Children of Time

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  He signalled to her that he was coming, and found a shuttle and pilot were ready for him in the bay. On the journey over, he turned the external cameras towards the planet and stared moodily at the fungal grey orb, imagining it reaching upwards, vast building-sized towers of fruiting bodies bloating into the upper atmosphere to seize the tiny intruders that had dared to dispute its complete mastery of the world.

  A pair of engineers – from Lain’s original Key Crew, he reckoned – were waiting for him at the station end, assuring him that he wouldn’t need to suit up.

  ‘All the parts we’re still bothered about are stable,’ they explained. When Holsten asked them what the problem actually was, they just shrugged, blithely unconcerned.

  ‘Chief’ll tell you herself,’ was all he got from them.

  And finally he was almost unceremoniously shoved into a chamber in the second rotating ring segment, where Lain was waiting.

  She was sitting at a table, apparently about to start on a meal, and for a moment he hovered in the hatchway, assuming that his timing was off as usual, before noticing that there were utensils for two.

  She raised her eyebrows challengingly. ‘Come on in, old man. Got some tens-of-thousands-of-years-old food here. Come and do history to it.’

  That actually got him into the room, staring at the unfamiliar food: thick soups or sauces, and greyish chunks that looked uncomfortably as if they might have been hacked from the planet below them. ‘You’re joking.’

  ‘Nope, food of the ancients, Holsten. Food of the gods.’

  ‘But that’s . . . surely it can’t still be edible.’ He sat himself across from her, staring down in fascination.

  ‘We’ve been living on it for almost a month now, over here,’ she told him. ‘Better than the pap the Gil churns out.’

  A loaded pause came and went, and Holsten looked up sharply as she gave a bitter little laugh.

  ‘My starter gambit worked too well. You’re not supposed to actually be that interested in the food, old man.’

  He blinked at her, studying her face, seeing in it the extra hours she had put in, both here on the station, and in sporadic waking days during the journey from Kern’s World, while making sure the ship didn’t consume more of its precious cargo by malfunction and error. We’re a good match now, Holsten realized. Look at the two of us.

  ‘So this is . . .’ He made a gesture at the assortment of bowls on the table and ended up getting some sort of orange goo on his finger.

  ‘What?’ Lain demanded. ‘It’s nice here, isn’t it? All the conveniences: light, heat, air and rotational gravity. This is the lap of luxury, believe me. Hold on, wait a moment.’ She fiddled with something at the table edge, and the wall to Holsten’s left began to fall away. For a heart-stopping moment he had no idea what was happening, save that the dissolution of the entire station appeared to be imminent. But there was a somewhat clouded transparency left behind after the outer shutters groaned open and, beyond it, the vastness of the rest of creation. And one more thing.

  Holsten was staring out at the Gilgamesh. He had not seen it from the outside before, not properly. Even when being returned to it after the mutiny, he had passed from shuttle interior to ark ship interior without even thinking about the great outdoors. After all, in space the great outdoors existed mostly to kill you.

  ‘Look, you can see where we’re putting the new stuff in. All looks a bit tatty, doesn’t it? All those micro-impacts on the way, all that vacuum erosion. The old boy’s certainly not what he was,’ Lain remarked softly.

  Holsten said nothing.

  ‘I thought it would be . . .’ Lain started. She tried a smile, then began another one. He realized that she was unsure of him, nervous even.

  He navigated his way across the table to touch her hand, because frankly neither of them was good with those sort of words, nor were they young enough to have the patience to fumble through them.

  ‘I can’t believe how fragile he looks.’ The future, or lack of it, decided by the fate of that metal egg – tatty, patched and, from this vantage point, how small the Gilgamesh looked.

  They ate thoughtfully, Lain progressing from brief moments where she talked far too fast, trying to force on a conversation for the patent reason that she felt they should be having one, then subsiding into longer stretches of companionable quiet.

  At last, Holsten grinned at her, out of one of those periodic silences, feeling the youth of the expression stretch his face. ‘This is good.’

  ‘I hope it is. We’re shipping tons of the stuff over to the Gil.’

  ‘I don’t mean the food. Not just that. Thank you.’

  After they had eaten, and with the rest of Lain’s crew tactfully out of sight and out of mind, they retired to another room she had carefully prepared. It had been a long time since their previous liaison on the Gilgamesh. It had been centuries, of course – long, cold spacefaring centuries. But it seemed a long time, also. They were part of a species that had become unmoored from time, only their personal clocks left with any meaning for them while the rest of the universe turned to its own rhythms and cared nothing for whether they lived or died.

  There had been those back on Earth who claimed the universe cared, and that the survival of humanity was important, destined, meant. They had mostly stayed behind, holding to their corroding faith that some great power would weigh in on their behalf if only things became so very bad. Perhaps it had: those on the ark ship could never know for sure. Holsten had his own beliefs, though, and they did not encompass salvation by any means other than the hand of mankind itself.

  ‘What’s he after?’ Lain asked him later, as they lay side by side beneath a coverlet that had perhaps been some ancient terraformer’s counterpane thousands of years before.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘I don’t know either.’ She frowned. ‘That worries me, Holsten. He’s even got his own engineers doing all the work, you know that? He took his pick from the cargo, woke up a bunch of second-stringers and made them his own personal tech crew. Now they’re installing all that stuff you’re helping him with, fitting the Gil with it. And I don’t know what it does. I don’t like having things on my ship that do things I don’t know about.’

  ‘Are you asking me to betray the commander’s trust?’ Holsten was joking as he said it, but then he was suddenly stung by the thought, ‘Is that what this is about?’

  Lain stared at him. ‘Do you think that?’

  ‘I don’t know what to think.’

  ‘What this is about, old man, is me wanting to scratch an itch without messing up the way my crew works and . . .’ He could hear her trying to harden the edge in her voice, and hear it crack a little, even as she did so. ‘And you know what? I’ve been on my own a lot over the last . . . what? Two hundred fucking years, is what. I’ve been on my own, walking around the Gil and keeping him together. Or with some of my crew, sometimes, to fix stuff. Or sometimes Guyen was there, like that’s better than being on your own. And there was all that mad stuff . . . the mutiny, the planet . . . and I feel like I forget how to talk to people, sometimes, when it’s not – not the job. But you . . .’

  Holsten raised an eyebrow.

  ‘You’re fucking awful at talking to people too,’ she finished viciously. ‘So maybe when you’re around it doesn’t feel so bad.’

  ‘Thank you very much.’

  ‘You’re welcome.’

  ‘Guyen’s thing, it’s for uploading people’s brains into a computer.’ It felt oddly good for him to no longer be the sole custodian of that information. Otherwise, only Guyen knew, as far as Holsten was aware. Even his tame engineers were just working to rote, each on their own piece.

  Lain considered that. ‘I’m not sure if that’s a great thing.’

  ‘It could be very useful.’ Holsten’s tone of voice did not even convince himself.

  Lain merely made a sound – not a word, not anything really – just to show him she’d heard him. It left Holsten turn
ing over in his mind what little he had learned about the device from the technical manuals Guyen had set him to work on. They had all been written for people who already knew what the device did, of course. There was no handy moment when the authors had stopped and gone back to explain the basics for their unthinkably distant monkey descendants.

  Holsten was becoming sure that he now knew what the upload facility was, though. More, he thought that he might have seen the result of one, and what happened when someone was mad enough to make themselves its subject.

  For out there, in the distant dark around another world, in her silent metal coffin, was Doctor Avrana Kern.

  4.8 AGE OF PROGRESS

  Ever afterwards, Bianca has suffered from momentary fits, stumblings in speech and gait, sudden epilepsies when she is cut adrift from her surroundings for varying periods of time, her legs drumming and spasming as if trying urgently to impart a message in some idiolectic code.

  But she has survived the plague and, when a fit is not upon her, retained her mind. For Viola, whose biochemical genius furnished the means, the cure came too late. Many others, great minds, great warriors, leading females of peer houses, starving males in the gutter, all have been struck down. Great Nest has been saved, but thousands of its inhabitants were not so lucky. Other cities were similarly affected, even with production of the cure taking over the work of every suitable ant colony, and the theoretical basis being sung down the lines that link the spider communities together. The disaster has been averted, but narrowly. It is now a new world, and Portia’s people recognize the fragility of their place in it. A great many things are poised on the point of change.

  It is not Portia herself who first grasps the wider import of her cure. It is hard to say which scientist was first to the mark: it is one of those ideas that seems simultaneously to be everywhere, exciting every enquiring mind. Portia’s treatment has allowed living adult spiders to benefit from a foreign Understanding. Yes, what was transferred was an immunity, but surely the process would work with other Understandings, if they can only be separated out and their page noted in Viola’s great book of the body. No longer will the spread of knowledge be held down by the slow march of generations or by laborious teaching.

  The need for this technology is great. The depredations of the plague have made Understandings hard to find: where once a given idea might be held within scores of minds, now there are just a handful at best. Knowledge has become more precious than ever.

  It is only a few years after the plague that the first idea is transferred between adults. A somewhat garbled Understanding of astronomy is imparted to a male test subject (as are all such, given some failures in earlier experiments). From there on, any spider may learn anything. Every scientist of Portia’s generation and beyond will stand on the shoulders of the giants that she chooses to reside within her. What one knows, any can know, for a price. An economy of modular, tradable knowledge will swiftly develop.

  But that is not all.

  After she is recovered, Portia presents Bianca to the Temple. She explains about her fellow’s contribution to the cure. Bianca is permitted to address the assembled priestesses.

  There has been a shift of orthodoxy in the wake of the plague. Everyone is having to stretch their minds to fill the gaping void left by all those who did not survive. Old ideas are being revisited, old prohibitions reconsidered. There is a great feeling of destiny, but it is a self-made destiny. They have passed the test. They are their own saviours. They wish to communicate something to that one point of intellect outside their sphere: the most basic, essential signal.

  They wish to tell the Messenger, We are here.

  Bianca’s battery, in and of itself, does not make a radio transmitter. Whilst the experiments with the transmission of Understandings between spiders progress, so does the investigation into the transmission of vibrations across the invisible web that is strung from their world to the distant satellite and beyond.

  Years later, an ageing Bianca and Portia are amongst a crowd of the intimates of the temple, now ready to speak to the unknown, to cast their electromagnetic voice into the ether. The replies to the Messenger’s mathematical problems – that every spider knows and understands – are ready for transmission. They wait for the Messenger to appear in the night sky above, and then they send that unequivocal first transmission.

  We are here.

  Within a second of the last solution being sent, the Messenger ceases its own transmissions, throwing the whole of Portia’s civilization into a panic that their hubris has angered the universe.

  Several fraught days later, the Messenger speaks again.

  4.9 EX MACHINA

  The signal from the green planet resonated through the Brin 2’s Sentry Pod like an earthquake. The ancient systems had been waiting for just this moment – it seemed forever. Protocols laid down in the days of the Old Empire had gathered dust through the ages, through the entire lifespan of the new species that was even now announcing its presence. They had grown corrupted. They had lost their relevance, been overwritten, been infiltrated by the diseased spread of the uploaded Kern persona that the Sentry Pod had been incubating like a culture all these years.

  The systems received the signal, checked over the sums and found them within tolerance, recognized that a critical threshold had been passed with respect to the planet below. Its purpose, rusty with aeons-long disuse, was abruptly relevant again.

  For a recursive, untimed moment, the systems of the Sentry Pod – the sea of calculation that boiled behind the human mask of Eliza – were unable to make a decision. Too much had been lost, misfiled, edited out of existence within its mind.

  It attacked the discontinuities within its own systems. Whilst it was not truly a self-aware artificial intelligence, it nevertheless knew itself. It restored itself, worked around insoluble problems, reached the right conclusion by estimate and circuitous logic.

  It did its best to awaken Avrana Kern.

  The distinction between living woman, uploaded personality construct and pod systems was not finely drawn. They bled into one another, so that the frozen sleep of the one leaked nightmarish dreams into the cold logic of the others. A lot of time had passed. Not all of Avrana Kern remained viable. Still, the pod did its best.

  Doctor Kern awoke, or she dreamt of waking, and in her dream Eliza hovered at her bedside like an angel and provided a miraculous annunciation.

  This day is a new star seen in the heavens. This day is born a saviour of life on Earth.

  Avrana fought with the trailing weeds of her horrors, struggling to resurface enough to understand what was really being told to her. She had not been truly conscious for some time – had she ever been? She had confused recollections of some dark presence, intruders attacking her charge, the planet below that had become her purpose, the sum total of her legacy. A traveller had come to steal the secret of her project – to rob her of the immortality represented by her new life, by her progeny, by her monkey-children. Had it? Or had she dreamed it? She could not separate the fact from the long cold years of sleep.

  ‘I was supposed to be dead,’ she told the watchful pod. ‘I was supposed to be locked away, oblivious. I was never supposed to dream.’

  ‘Doctor, the passage of time appears to have led to a homogenization of information systems within the Sentry Pod. I apologize for this, but we are operating beyond our intended parameters.’

  The Sentry Pod was designed to lie dormant for centuries. Avrana remembered that much. How long would it take the virus to spark intellect into generations of monkeys? Did that mean that her experiment was a failure?

  No, they had signalled at last. They had reached out and touched the ineffable. And time was suddenly no longer the currency it once had been. She remembered now why she was in the Sentry Pod at all, performing this function that had been meant for someone far more disposable. Time didn’t matter. Only the monkeys mattered, because the future was theirs now.

  Yet those trou
bling half-dreams recurred to her. In her dream there had come a primitive boat of travellers claiming to be her kin, but she had looked at them and seen them for what they truly were. She had scanned through their histories and their understandings. They were the mould that had grown on the corpse of her own people. They were hopelessly corrupted with the same sickness that had killed Kern’s own civilization. Better to start anew with monkeys.

  ‘What do you want of me?’ she demanded of the entity/entities that surrounded her. She looked into their faces and saw an infinite progression of stages between her and the cold logic of the pod systems, and nowhere could she say where she herself ended and where the machine began.

  ‘Phase two of the uplift project is now ready,’ Eliza explained. ‘Your authority is required to commence.’

  ‘What if I’d died?’ Avrana choked out. ‘What if I’d rotted? What if you couldn’t wake me?’

  ‘Then your uploaded persona would inherit your responsibilities and authority,’ Eliza replied, and then, as if remembering that it was supposed to show a human face, ‘but I am glad that has not occurred.’

  ‘You don’t know what “glad” means,’ but, even as she said this, Kern was not sure that it was true. There was enough of her smeared up that continuum towards the life electronic that perhaps Eliza knew more of human emotion than Kern herself was now left with.

  ‘Proceed with the next phase. Of course, proceed with the next phase,’ she snapped into the silence that followed. ‘What else are we here for? What else is there?’ In a very real sense, indeed, what else is there?

  She remembered when the false humans, that disease that had outlived her people, had approached the planet. Had they? Had that actually happened? She had spoken to them. The her that had interacted with them must have recognized enough humanity in them to bargain, to spare them, to allow them to rescue their own. Each time she was awoken, it seemed some different assortment of thoughts took the helm of her mind. She had been in a giving vein, then. She had recognized them to be human enough to show mercy to.