Children of Ruin (Children of Time #2)

The octopus ambassador is trying to tell Helena something. It is showing her angry and frightened shades (still the most readily identifiable, and what does that say about interspecies relations right now?) but she can tell, by almost subliminal qualifiers that her software picks up on, that it is not feeling these emotions, but telling her a story about them. It is telling her about another anger, elsewhere. Not really news, then, except it is quite insistent about it. But then Human narrative structure is not the octopus way, and so…

But here Portia interrupts her, having burrowed into the data. “The warship. It means—no, not the warship here, the ship over there, that shot down the Lightfoot. It… is requesting to talk to you. I think that’s what this means.”

And Helena comes to the belated realization that the ambassador was, in effect, doing an impression, its take on the essential nature of the representative from the Profundity of Depth.

She composes a response, requesting that the ambassador will serve as translator. A moment later, she realizes she should have asked for a visual channel to the Profundity, because otherwise she is entirely at the mercy of what the ambassador wants to tell her.

Thankfully, a visual channel is the first thing the octopuses give her, a distorted lens onto a purple-red lit space where tentacled shadows drift on obscure errands of their own. One such is obviously the individual they are talking to, but unlike a human speaking to a communications screen, it is never still, and its attention appears to wander constantly as it bobs in and out of sight. Helena tries a few greetings, showing it colours and watching the ambassador passing on something approximate to her colours and shapes. For a long time there is no acknowledgement whatsoever that the Profundity of Depth is even receiving their signal, but then abruptly the octopus there has lunged for the screen, eclipsing their view with a mosaic of suckers for a moment before backing off, a couple of trailing limbs still absently attached. Its skin mottles and shifts, and Helena realizes the bruise-coloured lighting in the Profundity’s interior (and is that the equivalent of martial mood music for them?) completely skews her ability to know what the creature is saying/feeling.

So how angry is it? Because it is already launching into a furious tirade about something, its skin rippling and dancing with colours as its arms clench and lash at the water around it. In the background of her view, several of its compatriots hang in the water, watching their representative raptly, their skins muttering its sentiments to each other on a staggered delay like the chorus in a tragedy.

The ambassador is trying to give her the dumbed-down student notes of the lecture, and she braces herself for the fury. Instead, though, the sentiments are… calm, weirdly upbeat. She is at the stage in her relationship with octopus language that she gets the tone immediately, but the context must still trickle unreliably through the interspecial membrane. The enemy seems… happy? Not a pleasant thought. Maybe it has already obliterated her crewmates and this is its triumphal announcement. But Portia’s interpretation of the data channel is that it is directing this bombast at her in particular—she is very clearly isolated and identified. Helena feels like throwing her hands up in the air with sheer frustration. She and the ambassador had just about reached a working understanding but introduce one more mollusc into the mix and she’s lost again.

“It is expressing positive regard for you,” Portia tells her.

Helena squints at the spider. “What now?”

“It is telling you that it admires you in some way. It has been… there is reference here to your earlier transmissions, meaning your account of our species’ shared history. It… appreciates whatever it understood or…”

“It enjoyed the performance,” Helena says emptily. She has a fan, apparently. Who knows what the creature actually understood of the content. Not “once upon a time,” surely, because most likely even that basic storytelling building block is meaningless for creatures as mutable as these. But the emotions behind the story, perhaps those are what it grasped. The common language they share, or at least that no man’s land where their two species come close enough to clasp.

And then the ambassador continues, its own mantle shuddering a little with unhappiness, as the commander of the Profundity tells them to go away.

****

Ahab is moved, but that is no unusual thing. Being emotionally moved by something is practically the baseline for his species. He has been moved by the science faction aboard the Without Peering Within, though not enough to shake him from his ideological moorings. He is regularly moved by his fellows aboard the Profundity, or simply by notions of his own manufacture, by the sight of the sun cresting the ocean-edge of Nod, by the stars. To be lost in wonder at the universe by no means clashes with his duties as the leader of a warship.

But he has been moved by this alien, or by its awkwardly translated accounts. He has felt a connection with this human that has come to them like the shadow of Senkovi. His Crown desired that he be permitted to answer the creature Guise to Guise, and shortly afterwards this was accomplished, through a sequence of technical wrangling between Reaches of which he remained entirely unaware.

It is a strange thing, this human, as is its companion the crab. It is almost mute, almost paralysed, but that connection remains. Ahab can make that cognitive leap and accept this other as sentient, feeling. He wishes it to be preserved, for as long as such a fragile thing might last. And he wishes it to turn back and take the meddling scientists with it. He waxes eloquent with expression, sincerity in every coil and flash.

It replies, after a pause for thought in which he watches every part of its exposed skin for clues as to its inner nature. It says that it yearns for its surviving companions on the planet’s surface. It mourns. It knows hope, directed at Ahab.

He lectures it on naivety, puts on a grand performance of the horror and the dissolution the very thought of Nod brings on. And yet the human seems dead set on self-destruction, as passionate about giving itself to the infection as Ahab is to contain it. And that, too, is admirable. But it is not permissible.

Ahab confers briefly with his current opposite number aboard the Shell That Echoes Only. Even as he does, there is a new transmission from the downed wreckage on the planet’s surface, helpfully pinpointing the site for his Reach to target. Instantly, he knows he is now ready to destroy the aliens on the surface, and perhaps to rid them all of the orbital as well. The science faction are singing a new song of progress and freedom and escape, but Ahab feels the various parts of his mind fall into alignment. If he removes all of these threats then the human that has somehow achieved true sentience may not sacrifice itself, and that, it seems to him, is desirable.

And besides, the transmission from the planet was very short, and no more follows.

****

It has found us. The signal, from Viola. Then, nothing.

Portia is trying to hail Kern, as the last possible point of contact. Avrana Kern has been off comms for a long time, though, and Viola’s past prognosis was that the computer was irreparably damaged, spiralling in some kind of self-consuming data storm. Which means that the person of Avrana Kern, this instance of her, is probably dead and gone. Helena is surprised to find that she thinks of Kern in that way. She grew up with various Kern instances, including the grand one that still runs a great deal of the world she had named after herself, and sometimes the contact was greater than human, sometimes less. Now she discovers, when it is too late, that the Lightfoot’s computer intellect was right in the cerebral Goldilocks zone all along, human enough to be mourned.

Portia signals Viola, over and over, but there is no reply. Whatever the crew are doing, they have greater priorities than helping Helena prevent their utter destruction. A sobering thought. She is still receiving a torrent of data from the neighbouring warship Shell That Echoes Only, encapsulating reports on the far-off Profundity of Depth, which is currently slinging out of its lunar orbit, fixing its weapons systems on the crash site. Helena has frozen, now. The slate slips from her fingers to drift into the glue of the wall. She can only watch the data and hear Portia try over and over to raise their friends. She can only imagine how the last moments will be, for Viola and Zaine and Fabian, as their last refuge becomes a glowing monument to Helena’s inability to communicate. Helena always thought the linguist’s nightmare would be a scenario where communication was impossible. Now she has a clear channel, but nothing she can say that will help.

Which is when Portia leaps straight up, landing on the ceiling, because, just when all hope had seemed lost, Kern had contacted them.

“Confirm you retain communication channels with the molluscs.” There is just enough of Kern’s abrupt manner in the transmission for Helena to know her.

“For what it’s worth,” Portia sends back for both of them, as Helena scrabbles for the slate, dragging it loose, opening it for another pointless plea.

“I require you to translate for me, then,” Kern says, doing nothing so polite as asking, of course. “Ready?”

“I…” Helena signals the ambassador, which had drifted off after their last exchange. Out in space, past the visible hull of her own ship, the Shell That Echoes Only’s hull is a brooding storm-coloured wall riven with flashes of anger and fear like lightning. Abruptly, the overlaid window on the Profundity is a busy knot of arms as the vessel’s commander swims into view again, though whether to listen or pontificate she cannot know.

“Tell it I bring a message for its species from the parasite.”

“They won’t want to talk about it. The very mention—”

“It wants a truce.”

“What?”

Then Portia is signalling to her because the Profundity’s commander has been spurred into a paroxysm of agitation, arms coiling and its skin making jagged, fearful patterns.

“Doctor Kern, they’ve detected your signal. They… they say you’re not communicating from the Lightfoot any more.” The data channel is right there, and Portia marks out the mathematical proofs. “You’re coming from the station where the… where the thing is. I think they think you’re… not you any more.”

“They’re right and wrong. I cannot be infected like an organic intelligence. Although if the parasite got into my ant colony on the Lightfoot, that would cause me considerable issues. However, as your hosts have divined, I am no longer operating from there. I am in much straitened circumstances, and I need you to do this for me while I am still capable of acting as intermediary. The organism—we need a name for it, really, something of the civilization, something of the petri dish…”

“Launch,” Portia says.

“No!” Helena begins throwing emotions into her slate, displaying them one on the heels of the last. No, no, no, do not do this, please, no! She tries to find something, some line connecting her with the angry cephalopod within the lens-like screen, some way of making her emotions leap across the void to it. In the back of her mind the missiles are cutting across the vacuum, off to cut through Nod’s atmosphere like busy knives.

“Doctor Kern!” Portia raps out, because Kern seems to be losing focus, seems to be diminishing. Helena isn’t sure what’s on the orbital that could even host something like Kern, but whatever is there doesn’t seem to be sufficient.

“Present,” Kern confirms sharply.

“You have incoming—”

“I am well aware. You must tell them to disable the warheads, divert the missiles, in some way hold off their attack. I am in communication with the parasite organism. It is sentient. It is capable of fabricating an interface with which to take in and process human-level concepts. I have reached a détente with it, on behalf of all of us.”

“All of who?”

“Us, life—life that isn’t it. The rest of the universe. Whoever we feel like speaking for. However, I do not want this hard work to get blown up by a pack of reactionary warmongers. I had plenty of that back when I was human. Helena, tell them it wants to talk. Tell them… it understands.”

“We don’t understand,” Portia complains.

“I don’t require you to,” is Kern’s imperious response. “You are a linguistics team. Translate for me, as I translate for it.”

Helena stares into the alien eye of the Profundity’s commander and clenches down on her emotions. It is for the octopuses to be free and ruled by their feelings. She must control hers, because no amount of wailing and gnashing of teeth will help right now. Instead she speaks hope into her slate. She speaks new horizons. She implores them to listen. She speaks patience as Portia plots out orbital holding patterns that will keep the missiles in play without sending them on their fatal errand to the surface.

“Tell them this…” And Kern speaks: the intentions of an alien culture, filtered through a once-human computer now rapidly running out of thinking room, through a Portiid spider, through a Human and into the world of the cephalopods that even now have their arms about the trigger. Kern speaks fast: she funnels a whole alien world through her narrowing perspective. Helena lets the concepts flood through her, turned from human thoughts to colours and patterns and sublime equations, and probably a third of it turns out as nonsense, but she thinks, They’re still watching. They’re taking it in. It means something to them. And the warship commander, her alien admirer, watches her face and her slate and most of all her eyes, and the missiles are still on their way.

The organism wants to meet us, Kern is saying. It wants to experience us and understand and learn from us. It wants to reach out and grasp the universe. But it no longer wants to be us, or for us to be it. It has learned the limits of monoculture, turned inward in an everlasting round of tedium. Only by accepting the other can it truly find diversion and inspiration; only by allowing the universe to be separate from it can it have the infinite variety it craves.

Helena speaks into her slate and watches waves of colour and feeling pulse out through the ambassador into the scientists, from them to their hull, from their hull to the neighbouring warship and the universe at large. She watches the commander of the Profundity of Depth turn slowly, hanging within its domain. She imagines the missiles, which feel nothing and care for nobody, leaping from their leashes like eager hounds.

And at the end of it all she feels a resounding silence, an uncertainty. The octopuses are shifting things, after all. You cannot rouse them to a cause and expect them to follow you without a battery of responses like Why? and Are you sure? and But… And yet Portia is receiving new telemetry that shows the slightest deviation in the attack, coaxing the missiles onto a new course, still live, still lethal, but curving into an orbital path laid out for them, where they can wait like falcons high above, that can descend on their prey at any moment.

Helena meets the eye of the Profundity’s commander, and she can imagine all manner of human meaning in that gaze: weariness, doubt, concern, a fellow feeling almost certainly entirely in the beholder.

“They’re not convinced yet,” she tells Kern, hoping that there is enough left at the other end to understand her. “It’s won us some time, maybe, a little. But I think they’re still—”

“Stop prattling.” Plenty enough of Kern left, apparently. “I am sending you a live link to a visual feed. They like visuals, do they not? And supporting data, seeing as that’s how they do things. I am providing proof. Watch, just watch.”