Children of Ruin (Children of Time #2)

The creator referred to these records as the Senkoviad. It means nothing to Helena but had plainly amused him. He had been human, from Old Earth, one of Kern’s contemporaries. Helena even stumbles across a reference to Avrana Kern herself.

There is a lot of material. The archive she uncovered is vast and she can almost imagine the dust on it all: not curated by its owners, just left unheeded in the great jumble of their electronic architecture. There is no security; that was what surprised her at the start. As soon as she configured her access protocols to something suitably archaic, she was let in as though she owned the place. Obviously, she and Portia then spent a busy ten hours trying to access systems of more practical use, only to find that all they had access to was a great morass of data, and not, say, the doors or life support or even a map. She has the distinct sense that all those things are out there, part of the sprawling virtual landscape, but they are not being governed by the same Old Empire logic and access procedures. Portia is still gamely trying, because that is her nature, although right now opening any doors is likely to get them both drowned. Left with no other options, but a more than ample sufficiency of time, Helena has gone back to her first love, because it was the obsession of Senkovi’s later days, too. She is learning about translation.

The Senkovi she meets is a man ranging from late-middle to elderly years in various recordings. He wrote and recorded in Imperial C, although she wrestles with his accent, slang and various systems of abbreviation that were probably his own invention, born of being utterly without other human company. Senkovi considered himself the last human being in the universe. Mostly he made the reference flippantly, turning it into a joke. A couple of recordings see him bleakly, deeply depressed, just rambling to himself about loneliness and frustration, mentioning the names of the dead, talking about his far-away, long-lost home. Helena guesses there had been far more of that than she was seeing; that he hadn’t often been in the mood to turn the recorders on when he’d been at his low points.

But mostly her searches turn up sessions where he works with his… experimental subjects? She has a sense that the relationship between him and his octopuses had started there but, by the earliest recording she can unearth, they had already renegotiated their respective standings. By inference, it is clear that Senkovi was aboard a ship or station in orbit, and that the watery planet below was the domain of the octopuses he appeared to have engineered, but with which he could not—at this point in the records—reliably communicate. He seemed to have no real control over them, either: they came and went, up and down the gravity well, according to their own whims. Senkovi had been a hands-off creator, she feels, but desperate to talk to them, and in the recordings they seem just as keen to talk to him. Which is ideal for Helena, who now has a vast library of recorded sessions of them failing to talk to each other, far more useful for her purposes than actual successful communication.

Portia, she signals, and the spider lifts her palps in acknowledgement. I’m going to need to cannibalize some of my translation software.

Portia’s left palp cocks expectantly: Hmm?

I need to reconfigure it to deal with the visual information the locals use, to give me even a baseline translation of what they’re trying to put across. And it’s going to be a bitch, frankly, because it’s not… discrete. I don’t think they have distinct building blocks—it’s some kind of gestalt of colours and textures putting over a composite message. I mean, I’m watching the man who actually made them, and he was working on this for decades, on and off, and I’ve skipped ahead and I don’t think he actually managed to reach conversation-level interaction with them.

Portia’s front legs lift slightly, an echo of her threat display as she contemplates the scale of the task. But you can? she says, with considerable faith in her friend.

I have something he didn’t, Helena says, trying to match the spider’s optimism. I have their current communications, the two-channel ones. Looks like they found their current mode of conversation long after this Senkovi’s day and it gives me an insight into their communications he didn’t have. So I can build on his work and maybe we can start talking. She sincerely hopes, because she is a linguist and talk is all she has.

Portia regards her for long enough that Helena asks, What? and the spider gives a curious little shake of her body.

You have great faith in the ability of communications to solve our problem. What if they are more than happy to keep us here, talk or not?

We cannot afford to believe that, Helena says with desperate faith. But like I say, I need to devote my software to this, which means I can’t keep it configured to translate for you. We’ll have to rely on yours instead.

Portia goes still, at first just thinking but then Helena translates her poise as the equivalent of embarrassment: slightly crouching, hoping to go unnoticed.

I will… configure my jacket and implants, Portia says awkwardly.

Helena feels a curious stab of betrayal. You’ve been relying on my translation all this time? And, yes, she has been eager to speak to Portia in the spider’s own idiom, to listen through her gloves. But she assumed Portia was running a simultaneous facility to understand Humans. For a vertiginous moment she sees the situation from the spider’s point of view. Of course, Humans would make the effort to communicate with the Portiids, to learn their language and imitate their sensory capabilities, but why would the Portiids, the hosts and rulers of Kern’s World, spend all that effort on talking and listening like Humans? It is a melancholy thought that even Portia might not quite see her as an equal, despite their years together. The two species are still building that bridge between them, strand by strand, even two generations on.

And so she turns to that other bridge, the one that is hers to build, working off the rickety scaffolding set down so long before by Disra Senkovi. He had been an erratic researcher; intent and obsessive in some sessions, frustrated in others, and then there were the long gaps between recordings where he had plainly lost the will to go on. The recording sequences are incomplete, some are corrupted. She lacks key milestones and must fill in gaps. But time is what she has.

Sometimes there is food: a kind of fishy slurry that is sour but edible. Sometimes the lights dim, although not to any set pattern she can detect. In the next-door chamber, the solitary octopus comes to the window to stare at her, its colours fluctuating between chalk and ash but making no discernible attempt to tell her anything.

Without Senkovi she could never have made any progress. The octopus communication is equally distant from Portiid speech as it is from human. Senkovi never cracked it, but he made records and tentative lexicons and hours of recordings. She watches him in the tanks, floating alongside his interlocutors; out in the dry, wrestling with multiple screens and a computer system that was slowly failing just as he was. She watches him butt against his limits and not know it: a man of erratic genius trying to apply his personal toolset to a problem he was ill-suited to. Senkovi was a planetary engineer, she understands, and he fell back on pushing for hard solutions and exact answers. Helena, on the other hand, is a linguist, a specialist in non-human language—even if she has only had experience with one such language until now. She takes the dead ends that turned Senkovi around, and she finds a way forward.

Sometimes more octopuses squirm into the other adjoining chambers to watch her and Portia. She takes the opportunity to record them as their skins ripple and dance with colours. Patterns spread from individual to individual, mutate, change; they are constantly talking, or perhaps emoting. They touch often, and sometimes they break abruptly into what looks like fighting—one even loses an arm to such a struggle—but which she begins to think is an inherent part of their communication strategy. She makes notes, observing them just as they observe her.

The lone, pale octopus is kept segregated, she notes, and she is increasingly certain it is their former ambassador, contaminated by contact with aliens. Its own skin flickers hesitantly when its kin arrive, and she sees an interplay between it and them, yet there is also a distinct exclusion in the way they react to it, like humans turning their backs. The interplay within the group is far more dynamic than that between them and the loner. And yet they are still “talking” to it, even as they ignore it. Which makes her ever more sure that what she is watching is something other than “talking” and puts her in mind of the twin channel transmissions the creatures broadcast with.

She sleeps, Portia and she looking out for each other and taking shifts. They eat the tedious fish-smelling paste extruded sloppily into their chamber. She works alongside the long-dead Disra Senkovi, reliving his moods and despair, his moments of manic animation, the cut-off ends of his psychological low points when he abandoned his research and his recording to feed the black dog that constantly followed him.

He lived a long time, alone, she realizes. He spent half a lifetime trying to reach out to his creations, because there was nobody else in his universe he could talk to. And he came so close, negotiated a means of exchanging data and information, yet never made that emotional link. She thinks about herself and Portia, how she can recognize the moods of the spider, even though they are not quite Human moods; and vice versa, she hopes. I am damned lucky, is what I am.

And then she finds one long clip in which Senkovi tells a joke to an octopus. It isn’t a good joke; dreadful, in fact. He finds it hilarious though, being in that part of his mood-cycle, and she watches as the cephalopod’s skin slowly shifts and changes, and then begins to rapidly flicker and dance. Laughter? No, laughter is human. Beyond an appreciation of simple physical pratfalls, Portiids do not find Human humour funny, just as Portia once tried to describe a complex social engagement she plainly considered… something, some word Helena didn’t have, the emotive impact entirely beyond her reach. So here is poor Disra Senkovi, a man a century old and many thousand years dead, telling jokes to sea life and getting a response.

And the reaction delights him. He goes on and on, dredging up puns and wordplay and double entendres, almost splitting his sides with laughter, and the octopus glitters and shimmers with bright, daylight colours, clinging to the glass of the tank and watching the ageing comedian in fascination.

Helena’s notes are sufficient, by then. She can understand what Senkovi never knew. The octopus could not get the joke, but it understood that he, its creator, was happy. Happiness is a universal, perhaps; or at least it was something the octopus read in that cackling face, and married to some state of its own. The octopus knew he was happy, and it loved him, or valued him, or felt something enough that his happiness was important to it. And that in itself is a miracle; that is the grand triumph Senkovi never grasped, that his creatures could empathize, could apply a theory of mind to entities quite unlike themselves, could be great-hearted enough to be happy that someone else was laughing, even if they couldn’t get the joke.

She watches them for a long time, and then she turns the recordings off, lets the data lie fallow. She sits with her arms about her knees and stares at the solitary grey octopus in the next cell and feels unutterably sad.

At last there is a faint touch down her lower back, one leg-tip stroking her tentatively. Portia understands Human emotions, too. Sadness is another universal, maybe, even if different stimuli trigger it.

“He was so lonely,” Helena whispers, hoping Portia has her translation software configured.

Again that stroking touch. Emotional trauma is worse for Humans, Helena knows. Portiids still feel it: for them, shock or frenzy are most common. Portiid brains are more uniform, though; they have more common experience with each other than Humans, and hence sympathize with each others’ trauma more readily, rather than each becoming a solitary prisoner of their experiences, as Humans so often are.

Helena wonders if the octopuses have it better or worse. Except of course they wear their hearts on their skins, all the time. Perhaps there is simply no such thing as a private trauma, and hence no stigma to it. Perhaps they live their lives like operatic heroes and heroines, broadcasting the grandeur of their melancholies and their rages to all within eyeshot. Thinking of poor Senkovi, that alternative sounds eminently healthy to her.

And one day, after she has thrown her bucket into Senkovi’s well and heard it strike dry, she knows she is as prepared as she will ever be. When the little parliament of molluscs arrives to eyeball her and Portia again, she is ready. She takes her slate, now configured to encode and decode as much of the octopus communication as she has grasped (pitifully little, even now) and presents it to them boldly, and hopes she is saying hello.