Children of Ruin (Children of Time #2)

Abruptly they have left the fighters spinning in their wake, the Lightfoot accelerating with all its power. Only the spiders, Portia, Viola and Fabian, remain at the controls. Helena and Zaine are doing their best to save the life of their fellow Human, Meshner, fighting cerebral inflammation and calming his spiking neural activity until at last he opens his eyes.

Helena isn’t sure they still have him, despite everything. There is a moment when nothing of Meshner stares out at her. Then expression falls back onto his face and he says, “They’re fighting,” which seems the most fatuous observation in the world until Fabian starts tapping and scraping at his console and she puts a gloved hand down to catch his meaning

… . being screened by three of the vessels. One of the others is damaged—there’s ice bleeding from it! They are at war! He is practically bouncing at his post, hanging head-down up the wall. A moment later he jumps down and runs around Meshner’s prone form, because Portiids have great trouble keeping still when they are excited.

Helena checks the medical monitors: Meshner seems stable now, though he has apparently lapsed back into unconsciousness. She sits back, feeling exasperated at him. Some feedback from his implant struck him down, nothing of the fight at all. She isn’t the only one to be thinking it. Fabian’s skittering progress comes to an abrupt end as Viola jumps down in front of him, her forelegs raised in threat. The male instantly adopts a submissive posture and she hoists herself higher for a moment, displaying her utmost anger with him, before stalking off to Bianca’s station.

Fabian’s palps lift and twitch, which Helena reads automatically as What did I do?

You made this happen, Portia signals, creeping over to hunker down by Helena. You experimented on him.

The male makes a few stuttering motions, not a complete sentence but the equivalent of a Human muttering to themselves, How was I to know?

Curtail your activities, Portia tells him. We are all in danger.

Fabian’s clenched legs suggest he wants to ask how he could have foreseen that, either, and Helena has some sympathy there. One moment the aliens were happy to communicate, the next—the moment they saw a human form, in fact—one group were driven to some furious rage, while others were equally vehement about defending the Lightfoot, both factions springing to instant all-out aggression without any sign or warning. And does that make them human? Not in Helena’s book. Admittedly the Humans of Kern’s World are unusually pacifistic, based on Kern’s dark references to the long past of the species, but she reckons that people would still need to steel themselves for something like that, to justify it to themselves. Unless the whole thing was a trap from the start, already primed to devolve into murderous intent, but that doesn’t explain the ships that apparently took the Lightfoot’s side in the quarrel.

None of it makes sense, she tells Portia through her gloves.

We are being contacted, comes a general announcement from Viola, with Kern’s spoken translation following a moment after. Three large ships, following our course. The vessels that covered our escape.

“At least we’re faster,” Zaine says, doubtless remembering the ponderous manoeuvring of the alien vessels.

We are not, Viola says pedantically. We are merely able to accelerate more rapidly for now. They are signalling us as before, although with a greater proportion on the technical channel. More coordinates.

Everyone exchanges looks: Human heads turn, Portiids cant bodies towards each other.

“A trap?” Zaine suggests, but she doesn’t sound convinced.

Potentially a trap if these are simply enemies that want enough of us left to study, Viola puts in. The subtext of her palp-waving means Bad things multiply, implying that just because the alien factions are fighting does not mean they are neatly divided into “friend” and “foe”.

“Can we speak to the Voyager?” Helena asks.

Kern’s own voice breaks in, transmitting through the air and floor simultaneously. “We simply don’t know the capabilities of these ships, now they are paying such close attention to us. At the very least we would be alerting them to the presence of the Voyager if we sent a transmission. We must hope our comrades are watching.”

We can just flee outwards, Fabian suggests. We can change course faster than they can.

And then what? Portia demands. Helena waggles a thumb to get her attention and then signals, Easy, calm, because her colleague tends to become the arch-traditionalist in times of stress, a female’s female. With obvious effort, Portia de-escalates her body language from threat to conversational, saying, If we flee now, even if we escape them, what have we gained? What has Bianca died for? We came all this way riding the line of their signals. There is a mystery here we need new perspectives to understand. Are they enemies that will threaten us back at our home one day? We have seen their technology is as complex as ours, or more so. If we can travel between the stars, so can they. Are they allies? Do they need our help? Why fight each other? Why attack us? If there is any chance of learning more of them, and especially of making peaceful contact, we must take it. Converted to Human terms, she is a passionate speaker, embodying the Portiid virtue of intrepid curiosity.

Zaine has plotted the new coordinates. “They’re taking us in-system, past the orbit of the next planet. That gives us around two months, more than enough time to reconfigure the ship and prepare.”

“I am seeking a meeting of minds on defensive strategy,” Kern throws out. The odd wording is a best-fit translation of the spider concept: everyone sitting around a web, plucking out ideas as they occur.

Helena feels she would have little to contribute. Instead she has the Lightfoot’s records line up a large sampling of the alien transmissions, especially the visual elements. She is, after all, the doyenne of translation software, even if her efforts have been focused on an entirely different communication system. She has time on her hands, now, if she is happy to burn her own personal allotment of it by staying out of cold sleep. Adapting her goggles and gloves and rejigging her internal software is a long and delicate process, but with Portia’s help she has the opportunity to do it now. And hopefully not screw over my brain like Meshner did.

One of her mentors back on Kern’s World had warned of exactly that—the potential for alien thought and language to cause damage to the Human brain simply through exposure. The woman had been paranoid about some hypothetical “true aliens” whose simple cognition would be anathema for any Humans (or Portiids) who tried to understand it. Helena suspects that mentor was someone whose psychology had problems coping with living on a planet full of spiders. Some of the original Gilgamesh survivors had simply never adjusted, living on a Human reservation where Portiid presence was minimal and covert. Helena’s mentor, when positing that lethal alien race, had been externalizing an internal fear she had lived with all her life, or so Helena came to believe.

And there are Portiids who find Humans impossible to be around, she knows. Sometimes it is the sheer scale, sometimes they simply can’t tune out the crashing of Human footfalls in the way most spiders do. The two species rub along with some rough edges, even after all this time.

Portia strokes her arm gently; a gesture of solidarity evolved independently by two very different species.

Remember what we said about males, Helena tells her, ruffling the tufted brows over Portia’s main eyes.

Fabian is not a typical male, Portia shuffles, doubtless keeping at least one other eye on the subject of her ire. He crouches and dances neatly enough, but he doesn’t mean it. He bears grudges, that one.

And you give him reason to, Helena points out. On her screen, the computer has coded five hundred separate alien signals, visual and informational. This is ant-work, performed by the Lightfoot’s live-in colony rather than Kern’s consciousness or the electronic systems. It is the sort of qualitative analysis at which Portiid ants beat Human computers every time.

Helena frowns, used to finding patterns in signals, in speech; so much of her Portiid language work is finding the correlations between meaning, stance, palp qualifiers, even scent chemicals, all the different facets of communication. Here she sees alien transmissions invariably sent out as two distinct formats, and yet there is no immediate correlation at all. Or if there is, it lies in some part of the data she is not analysing properly. She goes back to the source and taxes Kern about possible other channels, separate elements of the message that haven’t come through to her.

Many days later, and with Kern threatening to throttle her systems access, all she has is absence of evidence for any pattern between visual and numerical signals. Which isn’t evidence of absence, but still… “What if there are two separate species in their ships, too?” she wonders. “What if the number signals are… hidden within the main transmission by some sort of fifth column?”

So instead of giving us a rendezvous, some spy was telling us where they were going? Portia shivers, signalling her discontent with the idea. They were acting on it, though. And we have signals here not meant for us. Every one is split the same way, to a greater or lesser extent. The data-heavy visual information, the more compact Old Empire format numbers. And the proportion changed—look, there’s a pattern.

And she is right. The correlation is not with content but with split. Certain combinations of colour and shape match where the visual information comes close to edging out the numbers altogether. As though they were shouting. And indeed the colours and shapes for those periods seem distinctly less friendly. Black, red, white, spikes and sharp angles. Perhaps universal symbols of threat to anything with an Earth origin. And they are looking at something that came from distant Earth, without a doubt. The technology being used to send these baffling signals is a close cousin to tech the Gilgamesh found in Old Empire facilities, or the tech used to preserve Avrana Kern in orbit about the world that bore her name. Closer to us than whoever’s sending the signals.

Nobody is talking about a machine intelligence now, but Helena strongly feels that there isn’t a human operator on the other end of these transmissions either.

In her mind is Viola’s instinctively angry approach to Fabian, those raised legs, the implicit promise of violence carried over from ancestral, pre-sentient times: I am bigger, I am dangerous, submit to me. Portiid radio transmissions are very urbane: they carry a coded version of the meaning of spider language—the vibrations and visual qualifiers—but without the larger-scale body language to give it broader emotional context. In that sense, Human voices are better radio, because so much of the subtext is carried in tone and pacing, but even then, Humans prefer to communicate by screen where they can read each other’s expressions.

Do you think your people might have developed a distance communications method that translated body language? she asks Portia, whose attention is far more on the defensive tactics huddle, where Zaine, Viola and Fabian confer with Kern. Portia’s palps give a noncommittal shrug.

Helena feels a rising excitement, though. If they relied more on their body language… or if we made our physical expressions even more key to getting meaning across. And hadn’t the Old Empire invented a whole extra alphabet of symbols to add emotional qualifiers to written text, to fulfil just that need? So let’s say we’re dealing with a species for whom visual signifiers are a key part of their communication, and they just can’t pass meaning along without them… And that is a sticking point, for surely, when developing their culture, such a species would still need to reduce that meaning to some sort of code, something like written characters, that would abbreviate and come to represent the original physical communication. But what if it hadn’t, somehow? She cannot imagine the path such a culture would take. How could they get from barbarism to such a height of technology without ever having to reduce their language to a simpler code? Or perhaps what she sees in that packed visual channel is an abbreviation of something even more complex…

Remember to breathe, Portia tells her, and Helena realizes she has frozen up, her mind chasing blind alleys as she holds her breath. It helps to have a friend who knows her that well.

“I’m going to focus on the visual channel alone,” she announces. She will take the initial categorization work done by the ants and apply her translation algorithms to it, that are themselves the evolutionary descendants of programs devised by her ancestor, Holsten Mason, when he was still a crewman on the Gilgamesh. The ants will take on her software and bring her crumbs of meaning from the wealth of data that she has.

And it is a wealth that only increases as they fall in-system away from the asteroid belt. The traffic that was so riotous about the silvery habitats or installations or whatever they were is nothing compared to the cacophony they can detect already from the next planet in, a broad-spectrum… what? Not babble, but an eyesore of clashing colours, Helena considers. A complex, shifting display from ten thousand separate sources. She wonders if they are at war, whatever they are, but it seems impossible that there could be a whole angry planet with such a level of technology that wouldn’t just destroy itself. Like Earth did. As though there is some millennia-old curse that follows all the children of that lost planet and goads them into annihilation.