Children of Time

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  I want the right to live, he tells them, as firmly as he dares. I want the death of a male to be punishable, just as the death of a female is – even a death after mating. I want the right to build my own peer house, and to speak for it.

  A million-year prejudice stares back at him. The ancient cannibal spider, whose old instincts still form the shell within which their culture is nestled, recoils in horror. He sees the conflict within them: tradition against progress, the known past against the unknown future. They have come so far, as a species; they have the intellect to break from the shackles of yesterday. But it will be hard.

  He turns slowly on the spot in a series of short, jerky moves, looking from eye to eye to eye. They weigh him up, and they weigh the cost of his demands against the cost of having to acquiesce to Great Nest. They consider what his victory has bought them, and how it has improved their bargaining position. They ponder what Great Nest will exact from them if they surrender – certainly the temple at Seven Trees will be emptied and filled with foreign priestesses, all enforcing their orthodox vision of the Messenger’s will. Control of Seven Trees will be removed from these females here. Their city will become a puppet worked by strings from afar, dancing to the pulse of Great Nest’s radioed instructions.

  They confer, they agonize, they threaten each other and scuffle for dominance.

  At last they formulate their answer.

  5.7 ASCENSION

  ‘It wasn’t meant to happen like this. It wasn’t meant to take so much time.’

  Holsten was dining with Guyen. The commander’s cultists, or highly trained engineers or whatever they really were, had brought him some of the rations that he remembered being pillaged wholesale from the terraforming station. It was heated and thawed to a warm slurry, and he spooned this slop unenthusiastically into his mouth as the old man talked. What Guyen ate these days was unclear, but he probably had a tube for that – and another one at the other end to deal with what his desiccated insides couldn’t process.

  ‘I woke up a crew that looked good, according to the records. They all had tech experience,’ Guyen went on, or at least the machines that spoke for him did. ‘We had all the kit we’d taken from the station. Preparing the ship was supposed to be quick. Just another few days. Just another few months. Just another year. Always just another year. And then I’d go to sleep for a bit, and wake up, and they’d still be at work . . .’ His withered face went slack with remembering. ‘And you know what? One day I woke up, and all those young faces . . . I realized that half the people doing the work had been born outside suspension. I’d taken up peoples’ whole lives, Mason – they’d been trying to make it work for that long. And the new generation . . . they didn’t know as much. They had learned what they could but . . . and then came another generation, devolving, understanding less than before. Everyone was too busy doing the work to pass on the knowledge. They knew nothing but the ship, and me. I had to lead them because they had work to do, no matter how inferior they were, how much longer it would take.’

  ‘Because you need to fight the Kern satellite, the Brin habitat thing?’ Holsten filled in for him, between mouthfuls.

  ‘I have to save the species,’ Guyen confirmed, as though that meant the same thing. ‘And we did it. We did it, all of us. All those lives weren’t wasted, after all. We have Empire tech defences, physical and electronic. There’s not a weak point left where Kern can sneak in and switch us all off. But by then I realized that I was old, and I realized how much the ship needed me, and so we got the upload facility and started work on that. I’ve given everything, Mason. I’ve given so many years to the Gilgamesh project. I want . . . I really want to just close my eyes and let go.’ The artificial voice fell to a static whisper. Holsten recognized this as a sacrosanct pause, and he didn’t try to insert any words.

  ‘If I thought there was no need of me,’ Guyen murmured. ‘If I thought they – you – could manage without my guidance, then I would go. I don’t want to be here. Who would want to be this dying, intubated thing? But there’s nobody else. The human race stands on my shoulders, Mason. I am the shepherd. Only through me will our people find their true home.’

  Mason nodded, and nodded, and thought that Guyen might or might not believe all of that, but knew that he detected a thread of mendacity nonetheless. Guyen had never been a man to take advice or to share command. Why should he now be a man who would hand it over, especially when a kind of immortality was his for the taking if this upload business worked?

  If the uploader didn’t wreck the Gilgamesh’s systems.

  ‘Why not Lain?’ he asked Guyen.

  The old man twitched at the name. ‘What about Lain?’

  ‘She’s chief engineer. You wanted all this work doing, so why not pop her out sooner? I’ve seen her. She’s older, but not . . .’ not as much as you, ‘not that much older. You can’t have sprung her from the chambers that long ago. Why not start with her?’

  Guyen glowered at him for a moment, or perhaps some machine glowered at him on Guyen’s blind behalf. ‘I don’t trust Lain,’ he snapped. ‘She has ideas.’

  There was no real answer to that. By now Holsten had already formed distinct ideas about whether Guyen was crazy, and whether Lain was sane. Unfortunately that did not seem to translate into an equal certainty about which of them was right.

  He had one arrow left in the quiver. There was a sequence of recordings that Lain had played for him, before that meeting with Karst and Vitas: the last transmissions of the moon colony they had set up back in Kern’s system. It had been Lain’s secret weapon, to persuade him that Something Must Be Done. It had worked, at the time. She had been merciless, and Holsten had been left as depressed and miserable as he ever had been. He had heard the desperate, panicking voices of the people Guyen had left behind: their pleas, their reports. Everything had been failing, the infrastructure of the colony had simply not been self-sustaining. Long decades after the base was established, it began to die.

  Guyen had left a community there, some awake, some in suspension. He had abandoned them to live there, and to raise their children to replace them at the helm of that doomed venture. Then the Gil’s commander had listened to their dying cries, their frantic begging, enduring the cold, the foul air . . . The lucky ones would have just rotted in their cold coffins once the power failed.

  The last message had been a distress beacon, automated, repeated over and over: the successor – humanity’s version of Kern’s thousand-year call. Finally even that had ceased. Even that had not stood the test of that little span of time.

  ‘I heard the recordings from the moon base,’ he told Guyen.

  The commander’s leathery visage swung towards him. ‘Did you?’

  ‘Lain played them to me.’

  ‘I’m sure she did.’

  Holsten waited, but there was nothing more forthcoming. ‘You’re . . . what? You’re denying it? You’re saying Lain faked it?’

  Guyen shook his head, or something else shook it for him. ‘What was I supposed to do?’ he demanded. ‘Go back for them?’

  Holsten was about to say that, yes, that was exactly what Guyen should have done. Instead, a little scientific awareness coloured his passion, and he began, ‘The time . . .’

  ‘We were decades away,’ Guyen agreed. ‘It would have taken decades to return to them. By the time they found there was a problem, they didn’t have anywhere near that long. You wanted me to go through the colossal exercise and waste of turning this ship around, just to bury them?’

  Guyen almost managed it then. Holsten’s perceptions of right and wrong flipped and flopped, and he found he could look into that grey, dying face and see the saviour of mankind – a man who had been trained to make tough decisions, and had made them with regret but without hesitation.

  Then a real expression finally clawed its way on to Guyen’s face. ‘And, besides,’ he added, ‘they were traitors.’

  Holsten sat quite, quite still, staring at the horrible
rearrangement of the commander’s features. A kind of childish, idiot satisfaction had gripped the old man, perhaps entirely without his knowledge.

  There had been mutineers, of course, as Holsten had more cause than most to remember. He recalled Scoles, Nessel and all that rhetoric about being sacrificed to an icy grave.

  And they were right.

  And, of course, most of the actual mutineers had been killed. The cargo decanted out to form the moon base crew had not been traitors; in fact they would have had very little idea of what was going on before learning of their fate.

  ‘Traitors,’ Guyen repeated, as if savouring the word. ‘In the end, they got what they deserved.’ The transition from earnest, martyred leader to raving psychopath had simply happened without any discernible boundary being crossed.

  Then people started entering the chamber, Guyen’s people. They shuffled about in their robes, and swirled and milled into a ragged congregation before the great mechanical majesty of Guyen’s dais. Holsten saw them arrive in their hundreds: men, women, children.

  ‘What’s happening?’ he demanded.

  ‘We’re ready,’ Guyen breathed. ‘The time has come.’

  ‘Your upload?’

  ‘My ascension, my eternal duty that will enable me to guide my people forever, in this world and the next.’ He began to take the steps stiffly, one at a time.

  From somewhere, Vitas and a handful of her team had appeared, hovering about the machines like a priesthood. The science chief glanced once at Holsten, but incuriously. Around the edges of the wider chamber, there stood a score or so of men and women in armoured shipsuits – Karst’s security team. One of them must be the man himself, but they had their visors lowered.

  So the old gang’s together again, all but one. Holsten was acutely aware that Lain would expect him to buy her some time, although he had no idea if she was even on her way.

  ‘Guyen,’ he called after the commander. ‘What about them?’ His gesture took in the massing congregation. ‘What happens to them when you’re . . . translated? Do they just keep multiplying until they overrun the ship? Until there’s nothing left to eat? What happens?’

  ‘I will provide for them,’ Guyen promised. ‘I will show them the way.’

  ‘It’ll be the moon colony all over again,’ Holsten snapped. ‘They’ll die. They’ll eat all the food. They’ll just . . . live everywhere until things break down. This isn’t a cruise ship. The Gil isn’t supposed to be lived in. They’re cargo. We’re all cargo.’ He took a deep breath. ‘But you’ll have your electronic avatar by then. So long as the power holds, you’ll be fine. Probably most of the ship’ll be fine, the cargo in suspension . . . but these people, and their children, and – then what? – maybe one generation after that, they’ll die. Your followers will die a drawn-out death of starvation and failing machinery, and cold, and suffocation, and all the other things that can happen because we’re out in fucking space!’ He had shocked himself with the vehemence of his tirade, thinking, Do I actually care about all these lunatics that much? But apparently he did.

  ‘I will provide!’ Guyen’s voice rose to a boom without effort, channelled through speakers about the room. ‘I am the last shepherd of the human race.’

  Holsten had expected his own words to start a riot of fear and uncertainty among the congregation, but they seemed weirdly placid, accepting what Guyen said and barely seeming to register a word said against him. In fact the only reaction he got was that suddenly a couple of the larger sheep in Guyen’s flock were standing at his shoulders, laying hands on him as if about to bundle him away. He needed more ammunition. He would have to fight dirty now.

  ‘One more thing!’ he shouted, just as Guyen reached the top step. ‘You do know that Karst and Vitas have been working with Lain behind your back?’

  The dead silence that followed this pronouncement was spoiled by Karst’s helmet-muffled voice spitting out, ‘Oh, you fucker!’

  Guyen had become quite still – and so everyone had become quite still. Holsten stole a look at Vitas, who was observing the situation around her with a calmly inquisitive air, as if she could not feel the sudden change of mood in the crowd. Karst’s people had begun to bunch up. They all had guns, and now these were mostly pointing at the faithful.

  Have I just done the most sensible thing that I could, under the circumstances?

  ‘I don’t believe you,’ Guyen’s voice croaked, although if his disembodied voice was indeed devoid of belief, it was full to the brim with electronic doubt. Guyen’s paranoia clearly had a 360-degree field of vision.

  ‘When your clowns grabbed me, I was just coming back from a meeting – of me, Lain, her, him,’ pointing out the guilty for the court.

  ‘Mason, shut up or I will shoot your fucking head off!’ Karst bellowed, neatly erasing any lingering suggestion of innocence.

  The congregation was mostly armed, even if it was with knives and makeshift spears and maces. They outnumbered Karst’s squad heavily, and the quarters were close.

  ‘You will go back into suspension!’ Guyen snapped. ‘You, Vitas, all of your people!’

  ‘Piss off! And what then?’ Karst snapped. ‘You think I trust you?’

  ‘I will be the ship!’ Guyen fairly howled. ‘I will be everything. I will have the power of life and death over every member of the human race. Do you think that simply staying out of suspension will save you from my wrath, if you defy me? Obey me now and I will be merciful.’

  ‘Commander—’ Vitas started. Above the rising mutter of the congregation Holsten did his best to read her lips.

  ‘You too, traitor!’ Guyen levelled a twig-thin finger at her.

  Then either Karst or one of his people – Holsten didn’t see which – tried to level a gun at Guyen, and the fighting started. A few shots went off, striking sparks from the ceiling, some ripping hungrily into the crowd, but matters degenerated into a brawl almost immediately, the untrained but fervent masses ranged against Karst’s few.

  That was when Lain chose to make her move.

  A knot of robed acolytes burst from the throng, bounding up the steps towards Guyen, and even Holsten thought they were fanatics heading to protect their leader, to form some sort of human shield. Only when their leader dragged some sort of makeshift weapon out, and her cowl slipped back, did he realize his mistake.

  Moments later Lain had her weapon – some sort of industrial nail-gun – against the side of Guyen’s head and was yelling for everyone’s attention.

  They were about twenty people down to injury or death by that point – a couple of Karst’s band, and the rest luckless followers of the Church of Guyen. Lain never got her requested silence – there was sobbing, cries for help, at least one keening wail that spoke of desolated loss and grief. The bulk of the faithful, however, were frozen in place, seeing their prophet about to be struck down at the very point of his transcendence.

  ‘Now,’ Lain shouted, as best she could. Her voice wasn’t made for public declamation or for confrontational heresy, but she did her utmost. ‘Nobody’s going anywhere, and that includes into that fucking computer.’

  ‘Karst . . .’ It was Guyen’s voice, although his lips hadn’t moved. Holsten looked over to the security team, backed into a tight knot with their leader in its midst. If there was any reply, it was too quiet to be heard, but it was plain that there would be no help for Guyen from that quarter, not any more.

  ‘Vitas, disconnect this shit,’ Lain instructed. ‘Then we can start to sort out the mess.’

  ‘Hmm.’ The science chief cocked her head on one side. ‘You have some sort of plan then, chief engineer?’ It seemed an odd thing to say, for someone with no small-talk. Holsten saw the frown on Lain’s face.

  And, of course, Vitas had wanted the upload to go ahead. She had wanted to see what would happen.

  ‘Lain!’ Holsten shouted. ‘It’s happening! He’s uploading now!’ It was a lengthy process, but of course Guyen had been plugged in all this time. He h
ad probably been feeding his brain into the Gil’s memory for ages, a bite-sized piece at a time.

  The realization hit Lain at the same time and she pulled the trigger.

  Vitas’s face was a picture in that split second: real shock gripping her at last, but at the same time a kind of prurient interest, as if even this twist would yield valuable data for her studies. Guyen’s face, of course, joined the rest of his head in painting the upload facility red.

  There was a colossal groaning noise that echoed through the room, twisting and garbling and collapsing into static, but rebuilding itself jaggedly until at last it became a voice.

  ‘I!’ shouted Guyen even as his body collapsed back into its cradle of tubes and wires. ‘I! I! I!’

  The lights died, sprang back, flickered. Screens about the chamber suddenly sprang alive with random vomitings of colour and light, fragments of a human face, and that voice stuttering on, ‘I! I! Mine! Obey! I!’ as though Guyen had been distilled down to the basic drives that had always motivated him.

  ‘Damage report!’ Lain’s team were all up on the dais now, accessing the Gil through the machinery there. ‘Karst, get control, you useless fuckwit!’

  Karst pointed his rifle at the ceiling and loosed a handful of shots, the roar of the gun scouring the room free of any other human noise, but unable to blot out the tortured glossolalia of the speakers. On the screens, something was trying to form itself into Guyen’s face, a proof of ascension for the true believers; it failed and failed again, incomplete and distorted. Sometimes, Holsten thought, it was Kern’s face instead.

  He lurched his way up the steps to join Lain. ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘He’s in the system, but . . . it’s another incomplete copy like his test runs. Only it’s more . . . there’s more of him. I’m trying to isolate him, but he’s fighting me – they’re all fighting me. It’s like he’s seeded the fucking computer with his people, sent them ahead to clear the way. I—’