Children of Ruin (Children of Time #2)

Fabian suggests that one faction of the locals owned the asteroid belt and they were in dispute with the faction on the inner planet whose orbit they are now speeding towards. Certainly there are signals triangulating between the world and the alien ships shadowing them. The new rendezvous point—or ambush opportunity, as Portia cannot help thinking of it—will put them within the orbital track of the planet, but a good thirty million kilometres from its position at that time, and she considers the precision of this. Perhaps some alien mind has tried to find a compromise that puts the proposer close enough to home, while not so close as to spook the visitors from the stars. Or perhaps the locals simply have weapons and technology that makes a nothing of thirty million kilometres. If forced to make the call, Portia does not think they do, from what she’s seen, but they definitely have an edge over her own people’s tech. Still, technology is not a linear business. There will be strengths and weaknesses on all sides, even with everyone clinging to the shoulders of antique human giants.

Ever since Portia last came out from the freezers, she has been bothering Kern for updates, regularly asking: Are we nearly there yet? so excited she is skittering all about the crew compartment, floor, walls and ceiling. It is a particularly Portiid state, born from a hunting species that evolved a society where aggressive behaviour has to be kept in check. When the moment for action comes, she will be stillness personified if she needs to be. Right now, her deep ancestral instincts are telling her to Do something! and so she runs about the available space, and stops, and runs, and stops, playing with the level of oxygen and sugars inside her to keep her frustrations in check.

Kern’s long-range scanning shows new alien ships summoned in to wait for them at the rendezvous point, already doing… something. The scanners are uncertain at this range, but it is possible that one of them is altering shape or splitting in two, which suggests some interesting convergences with Portiid engineering.

Kern has also taken some better readings on the planet, distant though it is, and come up with a battery of interesting findings. The signal density suggests a very technologically active society, but the good doctor’s analysis is that such a volume of signals does not support the idea of a densely-populated world reliant on radio transmissions. Kern’s comparison with the world named after her, for example, indicates that if Portiid communication was still primarily radio-based, signals would exceed what she is detecting by a factor of ten. Of course, the bulk of modern Portiid chatter is not sent over the airwaves but instead by fibre optics and similar closed systems, meaning Kern’s World is quite a quiet place to any alien listening stations. The crew have formulated a range of mostly unsupported theories to throw evidence at. Is there just a small population? Is radio rationed or restricted to a certain class (as it was through much of Portiid history for religious-social reasons)? Perhaps the world throngs with non-broadcast technology and there is simply a large orbital presence relying on radio transmissions. That is Portia’s suggestion, which she feels best fits the observed facts.

Viola counters with Perhaps they’re just alien, which is not, to Portia’s mind, very helpful. Viola has taken Bianca’s death badly—the two of them had been born to the same peer house, had known each other almost from the moment they hatched. Portiids do not have the close family bond Humans are so dependent on, but kindred minds of long association form a tight-knit sorority—siblinghood, Portia corrects herself, a wave of her palps approximating a rolling of the eyes—where the loss of a colleague leaves a gap in the network, a hole that drags the world out of shape with its absence. And so if Viola’s state of mind is not exactly like Human grief, it is still a mournful acknowledgement that the world of today is at variance with the world of yesterday, and today is not the richer for it.

Still fidgety, Portia pages through the data Kern is accumulating about the planet. Even at this distance, considerable orbital scaffolding is in evidence; not quite the ring about the world that Portia’s home sports, with its geosynchronous web strung out from dozens of elevator cables, but a great clutter of what might be space stations or what might be debris. Sporadic energy signatures suggest either some particular flashy industry or perhaps large-scale weapons discharge. Past all that, the actual planet has a curious signature that Kern can only explain with the idea of an almost entirely liquid surface. At that distance from the sun, this is most likely water, Portia knows.

There are aquatic intelligent species on Kern’s World. A species of crustacean has long had diplomatic relations with the Portiids, and limited trade and exchange of technology. The spiders do not venture beneath the water much, though, and the ocean-bound culture seems destined to remain there, their technology lagging behind the Portiids, and the horizons of their ambition forever ending at the surface. Aquatic cultures are not good candidates for high technology, and most especially not for spacefaring. That, at least, is Portiid received wisdom on the subject.

Kern agrees with such wisdom in principle. At the same time she has been drawing up calculations about mass, momentum and inertia as applied to the alien ships, and finding neat solutions to her equations only if the huge vessels were filled with water—and completely filled, mind you, with no gaps for air or the sloshing would burst any kind of hull Kern can conceive of. And there was that icy, ruptured wreck they came across on their approach; surely that would have been just such a ship that had encountered some calamity and opened to the freezing void of space, gouting its life’s blood before the remnants froze solid.

There is much debate on the possibilities and Portia keeps a couple of idle legs in the conversation just in case anything particularly edifying is said. With three other feet she asks Helena how an aquatic species might communicate.

We’ve seen how, Helena tells her, deep in the strands of her own work as she fights with the aliens’ communications. Visually, at least in part. Perhaps infrasound. Maybe there are whole extra channels we’ve not picked up, and all this is meaningless. She sounds frustrated, but Portia knows her as well as one of her kind can ever know a Human. Helena has a patience with long, complex tasks that Portia finds quite spiderlike. In her more honest moments Portia would admit it is a facility she herself often lacks. She jumps without a line, as the saying goes, all too often. But then the spiders recognize that to prosper, a colony needs a good balance of temerity and caution.

I see what they have done now, announces Kern, and the screens shift to show new images. Knotlike tangles of legends spring up around the images as Kern explains. The largest waiting ship is now considerably reduced in size, and its mass has contributed to a new globe, that may be either protected by the same flexible membrane, or possibly by something entirely beyond Portiid technology: a field of pure electromagnetic energy. Another ship has docked with this transparent globe, an organic-looking umbilical projecting into it as the two spheres gently orbit one another. The other ships are standing off, some thousands of kilometres away.

I have received some fresh transmissions. Helena is considering them, but they include one clear section that, I think, is unmistakable. It is a docking authorization code that I recognize from my own time. It is, therefore, an invitation. Helena?

I concur, Helena taps out absently, then speaks the sentiment for Meshner and Zaine.

Portia hunches, feeling a frisson of fear at the thought. A strange arena for a first contact: a sphere of water held impossibly in the vacuum of space, an inimical medium for a Human, more so for a Portiid. A challenge, therefore.

I will go, she stamps out emphatically, getting in before some other daredevil can steal her thunder. I will meet with them.

She feels Helena’s hand on her back.

I had better go, too, her Human says. I think I have some first principles of their language worked out.

****

The Lightfoot has been decelerating for some days now, though not for as long as the other alien ships, the ones still far behind them, which are slow to start and just as slow to stop.

The water, of course, Fabian suggests. He waits for a challenge from the females, but right now they are either content to listen or have other things on their minds. They will have hard limits on speed gain and loss, colossal momentum and inertia problems, and the energy required! He finishes his speech with a half-threat gesture to emphasize the martial nature of their opposite numbers.

Someone has taken on a few new Understandings, Portia observes drily, suggesting that Fabian’s newfound authority is very much standing on the backs of (female) giants. Helena absently flicks her a cautionary gesture with one thumb and the spider responds with a little irritated twitch of her palps. Yes, yes, he’s right of course. However he came by it. Portiid genius is in the interpretation and application, not the knowing; she can’t really deny the male his moment.

Viola is unhappy about entering onto “enemy” ground for any kind of meeting. Kern is, too, but everyone else decides in favour of it. Portiids are not good at chains of command. There is no clear successor to Bianca because they tend to think in terms of branches and networks rather than straight lines. Authority amongst them comes down to nebulous levels of influence and Viola is not well-liked enough to carry the argument. Kern herself would be a tyrannical autocrat if anyone let her, Helena suspects, but her long history of negotiation with the Portiids led in different directions, with her reliant on them, less a matriarchal god figure, in the end, than a conjured demon that has grown used to the captivity of its magic circle. Although the Kern instances vary, Helena knows.

“So tell me.” Kern’s voice makes her jump with its closeness, for all the computer hybrid can speak from any point around the crew quarters. “How are your efforts at communication doing? Because you don’t have time for peer review and editing.”

Helena grimaces. “I have a working system, downloaded to my implants and a slate. I can produce signals that are at least superficially similar to their visual data, and I’ve found some… tenuous correlations between what we see and the technical data stream paired with it—as well as the simpler emotional content we already had.”

“Hmmm.” Kern’s human voice is doubting, and probably she only makes the noise to transmit that doubt. “I was not able to find any correlation between the data sets. Show me your working.”

Helena does so, because that sort of snappish demand is just how Kern is—a less than charming personality that every Human and Portiid on Kern’s World has grown quite used to. She flags up the correspondences, which are not any kind of continuous linkages, but points where certain key signifiers in the visual stream—colour-choice, wavelength spread, the physical shapes of objects—always seem to prompt particular responses, as though the visual stream is off on its own for most of the time but comes back down to check in with its sibling channel and…

“Your conclusions, please?” Kern prompts her, because the data she has provided is intricate but goes nowhere. “What is this for?”

“To give instructions, perhaps. Or take on information,” Helena explains. “But probably the former, because you can see this precedes a lot of the physical response we’ve seen in them, especially the fighting. I’m wondering if we’re dealing with more than one species working closely together, or a species and a machine system, like Viola was saying.”

“And?”

“Working out from that, I can see certain visual signals lead to certain types of action. I’ve classified these…” More data flagged up; Kern can search the whole database but this saves her computational power, which Helena knows she appreciates. “I can’t exactly chat to them about the weather but I can get as far as We come in peace. And on the technical stream side I have more I can say, but I suspect, without a visual stream, they may not take it on board, or maybe whoever does understand what I’m saying isn’t in a position to call the shots…?”

Apparently Meshner has been eavesdropping. “Their technology is superior to ours, we think? Why not let them call the shots?” He still looks pale and sorry for himself despite convalescence in cold sleep, but he is back with them.

“We have a large library of their transmissions,” Helena points out. “They have almost nothing of ours.”

“And I intend to keep it that way if at all possible,” Kern puts in firmly. “I have not detected any attempt to compromise our systems”—meaning herself—“but I have put some fail-safes in place and given instructions to certain crewmembers to check on me.” The unspoken coda: if Kern is hacked by the aliens, will she know? The main hope is that Portiid computing is so different to the Old Earth systems the aliens appear to base theirs on that any attempt at taking Kern over would be doomed by sheer incompatibility, whereas Kern is growing increasingly familiar with how the locals’ computers must work.

It hasn’t escaped anyone’s attention that Meshner has been given broad access privileges to Kern’s systems, heading up a list of two ahead of Viola. That raises eyebrows and palps all round, but neither Kern nor Meshner are in an expository mood, and full disclosure will have to wait.

And then their engines are shouldering against their momentum, jockeying with physics to come close to a spectral sphere that seems to be nothing but a globe of water, dancing in slow circles with the alien ship. It is almost empty, save for two chaotic-looking jumbles of angular, unformed plastic facing one another across a vast fluid space. Except that Helena sees the assemblies are exact mirror images. Our side, your side.

The prevailing theory amongst the Portiids is that they will find something here like the stomatopod civilization back on Kern’s World, only vastly more advanced. The crustaceans back home are also highly colour-sensitive, and indeed their natural sensoria contributed considerably to Portiid tech. The slate Helena will be projecting her colourful messages onto, and all the screens in the crew quarters, form their pictures by modified chromatophores, myriad colour cells that swell and shrink, tiny and multitudinous enough to produce lifelike moving images.

“How big are they, do we think?” Zaine asks warily, because although the new globe is dwarfed by its parent ship, it is still a lot of water.

No larger than I am, Portia replies promptly. She flags the dimensions of the connecting umbilical, which a Portiid would just be able to crawl into. They must just like the open sea.

“There is a problem,” Kern puts in. Her human voice is flat, suggesting she has reassigned processing power from trying to sound like her old self. Helena catches subtext in the Portiid vibrations she gives out, though: warning, anxiety and an odd sense of confession, clarified by her saying, “I have been working on a weapon to deploy against the enemy. Only if things went wrong, obviously.”

“Let’s not call them ‘the enemy,’” Helena says quietly.

“I had hoped that an electromagnetic pulse would impair their systems and allow us to escape, as we are far less vulnerable to such weapons,” the computer explains primly. “However, this globe exists only by virtue of a magnetic field, which might not survive such an attack. Hence, our ambassadors enter very much at their own risk.”

It was always going to be that way, Portia puts in immediately.

“I have prepared your suits, then,” says Kern, somewhat mulishly. “Suitable for water or vacuum, for what it’s worth.”

“Good luck,” Meshner says, not sounding terribly optimistic. Helena manages to meet his bloodshot gaze and smile.