Children of Time

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  ‘Why has to be?’

  ‘Because he looks like he’s a fucking hundred, Holsten. He’s been up and about for maybe fifty years, on and off. He told his cultists he was God, and when he woke up next time they told him he was God, and that little loop has gone round and round until he himself believes it. You see him, after they woke you?’

  ‘Just his people.’

  ‘Well, believe me, any part of his brain that you might recognize abandoned ship a long time ago.’ Lain looked into Holsten’s face, hunting out any residual sympathy there for the commander. ‘Seriously, Holsten, this is his plan: he wants to put a copy of his brain into the Gil. He wants to become the Gil. And you know what? When he’s done it, he won’t need the cargo. He won’t need most of the ship. He won’t need life-support or anything like that.’

  ‘He’s always had the best interests of the ship at heart,’ said Holsten defensively. ‘How do you know—?’

  ‘Because it’s already happening. Do you know what this ship was not designed for? Several hundred people living on it for about a century. Wear and tear, Holsten, like you wouldn’t believe. A tribe of people who don’t know how anything actually works getting into places they’re not supposed to be, buoyed up by their sincere belief that they’re doing God’s work. Things are falling apart. We’re running out of supplies even with what we took from the station. And they just go on eating and fucking, because they believe Guyen will lead them to the promised land.’

  ‘The green planet?’ Holsten said softly. ‘Maybe he will.’

  ‘Oh, sure,’ Lain scoffed. ‘And that’s where we’re heading all right. But, unless things get back under control and people go back to the freezer, Guyen’ll be the only one to get there – him and a shipful of corpses.’

  ‘Even if he does manage to upload himself, he’ll need people to fix him.’ Holsten wasn’t sure precisely why he was defending Guyen, unless it was that he had long made a profession out of disagreeing with just about every proposition put in front of him.

  ‘Yeah, well.’ Lain rubbed at the back of her neck. ‘There was all that auto-repair system business we took from the station.’

  ‘I didn’t know about that.’

  ‘It was priority for my team. Seemed like a good idea at the time. I know, I know – conniving at our own obsolescence. It’s up and running, too, or looks like it. But, from what I saw, it’s not dealing with the cargo or even most of the systems we need. It’s only set up for those parts of the ship Guyen’s interested in. The non-living parts. Or that’s the best impression I got, before I took my leave.’

  ‘After Guyen woke you.’

  ‘He wanted me to be part of his grand plan. Only, when he gave me access to the Gilgamesh, I found out too much way too fast. Some seriously cold stuff, Holsten. I’ll show you.’

  ‘You’re still in the system?’

  ‘It’s all over the ship, and Guyen’s not good enough to lock me out . . . Now you’re wondering why I haven’t screwed him over from inside the computer.’

  Holsten shrugged. ‘Well, I was, yes, actually.’

  ‘I told you he’s been testing the upload thing? Well, he’s had some partial successes. There are . . . things in the system. When I try and cut Guyen out, or fuck with him, they notice me. They come and start fucking right back. Guyen, I could handle, but these are like . . . retarded little AI programs that think they’re still people. And they’re Guyen’s, most of them.’

  ‘Most of them?’

  Lain looked unhappy – or rather, unhappier. ‘Everything’s going to crap, Holsten. The Gil’s already starting to come apart at the system level. We’re on a spaceship, Holsten. Have you any idea how fucking complex that is? How many different subsystems need to work properly just to keep us alive? At the moment, it’s actually the auto-repair that’s keeping everything ticking over, rerouting around the corrupted parts, patching what it can – but it’s got limits. Guyen’s pushing those limits, diverting resources to his grand immortality project. So we’re going to stop him.’

  ‘So . . .’ Holsten looked from Lain to her crew, the old faces and the new. ‘So I know about the upload facility. So you got me out.’

  Lain just looked at him for a long moment, fragments of expression burning fitfully across her face. ‘What?’ she said at last. ‘I’m not allowed to just rescue you, because you’re my friend?’ She held his gaze long enough that he had to look away, obscurely ashamed of what was objectively an entirely reasonable paranoia he felt about her, about Guyen, and about near enough everything else.

  ‘Anyway, get yourself cleaned up. Get yourself fed,’ she instructed him. ‘Then you and I have an appointment.’

  Holsten’s eyebrows went up. ‘With who?’

  ‘Old friends.’ Lain smiled sourly. ‘The whole gang’s together again, old man. How about that?’

  5.2 IN GOD’S COUNTRY

  Portia stretches and flexes her limbs, feeling the newly hardened sheen of her exoskeleton and the constricting net of the cocoon she has woven about herself. The urge came at an inconvenient time, and she put it off as long as she could, but the cramping tightness at every joint had eventually became unbearable and she was forced to go into retirement: a moon’s-span of days out of the public eye, fretting and fidgeting as she split her way out of her cramped old skin and let her new skeleton dry out and find its shape.

  During her lying-in she has been attended by various members of her peer house, which is a dominant force now in Great Nest. There are two or three others who, as a union, could challenge the hold of Portia’s family, but they are seldom friends with one another. Portia’s agents provocateurs ensure that they are kept constantly fighting over second place.

  The political realities of Great Nest are finely balanced just now, however. Despite the reports brought to her daily during her lying-in, Portia knows there will be dozens of key pieces of information that she will have to catch up with. Thankfully, there is a ready mechanism for doing that.

  Portia is the greatest priestess of the Messenger that Great Nest has, but a month out of circulation will have given many of her sisters ideas. They will have been talking to that fleet, all-important light in the sky, receiving the bizarre, garbled wisdom of the universe, and using it for their own benefit. They will have been taking over the grand, often incomprehensible projects ordered by the voice of God. Portia will have to jostle to recover her old prominence.

  She descends to the next chamber, a gaggle of younger females attending her. A flicker of her palps and a male is brought in. He has lived a busy month, and been present at gatherings that his gender are usually banned from. Everywhere that Portia might have gone, he was brought by her adherents. He has had every missive, every discovery and reversal, every proclamation of God patiently explained to him. He has been well fed, pampered; he has wanted for nothing.

  Now, one of the females brings forward a bulging bulb of silk. Within is the distilled Understanding that the last month has added to this male. It comprises an intelligence report which, if delivered in any conventional way, would be interminable in its detail. That single draught contains enough secrets of Portia’s peer house to hand Great Nest on a platter to any of her enemies.

  She drinks, the fluid thick with learning, the bulb held within her palps as she carefully drains its contents, before passing it to her subordinates to be destroyed. Already she feels a flutter of discord inside her as the nanovirus she has just ingested begins to fit the purloined knowledge into place within her own mind, accessing the structure of her brain and copying in the male’s memories. Within a day and a night she will know all that he knows, and likely she will have lost some unfrequented mental pathways too, some obsolete skill or distant recollection reconfigured into the new and the necessary.

  I will send word about him. She indicates the male. Once she is sure that the new Understandings have taken, the male will be disposed of – killed and eaten by one of Portia’s clique. He knows too much, quite literally
.

  Portia’s society has come some way since the primitive days when the females ate their mates as often as not, but perhaps not so very far. The killing of males under the protection of another peer house is a crime that demands restitution; the needless killing of any male garners sufficient social disapprobation that it is seldom practised, and the culprits usually shunned as wasteful and lacking that golden virtue of self-control. However, to kill a male for a good reason, or after coitus, remains acceptable, despite occasional debates on the subject. This is simply the way things are, and the conservation of tradition is important in Great Nest these days.

  Great Nest is a vast forest metropolis. Hundreds of square kilometres of great trees are festooned with the angled silk dwellings of Portia’s kin, constantly being added to and remodelled as each peer house’s fortunes advance or decline. The greatest of the spider clans dwell in the mid-level – shielded from the extremes of weather, but suitably distant from the lowly ground where those females without a peer group must fight for leg-room with a swarm of half-savage feral males. In between the peer houses are the workshops of artisans who produce that dwindling stock of items that ants cannot be bred to manufacture, the studios of artists who weave and craft and construct elegant knot-script, and the laboratories of scientists of a score of disciplines. Beneath the ground, amongst the roots, crawl the interlocking networks of ants, each nest to its own specialized task. Other, larger, nests radiate out from the metropolis’s limits, engaged in lumberjacking, mining, smelting and industrial manufacture. And, on occasion, war. To fight the other is something that every ant colony can remember how to do, if the need arises, although Great Nest, like its rivals, has specialist soldiers as well.

  Portia, on her way to temple, feels fragments of current affairs falling into place within her. Yes, there have been further troubles with Great Nest’s neighbours: the lesser nests – Seven Trees, River Chasm, Burning Mountain – they are testing the boundaries of territory once again, jealous of the supremacy of Portia’s home. It is likely that there will be a new war, but Portia is not concerned about the result. Her people can muster far more ants – and far better designed ants – for the fight ahead.

  The sheer size of Great Nest necessitates a public transport system in the higher reaches. The central temple where Portia holds sway is some distance from the site of her lying-in. She is aware that the transporting of things is the province of God, and among God’s troubling, hard-to-understand plans are various means of moving from place to place at great speed, but so far no peer house, no city, has succeeded in realizing any of them. The spiders have made their own arrangements in the interim, albeit with a cringing awareness that they are inadequate compared to the Divine Plan.

  Portia boards a cylindrical capsule that is strung along a thick, braided strand, and lets it carry her at a rushing speed through the arboreal glory that is her home. The motive power is partly stored energy in silk springs, a macro-engineered development drawn from the structure of spider-silk itself, and partly cultured muscle: a mindless slab of contracting tissue running along the dorsal rib of the capsule, obliviously hauling itself over and over – efficient, self-repairing and easy to feed. Great Nest is a complex interconnecting web of such capsule-runs, a network amongst networks, like the vibrational communications strands that go everywhere, since the temple maintains a rigorous monopoly on the invisible traces of radio waves.

  Shortly thereafter she steps into the temple, carefully marking the reactions of those she finds there, sniffing out potential challengers.

  What is the position of the Messenger? she asks, and is told that the voice of God is in the skies, invisible against the daylight.

  Let me speak to Her.

  The lesser priestesses clear out of her way somewhat resentfully, having had the run of this place for a month. The old crystal receiver has been improved steadily since the messages of God became comprehensible – that being the first lesson of God, and one of the most successful. Now there is a whole machine of metal and wood and silk that acts as a terminus for a sightless strand of the great and unseen web of the universe that links all such termini, allowing Portia to speak direct to other temples across half the world, and to speak to and hear the words of God.

  After God originally began speaking, it took the combined great minds of several generations to finally learn the divine language, or perhaps to negotiate that language, meeting the comprehension of God halfway. Even now, a certain amount of what God has to say is simply not something that Portia or anyone can understand. It is all set down, though, and sometimes a particularly knotted piece of scripture will yield to the teasing of later theologians.

  Slowly, however, a rapport with the godhead was established by Portia’s forebears, and a story was thus told. Late in the development of their culture therefore, Portia’s people inherited a creation myth, and had their destiny dictated to them by a being of a power and an origin that passed all their understandings.

  The Messenger was the last survivor of an earlier age of the universe, they were told. In the final throes of that age, it was the Messenger who was chosen to come to this world and engender life out of the barren earth. The Messenger – the Goddess of the green planet – remade the world so that it would give rise to that life, next seeded it with plants and trees, and then with the lesser animals. On the last day of the previous age, at the apex of creation, the Messenger dispatched Portia’s distant ancestors to this world, and settled back to await their voices.

  And, after so many generations of silence in which the Messenger’s voice alone touched the strands of that invisible world-spanning web, the temples now sing back, and the balance of God’s plan is parcelled out in piecemeal revelations that almost nobody can yet understand. The Messenger is trying to teach them how to live, and this involves building machines to accomplish purposes that Portia’s people can hardly grasp. It involves dangerous forces – such as the spark that sends signals up the strands of the ether to the Messenger, but of a vastly greater power. It involves bizarre, mind-hurting concepts of nested wheels and eyes, fires and channelled lightning. The Messenger is trying to help them, but its people are unworthy, so preaches the Temple – why else would they fail their God so often? They must improve and become what God has planned for them, but their manner of life and building and invention is wholly at odds with the vision that the Messenger relates to them.

  Portia and her sisters are often in contact with the temples of other cities, but they are nevertheless drawing apart. God speaks to each of them, each temple being assigned its own frequency, but the message substantially the same – for Portia has eavesdropped on God’s dictates to others before. Each temple translates the good news differently; interprets the words and co-opts them to fit with existing mental structures. Worse, some temples are losing their faith entirely, beginning to recast the words of the Messenger as something other than divine. This is a heresy, and already there has been conflict. After all, that tiny point of moving light is their only connection to a greater universe which – they are told – they are destined to inherit. To question and alienate that swift star could leave them abandoned and alone in the cosmos.

  By the end of the day, between reports and the Understanding the male has just gifted to her, she has caught up with what has transpired in her absence. Friction with the apostate Seven Trees temple is high, and there has been serious infringement at the mine sites. The demands of God mean that raw materials – metals especially – are in high demand. Great Nest has maintained a monopoly of all good veins of iron and copper, gold and silver anywhere near its ever-extending reach, but other cities constantly dispute this, by sending their own ant colonies out in column to raid the workings. It is a war where the weapons, so far, have been more efficiently bred miners rather than fiercer warriors, but Portia is aware that this cannot continue. God herself has stated, in one of those long philosophical diatribes She is partial to, that there is always a single end-point to c
onflict if neither side will pull back from the brink.

  Spider has always killed spider. From the start, the species has had a streak of cannibalism, especially female against male, and they have often struggled for territory, for local dominance. Such killings have never been casual or common, however. The nanovirus that runs through each of them forms another web of connections, reminding each of the sentience of the other. Even males partake: even their little deaths have a meaning and a significance that cannot be denied. Certainly the spiders have never fallen so far as to practise widespread slaughter. They have reserved their wars for defending themselves against extra-species threats, such as that long-ago war against the ant super-colony that in the end proved such a boost for their technology. For a species that thinks naturally in terms of interconnected networks and systems, the idea of a war of conquest and extermination – rather than a campaign of conversion, subversion and co-option – does not come easily.

  God has other ideas, however, and the superiority of God’s ideas has become a major point of dogma for the Temple – after all, why would anyone need a temple otherwise?

  When she is finally on top of developments both theological and political; when she has been capsuled out of the city limits to visit the divine workshops where her priest-engineers labour to try and make real something – anything – from God’s perplexing designs, only then does she find time for a personal errand. For Portia, personal and priestly are almost always interwoven, but in this she is indulging herself: finding time to meet with one little mind amongst so many, and yet such a jewel of clarity. Several of the key moments of epiphany, in which God’s message was untangled even slightly, have originated with this remarkable brain. And yet she feels a tug of shame in spending her time in travelling to this little-remarked laboratory where her unacknowledged protégé is given the chance to experiment and build without the rigid control that the Temple traditionally exerts.