Children of Time

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  ‘Classicist Doctor Holsten Mason,’ said a voice, a woman’s voice. ‘Do you answer to your name?’

  ‘I . . . Yes, what?’ The question was on the pivot point between normal and strange.

  ‘Note that as a positive,’ a man said. ‘Doctor Holsten Mason, please stand up. You are being relocated. There is no cause for alarm, but your suspension chamber has become unstable and is in need of repair.’ Nothing in this speech made any acknowledgement of the fact that these clowns had just had to rip the lid off his coffin to get at the meat within. ‘You will be taken to another chamber and returned to suspension or, if no functioning chamber is available, you will be taken to temporary accommodation until one is. We understand that this must be distressing for you, but we assure you that everything is being done to restore normal ship operation.’

  At last, Holsten looked up at them.

  They were wearing shipsuits, and that had to be a good thing. He had half expected them to be dressed in hides and skins, a doubly unpleasant thought given that the Gilgamesh had only one animal in abundance.

  They were two women and one man, and they looked surprisingly neat and clean. For a moment he could not work out why that alarmed him so. Then he clicked that, had this been some random emergency, and if these were crew, he would have expected them to be dishevelled and tired about the eyes, and for the man to be unshaven. Instead, they had taken the time to smarten themselves up. The shipsuits, on the other hand, were plainly not new: worn and scuffed and patched – and patched again.

  ‘What’s going on?’

  The man who had reeled off his reassuring little speech opened his mouth again, but Holsten put up a hand to stop him, hauling himself to his feet.

  ‘Yes, yes, I got it. What’s going on?’

  ‘If you would come with us, Doctor Mason,’ one of the women told him.

  He found his hands had formed pathetic little fists and he was backing away. ‘No . . . No, I’ve had enough of being hauled out every century by another band of halfwit clowns who’ve got some stupid idea of what they want to do, without telling me anything. You tell me what’s going on or I’ll . . . I swear I’ll . . .’ And that was really the problem, because he’d what? What would the great Holsten Mason then do? Would he throw a tiny tantrum, out here in the vastness of space? Would he go back to his lidless coffin and fold his arms across his chest and pretend to be sleeping the sleep of the dead?

  ‘So help me, I’ll . . .’ he tried again, but his heart wasn’t in it.

  The three of them exchanged glances, trying to communicate by grimace and eyebrow. At least they were not trying to haul him anywhere by force, just yet. He cast a desperate glance around Key Crew to see what there was to see.

  At least half the suspension chambers were lying open, he saw. Some others remained closed, the panels on their exteriors displaying the cool blue glow of good functioning. Others were shading into green, and even towards the yellow that his own had perhaps been displaying. He went over to one, looking down at the face of a man he thought he recalled as being on Karst’s team. The panels had a host of little alerts indicating what Holsten assumed was probably bad news at some level.

  ‘Yes,’ one of the women explained, noting his gaze. ‘We have a lot of work to do. We have to prioritize. That’s why we need you to come with us.’

  ‘Look . . .’ Holsten leant forwards to peer at the name on her shipsuit, ‘Ailen, I want to know what the situation is with the Gil and . . . you’re not Ailen.’ Because abruptly he remembered the real Ailen, one of the science team: a sharp-faced woman who hadn’t got on much with Vitas, or with anyone else.

  He was backing away again. ‘How long is it?’ he demanded of them.

  ‘Since when?’ They were advancing on him slowly, as if trying not to spook an excitable animal, fanning out around the broken coffin to pin him.

  ‘Since I . . . Since Guyen . . .’ But they wouldn’t know. Probably they didn’t even remember who Guyen was, or perhaps he was some demon figure in their myth cycles. These people were ship-born, Gilgamesh’s children. All that smooth patter, the shipsuits, the appearance of neat competence, it was all an act. They were nothing but monkeys aping their long-vanished betters. The ‘new suspension chamber’ they would take him to, after destroying the real thing, would be nothing but a box with a few wires attached to it: a cargo cult coffin built by credulous savages.

  He looked around for something to use as a weapon. There was nothing to hand. He had a mad idea of waking up others of the Key Crew, of popping out the security man like some sort of guardian monster to scare them away. He had a feeling that his persecutors were unlikely to wait patiently while he worked out how to do it.

  ‘Please, Doctor Mason,’ one of the women asked patiently, as though he was just some confused old man who wouldn’t go back to his bed.

  ‘You don’t know who I am!’ Holsten yelled at them, and then he ducked and somehow came up holding the whole jagged-hinged lid of the suspension chamber, the unbalancing weight of it a weird reassurance that there was something solid in the world that he had control over.

  He threw it. Later, he would look back with amazement, watching this raging stranger he had briefly become, heaving the ungainly missile over the open coffin towards them. He got it bang on target, striking their upraised arms, knocking them out of the way, and then he rushed past them, sleep-suit flapping open at the back as he dashed out of Key Crew.

  There was absolutely nowhere he could think of heading, so he just went, stumbling and staggering and pelting down the corridors that he remembered, but that had been transformed in his absence into something strange and broken. Everywhere there were wall panels removed, wiring exposed, some of it ripped out or cut through. Someone had been flaying the Gilgamesh from the inside, exposing its organs and inner workings at countless junctures. Holsten was irresistibly put in mind of a body giving way to the last virulent stages of some disease.

  There were two people ahead of him, yet more manicured savages in orange shipsuits. They had been tinkering with a mess of tangled wiring, but stood up abruptly at the shouts issuing from behind Holsten.

  He would have to go through them, he knew. At this stage his only hope was to keep running, because that might at least get him somewhere other than this. This was not a place he could be. This was all too clearly a great and delicate space vehicle that was being torn apart from the inside, and how could any of them last after that?

  What happened? he was asking himself frantically. Lain was working to contain the Guyen infection. There was nothing I could do. I had to go back to sleep, in the end. So how did it come to this? He felt that he was developing some hitherto unknown ailment, some equivalent of motion sickness caught from too many dissociated moments of history crammed into too little personal time.

  Is this the end, then? Is this the human race in the end?

  He got ready to put his shoulder up against the two primitives ahead of him, but they refrained from getting in his way, and he just stumbled on past them as they stared at him blankly. For a moment he saw himself through their eyes: a wild-eyed old man bouncing off the walls, with his arse hanging out.

  ‘Doctor Mason, wait!’ they were calling from behind him, but there was no waiting permitted to him. He ran and he ran, and eventually they cornered him in the observation cupola, with the starfield drifting behind him, as though he was about to hold them off by threatening to jump.

  There were more than three of them, by then: the commotion had brought along maybe a dozen – more women than men, and all of them unfamiliar people in old shipsuits with dead names on them. They watched him cautiously, even though there was nowhere else he could go. The three who had woken him were notably neater than the rest, whose garments and faces looked decidedly more lived-in. Welcoming committee, he thought drily. Awards for the best-dressed cannibals of whatever stupid year this is.

  ‘What do you want?’ he demanded breathlessly, feeling himself at bay against the
universe.

  ‘We need to reallocate you a chamber—’ started the man from the welcoming committee, in those same bright, calm, false tones.

  ‘No,’ said one of the others. ‘I told you, not this one. Special instructions for this one.’

  Oh, of course.

  ‘So, tell me?’ Holsten broached to them. ‘Tell me who you really are. You!’ He pointed at not-Ailen. ‘Who are you? What happened to the real Ailen that you’re wearing her skin – clothes, her clothes?’ He could feel a deep craziness trying to shake itself loose inside him. This crowd of serious, well-mannered people in stolen shipsuits was beginning to frighten him more than the mutineers, more than the ragged robes of the cultists. And why was it always like this? ‘What’s wrong with us?’ And only from their expressions did he realize that he had just spoken aloud, but the words wouldn’t stop. ‘What is it about us that we cannot live together in this fucking eggshell ship without tearing at each other? That we have to try and control one another and lie to one another and hurt one another? Who are you that you’re telling me where I have to be and what to do? What are you doing to the poor Gilgamesh? Where did all you freaks come from?’ The last came out as a shriek that appalled Holsten, because something in him seemed to have snapped beyond any control or repair. For a moment he stared at his audience of the young and alien, with his mouth open, everyone including himself waiting to see if more words would be forthcoming. Instead he could feel the shape of his mouth deforming and twisting, and sobs starting to claw and suck at his chest. It was too much. It had been too much. He, who had translated the madness of a millennia-old guardian angel. He who had been abducted. He who had seen an alien world crawling with earthly horrors. He had feared. He had loved. He had met a man who wanted to be God. He had seen death.

  It had been a rough few weeks. The universe had been given centuries to absorb the shock, but not him. He had been woken and pounded, woken and pounded, and the rigid stasis of suspension offered him no capacity to recover his balance.

  ‘Doctor Mason,’ said one of them, with that relentless, brutal courtesy. ‘We are Engineering. We are crew.’ And the woman he had singled out added, ‘Ailen was my grandmother.’

  ‘Engineering?’ Holsten got out.

  ‘We are fixing the ship,’ explained another of the youngsters, so very earnestly.

  This new information spun about inside Holsten’s skull like a flock of bats trying to find a way out. Engineering. Grandmother. Fixing. ‘And how long will it take,’ he said shakily, ‘to fix the ship?’

  ‘As long as it takes,’ said Ailen’s granddaughter.

  Holsten sat down. All that strength, the rage and the righteousness and the fear, it all drained from him so viscerally that he felt he should be surrounded by a visible pool of spent emotions.

  ‘Why me?’ he whispered.

  ‘Your suspension chamber required urgent attention. You had to be retrieved,’ said the welcoming-committee man. ‘We were going to find you somewhere to wait while a new chamber was prepared, but now . . .’ He glanced at one of his fellows.

  ‘Special instructions,’ one of the newcomers confirmed.

  ‘Let me guess,’ Holsten broke in. ‘Your chief wants to see me.’

  He could see he was right, although they stared at him with something approaching superstition.

  ‘It’s Lain, isn’t it,’ he said confidently, and the words unleashed a sudden jagged onset of doubt. My grandmother, not-Ailen had said. And where was Ailen now? ‘Isa Lain?’ he added, hearing a renewed tremble in his voice. ‘Tell me.’

  In their eyes he could see himself: a terrified man out of his time.

  ‘Come with us,’ they urged him. And this time he went.

  6.3 COMMUNION

  Bianca has spoken to the Messenger before, and she has taken on a set of Understandings donated by researchers who have distilled the wide history of contact with the artificial god into an easily analysed format. To Bianca, the results are fascinating, and she is not sure any other before her has come to quite the same conclusions.

  The Messenger is plainly a sentient entity orbiting her world at a distance of around three hundred kilometres. The earliest extant Understandings record that, for an unknown period of time, the Messenger was sending a radio signal to the world consisting of a series of mathematical sequences. A relatively short time ago, historically speaking, an answering transmission was sent out by one of Bianca’s forebears, and a strange and unsatisfactory dialogue commenced.

  It is the character of this dialogue that Bianca has been obsessing over. She has mulled over the second-hand experiences of those who came before, felt their distant conviction that the curious voice they heard belonged to some manner of intelligence, one that was deeply interested in her kind, intent on communicating, and that had a wider purpose. These conclusions seem unarguable from the facts. Bianca is also aware, from the Understandings she has known, that her ancestors constructed a number of beliefs that are, in retrospect, less verifiable. Many came to believe that the Messenger was responsible for their existence, a belief that their God actively fostered. Furthermore, they believed that the Messenger had their best interests at heart, and that the plan they were following so diligently – and, later, at such cost – was one that, could they only understand it, was for their express benefit.

  Bianca has considered all of that, and finds none of it supported by fact. She is aware that a great many of her species are still invested in Temple, and the belief that the Messenger is in some way looking out for them, even though that belief is only a wishful shadow of the fervour that once existed. She has been relatively tactful about her conclusions, therefore, but she has made it plain that the traditional, antiquated view of the Messenger as something like their own kind writ large – some great spider in the sky – is absurd.

  That the Messenger is an entity of great breadth of intellect, she cannot contest. Potentially it is a superior intellect, but that is a harder judgement to make because she can only conclude that it is a very different type of intelligence from her own. There is plainly a vast amount that the Messenger takes for granted which even Bianca, stretch her mind as she might, cannot grasp. Conversely, there is much that has been said to the Messenger that has evidently been misunderstood, or met with blank incomprehension on the part of God. The capabilities of the divine are apparently limited in curious ways. There are concepts that the most ignorant spiderling would intuitively understand that clearly pass the Messenger by.

  And this, of course, is with a common language painstakingly hammered out between the two ends of the twitching radio waves. Ergo, as Bianca is not the first to consider, the Messenger is far from all-seeing or all-knowing. It must feel its way; it must work to understand, and all too often it fails.

  Where comprehension is most lacking is in basic everyday matters. The Messenger is plainly unaware of most events occurring on the world it orbits. Moreover, descriptive language is usually lost on it. It is able to deal with visual descriptions in relatively basic ways, but any language coloured by the rich sensorium of a spider – the touch, the taste – tends to lose itself in translation. What is received most readily is numbers, calculations, equations: the stuff of arithmetic and physics.

  Bianca is familiar with that sort of communication from other sources. Out in the sea is a thriving civilization of crustaceans that her species has been in sporadic contact with for centuries. A basic gestural language has been negotiated over the years, and the submerged stomatopod state has experienced its own dramas and crises, its upheavals, coups and revolutions. Now they have radio, and scientists of their own, albeit their technology is constrained by their environment and their limited ability to manipulate that environment. They are a world apart, though, not just in being aquatic but in their priorities and concepts. The one thing that Bianca can discuss with them readily is mathematics, something for which the stomatopods have a passion.

  She has spent many years refining and elevating th
e complex architecture of the ant colonies in order to create the tools she needs for her cutting-edge experimentation. The most complex systems, such as the self-regulating flight control-colony aboard the Sky Nest, work on highly mathematical principles, and their chemical architecture is able to receive numerical information and act upon it, even to performing intricate calculations played out in ant bodies and the neurons of individual ant brains.

  Bianca is living with a recurring thought concerning the theoretical similarity between the Messenger and an ant colony grown sufficiently advanced and complex. Would it feel the same, to communicate with both?

  These days, active communication with the Messenger is strictly limited. There are always odd sects: recidivist peer houses who have somehow nurtured and become consumed by a deviant Understanding. As any reply from the Messenger is received wholesale across most of the planet, such closet zealots are quickly uncovered and hunted down the moment it becomes apparent that someone has opened an unauthorized channel to God. Instead, the major cities each have a say in who has access to the Messenger. Some temples, notwithstanding, attempt to find the divine truth behind the bewildering plan that is still broadcast entreatingly from time to time. Mostly, though, the privilege falls to enquiring scientists, and Bianca has schemed, plotted, flattered and performed favours to buy herself the chance for a free and frank exchange of views.

  The Sky Nest is making good progress on its historic mission, rising steadily into the atmosphere. The onboard colony reports on its own radio frequency to Bianca, confirming that all is well, and data from three other distant transmitters triangulate the airship’s position. This is the easy stage of the journey. Barring unforeseen weather, the Sky Nest should reach its effective operational ceiling on schedule.

  The Messenger will be clearing the horizon, and Bianca sends a signal to Her, inviting dialogue. She includes a certain amount of the formalities that Temple once used, not because she believes there is any need for them, but because God is better disposed towards those who feign the right humility.