Children of Time

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  She does her best to interpret what she sees in light of her experiences, and those experiences she has inherited, but there is nothing comparable in the whole history of her own world. The ants feel the same. Their constant exploration of possibilities has resulted in this solitary contact with something vast and intangible, and the colony processes the information it receives and attempts to find a purpose for it, more and more of its biological processing power being applied to the task, more and more ants quivering under the pulsed rhythms of a distant radio signal.

  Intent on trying to find pattern and plan in the scene before her, Portia’s hungry eyes note one more element, and she wonders, Is that important?

  Like humans, Portia’s people are quick to see patterns, sometimes when there are none. Hence she makes the association quickly, seeing the timing as too close to be coincidental. When the gathering of ants breaks up and hurries inside, without warning and all at once, it is just as the traveller, the swift-moving star that she has often watched coursing across the sky, is passing beneath the horizon.

  She makes a plan then, swiftly and without much forethought. She is intrigued, and her species is driven to investigate anything new, just as the ants are, though in very different ways.

  Once most of the ants are gone she approaches the spire carefully, wary of triggering some alarm. Lifting her palps she lets the wind ruffle them, feeling its strength and direction, and matching her movements to it.

  She ascends carefully, foot over foot, until she finds the crystal before her. It does not seem so large, not to her.

  She sets to spinning a complex package of silk that she holds with her rear legs. She is keenly aware of being at the very centre of the great colony. A mistake at this point would go very badly.

  She has left matters almost too late. Her presence – through the vibrations of her work – has been detected. From its hole at the spire’s base, the small ant that led the congregation abruptly emerges and touches one of her feet with its uncovered antenna.

  Immediately it lets out an alarm, a chemical sharp with outrage and fury at finding an alien, an intruder, in this place. As the scent passes outwards it is picked up by tunnel guards and other castes that have remained close to the exterior. The message is passed on and multiplied.

  Portia drops on the ant beneath her and kills it with one bite, removing its head as she did with the others, although she knows she cannot bluff her way out of this one. Instead she scuttles up the spire again, seeking as much height as it will give, and seizes the crystal from the top.

  She secures her two trophies to her abdomen with webbing, even as the ants begin to swarm out over the exterior of their colony. She sees plenty there with tools and modifications that she is suddenly no longer sufficiently curious to investigate.

  She jumps. An unassisted leap from the spire would land her in their very midst, to be savagely held and stung and dismembered alive. At the apex of her upward spring, though, her hind legs kick out their burden of carefully folded silk, forming a fine-spun net spread between them that catches the wind Portia was so carefully measuring earlier.

  It is not taking her quite back towards Bianca and the others, but she has no control over that. At this moment her chief priority is to get away, gliding over the heads of the enraged insects as they lift their metal-sheathed mandibles and try to work out where she could have gone.

  Her descendants will tell the story of how Portia entered the temple of the ants and stole the eye of their god.

  2.7 EXODUS

  Guyen took his time over his decision, as the Gilgamesh followed its long curving path around this solitary island of life in the vast desert of space, its trajectory constantly balanced between the momentum that would fling it away and the gravity that would draw it in.

  The face of Doctor Avrana Kern – whoever and whatever she truly was – flickered and ghosted on their screens, sometimes inhuman in its stoic patience, at other times twisted by waves of nameless, involuntary emotions, the mad goddess of the green planet.

  Knowing that Kern was listening, and could not be shut out, Guyen had no way to receive the counsel of his crew, but Holsten felt that the man would not have listened anyway: he was in command, the responsibility his alone to bear.

  And of course there was only one answer, for all the agonized pondering that Guyen might give to the question. Even if the Sentry Habitat had not possessed weapons capable of destroying the Gilgamesh, the ark ship’s systems were at Kern’s mercy. The airlocks, the reactor, all the many tools they relied on to keep this bubble of life from the claws of the void; Kern could just switch it all off.

  ‘We’ll go,’ Guyen agreed at last, and Holsten reckoned he wasn’t the only one who was relieved to hear it. ‘Thank you for your help, Doctor Avrana Kern. We will seek out these other systems, and attempt to establish ourselves there. We will leave this planet in your care.’

  Kern’s face sprang into animation on the screens, though still moving almost randomly, and completely divorced from the words. ‘Of course you will. Go take your barrel of monkeys elsewhere.’

  Lain was murmuring, ‘What is this business about monkeys?’ in his ear, and Holsten had been wondering the same thing.

  ‘Monkeys are a sort of animal. We have records regarding them – the Empire used them in scientific experiments. They looked something like people. Here, I’ve got images . . .’

  ‘Gilgamesh has got a course plotted,’ Vitas stated.

  Guyen looked it over. ‘Re-plot. I want us to swing by this planet here, the gas giant.’

  ‘We won’t be able to gain anything useful by slingshot-ting—’

  ‘Just do it,’ the commander growled. ‘Here . . . get me an orbit.’

  Vitas pursed her lips primly. ‘I don’t see what would be served by an orbit—’

  ‘Make it happen,’ Guyen told her, glowering at one of Kern’s images as though waiting for it to challenge him.

  They felt the change of forces as the Gilgamesh’s fusion reactor brought the engines back online, ready to coax the vast mass of the ark ship off its comfortable orbit and hurl it out into space once more.

  Without warning, Kern’s face was gone from the screens, and Lain quickly ran a check of all systems, finding no trace of the intruder’s presence there.

  ‘Which is no guarantee of anything,’ she pointed out. ‘We could be riddled with spy routines and security back doors and who knows what.’ She did not add, Kern could have set us to explode somewhere in deep space, which Holsten reckoned was generous of her. He saw the same thought on everyone’s face, but they had no leverage, no options. Just hope.

  Pinning the whole future of the human race on hope, he considered. But, then, hadn’t the whole ark ship project been just that?

  ‘Mason, tell us about the monkeys,’ Lain suggested.

  He shrugged. ‘Just speculation, but the thing was talking about an “exaltation program”. Exaltation of beasts, the old stories say.’

  ‘How do you exalt a monkey?’ Lain was studying the archive images. ‘Funny-looking little critters, aren’t they?’

  ‘The signal to the planet, and the mathematics,’ Vitas mused. ‘Are they expecting the monkeys to respond?’

  Nobody had any answers.

  ‘You’ve set our course?’ Guyen demanded.

  ‘Naturally,’ came Vitas’s immediate reply.

  ‘Fine. So the whole universe is ours except the one planet worth living on,’ the commander stated. ‘So we don’t stake it all on whatever’s at this next project we’re being sent to. We’d be fools to – it could be as hostile as here. It could be worse. There might not be anything there. I want us – I want humanity to have a foothold here, just in case.’

  ‘A foothold where?’ Holsten demanded. ‘You said yourself that was the only planet—’

  ‘Here.’ Guyen brought up a representation of one of the system’s other planets: a streaky, bloated-looking gas giant like some of the outer planets of Earth’
s system, then narrowing in on a pallid, bluish moon. ‘The Empire colonized several moons back in Earth’s system. We have automated base units that can carve us out a home there: power, heat, hydroponics, enough to survive.’

  ‘Are you proposing this as the future of the human race?’ Vitas asked flatly.

  ‘The future, no. A future, yes,’ Guyen told them all. ‘We will head off first to see if this Kern has sold us something of worth or not – after all, whatever’s there isn’t going anywhere. But we’re not betting all we have on that. We’ll leave a functioning colony behind us – just in case. Engineering, I want a base unit ready to deploy once we arrive.’

  ‘Hm, right.’ Lain was running calculations, looking at what the Gilgamesh’s sensors could say about the moon. ‘I see frozen oxygen, frozen water, even tidal heating from the gas giant’s pull, but . . . it’s still a long way short of cosy. The automated systems are going to take . . . well, a long time – decades – to get everything set up so that someone can be left there.’

  ‘I know. Detail a roster of Science and Engineering to be woken at regular intervals to check progress. Wake me when it’s near completion.’ At the general groan, Guyen glared around at them. ‘What? Yes, it’s back to the chambers. Of course it is. What did you think? Only difference is, we’ve one more wake-up call before we set off out of the system. We maximise our chances as a species. We establish ourselves here.’ He was looking at the screens, where the gradually receding green disc of Kern’s World was still showing. The unspoken intent to return was plain in both his face and his tone.

  Vitas had meanwhile been running her own simulations. ‘Commander, I appreciate your aims, but there was limited testing of the automatic base systems, and the environment they will be deployed into does seem extreme . . .’

  ‘The Old Empire had its colonies,’ Guyen stated.

  Which died, Holsten thought. Which all died. True, they had died in the war, but they had primarily died because they were not stable or self-sufficient, and when the normal business of civilization was interrupted, they had not been able to save themselves. You won’t get me living there, if I have any choice in the matter.

  ‘All doable,’ Lain reported. ‘I’ve a base module ready for jettison. Give it long enough and who knows what we might cook up down there? A regular palace, probably. Hot and cold running methane in every room.’

  ‘Just shut up and do it,’ Guyen told her. ‘The rest of you, get ready to go back to suspension.’

  ‘First off,’ Karst interrupted, ‘who wants to see a monkey?’

  They all looked at him blankly and he grinned. ‘I’m still getting signals from the last drone, remember? So let’s look around.’

  ‘Are you sure that’s safe?’ Holsten put in, but Karst was already sending the images to their screens.

  The drone was moving over an unbroken canopy of green, that unthinkable wealth of foliage that had been denied to them.

  Then the viewpoint dipped, and Karst was sending the drone down, corkscrewing it through a gap in the trees, zigzagging its way delicately around a lattice of branches. The world now revealed was awe-inspiring, a vaulted cathedral of forest overshadowed by the interlocking boughs above, like a green sky held up by the pillars of tree trunks. The drone glided on through this vast and cavernous space, keeping ground and canopy equally distant.

  The expressions of the Gilgamesh crew were hungry and bitter, staring at this forbidden birthright, an Eden not made for human touch.

  ‘What’s that ahead?’ Lain asked.

  ‘Detecting nothing. Just a visual glitch,’ Karst replied, and then abruptly their viewpoint was swinging wildly, wheeling in mid-air with frustrated forward momentum.

  Karst swore, fingers flying as he tried to send new instructions, but the drone seemed to be caught on something invisible – or near-invisible. Holsten could only see brief glints in the air as the drone’s viewpoint spun and danced.

  It happened very swiftly. One moment they were staring out into the clear space ahead that the drone was being inexplicably denied, and then a vast hand-like shadow eclipsed their view. They had a moment’s glimpse of many bristling legs spread wide, two fangs like curved hooks striking savagely towards the camera with ferocious speed and savagery. On the second impact, the picture shattered into static.

  For a long while nobody said anything. Some, like Holsten, just stared at the dead screens. Vitas had gone rigid, a muscle ticking frantically at the corner of her mouth. Lain was replaying the last seconds of that image, analysing.

  ‘Extrapolating from the drone and its camera settings, that thing was the best part of a metre long,’ she remarked at last, shakily.

  ‘That was no fucking monkey,’ Karst spat.

  Behind the Gilgamesh itself, the green world and its orbiting sentinel fell away into obscurity, leaving the ark ship’s crew with, at best, mixed feelings about it.

  3

  WAR

  3.1 RUDE AWAKENING

  He was hauled unwillingly into consciousness within the close confines of the suspension chamber, with the thought in his mind: Didn’t I do this before? The question came to him substantially before he recalled his own name.

  Holsten Mason. Sounds familiar.

  Fragmentary understanding returned to him, as though his brain was ticking off a checklist.

  . . . with Lain . . .

  . . . green planet . . .

  . . . Imperial C . . .

  . . . Would I like to speak to Eliza? . . .

  . . . Doctor Avrana Kern . . .

  . . . Moon colony . . .

  Moon colony!

  And he jolted into full comprehension with the absolute certainty that they were going to send him to the colony, to that freezing wasteland of frozen-solid atmosphere that Vrie Guyen had decided would be humanity’s first stab at a new home. Guyen had never liked him. Guyen had no more use for him. They were waking him now to transport him to the colony.

  No . . .

  Why would they wake him before dispatch? What could he contribute to the founding of a lunar colony? They had already taken him there, insensible in his chamber. He was waking in the eggshell confines of the base structure, to tend the myoculture vats forever and forever and forever.

  He could not keep the conviction at bay, that they had already done this to him, and he tried to thrash and kick in the close interior of the suspension chamber, shouting loud in his own ears, battering at the cool plastic with shoulders and knees, because he could not get his arms up.

  ‘I don’t want to go!’ he was shouting, even though he knew he had already gone. ‘You can’t make me!’ Even though they could.

  The lid opened suddenly – wrenched up as soon as the seal broke – and he nearly jackknifed out entirely to hit the floor face first. Arms caught him, and for a moment he just stared around him, unable to work out where he was.

  No, no, no, it’s all right. It’s the Key Crew room. I’m still on the Gilgamesh. I’m not on the moon. They haven’t taken me—

  The arms that had caught him were being none too gentle about setting him on his feet, and when his knees buckled, someone grabbed him and shook him, ramming his back against the chamber so that the lid slammed shut and trapped a fold of his sleep-suit.

  Someone was shouting at him. They were shouting at him to shut up. Only then did he realize he was screaming at them – the same words over and over, that he didn’t want to go, that they couldn’t make him.

  As if to give the lie to that, whoever was manhandling him slapped him across the face, and he heard his voice wind down to a puzzled whimper before he could get control over it.

  Around then, Holsten realized that there were four people in the room and he didn’t know any of them. Three men and a woman: all strangers, total strangers. They wore ship-suits but they weren’t Key Crew. Or if they were, Guyen hadn’t woken them for the pass at the green planet.

  Holsten blinked at them stupidly. The man who held him was tall, lean and l
ong-boned, looking around Holsten’s own age, with little scars around his eyes that spoke of recent surgical correction – recent presumably meaning several thousand years ago, before they put him to sleep.

  The classicist’s eyes passed over the others: a young-looking woman, heavily built; a small, thin man with a narrow face that was withered up on one side, perhaps a suspension chamber side-effect; a squat, heavy-jawed man standing by the hatch, who was constantly glancing outside. He was holding a gun.

  Holding a gun.

  Holsten stared at the weapon, which was some sort of pistol. He was still having difficulty interpreting what he was seeing. He could think of no reason whatsoever why there would be a gun involved in this scenario. Guns were on the manifest for the Gilgamesh, certainly. He was aware that, of all the trappings of old Earth carried on to the ark ship, guns had certainly not been left behind. On the other hand, they were surely not something to be carried about aboard a spaceship full of delicate systems, with the killing vacuum waiting just outside.

  Unless the gun was there to force him to go down to the moon colony – but it would hardly take a gun. Karst or a couple of his security detail would surely suffice, and run less risk of damaging something vital aboard the Gilgamesh. Something more vital than Holsten Mason.

  He tried to phrase an intelligent question, but managed just a vague mumble.

  ‘You hear that?’ the tall, lean man told the others. ‘He doesn’t want to go. How about that, eh?’

  ‘Scoles, let’s move,’ hissed the man at the door, the one with the gun. Holsten’s eyes kept straying to the weapon.

  A moment later he found himself strung between Scoles and the woman, being awkwardly push-pulled through the hatch, the gunman leading, pointing his weapon along the corridor. In Holsten’s last glimpse through the hatch before withered-face closed it, he saw that the status panels for the other Key Crew chambers were all showing empty. He had been the only person left to sleep late.