Children of Ruin (Children of Time #2)

By the time the Voyager finally arrives, after crossing all the great empty reaches between the outer solar system and the shores of Damascus, Helena is at the level of ordering creature comforts from the octopus orbitals’ fabricators: Human and Portiid food constructed from spare molecules; furniture, laboratory equipment. They have a little enclave, the Lightfoot’s structure worked into a section of one of the Homeship globes, the one bubble of air in the great watery necklace Damascus wears. A year and more as guests of the octopuses and they are still not exactly trusted, yet. Whichever shifting alliance of cephalopods considers the alien visitors its business on any given day is doubtless keeping a few protuberant eyes on them, but in the absence of evident betrayal or a political convulsion amongst their hosts, an amicable interspecies peace has slowly incubated. Each day Helena can communicate a little more precisely, refining her software, finding shortcuts in the mess of Old-Empire-derived computer architecture the molluscs use, trusting to her gut feeling and the shifting hues of the bodysuit she had devised.

Portia is the happiest to see the Voyager. She is bored, cooped up on the orbitals. How do you think the octopuses feel? Helena asks her, but Portia is too fractious to show much empathy. She wants new horizons, or why else go to space? She’d even started drumming about going to Nod, setting foot on the alien world. She is the greatest explorer of her people, after all, in her own humble opinion, and it rankles with her that Fabian and Viola beat her to it.

Zaine is also more than happy that the mothership is due. She has healed as best she can by now, but human medical care is not something their hosts ever felt a need to research after Senkovi died, and the relevant Understandings were lost in the attack on the Lightfoot. She has a dozen kinks and imperfectly-healed breaks that have left her on a diet of painkillers and frustration, longing for corrective work in the Voyager’s infirmary.

If not for Zaine, Viola could have put off the Voyager’s arrival for another year or so, engrossed as she has been in building a virtual model for interface with the parasite on even terms. Helena feels this is a step too far, and in this she is in the majority, but Viola is looking beyond all the new horizons. Every so often one of the octopuses comes to speak with her, pressing Helena into awkward translations of neurological and biochemical concepts she does not truly follow herself. The transient nature of the cephalopods’ opinions mean they can very quickly enter into temporary cahoots with their alien guests. Viola claims she is holding her own on the science front, despite the technological disparity, but Helena suspects she is still playing catch-up. Helena has seen what the science faction retrieved from the Nod orbital, after all, and watched Paul the ambassador’s attempts to describe its capabilities. This is Noah’s project, his means by which he and his people might escape their ruined world. The science faction has rescued and resurrected it at last, and they will test it soon. She and Portia have been invited to witness it. She has also come to a sufficiently refined understanding of the octopus mind to understand that their hosts themselves do not know what they have built. They only know what they want it to do, and so descriptions of their work are like those of mystics describing their visions. The logical donkey-work goes on elsewhere, inaccessible to the minds that benefit from it. At first she was baffled and almost offended: this is not, after all, how sentience should work. Humans and Portiids agree on these things. Now, after enough time to reflect, she wonders if the octopuses are not happier: free to feel, free to wave a commanding tentacle at the cosmos and demand that it open for them like a clam.

Fabian is also engrossed in his work, which has shifted emphasis since its inception. He is designing Implant 2.0 with the help of his former research assistant/laboratory test subject. Implant 2.0 may turn out to be a better medium for non-Portiids to experience and internalize the spider Understandings, but that will be something of a sideshow to the main circus. Recent events demonstrated that the implant architecture is capable of being pushed beyond its original purpose, allowing a remarkable kind of neural neutral ground—between the organic and the inorganic, and between species. Fabian is going to be the father—horrified gasps from the Portiid scientific orthodoxy!—of a new technology, and that technology may just unlock a very different future for everyone.

Lost in action, then: Bianca, killed in the initial confused engagement and still mourned; Avrana Kern, or that part of her formerly in control of the Lightfoot. And Meshner Osten Oslam of course, or at least his mortal remains. That loss may be a temporary affair; his body is currently walking around down on Nod after being shuttled there remotely from the orbital. It is not clear if the parasite could evacuate his brain and leave it whole and still Meshner, and negotiations with the parasite are more difficult by an order of magnitude than Helena’s chats with the octopuses. Meshner the fledgling AI is philosophical. He is still finding his feet, now that he is wearing Kern’s shoes.

Helena speaks to him about Kern, finding him oddly evasive. Is Kern still present somewhere, on the orbital, in the implant? Meshner doesn’t know, but he thinks the expanding presence of the parasite would pare down the computer intelligence until whatever remained was no longer Avrana Kern, and unlike Lante or Meshner himself, the parasite’s own recollections will not include a simulation of Kern, only memories of its interactions with her. Certainly there is no Kern personality present within the Lightfoot: no space in that damaged housing for two human-complex intelligences. She overwrote herself to preserve Meshner. Helena wonders what the Kern instance on the Voyager will make of it, and whether Meshner will make a fuller confession of precisely what went on between him and Kern within the implant, before the end.

And how Kern as a whole will feel, now that she is no longer unique. Will she be a jealous goddess, where Meshner is concerned? Or will she find that she has been lonely all this time?

Long before the Voyager’s arrival, multi-species diplomacy arrived at a plan for what Fabian coined as The Insertion, a description that sounds better to the Portiids (who inject venom, after all, and fertilize their eggs externally) than to a Human. The Insertion, when it took place, was not much of a spectator event: a single missile shot from an isolated orbital into the waters of Damascus, requiring magnification even to see it from Helena’s vantage point. Results are inconclusive as yet: nobody knows whether the plan will have its desired effects. What seemed like a thousand octopus factions had been wrangling over whether to even go ahead with the attempt. And then some of them just went ahead and did it, because that, apparently, is how decisions are made in this part of the galaxy. Helena tracked the projectile until it broke open against the waves. Contained within, unleashed upon the world, was a sample of the parasite from the Nod orbital, complete with its memories of Avrana Kern and her argument and the truce that had been formulated between them. Just as with the Nod planetside parasite, it is hoped that a conversion might spread out across the contaminated planet: an awareness of the parasite, its place and its potential. Perhaps one day the cephalopods will have their planet back, in some shape or form, although probably they will never have it wholly to themselves. Right now, the only practical response is to wait and to watch.

Which leaves one thing before the reunited Voyager crew make their final decisions and farewells.

The science faction are going to test the Noah device, now repaired and improved. That they feel the need to take it outside the orbit of either Damascus or Nod in order to deploy it is unsettling, but Helena and Portia want to see, finding themselves in quarters very like their previous incarceration on the rescue mission.

The device itself is surprisingly small, an overarching framework fit around a single, unmanned sphere-ship, far enough out that Helena must take it on faith and instrumentation that it is there at all.

She doesn’t understand the full science behind the thing, only what it is supposed to do. She doesn’t really believe that, either. The octopuses are erratic engineers, after all, plagued by factionalism and short attention spans. It’s all impossible, isn’t it? And true, Old Empire humans conceived of such a loophole in the universe, but even for them the energy requirements were ludicrously out of reach. Generations of octopus scientists have been tantalized by the thought, though, and have desired to make it real, subconsciously telling their Reaches, Find a way, cheating physics, paring away at the problem until… this. And still she does not believe it, and her scepticism is tiny compared to Portia’s.

And yet the two of them were sent for, and they came; bit parts in the triumph or tragedy of greater players.

****

A wise man once said that space is not an ocean, despite the temptation to think in terms of battlecruisers and naval ranks and war-fleets exchanging broadsides as they pass, graceful and leisurely, through the night. To the octopuses, however, space is an ocean—save that the concept of “ocean” is a very different thing to them than it is to humanity: a great many-dimensional canvas that surrounds them, and that they can manipulate and open up, to see if anything edible can be found within. Taking things apart out of idle curiosity has always been part of their mental toolkit and why should the universe itself be an exception?

Once there was an octopus, call him Noah, whose people had suffered a cataclysm of far more than Biblical proportions, billions lost to a raging infection that tore them apart, broke them down, remade them as a sentient sludge that coated their entire world, only a remnant population left on the orbitals to stare down at what they had lost. And while some sought to rebuild a new stability in orbit, many others felt that the infection would jump to them eventually, quarantine how they might. Factions, infighting, open war sprang up in a ring around Damascus and out into the wider solar system. And Noah saw it and despaired.

Just like his distant ancestors chafing against the close confines of their tanks, he thought, I need to escape. And Noah knew—or his Reach did—that the universe was vast, and that anywhere he might want to flee to was unimaginably far away. And, impatient to be gone, his Reach threw out such long-term plans as cold sleep and generation ships in favour of…

This.

Space is an ocean, in this sense. It has waves and currents, and while there are hard and absolute limits to the speeds that objects can move through space, such limits do not apply to space itself.

When they test Noah’s device, it vanishes instantly. The octopus scientists are split, some hailing this as a success, some as a failure. Their instruments are ambivalent as to what happened because their instruments cannot yet test the principles that they are deploying, a common problem given the leap-of-inspiration nature of cephalopod science.

A year later, however, the signal will reach them from a light year out in the void. The device arrived successfully, having manipulated the expansion rates of the space immediately before and behind it to travel the distance in a matter of subjective hours. No return trip had been planned, however, and the actual signal will be forced to travel the old-fashioned way, under the stern eye of a relativity that does not even realize it has been tricked.