Children of Ruin (Children of Time #2)

Of course Helena isn’t expecting to be instantly passing pleasantries back and forth with her new octopus overlords. When her ancestors met the Portiids, Avrana Kern was there to act as translator and reluctant mediator. Half exalted, half terrified by the idea, Helena has a reasonable claim to be the very first human being to venture cross-species first contact since Kern herself, and Kern had centuries and a machine’s limitless patience. Helena has only her own skills, a little software and the records of Disra Senkovi. And arguably the linguistic challenge is greater here than it ever was with the Portiids.

Turning her communications into something the octopuses can even register is the first challenge. She starts off by handcrafting each image, as clumsy as making sentences by writing one word at a time on a sign. Still, she knows how to display calm and peaceful intent, and how to exhort similar emotions from her audience. She blesses Senkovi’s sentimental nature, which had given her a large library of positive impressions. She starts with that, and has their attention, or her slate does. I need a bodysuit that displays colours. And that can morph into ridges and whorls. Not that she has the facilities here, but it seems something that might be possible with equipment back on the Voyager, and that sets her heart racing. We can overcome these limits. We could actually talk to them for real. In that moment she forgets both her predicament and her comrades.

She keeps on showing slides, effectively indicating how terribly well-meaning she is, and reading the responses she gets. Armed with Senkovi’s library, her translation software whispers in her ear, indicating the moods of each cephalopod she looks at, and sometimes adding tentative translations. Most of them give her almost nothing else, but there is some fragmentary chatter being received on the under-channel, numerical and logical data running through complex proofs and calculations she struggles to follow.

“Where is it coming from, even?” she asks. “They must have implants.”

Portia has her own software reconfigured to translate human speech, and she is also working on some sub-systems of Helena’s own, using Human language to make real-time imaging for the octopuses. That sounds somewhat like relying on a phrasebook written by someone fluent in neither language, but Helena has hit her own hard limits of what she can accomplish in the time. She has faith in Portia. She has nobody else.

Still, Portia has lots of eyes, and the lesser ones are very attuned to movement. Helena at first assumes Portia’s system is glitching when she says via her translator, “Console furniture.” The spider’s jabbing palps direct her to various fungal-looking protuberances around the water-filled chamber. The octopuses there are never still. Often they drift about one another—sometimes displaying different colour schemes towards different individuals. Sometimes they grapple, wrestling fiercely and then breaking apart to studiously ignore one another as though caught out in an indiscretion. There are usually one or two performing similar assaults on the rubbery assemblages towards the bottom of their tank, though. Helena studies them, while cycling through her messages of peace and goodwill. Are they just exercising, or is that an actual terminal, and their squirming an exchange of information? The lumpy, irregular stubs of the putative consoles have plenty of grooves and pits, perfect to be pried and squeezed by the creatures. She sets up a subroutine that confirms Portia’s guess; there is a correlation between the logic-number channel sequences and the octopuses’ stints on the consoles.

Progress.

She begins transmitting back on the same channel. There, at least, the meaning of the signal is more readily graspable, and it seems reasonable that they can receive as well as transmit. At first she sees some definite reaction: the octopuses wrapping themselves about the controls, jetting away, strobing their skins at her or at each other. She tries to indicate astronomical data—the idea of having travelled at a great distance, the idea of equality and fairness. The information the under-channel can display is frustratingly limited, and it didn’t even exist when Senkovi was holding court. And their captors are losing interest, she sees. Some have drifted up out of the chamber altogether, and there are fewer and fewer eyes turned on her.

Because I’m not saying anything. She recalls the way that the Lightfoot was ignored that first time, when it just sent numbers. Because what, really, could one say in such a medium? It is ideal for technical notation, schematics, data, but despite what some mathematicians of her acquaintance might claim, you cannot reduce all Human experience to numbers. She can share a theory or prove an equation, but she cannot hold a conversation.

“Ready,” comes Portia’s translated confirmation, “Speak now after checking.”

Helena’s side of the slate now displays a lexicon of Human words in Imperial C. Helena selects three: peaceful, earnest, passionate. The visual display gives out a complex whorl of colours and shapes—entirely abstract, not resembling an actual octopus in any way, but her audience is instantly more engaged. She notes their responses and side-conversations; they are still not really talking to her, but she picks up a lot of curiosity-signifiers amongst them, and presumably that is a good thing.

Simplify, she decides. Peaceful, placid, calm. And the colours stabilize and compliment each other, until she has variations on a theme. She adds further alternatives, layering synonyms that almost overlap, emphasizing how very sincere she is, how very willing to deal honestly. She sees some of her colours reflected back at her, but not as many as she hoped, and so she slims her meaning down further. They still don’t understand me. There are subtleties to this that neither Senkovi nor I fathomed. She virtually thrusts the slate at them: Peace, peaceful, peace-loving.

“Getting bored,” Portia says. Her voice comes over flat and dead, like Kern on a busy day. If we get out of this we are going to work on your side of the translation software. But she is right: several more of the observation team have simply jellied off across the chamber and left. She is not reaching them, not even holding their interest. She tries speaking; the slate picking up her words and translating any emotive term into what she hopes is the octopus language. Her fingers are still adding qualifiers, constructing linguistic towers of sentiment that surely mean something to the octopuses. Or has she got it wrong from the start? Is the meaning she extracted from all those hours of old recordings an artefact of anthropomorphosis after all? Perhaps there is nothing there she could ever communicate with.

“What was that?” Portia demands abruptly, bringing Helena back to herself. She realizes she has been running on automatic, her attention elsewhere, off on a wild goose chase for meaning. She has been awake for nineteen hours straight, setting up this chance to open diplomatic channels, and now she is sleeping on the job.

But the four octopuses still with her are all staring at her. What did she say? Nothing new, surely, but… She goes back over her comms records and her heart sinks. “It’s nothing. I screwed up.” Her hands had been insisting on calm, peace, tranquillity. Her voice had jumped topic and she’d told her slate that she was desperate, fiercely desperate, passionate to reach them. She was on autopilot by then. The slate mechanistically took it all in and gave out a display of peaceful desperate calm passion.

She moves to scrub it and start again, but the octopuses are signalling to one another, and one is fighting its console again, a seemingly lackadaisical display of violence that nonetheless translates into a complex signal that is… maddeningly out of reach for her. What does it all mean? She feels like crying.

“It is flight telemetry,” Portia remarks. Her agitated movements are excited, her translated voice dreary. “It…” For a moment she is plainly not sure of her own conclusions, but then she jumps, actually jumps so that she almost hits the intervening window between them and their mute interrogators. “Look…” And she waves her palps in the air, trying to describe what she means. Helena simply can’t see it, Human comprehension failing to mesh with the way that Portiids understand motion and trajectory, but in the end she trusts her friend and takes it on faith even as that flat voice drones on.

She feels so abominably weary, but what if this is the only chance they get? She fights with the slate, trying to formulate a message, aware that her audience is losing interest yet again, even as Portia’s recounting inadvertently drags her closer to sleep…

And she almost does nod off, but in that hallucinogenic borderland between wake and repose the understanding comes to her, jolting her back.

I’m being dull. For a Human, it is natural to try and simplify, but she can see the whirl of complex patterns the octopuses direct towards her and each other. The old recordings with Senkovi had been the same. If they were talking, they were yammering away constantly, too fast for her to understand and with no care that she was a poor, lost alien without a hope of following.

She lurches to her feet and approaches the window, slate held before her like some seal of authority. “Please listen to me. I am cold and hungry and very, very tired. I am frightened. Everything here frustrates me. I feel I’m letting down my crewmates and my people. This is important to me and I’m failing and I don’t know why. Please help me!”

Her speech—that horrible undiplomatic gabble—goes right through to the slate, which does its best to make it into pretty patterns and shapes. She runs a triple-speed playback, seeing a horrible mess surely proof against any translating.

And yet, when she looks back, she has their attention, or at least three of them stare right at her: that shock of contact, eye to eye, just as she would have with a human, more than with a Portiid, even.

And then they begin speaking directly to her. One coils about a console, two are right against the glass, pulsating out a rapid patter of agitated patterns. Her translation algorithms make a game attempt at meshing the colours and the accompanying data signal and weaving something comprehensible out of it, but it is too much all at once. Three octopuses shouting at her, figuratively, overlapping each other in a constant torrent of content. She stumbles back from them, Portia tapping her on the knee for solidarity.

They are very upset/confused/angry/indignant. At the same time she finds signals expressing surprise—shock, disgust, horror, wonder—at finding something like her that they can communicate with. The data channel throws up Senkovi more than once: they know her species, certainly. But there is more. They make demands of her, threats even. They want her to do something, or not to do, or…

“I’m lost.” She shares everything her software has gleaned with Portia. It overwhelms her. “I can’t understand what they—”

“It’s the others,” Portia fixates on the telemetry again. “They’ve gone inwards and our captors don’t like it. They’re threatening to destroy the Lightfoot.”

Which at least means they haven’t already done it. She readies her slate to project again and asks why, professing ignorance, innocence, spicing her words with so many needless emotive adjectives she feels like an actor in a terrible play.

The continuing flood of response seems to be identifying her—no, humans as a whole—with something terrible. Something that was a threat before, and now is again. At the same time she starts to separate out other threads of thought. There is still that sense of wonder and delight that communication is happening at all—not the pet for the long-lost master as Senkovi might have thought, but grand beings meeting some quaint atavism from the past that can perform an interesting trick. There is fascination with her—no, with all of them, including the Lightfoot. They are curious.

But they attacked. But not all of them, she considers, and so perhaps curiosity is the province of those who did not participate in that clash. Except that she is becoming increasingly aware that many of the conflicting, shifting messages seemed to originate within the same individuals before her.

They don’t even know what they want! But she reminds herself that is an anthropocentric universe speaking. They want many things. Human neurology works the same way, after all, with conflicting urges and drives bubbling away beneath the surface. Perhaps for these creatures those impulses are literally on the surface all the time.

“New recordings,” Portia notes. The data channel brings up links to more old archives and Helena opens them hungrily. Perhaps she will see the face of Disra Senkovi calmly explaining what was going on.

But the nametag of the fresh recording is “Yusuf Baltiel” and it is not what she had been expecting. An encounter between Baltiel and his fellows, an infection, bloodshed…

Parts of the octopoid conversation are thrown abruptly into sharp relief. This is an ancient recording, for all its horrors have been faithfully curated and copied, but the octopuses are not speaking of a long-ago threat but a current one, and one they are almost hysterically concerned about. And here their fury and their curiosity come together in a single whole because they fear what will happen if the Humans on the Lightfoot go to that inner planet. Whatever infected Baltiel’s crew—and himself, as she now sees, following his last doomed flight—is still there. It is a threat to the octopuses; it is a threat to the Lightfoot.

“I need to signal them,” she says, but that will mean nothing. Portia is already composing a request to initiate communications on the data channel and Helena must say, still sounding like some overwrought thespian chewing the scenery, “I am dreadfully worried and concerned for the safety of my fellows. I desperately wish to alarm them about this monstrous peril.”

She looks for comprehension in their skins. She looks for a debate between them, palette to palette. Instead they fight, break apart, seem to sulk, ignore her and each other, strobe patterns inscrutably at the walls. And of course, why would they agree to such a demand? She is their prisoner, an enemy, an invader, a spy. What would they gain…?

“We have an open channel,” Portia reports, her body giving vent to all the excitement her words cannot.