Children of Ruin (Children of Time #2)
Children of Ruin: Present 4 – Chapter 13

“We have vital information on the infection,” was easy to say to another Human. Three generations of cohabitation and the presence of Avrana Kern mean it is easy enough for a Human to say to a Portiid. To communicate it to the octopuses is proving problematic. The ambassador watches carefully, but trying to interest it in the infection triggers a great deal of fear-related colouring and a spontaneous change of subject. This thing was their demon, after all. Their entire civilization lives in orbit about a corrupted world, and they only have to look out of the window to be reminded of it. The merest association with that inner planet—Nod, as the old terraforming team called it—led the locals to attack their alien visitors twice and abduct their diplomats, an instant end to any amicable contact. The subject itself is poison.

And the warship’s own colours are no less fierce, scattering in angry rainbows across the immensity of its curved hull, all the universe Helena can see in that direction. She translates the colours in real time, seeing the waves of intent and reaction roll back and forth, an argument she can follow even if she cannot catch the words. They are furious that the aliens have come and awoken the monster; they are even more furious that the science faction, whatever they are after, should ignore the cultural forbiddance that placed Nod forever out of reach. And they are scared. They have a hundred shades of near-white for it, pastels and creams, bone-yellows, chalks and mother-of-pearl tints to express a vast language of terror. Helena can see past the raging reds and purples, the brooding dark hues, to the fear beneath. In her most empathic moments she is amazed they have not simply destroyed it all already, sent a dozen warheads to obliterate the Lightfoot’s crash site, had the Profundity of Depth turn the orbiting station into atoms.

But the scientists continue to advocate. She has a section of the ship’s hull turned inwards towards her now, at her request, permitting her to see both sides of the debate. She half-expects calm reasoning from the academics, but that isn’t how their species works. They are just as passionate, a flood of emotions washing back and forth: outrage, entreaty, enthusiasm, freedom! She never thought of freedom, of the simple fact of being free, as an emotion, but to the cephalopods it is. Freedom from censorship? No, freedom to be, to go. Freedom to do anything. The science faction is giddy with it, and she sees it reflected in errant swirls and shimmers across the warship’s hull.

“What are they going to do at the planet?” she asks the ambassador, adding curiosity and anxiety tags as two more emotions that their species seemed to hold very much in common. She has sudden visions of a scientific super-weapon that could obliterate the entire world to rid them of the spectre of infection.

The ambassador is all puzzlement, though. They haven’t let him in on their mission parameters.

Now, though, Helena has ammunition for them, which might buy her friends a little more time to evacuate the planet, if she can get the ambassador to listen.

Portia, still linked to the Lightfoot, keeps flagging up telemetry and equations from the data side of the ship-to-ship exchange. The Profundity of Depth is still lazily orbiting Nod’s moon, updating its allies with its targeting solutions for the crash site as the lunar path brings it inexorably round the planet. Portia has already recommended Viola and Fabian get clear of the downed ship. Neither is willing to risk exposure to the local biosphere if they don’t have to. The infection itself doesn’t seem to be airborne, according to the Lante records, but those aren’t sources they want to trust their lives to, and there might be any number of other flavours of nastiness out there. Although Viola seems to be more and more convinced that the infection is something very special.

Then the ambassador is signalling again and she thinks, It’s too late. They’ve launched. But instead all those abortive queries she sent over have apparently germinated, caught up in the whirl of the octopus’s cognition until some part of its mind has put it all together. She assembles its communications: suspicious, fearful, putting her at arm’s length and yet needful, desperate. Joining the dots using long-range scans of Nod, the orbiting station, recordings of multiplying infection rates from the fall of Damascus, Helena understands.

How are you going to deal with it? they ask her. Their human prisoner has stated it can help them with a plague they associate with humans, a thing humans brought to their planet. Senkovi is a benign creator, in their mythology, but Yusuf Baltiel is the fallen angel, unleashing all evils onto their world. The demand is almost superstitious, acknowledging the status of humanity as passing all understanding.

“What can we even promise them?” she asks Portia. “Can Viola… cure it?”

“No,” Portia confirms after an overly optimistic enquiry. “Viola is very excited about it. She says it is not a disease.”

“It’s infected Meshner. You saw what it did to the terraforming crew,” Helena points out.

“We saw. Viola is not sure we understood what we saw.”

“Our hosts are pretty sure they understand.”

Portia signals agreement qualified with a shrug of but-what-can-we-do? “Perhaps if we can get this data to them, the molluscs will be able to design an antibody or a cure or something. Their technology exceeds ours.”

“They will not be able to succeed.”

Helena starts. The voice comes to her direct from her neural implants, and she sees from Portia’s sudden stillness that she wasn’t the only recipient.

“Kern?” Because Viola told them, despairing, that Kern was locked in some kind of loop, uncommunicative but burning all the processing resources she could access.

“You cannot cure this disease.” Kern’s voice is, for a moment, as arch and sardonic and human as Helena has ever heard. “Even Lante underestimated what it was capable of, and that was after she was nothing more than a simulation running on its mainframe. But the truth is there to be read.”

Helena and Portia lock eyes. A flutter of comms indicates Viola wanting to know what is going on and where Kern has been?

“Explain, please,” Helena prompts quietly.

“It is a self-evolving organism. It is completely in control of itself. It was able to go from parasitizing an alien grazing animal to surviving within a human body to interfacing meaningfully with a human brain. I do not believe it would be possible to impose controls on it that it could not circumvent or subvert. It’s all in Lante’s notes, if you read them carefully enough.”

“Then…” Helena feels a swell of helplessness. “They’re right? They just have to destroy whatever they can, make a firebreak to stop any more of it coming over? Is that the only option? Where does that leave us?”

“That’s not what I’m saying.” Typical Kern, sharp, impatient with lesser intellects. “We are exploring possibilities, Meshner and I. You need to continue to buy us the time to do so.”

“Meshner’s there? Meshner wasn’t infected?” A surge of hope beyond any reasonable expectation.

“He is infected. We are currently confronting the Lante-parasite entity. I will save Meshner. I will save everyone. But I need time.” The human richness is draining out of Kern’s voice, leaving it flat and strangely desolate. “Time, Helena. Buy us time.” And then, after it seems the conversation is over: “I want to make things right.”

“Time,” Helena echoes. And of course they are still far from their destination, all the time in the world to chew the fat with the octopuses, except that the Profundity of Depth or whatever it calls itself is right there and might pull the trigger on a whim at any moment.

Fabian and Viola have a lot of data, well ordered and comprehensible to a Human reader. It is shorn of emotional content and simultaneously reliant on anecdote and description, not experimental proofs. Precisely the wrong sort of information to easily pass over to the cephalopods, therefore. But perhaps she doesn’t need to, not yet. She just needs to convince them that she can.

Tell them a story, Portia suggests, and Helena concurs. A story in which something of the tragedies of the past can be mended. A story of hope, because something is keeping the warship from deploying its ordnance and hope is the only thing she can think of—hope that withholding their fire will lead to a better future. The octopuses are changeable creatures; she’s seen that to her cost. But at the same time it means they are not slaves to dogma, not bound to defend traditions right or wrong, or entrench themselves in their positions. The species is the very definition of open-minded. They may unleash hell at any moment, but they are still listening.

Helena begins, not quite with “Once upon a time…” but with something like it. There was a world of humans who reached far beyond their home to planets like these. There was a party of terraformers, including a man who loved octopuses. There was alien life, the first ever encountered. There was a woman called Lante, neither a Senkovi nor a Baltiel. She studied the life of Nod. She learned of and fell victim to its most remarkable feat of evolution. Helena speaks to Viola, who feeds her information to weave into the story as Portia expresses in data what can be reduced to numbers, not the dry account of a human scientist but a fable, a legend of discovery and wonder with a tragic second act, and an ending still to be written.

****

She says these things to Paul, who understands at least some of it and passes it to his captor-benefactors to rephrase for their negotiations with the warship. As the process goes on, he replaces a new emotion stealing up on him and infecting his reaction and his account. Awe. He feels himself the catalyst of something vast and many-limbed. The aliens on the planet’s surface transmit to the prisoners before him, who speak to him in their way, so he can speak to the scientists and they can paint their theses on the walls of their vessel for the education of the warmongers, those here and those out circling Nod’s moon like a hungry shark. He is the lynchpin, a node in a greater whole, like a single sub-brain of an octopus’s Reach, receiving and transmitting and passing on the information. Or, though Paul cannot know this, like the parasite itself within Meshner’s brain, infiltrating the patterns of Human thought until it can decode and edit and re-encode them so seamlessly that there is no hard line where the Human ends and the alien begins.