Children of Time

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  Her kind has won a great victory over the ants, turning enemies into allies, reversing the tide of the war. From here on, colony after colony will fall to them. Surely it is in recognition of this, in reward for their cleverness and endurance and success, that the Messenger has sent them this sign.

  With her body twanging with manifest destiny, Portia now plans the capture of her colossal prize.

  3.11 THIS ISLAND GULAG

  From the comms room, Holsten watched the last shuttle depart for the moon base, carrying its oblivious human cargo.

  Guyen’s plan was simple. An active crew of fifty had been woken up and briefed on what was expected – or perhaps demanded – of them. The base was ready for them, everything constructed by the automatics during the Gilgamesh’s last long sleep, and tested fit for habitation. It would be the crew’s job to keep it running and operational, so as to turn it into a new home for the human race.

  They would have another two hundred in suspension – ready to call on when they needed them – to replace losses or more hopefully to expand their active population when the base was ready for them. They would have children. Their children would inherit what they had built.

  At some time in the future, generations later, it was anticipated that the Gilgamesh would return from its long voyage to the next terraforming project, hopefully carrying a cargo of pirated Old Empire technology that would, as Guyen said, make everyone’s lives that much easier.

  Or enable him to mount an attack on the Kern’s satellite and claim her planet, Holsten thought, and surely he wasn’t alone in thinking that, though nobody was voicing it.

  If the Gilgamesh did not return – if, say, the next system had a more aggressive guardian than Kern, or some other mishap should befall the ark ship – then the moon colony would just have to . . .

  ‘Manage’ was the word that Guyen had used. Nobody was going behind that. Nobody wanted to think about the limited range of fates possible for such a speck of human dust in the vast face of the cosmos.

  The newly appointed leader of the colonists was not another Scoles, certainly. That intrepid woman listened to her orders with grim acceptance. Looking into her face, Holsten told himself that he could see a terrible, bleak despair hiding in her eyes. What was she being handed, after all? At the worst a death sentence, at the best a life sentence. An undeserved penal term that her children would inherit straight from the womb.

  He started when someone clapped him on the shoulder: Lain. The two of them – along with Karst and his team – had only recently got out of quarantine. The only good out of the whole of Scoles’s doomed excursion planetside was that there didn’t seem to be any bacteria or viruses down there that posed an immediate danger to human health. And why would there be? As Lain had pointed out, there hadn’t seemed to be anything human-like down there to incubate them.

  ‘Time for bed,’ the engineer told him. ‘Last shuttle’s away, so we’re ready to depart. You’ll want to be in suspension before we stop rotation. Until we get our acceleration up, gravity’s going to be all over the place.’

  ‘What about you?’

  ‘I’m chief engineer. I get to work through it, old man.’

  ‘Catching up on me.’

  ‘Shut up.’

  As she helped him out of the chair, he felt his ribs complain. He had been told the suspension chamber would see him heal up nicely while he slept, and he fervently hoped it was true.

  ‘Cheer up,’ Lain told him. ‘There’ll be a whole treasure trove of ancient nonsense for you, when you wake up. You’ll be like a kid with new toys.’

  ‘Not if Guyen has anything to say about it,’ Holsten grumbled. He spared a last look at the viewscreens, at the cold, pale orb of the prison moon – the colony moon, he corrected himself. His unworthy thought was, Rather you than me.

  Leaning on Lain a little, he walked carefully off down the corridor, heading for the Key Crew sleep room.

  3.12 A VOICE IN THE WILDERNESS

  The fallen giant had died, of course, but not for a long time. Until then she – Portia and her kin found it difficult to conceive of this thing as anything other than a she – had dwelt in captivity, eating that limited selection of foods that she was willing to consume, staring out through the mist-coloured walls that kept her in, gazing up at the open top of her pen, where the scholars would gather to observe her.

  The dead giants were dissected and found to be essentially identical to mice in almost all internal structures, save for a difference of proportion in the limbs and certain organs. Comparative study confirmed their hypothesis that the living giant was probably a female, at least by comparison to its smaller endoskeletal cousins.

  The debate on its purpose and meaning – on the lesson that the arrival of such a prodigy was intended to teach – lasted for generations, over the whole span of the creature’s long life and beyond. Its behaviour was strange and complex, but it seemed mute, producing no kind of gesture or vibration that could be considered an attempt at speech. Some noted that when it opened and closed its mouth, a cleverly designed web could catch a curious murmur, the same that might be felt when objects were pounded together. It was a vibration that travelled through the air, rather than across a strand or through the ground. For some time this was hypothesized as a means of communication, provoking much intelligent debate, but in the end the absurdity of such an idea won out. After all, using the same orifice for eating and communication was manifestly too inefficient. The spiders are not deaf, exactly, but their hearing is deeply tied into their sense of touch and vibration. The giant’s utterances, all the frequencies of human speech, are not even whispers to them.

  Anyway, the airborne vibrations grew fewer and fewer during the thing’s captivity, and eventually it ceased to make them. Some suggested this meant the creature had grown content with its captivity.

  Two generations after it was taken, when the events surrounding its arrival had already passed into something resembling theology, one attendant noticed that the giant was moving its extremities, the deft sub-legs that it used to manipulate objects, in a manner imitative of palp-signalling, as though it was trying to mimic the basic visual speech of the spiders. There was a renewed flurry of interest, and a great deal of visits from other nests and trading of Understandings to enlighten future generations. Sufficient experimentation suggested that the giant was not simply copying what it saw, but that it could associate meaning with certain symbols, allowing it to request food and water. Attempts to communicate on a more sophisticated level were frustrated by its inability to approximate or comprehend more than a few very simple symbols.

  The baffled scholars, drawing on their species’ accumulated years of study, concluded that the giant was a simple creature, probably designed to undertake labour suitable for a thing of its immense size and strength, but no more intelligent than a Paussid beetle or a Spitter, and perhaps less.

  Shortly after, the giant died, apparently of some infirmity. Its body was dissected and studied in turn, and compared to the genetically encoded Understandings resulting from examinations of the original dead giants from generations earlier.

  Speculation as to its original purpose, and connection with the Messenger, continued, with the most commonly held theory being that the Messenger was served in the sky by a species of such giants, who performed necessary tasks for it. Therefore, in sending down its dumb emissaries so many years before, some manner of approbation had been intended. The inheritance of Understandings placed something of a curb on the spiders’ ability to mythologize their own history, but already the correlation of their victory over the ants and the arrival of the giants had become firmly accepted as somehow related.

  However, by the time this last giant died, the world of Portian theology was already being rocked by another revelation.

  There was a second Messenger.

  By that time the war with the ants was long over. The Paussid strategy had been successfully prosecuted against colony after colony un
til the spiders had reduced the insects’ influence back to its original territory, where once an ancient Portia had raided their temple, stolen their idol, and unknowingly brought the word of the Messenger to her own people.

  The scholars of Portia’s kind had been keen not to reprogram the ant colony, as they had done with its various limbs and expeditionary forces, because in doing so its unique abilities would be lost, and the spiders were not blind to the advances that the colony’s development had unlocked. So it was that years of complex campaigning had been entered into – at some considerable cost in lives – until the ant colony was manoeuvred into a position where cooperation with its spider neighbours became the most beneficial course of action, whereupon the ant colony passed, without acrimony or resentment, from an implacable foe to an obliging ally.

  The spiders were quick to experiment with the uses of metal and glass. Creatures of keen vision, their studies into light, refraction and optics followed swiftly. They learned to use carefully manufactured glass to extend the reach of their sight to the micro- and macroscopic. The older generation of scholars passed the torch seamlessly to a new generation of scientists, who turned their newly augmented eyes to the night skies and viewed the Messenger in greater detail, and looked beyond.

  At first it was believed that the new message came from the Messenger itself, but the astronomers quickly dispelled that notion. Working with the temple priestesses, they found that there was now another mobile point in the sky that could speak, and that its motion was slower, and curiously irregular.

  Slowly, the spiders began to build up a picture of their solar system by reference to their own home, its moon and its Messenger, the sun, and that outer planet which itself possessed an orbiting body that was sending out its own, separate signal.

  The one problem with this second message was that it was incomprehensible. Unlike the regular, abstractly beautiful numerical sequences that had become the heart of their religion, the new messenger broadcast only chaos: a shifting, changing, meaningless garble. Priestesses and scientists listened to its patterns, recorded them in their complex notation of knots and nodes, but could draw no meaning from them. Years of fruitless study resulted in a feeling that this new source of signal was some antithesis of the Messenger itself, some almost malevolent source of entropy rather than order. In the absence of more information, all manner of curious intentions were credited to it.

  Then, a few years later, the second signal ceased to vary and settled on a single repeated transmission, over and over, and this again led to a mass of speculation across what had by then become a loose-knit global community of priest-scientists. Again and again the signal was parsed for meaning, for surely a message repeated over and over so many times must be important.

  There was one curious school of thought that detected some manner of need in the signal, and quaintly fancied that, out there through the unthinkable space between their world and the source of that second message, something lost and desperate was calling for help.

  Then the day came when the signal was no more, and the baffled spiders were left staring blankly up into a heaven suddenly impoverished, but unable to understand why.

  4

  ENLIGHTENMENT

  4.1 THE CAVE OF WONDERS

  When he was a child, Holsten Mason had been mad about space. The exploration of Earth’s orbit had been ongoing for a century and a half by then, and a generation of astronauts had been raiding the fallen colonies, from the lunar base to the gas giant moons. He had immersed himself in dramatic reconstructions of bold explorers entering dangerous derelict space stations, avoiding the remaining automated systems to pillage tech and data from the burnt-out old computers. He had watched actual recordings of the real-life expeditions – often disturbing, often cut off suddenly. He remembered, at no more than ten years old, seeing a helmet torch play over the vacuum-desiccated corpse of a millennia-old spaceman.

  By the time he was grown up, his interest had migrated back through time from those bold scavenger pioneers to the lost civilization that they were rediscovering. Those days of discovery! So much had been hauled back down from orbit but so little of it was understood. Alas, the golden days of the classicist were already on the wane when Holsten had begun his career. He had lived to see his discipline steadily tainted by vicarious disgrace; there was less and less still to be gleaned from the scraps and splinters which the Old Empire had left behind, and it had become evident that those long-dead ancestors were still present, in a malign, intangible way. The Old Empire was reaching out of deep history to inexorably poison its children. Small wonder that the study of that intricate, murderous people gradually lost its appeal.

  Now, at an inconceivable distance from his dying home, Holsten Mason had been handed the veritable grail of the classicist.

  He sat in the comms room of the Gilgamesh, completely surrounded by the past, transmission after transmission filling the ark ship’s virtual space with the wisdom of the ancients. As far as he was concerned, they had struck gold.

  He was one of the few Key Crew able to participate from the comfort of the Gilgamesh itself. Karst and Vitas had taken a shuttle and some drones to check out the barren-looking planet below them. Lain and her engineers were out on the half-finished station itself, slowly proceeding down its compartmentalized length and recording everything they found. When they found working hardware they could access, they sent Holsten the results, and he deciphered and catalogued it wherever he could, or put it aside for further study where he could not.

  Nobody had ever had access to an Old Empire terraforming station before, even an incomplete one. Nobody had ever been sure that such a thing actually existed. Here, at the wrong end of his career, and at the wrong end of the history of the human race, Holsten was finally in the undeniable position of being able to call himself the greatest expert ever on the Old Empire.

  The thought was intoxicating, but its aftertaste one of bleak depression.

  Holsten was now in possession of a greater trove of communications, fiction, technical manuals, announcements and trivia in several Imperial languages – but mostly Kern’s Imperial C – than any scholar before him since the end of the Empire itself. All he could think was that his own people, an emergent culture that had clawed its way back to its feet after the ice, was nothing but a shadow of that former greatness. It was not simply that the Gilgamesh and all their current space effort was cobbled together from bastardized, half-understood pieces of the ancient world’s vastly superior technology. It was everything: from the very beginning his people had known they were inheriting a used world. The ruins and the decayed relics of a former people had been everywhere, underfoot, underground, up mountains, immortalized in stories. Discovering such a wealth of dead metal in orbit had hardly been a surprise, when all recorded history had been a progress over a desert of broken bones. There had been no innovation that the ancients had not already achieved, and done better. How many inventors had been relegated to historical obscurity because some later treasure-hunter had unearthed the older, superior method of achieving the same end? Weapons, engines, political systems, philosophies, sources of energy . . . Holsten’s people had thought themselves lucky that someone had built such a convenient flight of steps back up from the dark into the sunlight of civilization. They had never quite come to the realization that those steps led only to that one place.

  Who knows what we might have achieved, had we not been so keen to recreate all their follies, he thought now. Could we have saved the Earth? Would we be living there now on our own green planet?

  All the knowledge in the universe now at his fingertips, yet to that question he had no answer.

  The Gilgamesh had translation algorithms now, mostly designed by Holsten himself. Previously the sum total of the ancients’ written word had been so scarce that automatic deciphering had been infinitely hit-and-miss – he would still not have liked to have any conversation with Avrana Kern via a translation by the Gilgamesh, for example. No
w, with a library of miscellanea at his fingertips the computers were working with him to turn out at least halfway comprehensible versions of Imperial C. Most of the treasure trove of knowledge remained locked within ancient languages, though. Even with electronic help, there simply wasn’t time to decode it all, and most likely the bulk of it was simply of no interest to anyone but himself. The best he could do was get an idea of what each separate file represented, catalogue it for future reference, and then pass on.

  Sometimes Lain or her people would contact him with questions, mostly about tech they had found but which seemed to serve no obvious purpose. They would give him vague search terms and send him digging through his own directories for something that might pertain to it. More often than not, his organization and the wealth of material eventually yielded something of use, and he would set out a working translation of it. The fact that they could have looked for themselves was something he occasionally commented on, but it was plain that the engineers felt actually skimming Holsten’s catalogue was far more difficult than just pestering him about it.

  To be honest, he had hoped to get some talk of a more social nature with Lain but, in the forty days he had been awake this time round, he had not so much as met her face to face. The engineers were busy, actually living out there on the great hollow cylinder of the station most of the time. They had thawed out and awoken an auxiliary crew of thirty trained people from cargo to help them, and still there was more work to be done than they could keep up with.

  Six people had died: four to what had either been a working security system or a defective maintenance system, one to a suit malfunction, and one to sheer clumsiness, by managing to get their suit cut open whilst trying to hurry equipment through a jagged gap in the station infrastructure.

  It was far less than those early exploration recordings would have led him to expect, but then there were no ancient dead here, no suggestion that this installation had fallen victim to the infighting that had brought down the Empire and its entire way of life. The long-ago engineers had simply departed, probably heading back for Earth when everything went wrong. This terraforming project they had begun had been left to the slow, heedless mercy of the stars.