Children of Ruin (Children of Time #2)

Helena has now spent her rage and grief, and it bought her nothing, as far as she can see. Octopus interrogators have come and gone, flashed and flickered and undulated at her, and she began to hate the machines in her head that imparted meaning to any of it, even the tenuous meaning her programs could wring from all that fluid posturing and display.

Portia tried to help her as she made her futile demands. She wanted a rescue mission. She wanted a search for signals. She wanted reparations. She wanted… what she wanted was for it not to have happened, but no technology was advanced enough to grant that wish. She raged her temper into her slate and Portia danced, following the postural cues she had picked up that formed a part of the under-language, the data-channel. Portia’s jointed body merely aped their communication, a crippled caper to their endless ballet, but it was something. She had tried to help. And now Helena sits on the floor of their cell with the slate on her knees, and Portia’s forelegs stroke her leg hesitantly, trying to impart interspecial comfort. And it is not quite enough, Helena finds. It should be; she has lived amongst the Portiids all her life, they are friends and colleagues whom she understands. But it is not Human contact and, before now, she did not realize just how much that meant to her.

The other octopus, the prisoner, had been engaged in some manner of face-off with a lone observer who had drifted in. Now it is back to goggling at Helena, but she has no more words. The currency of their discourse is emotion and it has exhausted her.

At last Portia taps her thigh more urgently and she looks up to see an exit iris open. Her hair twitches and lifts as invisible forces shift around her. Beyond the circular opening is blue-lit water. A pail-full dashes out onto the floor of the cell in an almost contemptuous spout, as though the element is mocking her, but the rest remains contained by nothing at all. She recalls the bubble membrane the locals formed in space, as the theatre for her ill-fated diplomacy. Probably the technology would be exorbitantly inefficient within a stronger gravitic pull, but here in orbit the molluscs can apparently generate fields to overcome the pressure differential and the station’s own weak attraction, keeping air (or vacuum) out and the water in.

Portia approaches the portal suspiciously. “If they mean we can go, they’ve not thought it through.”

But the locals are not finished. Something eye-watering is happening at the water’s surface, the field deforming until a half-sphere of air dents into the water. Two or three of the cephalopods have come to watch her and she can see, even with the unassisted eye, that their colours are striating in related patterns. Her algorithms catch up and suggest they are asking or ordering or suggesting that she go in.

Neither she nor Portia like the idea much, but at the same time, they have nothing to bargain with and, if their captors want to drown or crush or vivisect them, there is nothing in this solar system that could stop them. Helena wants to tell herself that the octopuses are sentient, reasoning creatures, and surely to butcher or just dispose of alien ambassadors is unthinkable. Except who knows what they might do? And shouldn’t she stop relying on anthropomorphism as a yardstick of what alien minds can conceive of?

“The other prisoner has gone,” Portia reports. “Or perhaps it wasn’t a prisoner.” She stamps a little more and raises her front two pairs of legs at the doorway, a threat display born of pure frustration at their helplessness.

“We have to go,” Helena decides heavily. Their hosts must know that this airy bubble is not necessary for their survival, so perhaps it indicates an attempt at hospitality? She kicks off to the iris, scrabbling at the wall to stop herself just sailing through. Portia makes a better job of it, landing neatly on the very rim, one palp extended into the cavity beyond.

“Hold on to me,” Helena suggests. “Please.” She doesn’t want to be separated from her one surviving crewmate, her lifelong friend. She replaces her helmet and Portia re-seals her own suit with a fussy busying of her palps. Then the spider’s comforting weight transfers to Helena’s shoulder and back, and Helena herself hooks the opening with two fingers and gives herself just enough forward momentum to drift in.

The air bubble moves ahead of her, closing up behind, Helena’s legs kicking awkwardly at the water through the membrane to keep up, sending clashing ranks of ripples across its surface that scatter the dull blue light. Within twenty metres Helena knows she is in trouble. Life in low gravity isn’t condusive to strong muscle growth, even with all the supplements in the world, nor has it offered many opportunities to hone her swimming technique. She has some reserves in her suit jets, but not the skill to deploy them properly. Inevitably she loses the bubble, tumbling end over end in the water, hoping that this won’t be seen as an escape attempt or a violation of some other nebulous boundary. She feels the random aggression of their hosts like an almost physical pressure—surely anything might set them off, or nothing at all, prompting them to obliterate her. Perhaps she is already on her way to some pointless execution.

Why are they like this? How can they even have survived, if they are like this? Or are they loving gentleness with each other and xenophobia personified to the rest of creation?

The water begins surging more swiftly, rolling them over and over until they are hurtling through a windowless pipe, conveyed from here to there by impatient, absent masters, then slowing, the water pressure building ahead of them to shunt them to a stop so they can be decanted, almost gently, into a bubble barely large enough for the pair of them, one with hard, clear walls of plastic. We’re still in quarantine. Behind her, the pipe itself is sealed, withdrawing, no doubt to be sterilized. We are still infected, in their eyes, or they won’t risk the possibility. Helena tries to right herself, but the air pocket has not come with them and in the water she has no sense of up or down. Their little capsule hangs unsupported in a great spherical chamber and a hundred cephalopods drift on every side, or else cling to crooked spires and pillars that jut from the walls. Portia is scratching at her shoulder, dragging her attention round to their one reference point: one third of the chamber is window, a vast curved expanse that gives out onto the stars, onto other fragments of sun-touched detritus, onto chains and conglomerations of crystal-walled orbs rotating about each other like a maniac’s orrery collection, strung out as far as her Human eyes can discern.

“Oh,” she says, staring. For a moment the sight banishes everything else, her loss, her captors. If only she could put into words the wonder of it, what colours might her slate speak to the watching throng? But she is mute and the moment passes.

“Talking to us?” Portia cannot communicate freely in the water, without a surface to stand on. She laboriously inputs messages with her palps, letting her implants translate. Helena glances from her round, reflective eyes to the drifting, squabbling host all around them. There is a lot of talk going on between the octopuses, certainly, but she isn’t sure if any of it is directed at them. They just talk, or perhaps they just feel, and the feelings become speech without truly being pinned down into meaning… Helena the linguist is almost in tears with frustration. We had it so easy, with Kern and the Portiids. We never knew.

Still, she is a scholar by vocation. She engages her software, trying to draw patterns from the crowd around her: like sifting meaningful sentences from a thousand people all clamouring at the top of their lungs.

“Factions,” Portia offers, still clinging to her back and with the advantage of being able to watch several sides at once. “Fluid.”

Helena nods, too busy parsing information to reply. The octopuses are divided, but the members of any given party change constantly—winning adherents one moment, haemorrhaging support the next, and yet still continuing forwards even though, over the course of twenty minutes, a given faction might undergo a complete change of shift, with none of its original members remaining and yet its argument—whatever that was—carried forward by whichever individuals now comprise it. We’re watching memes fight. There is an Old Earth phrase Kern used sometimes, about a boat whose every part was replaced, and was it the same boat then? Kern probably feels the philosophical lash of that particular dilemma more than most, but here is an entire society that exuberantly embraces the idea, or so it seems to Helena.

Beyond that, though, it isn’t hard to see that most of the points of view being expressed around her are angry, full of ugly colours—reds, purples, the white of fear, by far the most readily translatable sentiments she has come across. Likewise, that she and Portia are the target.

So treat that as the background, she tells herself, and configures her headware to do just that. What else is there?

Portia is ahead of her, or perhaps she is better at sifting patterns from the chaos. “Some of them are quieter.” Visually quieter, obviously, but she flags up little cliques for Helena’s benefit, sub-systems of different colours moving through the busy throng like veins. When individuals meet, there might be a sudden exchange of grappling or a flicker of complex colours, but they are turned inwards, and many seem to be displaying the angry colours right up until such meetings, then donning them again immediately afterwards. Like a fifth column, she thinks, and that of course raises a whole other level of linguistic difficulty because it suggests these colours can be feigned at need, and does that mean they fake the emotions behind them, or…?

Helena feels her brain ready to snap. No more revelations. Let me get to grips with what I’ve got.

The universe is not about to oblige her. She hadn’t realized that her surroundings were rotating. However, just as she feels she can take nothing more aboard without sinking, the planet begins to sail ponderously into view below/above/before her, its leading edge steadily eclipsing the great window. The furious displays of the octopuses seem to calm, somewhat, or perhaps become more uniform. All of them are scared. All of them are filled with revulsion. Any subtleties of mood or communication show only as a flickering about the edges of their mantles.

Sub-screens begin to spring up, spreading like puddles across the concave surface from points around the window, showing her magnified views of the world below, and she understands that this is some intentional drama they are staging for her. She is being shown something so that they can see how she might react, but not in her cell, not in laboratory conditions. They want to make this a grand opera for her; the fifth act of a tragedy.

The world below is mottled, its oceans streaked and muddied and slicked over with dark, oily colours. In many of the sub-windows she has a clear view of the surface, tides rolling endlessly, frothy with organic residue, seething with… life? Something moves down there, certainly. There is a frenetic motion at the edge of each wave as though the very sea-foam is animate, and then other windows show her larger things, vast, unformed, like the decaying carcases of leviathans. She tries to understand the scale from the size of the waves, relying on the constancy of liquid physics. Thoughts of huge sea-beasts become thoughts of islands, archipelagos, land-masses. She watches a colossal mud flat writhe and quiver and reach up towards her vantage point with tentacles and limbs that dissolve back into slime even as they form. Then, just for a moment, there is something of a face, a human face, or perhaps several, for the features blur and blend. She sees lips gape, the half-made visage trying to vomit forth meaning before collapsing back into formless nothing.

Portia has been calculating and sends her over an estimate of scale. Four kilometres from chin to forehead unless there is something wrong with the waves. And of course there is something wrong with the waves. There is something wrong with all of it. The world has been overtaken by a churning pandemic that leaves nothing but itself. That is what they feared; that is what came from the other world. That is what her fellows had gone to find and why the octopuses, or some of them, some proactive faction of wardens, destroyed them. In that moment she can only nod numbly along with the sentiment.