Children of Time

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  She enters without fanfare, finding the object of her curiosity studying the latest results, a complex notation of chemical analysis woven automatically by one of the ant colonies of the city. Interrupted by her presence, the scientist turns and waves palps in complex genuflection, a dance of respect, subservience and pleading.

  Fabian, she addresses him, and the male shivers and bobs.

  Before coming here, Portia has been to the outer laboratories to view the progress on God’s plan, and she is not heartened.

  The history of the Messenger’s contact with Her chosen is the enactment of a plan. Once the language barrier was breached – as it is still being breached, missive to missive – God wasted no time in establishing Her place in the cosmos. There was, at the time, some debate amongst the scholars, but against a voice from the stars that promised them a universe grander than anything they had imagined, what could the sceptics suggest? The fact of God was inarguable.

  That it served the Temple to argue God’s corner is something Portia is aware of. She is aware that the first reaching out to God was a defying of Temple edicts of the time. Now she finds herself wondering what might happen if the Great Nest temple itself once again defied God.

  Unfortunately the most obvious answer is that God would simply gift more of Her message to other temples and not to Great Nest. A unity of religion has led to a rivalry and factionalism between the nests. In all their long histories they have worked together, kindred nodes on a world-spanning continuum. Now divine attention has become a resource that they must squabble for. Of course Great Nest is preeminent amongst the foremost favourites of God, with its own knot of frequencies with which it monopolizes much of the message. Pilgrims of other nests must come begging for word of what it is that God wants.

  Only those of the inner temple are uncomfortably aware that the message they distribute to those petitioners is merely a best guess. God is at once specific and obscure.

  Portia has viewed the best efforts in those high-risk laboratories outside the city. They are distant because they must be surrounded by a firebreak. God is in love with the same force that burns in the radios. The ants there smelt vast lengths of copper that carry pulses of that tame lightning just as silk can carry simple speech. Except that the lightning is not so easily tamed. A spark is often all it takes to birth a conflagration.

  The temple scientists try to build a network of lightning according to God’s designs, but it achieves nothing, save occasionally to destroy its own creators. Somewhere out there, Portia fears, some other community may be closer than Great Nest to achieving God’s intent.

  God’s work is not to be entrusted to males, but Fabian is special. Over the last few years, Portia has become curiously reliant on his abilities. He is a chemical architect of surpassing skill.

  It is the age-old limiting factor: the ants are slow. The scientific endeavour of each spider nest rests on its ability to train its ant colonies to perform needed tasks: manufacturing, engineering, analysis. Whilst each generation has become more adept, pushing the boundaries of their organic technology, each fresh task requires a new colony, or else for a colony’s existing behaviour to be overwritten. Spiders like Fabian create chemical texts that give an ant colony its purpose, its complex cascade of instinct that allows it to perform the given task. Although in truth there are few like Fabian, who accomplishes more, more elegantly and in less time, than any other.

  Fabian possesses everything a male might desire, and yet he is unhappy. Portia finds him a bizarre mix: a male whose value has made him forthright enough that she sometimes feels she is dealing with a competing female.

  Before she retired to moult, he was hinting that he was on the brink of a great advance, and yet a month later he has not broached the subject further with any of her subordinates. She wonders if he has saved it all for her. They have a complex relationship, she and Fabian. He danced for her once, and she took the gift of his genetic material to add to her own, so as to gift their combined genius to posterity. He has learned a great deal more, since then, that he has not passed on. In truth she should wait for him to petition her but, now she is here, the subject has come up.

  I am not ready, he replies dismissively. There is more to learn.

  Your great discovery, she prompts. Fabian is a volatile genius. He must be handled with a care normally unbecoming in dealing with a male.

  Later. It is not ready. He is agitated, twitchy in her presence. Her scent receptors suggest that he is quite ready to mate, so it is his mind that is holding him back. Let us get it over with now, she suggests. Or perhaps simply distil your new Understandings? Whilst I do not want anything to happen to you, there are always accidents.

  She had not intended a threat, but males are always cautious around females. He becomes quite still for a moment save for a nervous fidgeting of his palps, an unconscious plea for his life that goes back through the generations to before their kind ever developed language.

  Osric is dead, he tells her, which she was not expecting. She cannot place the name and so he adds, He was one of my assistants. He was killed after a mating.

  Tell me who was involved and I shall reprimand her. Your people are too precious to consume in such a way. And Portia is genuinely displeased. There remains a tight faction of ultra-conservatives in Great Nest that believe males can have no genuine qualities that are not simply a reflection of the females around them, but that hard-line philosophy has been dying out ever since the plague, when a simple lack of numbers saw males assume all manner of roles normally reserved for the stronger sex. Other city states, like Seven Trees, have gone even further, given the far greater ravages of plague there. Great Nest, originator of the cure, has combined cultural dominance with a greater social rigidity than many of its peers.

  The improved mining architecture has been completed, Fabian drums out distractedly. You are aware that I myself may be killed any day?

  Portia freezes. Who would dare so tempt my disapproval?

  I don’t know, but it may happen. If the meanest female is killed, that is a matter for investigation and punishment, just as if someone were to damage the common ground of the city or to speak out against the temple. If I am killed, then the only crime the perpetrator commits is to displease you.

  And I would be displeased greatly, and that is why it will not happen. You need not fear, Portia explains patiently, thinking: Males can be so highly strung!

  But Fabian seems oddly calm. I know it will not happen, so long as I retain your favour. But I am concerned that it can happen, that such things are permitted. Do you know how many males are killed every month in Great Nest?

  They die like animals down in the lower reaches, Portia tells him. They are of no use to anyone save as mates, and not even as mates of any substance most of the time. That is not something you need to concern yourself with.

  And yet I do. Fabian has more he wants to communicate, she can tell, but he stills his feet.

  You are worried that you may lose my favour? Keep working as you are, and there is nothing in Great Nest you will not have, Portia assures the fragile male. No comfort and no delicacy shall be denied you. You know this.

  He starts to phrase a response – she sees the emerging concepts strangled, stillborn, as he overrides the trembling of his palps. For a moment she thinks he will enumerate the things he cannot have, no matter how favoured, or that he will raise the point (again!) that all he can have, he can attain only through her or some other dominant female. She feels frustrated with him: what does he want exactly? Does he not realize how fortunate he is compared to so many of his brothers?

  If only he was not so useful . . . but it is more than that. Fabian is a curiously appealing little creature, even aside from his concrete achievements. That combination of Understandings, impudence and vulnerability makes him a knot that she cannot stop pondering. She must some day tease him out straight or cut him through.

  After that unsatisfactory confrontation with Fabian, she ret
urns to her official duties. As a senior priestess, she has been asked to examine a heretic.

  From radio communications with other temples, she is aware that other nests display varying tolerances for outspoken heresy, depending on the strength of the local priesthood. There are even those nests – some worryingly close – where the Temple is a shadow of its former strength, so that the city’s governance depends on a collusion of heretics, lapsed priests and maverick scholars. Great Nest itself remains a cornerstone of orthodoxy, and Portia is aware that even now there are plans to exert some measure of forceful persuasion on its recusant neighbours. This is a new thing, but God’s message can be interpreted as supporting it. The Messenger grows frustrated when Her words are ignored.

  Within Great Nest itself, the seed of heresy has recently taken root within the very scientists the temple relies on. The mutterings of artisan females who have lost Temple favour, or vagrant males fearful for their worthless lives, are easy to ignore. When Great Nest’s great minds start to question the dictates of Temple, important magnates such as Portia must become involved.

  Bianca is one such: a scientist, a member of Portia’s peer group, a former ally. She has probably entertained heretical views for a long time. Implicated by another wayward scholar, an unannounced search of Bianca’s laboratories demonstrated how her personal studies had veered on to astronomy, a science particularly prone to breeding heretics.

  Portia’s kind are hard to imprison, but Bianca is currently confined to a chamber within the tunnels of a specialist ant colony bred for this purpose. There is no lock or key but, without adopting a certain scent, changed daily, she would be torn apart by the insects if she tried to leave.

  The ant gatekeepers of the colony receive the correct code-pheromone from Portia, and douse her with today’s pass-scent. She has a certain period of time in which to conduct her business, after which she will become as much a prisoner as Bianca.

  She feels a stab of guilt over what she is about. Bianca should have been sentenced by now, but Portia is steeped in memories of her sister’s company and assistance. To lose Bianca would be to lose a part of her own world. Portia has abused her authority just to gain this chance to redeem the heretic.

  Bianca is a large spider, her palps and forelegs dyed in abstract patterns of blue and ultraviolet. The pigments are rare, slow and expensive to fashion, so to sport them displays the considerable influence – an intangible but unarguable currency – that Bianca until recently could muster.

  Hail, sister. Bianca’s stance and precise footwork give the message a barbed emphasis. Here to bid me farewell?

  Portia, already ground down by the vicissitudes of the day so far, hunches low, foregoing all the usual physical posturing and bluster. Don’t drive me away. You have few allies in Great Nest now.

  Only you?

  Only me. Portia studies Bianca’s body language, seeing the larger female change stance slightly, reconsidering.

  I have no names to reveal, no others to betray to you, the accused warns the inquisitor. My beliefs are my own. I do not need a brood around me to tell me how right I am.

  Leaving aside the fact that many of Bianca’s accomplices have already been seized and sentenced under the Temple’s authority, Portia has already decided to abandon that line of enquiry. There remains only one thing at stake. I am here to save you. Only you, sister.

  Bianca’s palps move slightly, an unconscious expression of interest, but she says nothing.

  I do not wish a home that I cannot share with you, Portia tells her, her steps and gestures careful, weighty with consideration. If you are gone, there will be a hole torn in my world, so that all else falls out of shape. If you recant, I will go to my fellows at Temple, and they will listen to me. You will fall from favour, but you will remain free.

  Recant? Bianca echoes.

  If you explain to Temple that you were mistaken or misled, then I can spare you. I shall have you for my own, to work alongside me.

  But I am not mistaken. Bianca’s movements were categorical and firm.

  You must be.

  If you turn lenses on the night sky, lenses of the strength and purity that we can now produce, you will see it too, Bianca explains calmly.

  That is a mystery that cannot be comprehended by those outside Temple, Portia reprimands her.

  So say those inside Temple. But I have looked; I have seen the face of the Messenger, and measured and studied it as it passes above. I have set out my plates and analysed the light that it seems to shed. Light reflected from the sun only. And the mystery is that there is no mystery. I can tell you the size and speed of the Messenger. I can even guess at what it is constructed from. The Messenger is a rock of metal, no more.

  They will exile you, Portia tells her. You know what that means? For females do not kill other females any more, and the harshest sentence of Great Nest is to deny the accused that metropolis’s wonders. Such felons receive a chemical branding that marks them out for death if they approach any of the city’s ant colonies – and many other colonies beyond, as the mark does not discriminate. To be exiled all too often means a return to solitary barbarism in the depths of the wilds, forever retreating before civilization’s steady spread.

  I have taken on many Understandings in my life, Bianca clearly might as well not have heard. I have listened to another Messenger’s incomprehensible signals in the night. The thing you call God is not even alone in the sky. It is a thing of metal that demands we make more things of metal – and I have seen it, how small it is.

  Portia skitters nervously, if only because, in her lowest hours, she herself has played host to similar thoughts. Bianca, you cannot turn away from Temple. Our people have followed the words of the Messenger since our earliest days – from long before we could understand Her purpose. Even if you have your personal doubts, you cannot deny that the traditions that have built Great Nest have allowed us to survive many threats. They have made us what we are.

  Bianca seems sad. And now they prevent us from being all that we could be, she suggests. And that is at the heart of me. If I were to cut myself away from it, there would be nothing left of me. I do not just feel Temple is mistaken, I believe that Temple has become a burden. And you know that I am not alone. You will have spoken with the temples in other cities – even those cities that Great Nest is hostile to. You know that others feel as I do.

  And they will be punished, in turn, Portia tells her. As will you.

  5.3 OLD FRIENDS

  Four of them met in an old service room that seemed to represent neutral ground in the midst of those parts of the ship claimed by the various cliques. Lain and the other two all had retinues who waited outside, eyeing each other nervously like hostile soldiers in a cold war.

  Inside, it was a reunion.

  Vitas hadn’t changed – Holsten suspected that overall she had not been out of the freezer much longer than he had, or perhaps she just wore the extra time well: a neat, trim woman with her feelings buried sufficiently deep that her face remained a cypher. She wore a shipsuit, still, as though she had stepped straight from Holsten’s memories without being touched by the chaos that the Gilgamesh was apparently falling into. Lain had already explained how Vitas had been enlisted by Guyen to help with the uploader. The woman’s thoughts on this were unknown, but she had come when Lain got a message to her, slipping through the circles of Guyen’s cult like smoke, shadowed by a handful of her assistants.

  Karst looked older, closing in on Holsten’s age. His beard had returned – patchy, greying in uneven degrees – and he wore his hair tied back. A rifle was slung over his shoulder, barrel downwards, and he had come in armour, a full suit of the kind that Holsten remembered him favouring before – good against Lain’s gun, perhaps not so much against a knife. His technological advantage was being eroded by the backwards nature of the times.

  He was also working with Guyen, but Lain had explained that Karst was something of a law unto himself these days. He controlled the
ship’s armoury and only he had ready access to firearms in any quantity; his security detail, and whatever conscripts he had enlisted, were loyal to him first and foremost. And so was he, of course: Karst was Karst’s chief priority, or so Lain believed.

  Now the security chief let out a loud bark of what sounded like derision. ‘You even broke the old man out of his grave for us! That sick for nostalgia, Lain? Or maybe for something else?’

  ‘I broke him from a cage in Guyen’s sector,’ Lain stated. ‘He’s been there for days. I guess you didn’t know.’

  Karst glowered at her, then at Holsten himself, who confirmed it with a nod. Even Vitas seemed to be unsurprised, and the security chief threw up his hands.

  ‘Nobody tells me fucking anything,’ he spat. ‘Well, well, here we all are. How fucking pleasant. So how about you speak your piece.’

  ‘How’ve you been, Karst?’ Holsten asked quietly, wrong-footing everyone, including Lain.

  ‘Seriously?’ The security chief’s eyebrows disappeared into his shaggy hairline. ‘You actually want to do the small-talk thing?’

  ‘I want to know how this can possibly work, this . . . what Lain’s told me is going on.’ Holsten had decided, on the way over, that he was not merely going to be the engineer’s yes-man. ‘I mean . . . how long’s this been going on for? It just seems . . . insane. Guyen’s got a cult? He’s been futtering with this upload thing for, what, decades? Generations? Why? He could just have brought this business before the Key Crew and talked it over.’ He caught an awkward look shared between the three others. ‘Or . . . right, ok. So maybe that did happen. I suppose I wasn’t Key Crew enough to be invited.’

  ‘It wasn’t as though anyone needed anything translated,’ Karst said, with a shrug.

  ‘At the time there was some considerable debate,’ Vitas added crisply. ‘However, on balance it was decided that there was too much unknown about the process, especially its effect on the Gilgamesh’s systems. Personally I was in favour of experimentation and trial.’