Children of Ruin (Children of Time #2)

Zaine is awake, but in pain. Fabian has some medical knowledge of Humans, but it is mostly neurology. The library of Understandings they would normally rely on is inaccessible, possibly gone for good unless they can get back to the Voyager. The synthesizing equipment that should produce things as basic as on-demand analgesics is not functioning, nor does it appear on the list of systems Kern is working on. Kern’s communications with the downed crew are steadily dwindling. It has been some time since anyone heard the familiar thrum of her voice through their feet. Viola has ordered and demanded and cajoled and even, when she thought Fabian was otherwise occupied, pleaded with the computer. Kern now communicates only through the consoles, giving brief, functional reports stripped of all personality. When Viola attempts a system-wide survey she discovers that, far from the minimal functioning she expects, Kern’s entire array is in furious activity, organic and inorganic both. Her electronic centres are running to capacity, slowly edging out the tasks required to maintain the crashed Lightfoot. Her ants, which deal with breadth of thought and parallel problem solving, are undergoing some kind of a crisis. The insects are in frenetic motion, constantly communing with each other as they shuttle data from antennae to antennae, each ant devoting its little collection of neurons to tiny subsets of reasoning, then recombining these with its neighbours, surveying, coming to decisions, going away to recalculate. The lightning speed of her electronic elements is Kern’s forebrain, making decisions and presiding over a vast and distributed decision-making engine housed in the various ant-colonies she commands. To Kern, it is all Kern, the illusion of a unified whole. To Viola, it is not clear how much of Kern is left, if any, but whatever is there is busy. She fears it is merely spinning the wheels, helplessly out of control. The ants are so ferociously active they have ceased to conduct their own regular maintenance. Dead workers are beginning to pile up, and that leads only to a dead colony (and the lobotomizing of Kern) if not remedied. And none of the crew can remedy it, only Kern.

Viola is a pragmatist, though. She is isolating sections of the computer architecture, stealing neurons from Kern’s frenzy. In this way she is hoping to sustain life support, hull integrity and their meagre repair efforts. She knows that if Kern—or some dysfunctional chaos currently occupying Kern’s place—notices then things may get ugly, because Kern may take it all back with extreme prejudice.

Working away, Viola remarks one conclusion to Fabian. Whatever the computer is doing is not mere chaos. She can see just enough to guess at patterns, and their comms array has been repeatedly modified to better allow it to transmit—not to the Voyager, but to the orbital drones and station. Kern is shunting a colossal amount of data up and down the gravity well and Viola cannot even begin to guess why.

Artifabian, the third member of their crew and still blessedly disconnected from Kern, is tending to Zaine. It has retained more vertebrate medical knowledge than either of its living fellows, and continues to behave like a polite, deferential male Portiid, which Viola finds comforting and Fabian annoying.

And then, unlooked-for, utterly beyond optimism, the comms light up with a signal.

Lightfoot, Kern, Viola, Fabian, Zaine, Meshner, anyone? A string of names in reassuring Portiid speech.

Lightfoot crew, he responds. Fabian present. Portia?

Viola rushes over to jostle knees with him, leaving Zaine across the crew chamber waiting anxiously for news.

Portia present, the speaker confirms. I don’t know how long we have. Tell me your circumstances.

Fabian does so, letting Viola dictate the briefest but most informative situation report possible, stressing just how little of everything they have left. And you? he adds at the end.

Despite her warning about time, Portia hesitates for just enough to set Fabian’s nerves twanging again. We are travelling towards you in a ship controlled by some kind of scientist faction amongst the molluscs. Their purpose is not currently to effect a rescue but Helena and I are attempting to persuade them. Her speech is coming over crudely, shorn of the proper interface that would add character and subtext to it, but Fabian can pick up from the very rhythms that she is not confident about the outcome of such persuasion. There is a complication, also. Another vessel is accompanying us. Its purpose is hostile, and it is linked with the vessel that attacked you. Currently however, there is a dialogue.

At Viola’s urgent palp-waving, Fabian asks, with creditable calmness, Expand, please.

Our crew have some manner of scientific purpose that the enemy ship wants to prevent, but thus far it is all… leg measuring. Posturing with colours. If they were not so powerful and their ships so large, it would be amusing. If we were not so helpless. Portia’s frustration is clear through any number of technical limitations. But there is a dialogue.

And the ship that attacked us?

Is currently in orbit about the planet’s moon. It appears to be willing to take its cue from the vessel accompanying us. For now. As we have seen, these creatures are inconstant.

Viola looms at Fabian’s side, about to shoulder him out of the way, but then reconsidering, her stance indicating a strainedly polite request to take the comms console. Fabian surrenders it with equal professionalism.

What is the cause of their hostility? Viola sends.

Viola? There is precious little difference to the flat transmission, but Portia has doubtless adjusted her body language to speak female to female. There’s an infection agent present on the planet you’ve come down on. The molluscs are terrified of it. Their whole planet is infested with it and they don’t want it getting anywhere else. Which complicates lifting you from the planet and retrieving our hosts’ science records or whatever they are after.

Viola gives a shivery little stamping of feet, a wordless expression of excitement and inspiration. Portia, I—We have been working on the station transmission. We have come to a good understanding of that agent. It is a great deal more than you think. It is… a remarkable discovery.

I’ve seen it at work. It scares me too, Portia tells her flatly, she who is most noted for her recklessness.

Portia, you have a communications channel to the molluscs? Viola presses.

Thanks to Helena we do. It is not precise, but we can transmit moderately complex ideas some of the time.

Viola’s legs brace, as though she is about to make a very risky leap. Then we have leverage. We have the Lante account, and we can work through it freely here. If they have an enemy, we can help them understand it. Perhaps we can even start them towards containing it, disrupting it, anything like that. But they need us. They need us off this planet and safe and cooperating willingly with them. Can you tell them that?

I can tell the science faction, Portia replies uncertainly. If we can make them understand, they can tell the war faction, but I don’t know if it will help.

Try, Viola directs her. It’s the only purchase we have on them.

Viola’s technical Understandings make her best suited to the work with the Lightfoot’s systems, which are constantly threatening them with power loss, life-support malfunction, failure of the food fabricators. Mired in this short-term but essential work she has passed the Lante archive to Fabian, telling him to get to grips with the zoological miscellanea transmitted by the station, or by the thing on the station. Having seen what he saw down in the fake city, Fabian would be absolutely in agreement with her even without the threat of spaceborne destruction and is sifting through the material as best he can, trying to build a picture of an alien biosphere using a source that for all he knows is nine-tenths fiction.

Some sections are nonsense, just text arranged like Old Empire words but without meaning, an illiterate’s copy. Some sections seem to mesh neatly with the way Fabian would expect an ancient human scientist to write—theirs was a ritualistic and formal presentation he has always found lacking in effect, and the Portiids are very familiar with it because Avrana Kern was one of that class, and still lapses into the idiom on occasion. And then there are the other sections, the later sections as far as he can tell. In fact, Fabian is forming a pattern in his mind, as Portiids and humans will do, left to their own devices. He has seen the ancient, curated images from the Old Empire mission to this forsaken world. There was a woman named Lante in them, and she was infected, as were they all. Infected and struck down by her commander, but who knows what happened after Baltiel’s viewpoint moved on?

And Fabian orders the entries based on Old Empire dating methods and best guess, and finds the anatomy of a transformation in which human intelligence is overwhelmed, dissolved into frothing chaos and then reconstituted like a metamorphosing insect, until something emerges that takes up the diary and tries to do science without understanding what science is or what words are. But eventually it learned, and the last few entries are almost lost in the noise because Fabian initially nests them within the early documents, so lucid do they seem.

At last, his chronology complete, he scurries up the wall and looks down on the screen where it is all laid out and tries to consider just what the implications are of a woman who died and was made again—and perhaps again and again—but never seemed to acknowledge or realize the fact. He reads of the life of Nod, as Lante called this planet. He reads of radial symmetry, hydrostatic skeletons and all the other ways that Lante translated the alien into biological concepts fit for a human scientist. And the heredity, owing nothing to DNA, information recorded in fine detail in the arrangements of atoms on the inside of membranes, vastly more energy efficient than Earth chromosomes, so that the inheritable material in any cell-analogue of, say, one of those sunbathing starfish takes up less than 0.1 per cent of the space occupied by the genes of an average Portiid or human cell. Except this is where something has gone wrong—either with the record or with evolution—because Lante, in her latter days, is fascinated by a species where that is not true at all, where the inherited instructions passed on to fleeting new generations seem ridiculously abundant.

Fabian thinks this is just an example of Lante no longer being a rational operator, but Viola rebukes him when he says so.

Understandings, she tells him. This is what I wanted in the first place. These are their Understandings. She takes time out from repairs for a few rough calculations on just how much data might be contained in such a trove of genetic code, and essentially runs out of numbers. Every cell a vast archive, but for what, for why?

Days and nights have gone by during all this work, and they remain undestroyed—Helena and Portia staving off the inevitable, resetting the hourglass on the hour. The Lightfoot crew are low on food and the water recycler is showing alarming signs of wear. Zaine sleeps a lot but is plainly suffering when awake. The air composition is slowly shifting, for all Viola can do to fix the scrubbers. And yes, there is a breathable atmosphere out there, but there are other things out there, too. Fabian sent the flying drone high for some longer-range reconnaissance. The land around them is inscribed with fragments of city, repeated over and over. Too high to see any shambling denizens, but something carved out those ready-made ruins.

And now it is night, and although Portiids see better in the dark, they are daytime creatures like humans are, visual first and foremost, and this is an alien night filled with all manner of monsters.

Fabian stares at Lante’s rambling, bizarre account and parts of him are trying to spin conclusions that the rest of him doesn’t like at all. In his head is a shambling figure slowly ascending the altiplano. He dreads a knock at the door.

Fabian makes his final report to Viola. They have the best picture they can of how life works on the planet they are stranded on, and in particular one specific part of that life.

You were right, after all, Fabian concedes. Understandings, here. Not as we have them, but something analogous.

Convergent evolution, Viola decides. Perhaps it is something that any life would attain, eventually.

Fabian is tired enough and unsettled enough to stamp out a sharp answer. Except we did not evolve it, not really. It is a part of the virus the humans used to “uplift” our forebears. Earth life never developed such a facility. This is the motherlode, here. We are… artificial pretenders to it.

Viola doesn’t like that. As a powerful, educated female from a dominant peer house she is used to thinking of herself as a natural consequence of advanced evolution. Still, right here, Portiid society is just the two of them, and Fabian feels he can speak freely because there is precious little chance of either of them getting out of this alive.

For Fabian, his discoveries about the alien organism open an existential chasm. Was there a Lante, at the end, and was she aware of what she had become? Did the philosopher dream she was a butterfly, or the other way around? For Viola and Zaine, their partnership now resumed, it means something profoundly exciting. Viola has finished being an engineer performing repairs and is free to draw on other Understandings and be a speculative scientist again. The pair of them are marvelling over the organism’s transcribing fidelity and data compression, compared favourably to the very best that Portiid technology has to offer, if only they can find a way to get off this planet and back home. Fabian is once again excluded, but this time he isn’t taking it, and instead just goes and stands very close, pointedly intruding on the conversation. Viola shifts to pin him with her primary gaze.

You have work to do?

None of us has, or all of us has. He would be able to muster a bit more righteousness if she hadn’t actually done most of the fixing up around the place. I am a scientist. Moreover, I am a specialist in Human neurology. I will have useful contributions. I am not merely the one to whom the menial duties devolve.

It takes a lot of courage to put himself forwards like this, especially with Viola, who is definitely Old Guard when it comes to males and their place. For a moment she regards him frostily, and Zaine plainly doesn’t know what to say. Artifabian breaks the ice, though, once again playing the polite male. We have come to the conclusions that the parasite has not only evolved a sophisticated method of encoding memory and experience, which is copied to all future generations, but that it has been able to use this facility to Upload a human consciousness, at least in part.

Everyone stares at the robot, which hunkers lower at the attention. Its turn of phrase is a weird mixture of polite male and clipped Kernean delivery. Fabian reflects that he could ask the same question of the automaton as he did of the Lante entity—does it feign or does it believe? Artifabian was an experiment of Kern’s, after all: a way for the bio-organic entity to enter further into the lives of its living fellows. Translation was only one means, and the damage it suffered in the crash has resulted in the deployment of this curious secondary personality, perhaps something Kern was cooking up for later use.

But if it is a male, then it can communicate quite happily with Fabian, and the others need its mediation to speak to each other. Without any formal consent from Viola, therefore, Fabian is part of the discussion.

Upload? he echoes.

Viola twitches irritably but concedes the point. Zaine’s impression of the later sections is that the parasite has… reconstructed the host’s neural system, or perhaps that it is simulating it. The dead human was rebuilt from memory and, for as long as the simulation lasted, believed herself to be this Lante, or this is what Zaine believes. Which means that the information storage capability of the parasite organism is beyond anything we can construct artificially.

Of each cell, Fabian corrects absently.

Viola stares. Artifabian translates, and Zaine stares as well.

Surely, he adds, defensively. According to Lante’s own notes, this is something like a bacterial culture. Individual cells are duplicated and reproduce themselves and then die off, but the information they contain is also duplicated. A single cell could produce a huge colony if allowed to reproduce unchecked, and bequeath to all its descendants all the information it contained. There is no suggestion of hierarchy or sharing out of information—that would take a level of organization I don’t read it as being capable of. Therefore, if this thing can reproduce Lante it is because she is contained within every part of it that came into contact with her.

Zaine shakes her head, lips moving, and Artifabian taps out, Impossible.

For once, Viola is with Fabian, though. This is the discovery of a thousand years, she declares, as though the scientific establishment of Kern’s World will be moved to swoop down and rescue them in recognition of this achievement, rather than noting their distant deaths on an alien world.

Fabian feels the need to bring her down again. And it’s still out there, and it still remembers. It was trying to be Lante—without even a host, now. Not living in the original shell creature hosts, and no human bodies left to it, but it remembered what it had been. It has been making human things here—that city must have been where Lante lived on Earth, perhaps. It has had thousands of years. It remembers being Lante but I don’t think it knows what that means. I don’t think there’s quite enough of Lante stored in it.

Zaine is speaking again, speaking over him because of the translation delay. Artifabian finishes making the Human sounds that encode Fabian’s meaning before making the step-shuffles and palp-waving that interpret her.

And now it will store Meshner.

Fabian freezes, on the edge of fugue again for just a moment. She didn’t mean it to hurt him, of course, but he had somehow got this far without making that logical step. Because this same thing has taken his research partner, who must even now be reduced to information set down amongst the broken shards of Lante.