Children of Ruin (Children of Time, #2)

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Fabian has spent no small amount of thought on the subject of how much their researches (“their” when negative, “mine” when positive, and he is fully aware of the mendacity of this and cannot train himself out of it)

In his mind—his Crown—this is because he is large and swift to fight and bully others, carrying all before him on a wave of violent emotion. At the same time, the distributed neurons of his Reach, that give precision to his many arms to put into motion the desires of his Crown, are rigorously logical, an organic calculating engine with few peers across the city. Paul has no idea about this, no clue as to the concepts being passed from Reach to Reach when he grapples with his political rivals.

They are a species for whom to exist is to broadcast their mood and thoughts, barring a conscious effort to shut down their skins. Some elevate this to an artform, so that even their enemies pause to watch them hang in the water column and emote the complex poetry of war and anger.

When Paul and his more influential peers rise up above the rest to give their declamatory displays they might seem like human politicians taking the podium to tubthump and spout rhetoric, but so much of human rhetoric is based on creating a false certainty—weaving fictions together so closely they can be presented as contiguous fact. Paul and his kin know there are no certainties, not even within their own minds. Paul simply follows the flutter of his emotions, letting his sense of what is right be tugged and stretched by the buried coils of his distributed subconscious.

He and his peers are leaders, but at the same time he feels he is a banner above an army, a signifier of its cause without necessarily being in command.

And yet when he releases his hold, triumphant, letting Salome jet away into the crowd below, Paul’s own messages are different. He has switched sides seamlessly, now a champion of the very cause he had come to break apart. Below, the tides shift once more, seeing his defection. Now Paul must fight some of his former allies. All this is perfectly normal, understood by all present. Rigid certainty is anathema to their mind; they would never trust a leader who nailed his or herself to any one issue or belief. Such dogmatism would be truly alien to them.

And they find the old habitat, of course, though it is now little more than bones, its inorganic parts brought down by chemical dissolution but its plastics and other organic compounds holding out against an ecosystem that has no way to metabolize them.