Children of Ruin (Children of Time #2)

Viola gets the drones working. Fabian is frankly surprised. He had her categorized as one of those females who didn’t get her legs dirty with the practical side of things, but it was she, not Kern, who got the tracked machine out to carry Zaine, and she steered it manually because she couldn’t reactivate its onboard processor.

Zaine’s suit is stowed in quarantine. Zaine herself, through a complex personal docking procedure, is now in the main crew compartment with the two Portiids, after Artifabian confirmed that she never shared an atmosphere with the potential infection. This is not an exacting scientific standard of proof but they are short on space in that portion of the Lightfoot that survived the crash.

Viola’s focus is very much the ship and its deteriorating status, as well as Zaine’s injuries, but she repairs an aerial drone for Fabian to go look at this “city” he has alleged. Kern is little help, responding to them in bare monosyllables or sentences shorn of personality. Her attention is on the comms. She is trying to send to the Voyager in such a way as will not give away the mothership’s position, or that is what she says she is doing. She is also devoting some of her attention to contacting Meshner, if there is a Meshner to be contacted. She swears there is, although Fabian has seen some data and thinks she has just linked to the Human’s implant, which is unlikely to be chatty on its own. Saying this to Kern meets with stony silence.

Fabian drags the operational drone into the airlock, seals the aperture and then scuttles over to the control console, which is operating on minimal power. Kern is converting the upper sections of hull to be photosynthetic, using her slowly replenishing micro-crew of ants because direct hull control is one of the many luxuries that failed to survive atmospheric insertion. Still, Portiid biotechnology is endlessly moddable in a pinch, up to and including Kern’s own organic hardware. She is restoring herself, recovering or reinventing her personality. From the occasional sharp retorts to stop questioning her, this is proceeding apace.

He has the outer airlock door open and sets the drone into wobbling flight, imagining the unsteady keening of its rotors as it lists to one side. Then it is out from the lock, rising up over the star-strewn plain, turning cumbrously to see what Viola insists is a natural phenomenon.

It is not a natural phenomenon.

Fascinated, a little afraid, Fabian guides the shuddering drone forwards, looking down on a boxy grid of streets, of ranks of blocky structures all collapsed onto each other. A city, but a ruin. A city, moreover, built to an alien but not unfamiliar aesthetic. Portiids tend towards a spiral, three-dimensional urban layout (which, moreover, they tend to snarl up and turn into a tangled chaos as various peer houses jockey for prominence). Humans, though… Humans like their boxes. They like their ranks and columns and their counting from one side to the other, from top to bottom. Such thinking! How do they ever create anything?

And yet they created this, surely. It is a city for humans. Where entryways have survived, they are scaled for a human’s huge frame, and all at ground level. And ruined, yes, and yet… Fabian’s pattern-recognition centres are firing, telling him what he’s seeing is wrong. He guides the drone lower, repurposing old skills because he is a behavioural scientist, not a pilot, and he got rid of any relevant Understandings long ago to free up mental space for more germane knowledge. If he had only known…

The buildings are…

Fabian does not jump to conclusions, especially not outlandish ones. No quicker way to kill off a male’s scientific career, after all.

The buildings are not built.

The ground would naturally rise in this direction. He can see higher ground beyond, perhaps speckled with some other species of sessile autotrophs, and he can see a cliff, and the higher ground is natural but the cliff is not. It has been cut away, the sendimentary stone of it worn down, quarried, mined, removed like a sculptor with a statue until all that is left is the city. These buildings were never built from the ground up, no worked stone, no bricks. They were left behind when the rest of the ground was removed. Humans do not build this way.

Fabian checks himself. He knows that Humans, capitalized, do not. Perhaps humans did, back in the Old Empire days. But he thinks not. He thinks that they were more efficient than that, for he can see that to excavate out a city like this would be far more work than simply placing stone on stone. And besides, the drone is lower now, to the level of the crumbling roofs. He should be seeing inside one of the buildings, but there is no inside. The entryway is just a front, a doorway to nothing but wind-blasted stone. The city is a ruin and the ruin is a fake. Some long time ago, someone came here and made a facsimile of a city, using manifestly non-optimal methods over who knows how long, for no reason Fabian can possibly imagine.

Fabian’s unease increases. Portiids traditionally react to the unknown with rampant curiosity, but Fabian is feeling the creeping fear of his forefathers who lived in a world where most things would try to kill them.

He checks out the drone’s parameters. It can go high; he sends it high, scudding far enough that the abandoned non-city becomes a streetmap, the altiplano itself just topology and relief written in late-afternoon shadow. A pair of the ragged kite-things billow past, startling him but paying absolutely no heed to the drone, which is not part of their world, irrelevant as Fabian himself save that they would make quite a mess if their trailing trains got caught in the rotors.

He sends the drone over the plateau’s edge, looking down on a vast expanse of red desert, disfigured by technicolour lakes like violent acne where some life or inorganic process stains the water angry rainbow colours. He sees stretches of mottling where some lifeform turns its darkness to drink the waning sunlight, and other regions of brown and rust-orange and even green, actual green, that tell of other life—little microbiomes around a meagre resource that lets some alien thing claw life out of the interior of the hot, dusty planet’s single continent.

He sees another city. It is ten times larger than the mere hamlet near their crash site; another grid, or perhaps an expansion, a larger map that contains within it a copy of the smaller. The same city: ruined, false. Fabian sends the drone further, watching its battery indicator tumble but unable not to satisfy his curiosity and feed his fear.

He fiddles with the drone’s cameras, reconfiguring them for a longer range. Another ghost-metropolis is on the horizon, on the banks of a line drawn in the sand that is a river before and after but, for as long as it runs through the city’s bounds, is straight as a canal. He pattern-matches what he can see of the grid; it is the same city, a human city from a dead world, here on this distant living one.

Just as he is turning the drone back for the journey home, he sees movement in the streets. For many beats of his heart (that long organ extending along the dorsal line of his abdomen) he is clenched at the controls, the drone spinning lazily in the air. He cannot move. His mind teeters on the point of fugue again. He has seen this thing before. Or, no, he has seen something that is to this as this false ruin is to the real city it must have been copied from.

It does not walk as a human walks, but its shape is something of a human’s shape. Fabian has no uncanny valley where humans are concerned but even he is gripped by the awful discontinuity of it, as it shuffles slowly towards the drone’s vantage point.

It is built of shells and pieces of nameless creatures and shards of rock and dust. Back on Kern’s World there is an insect called a caddisfly, the adults of which are brief-lived breeding machines (and also delicious). The larvae are sly aquatic ambushers that hide from prey and predators alike by constructing a casing about themselves with pieces of pebble and reed.

This thing has made itself a human shape in just the same way. Its progress is boneless, awkward, utterly unconvincing, but it has made itself gloves and sleeves and boots. And a helmet, because it is not just mimicking a human, but a human in an encounter suit, an old one, similar to the antique up in the station.

The polished faceplate of the helm is a stone worn smooth by the hands of running water, and it tilts to stare so that he can see the drone reflected there, just as if it were glass.

Then the drone is lifting away—only belatedly does he recognize his own handiwork, his palps on the controls. He hauls it backwards and skywards, the camera fixed on that oddly forlorn figure. It does not raise that “visor” or lift a rock-gloved hand towards the retreating remote. Instead, it slumps and shifts, as though some internal structure has been abruptly removed, and then the apparition breaks apart, individual shells and balls of detritus rolling (crawling?) away into the gathering shadows, and Fabian has the drone flee and re-watches the appalling footage and wonders what he can even say to Viola about it.