Children of Ruin (Children of Time #2)

Paul is increasingly frustrated. He was given the choice to remain a prisoner or throw his lot in with this clan of science mavericks, and he has just exchanged one cell for another. He never asked to be an ambassador. This isn’t true, of course. At the time, he was an enthusiastic volunteer and it all seemed an overwhelmingly good idea to be the first of his kind to contact visitors from another star, but now his feelings on the matter are precisely the opposite because it is no longer a choice.

Paul’s first instinct is to defy his host-captors by not playing their game at all and trying to find his way out. This is what he desires. The rational calculations going on below the conscious level in his neural structure quickly work out that escape is not an option unless he has a solution to the hard vacuum of space. His conscious, emotive mind feels itself thwarted and flows towards a different method of egress from its situation. If he must interact with these alien monsters then he will become the master of that relationship. The road to Nod is long, after all. He will have to stare at their bizarre forms for a very long time indeed. They have been trying to talk to him, with their device that stutters and mumbles feelings at him. He has not been trying to meet them halfway. Now, that is what he desires—to exert control over his life by mastering the only tool left to him, the aliens. His sub-brains set to work on trying to realize the impossible task set by his will.

Right about now, however, the attentions of both the aliens and the rest of the octopus crew are not on Paul, because they have company. A warship has come to join them.

The science vessel Outside Peering In is still accelerating, of course, not having reached the halfway point of its journey. Cushioned within the water, Paul feels the force more as a sense of depth than motion, but by now, after days of this travel, their overall speed through the frictionless void of space is truly incredible compared to… what? In relation to the planet they left, or to the planet their curving course is intended to intercept, they are moving very fast indeed, but neither of those celestial bodies are present for comparison. The warship, Shell That Echoes Only, has effortlessly matched not only their velocity but their acceleration, and so the two ships hang motionless next to one another, weirdly peaceful.

And “warship” is a misnomer, really. That is its current purpose, but the Shell itself is what Paul thinks of as a Homeship, a place to live now that the place where they all used to live has gone spoiled and rotten. Except that fights happen, between individuals, between groups, between communities. They happen spontaneously and create more fights, so that the roots of them, the scarcity of resources or incompatible ideologies, no longer matter. And so, when the whim took them, in fits and starts, ships began to be converted for war. Now this great orb bristles with weapons between its omnidirectional thrusters, and the science ship has nothing, or nothing that Paul can see. Except these molluscs he has fallen in with are a clever lot, bound together by the precise way their (subconscious) intellect works. Their minds are just as averse to being caged as the rest of their kind but those minds apply the same will to escape and manipulate and pry to the universe and its laws. There has always been such a current amongst the octopuses, from the very start, and it has always flowed about on the fringe, frequently pushed down by more conservative elements whipped into sudden anxiety by the threat of this or that experiment. In better days such a suppression was perhaps no more than a forced dismantling of equipment or a heated exchange of skin tones. Now, with their entire civilization clinging to the brink of dissolution, the stakes are higher and the violence deadlier.

And yet, they are not savages. That they can be very quick to fight does not mean that violence is their first resort. Instead, the group in current command of the warship is deploying an appeal. Colours begin to spill over the vast curved hull of the vessel, easily visible at this distance. Paul jets over to his console and receives the rest of the message, cold calculations of threat and entreaty, but the colours are more important. The numbers are mere sterile capability; the colours are intent. The warship faction are making an impassioned plea that nobody should venture to that cursed planet again—the fear, the horror! The scientists are starting to mix their own response, the various spheres of their chain-ship tinting different colours, a collection of slightly varying voices raised in protest. From the relatively relaxed stances of all concerned—and the distance to their destination—Paul knows this posturing will go on for some time. He has a sudden inspiration. The interplay between the neural centres of his Reach has been working on the problem ever since he felt the desire, and now it has found a solution. All Paul knows is that he wants to talk to the aliens now.

****

Helena almost misses the window on a landmark interspecies contact because of her understandable focus on the colossal ship outside. Perhaps for intimidation purposes, the warship has drawn so close that she can see moving motes in some clear parts of it that might be individual cephalopods thronging the windows to get a look at their soon-to-be-destroyed prey. She can see the weapons, too; the common roots of their technology leave little to the imagination on that score. Colours begin to spread across the enormous curved canvas, translucent filters washing and intermingling as the warship begins broadcasting a dozen different threats and demands all at once, on a scale so large that her software, her mere Human eyes, simply cannot process it. All she can do is stare at the colours and know them as angry and belligerent.

Then Portia, blessed with a wider field of vision, plucks at Helena’s sleeve with her palps. “The ambassador one is signalling you.”

“Now?” Helena demands, because the wretched creature had just floated there obliviously for an age during the tedium of the long flight. Now they are about to be smashed into atoms, though, it has turned chatty. Or perhaps it is formally telling them that they are about to be handed over for summary execution.

The juncture point between their spherical chambers has changed, becoming a magnifying lens so that the colours of the octopus are very clear. It broadcasts slowly—a whirl of agitation dances at the edge of its mantle, up and down its arms and around its eyes, but at the centre it is practically plodding, one shade shifting slowly to another as it tries to spell something out for her. Three or four tentacles coil about its console as though trying to pry the device from its housing.

“Helena, transmissions,” Portia notes. “Very different format.”

Helena accesses them, finds them at first to be nonsense, a series of chopped-up files, split seconds of visual data, audio recordings, numbers: quite unlike the usual semi-comprehensible data the creatures usually broadcast. A wave of despair surges over her. Have I not understood anything at all? And she looks at the ambassador and sees a kindred feeling in the half-suppressed flickering that keeps attempting to erupt across its skin. They are both up against the comprehension gap. It is trying to get through to her for the first time.

Then Portia finds the sequence: the jumbled pieces on the data channel were sent out of order, as though plucked from a great archive by a half-dozen separate whims and thrown together. There are sequencing indicators tagged to them, though. The puzzle can be reassembled. Helena looks over the resulting whole, briefly despairing again at the chaos, then realizes what she is looking at. She has seen these fragments before. They are pieces of Senkovi, his recordings, words, expressions. They are out of context now, strung together without any respect for their original order, but she plays through them in the new sequence: Senkovi teaching, crying, laughing, speaking to off-camera colleagues, eating, most of all conversing with his pets, the distant forebears of this bizarre spacefaring civilization. It should just be a mess, and she knows there is no “Senkovi” behind it, but she comes to the end with the impression of a coherent message, even though none of the exact words made sense. She plays it again, letting Senkovi stutter and jump from second to second, seeing his face, his expressions that are human yet not Human, separated from her by an age of time and loss.

He is talking about struggle, about experiment, unwise perhaps, condemned perhaps; resistance from others, pressing on regardless, a moment of wild maniac enthusiasm for the project of the moment, a moment of crushing depression because everything seems about to fail. A storm of feeling, but translated into human emotions, tagged with odd words that condense the denotations, polished until she can… see her face in it, a human face giving human import. And all the while the Octopus stares at her features, her eyes, everything visible within her mask, and perhaps it has magnified its view of that, looking for expression even as she tries to watch its colours.

And a part of her sits back, somewhat mulishly, and thinks: You couldn’t have done this before?

So far, so good. Now she has to speak back to it. Portia is already feeding her useful data flags to let her identify their own ship, the warship, the planets, the abstract concept of beyond to indicate their own origin. Helena takes it and begins speaking colours back to the ambassador. Repeating herself, mostly, save that this time it is watching her intently. This time she feels a connection—not just of one living thing recognizing another, which she had felt from their first meeting, but of another sentient mind fumbling with the same puzzle, trying to cooperate with her in the solving.

We come in peace. We need to speak with our friends. We need to help them.

And all the while the greater debate flashes in a thousand hues from the hulls of both vessels.