicit sense of threat.

Kern is still transmitting her own signals, including a variety of Old Empire codes and conventions, but there is no sign the aliens understand or even register them.

This is their primary means of communication, Helena states. Whatever they are, we need to send something back to them, something visual but simple. We have no idea what any of this means, but we’re now picking up a common emotional subtext. Or it might even be text. If we are all getting the same impression from this, and if they are of any kind of Earth stock, I think we can take this as an accurate reading. They’re getting angry.

Viola, proponent of the machine intelligence theory, disagrees. It’s not possible that they could have evolved in such a way. Your speech, our speech, we learned to encode it first, turning sensory impressions into numerical data that can be read in and of itself—from zeroes and ones to more complex codes. There is no suggestion that this data is encoding anything other than these images, and it’s using old human conventions even for that. You’re suggesting they leapt to being able to transmit their primary mode of communication without any sign of an intermediate stage that we might be able to detect and decode.

Portia understands the argument: after all, the only reason Humans and Portiids can understand each other at all is just such a simplified notation, which can then be built on to reconstruct the meaning. Without such an artificial encoding between them, the patter of spider feet and the vibrations of an anthropoid larynx could never have bridged the gap. And Viola is right, those alien signals are pure visual data. The idea that an emergent intelligence could develop a technology like that without intermediate building blocks is beyond credibility.

But then we are dealing with the alien, she thinks. Perhaps they just did. And if they blow us up we’ll never know.

She adds her voice to Helena’s, saying: We must send them something, even if it is just to show we’re not stupid.

Zaine says something that Portia’s working pannier translates as: Send theirs back to them.

Terrible idea, Helena counters swiftly. If they are threatening us, we don’t want to escalate.

Send them a picture of us, Portia throws in. When that gets everyone’s attention she clarifies: An image of one of us, an image of one of the Humans. Or even just a human image in the abstract. They are using technology that is at least human-derived, after all. It should mean something to them.

Everyone has an opinion on that, and Bianca asserts command to filter through the stamping and shuffling. Portia already knows her motion will pass, though: the hubbub is just the usual “yes-but-I-want-to-make-this-my-idea” that she is more than used to from groups of the ambitious amongst her own people.

Send an image of Helena, Portia submits, and that seems as good a solution as any. Bianca confirms the idea and Kern starts to transmit on the visual channel, throwing in a grab-bag of blues, yellows and pinks in the hope that these really are calming colours.

The result is dramatic. The profusion of angry-seeming colours fades instantly, leaving only simple, more repetitive patterns of what Portia guesses are neutral shades.

They’re telling us to wait, maybe? Fabian puts in timidly.

My spies suggest there is a great deal of communication between the alien vessels, Kern puts in.

Calculate some alternative trajectories for us, just in case, Bianca orders.

Indeed, the ship confirms. I can’t intercept much of the communication, but it is ninety-nine per cent visual… ninety-seven… ninety-two… The technical channels are experiencing a large upsurge.

I don’t like this being a countdown, Fabian puts in.

Bianca starts to reply, If you don’t have anything useful to contribute—and then everything goes wrong all at once. The alien ships are launching dozens of smaller vessels, as tiny and fleet as the originals were huge and lumbering, and they unleash their weapons almost at the same time.