She led him through the cluttered, half-unmade chambers and passageways of the crew area, heading towards what he recalled were the science labs.
‘We’re going to see Vitas?’ he asked.
‘Vitas,’ she spat. ‘Vitas I made use of right at the start, but she’s been sleeping the sleep of the not particularly trusted ever since. After all, she’d not soil her hands with maintenance, and I’ve not forgotten how she was egging Guyen on all the while before. No, I’m taking you to see our cargo extension.’
‘You’ve put in new chambers? How?’
‘Just shut up and wait, will you?’ Lain paused, and he could see she was catching her breath, but trying not to show it. ‘You’ll see soon enough.’
In fact, he did not see, when she eventually showed him. Here was one of the labs, and here, taking up much of one wall, was a specimen chamber: a great rack of little containers, hundreds of little organic samples kept on ice. Holsten stared and stared, and shook his head. And then, just as Lain was about to lay into his lack of perception, he suddenly connected the dots and said, ‘Embryos.’
‘Yes, old man. The future. All the new life that our species couldn’t stop itself putting out but that we had no space to raise and bring up. As soon as some over-eager girl decides she wants a family that I, in my wisdom, don’t think we can afford, it’s out with the surgery and it comes here. Harsh world, ain’t it?’
‘Alive?’
‘Of course, alive,’ Lain snapped at him. ‘Because right now I’m still hoping the human race has a future, and we are frankly still kind of short on people from a historical perspective. So we put them on ice, and hope that one day we can fire up the artificial wombs and bequeath a load of orphans to the universe.’
‘The parents must have . . .’
‘Argued? Fought? Kicked and screamed?’ Her stare was barren. ‘Yeah, you could say that. But also they knew what would happen ahead of time, and they still did it. Biological imperative’s a funny thing. The genes just want to squeeze themselves into another generation, no matter what. And, of course, we’ve had generations growing up here. You know how kids are. Even when you offer ’em countermeasures, they won’t use them half the time. Ignorant little fucks, so to speak.’
‘I don’t understand why you thought I so desperately needed to see all this,’ Holsten pointed out.
‘Oh, yeah, right.’ Lain bent over the console and skimmed through various menus until she highlighted one of the embryo containers. ‘That one, see it?’
Holsten frowned, wondering if there was some mutation or defect that he was supposed to be noticing.
‘What can I say?’ Lain prompted. ‘I was young and foolish. There was this lusty young classicist, he swept me off my feet. We had dinner by the light of dying stars in a ten-thousand-year-old space station. Oh, the romance.’ Her deadpan delivery never wavered.
Holsten stared at her. ‘I don’t believe you.’
‘Why?’
‘But you . . . you never said. When we were up against Guyen, you could have . . .’
‘Right then I wasn’t sure we had a future, and if Guyen had found out, and got control of the system . . . It’s a girl, by the way. She’s a girl. Will be a girl.’ And it was that repetition that told Holsten how close to the edge Lain was now skating. ‘I made the choice, Holsten. When I was with you, I chose. I made this happen. I was going to . . . I thought there would be time later . . . I thought there would be a tomorrow when I could go back to her and . . . but there was always some other damned thing. The tomorrow I was waiting for never came. And now I’m not sure I . . .’
‘Isa—’
‘Listen, Holsten, you’re going back under as soon as they find you a chamber, right? You’re priority, fuck all the rest. There are some perks to being me right now, and first off is that I call the shots. You go under. You wake up when we hit the green planet system. You make planetfall, and you make sure everything is done to make that place ours, come crazy computers or monster spiders or whatever. And you make it somewhere she can live. You hear me, old man?’
‘But you—’
‘No, Holsten, this thing you get to take responsibility for. I’ll have done all I can. I’ll have done everything humanly possible to bring about this tomorrow. It’ll be down to you after that.’
Only later, after she saw him to his newly restored suspension chamber, did he glimpse the name still tagged on the ragged shawl of shipsuit she wore about her shoulders. The sight of it froze him just as he was about to get a leg up into the refurbished coffin. Really? For all this time? Facing that long, cold oblivion, with no certainty that he would wake up again, it was curiously warming to know that someone, even if it was this cynical bitter woman, had been holding a torch for him all those unfelt years.
6.6 AND TOUCHED THE FACE OF GOD
Portia wants to go out along with the rest of the crew, but Viola has forbidden it. She is being saved for her own private ideal. Until then, Portia is to be as cosseted and pampered as a sacrificial king.
This high up, the Sky Nest’s colony needs physical help to keep the airship envelope in shape, and to keep the ship maintained. Even working from within, the cold is getting to the ants. Tiny and unable to regulate their own temperature, they cannot accomplish much outside the core of the ship itself, and so the spiders have donned their special suits and gone out to crawl about the exterior of their floating home, entering and leaving through pressure doors of their own weaving and re-weaving, temporary airlocks appearing and disappearing as needed. They stumble and stutter back in twos and threes, their work done for the moment. Some return bound to their comrades’ backs, overcome by the cold, despite the layers of silk swathing their bodies and the chemical heaters slung beneath their bellies. Portia feels uncomfortable at not being able to assist, for all she understands that she is being saved for another ordeal.
There were a few who had clung to the idea that being closer to the sun would be to feel its unmitigated heat. They have been roundly disabused of this notion. Up here the thin air leaches at their bodies like a sightless vampire. And, despite this, Portia would have joined them, worked knee to knee alongside them and pulled her weight, even as the airship is pulling all of their weights.
The other reason that she wants to work is to take her mind off what is going on down below – or up above, depending on perspective. The sudden silence of the Messenger has affected them all. Reason dictates that their mission is no more than peripherally connected – in that both events involve the erratic brilliance of Bianca – but, like humans, the spiders are quick to see patterns and make connections, to extract untoward significance from coincidence. There has been a curious anxiety about the crew, for all that those glory days of Temple are long gone. Being this much closer to the essential mystery of the Messenger, and so cut off from all they know, arouses strange thoughts.
At last Viola is confident that the Sky Nest will coast stably in the thin air, and she liaises with radio beacons on the ground. The air currents – that have been mapped out crudely over the last few years – are carrying them closer to the crisis point.
Portia, Fabian, go to your station, she orders.
Portia questions her respectfully, signalling with terse passes of her palps that she feels the mission could be achieved single-handed as easily as it could with two. It is not a lack of faith in Fabian’s abilities that moves her, but a fear for him. Males are so frail, and she feels protective.
Viola indicates that everything will proceed according to the plan, and that plan calls for two of them to enter the smaller craft mounted atop the Sky Nest. The Star Nest, they call it, and it will carry them where no spider has ever been – into regions that have been the province of myth and imagination since their records began. Some small unpiloted vessels have coasted close to that boundary. Now, the scientists believe they have come to an understanding of the conditions at the very edge of the world’s reach, and have planned accordingly. Portia and Fabian wil
l have to wrestle with the truth of their beliefs, and they go as a pair in case one of them should fail.
The Sky Nest is robust, able to survive the hectic and turbulent weather conditions extending all the way down to the surface of their world. It is still a great, almost weightless object: a cloud of silk and wood and hydrogen; a small crew of spiders and a handful of engines are the heaviest things aboard. Still it is not light enough. When fully inflated, the Star Nest will be a reasonable fraction of the Sky Nest’s size, and carry a much smaller fraction of its weight: a truncated onboard colony to handle life-support, a radio, two crew, the payload.
This is one of the things that Bianca and her peers have discovered, that there is a tapering edge to the sky, that the air diminishes as a traveller grows more distant from their world, thinner and colder and more unreliable until . . . Well, there remains some disagreement as to whether it actually ends, or whether it simply grows so rarefied that no instrument exists able to detect it. How many molecules of air in a square kilometre of space constitute a continuation of the atmosphere, after all?
Portia makes her way to the robing chamber, to be fitted into her suit. This is not simply an insulating covering, such as the sailors have worn, but a cumbersome and curious outfit that is bulky about the joints, and bloated about the abdomen where the air tanks are housed. At the moment it is depressurized, and hangs flaccid about her, feeling surprisingly heavy, interfering with her movements and making a mumble out of her attempts to speak. On this mission she will be reduced to palp signals and radio.
Fabian joins her, similarly caparisoned. He flicks her an encouraging gesture to keep her spirits up. He has been chosen as her second because they work well together, but also because, small even for a male, he is half her size and less than half her weight. The Star Nest has a long way to haul them; after all, the stars are very far away.
Even the Messenger is far away, passing across the sky far higher than the Star Nest could ever reach. Philosophical quibbles aside, there is no atmosphere there at all. The Messenger is a form of life dwelling in the harshest, most life-negating environment a spider can imagine.
And Portia cannot help wondering: Have we silenced Her by reaching as high as we are? Are we measuring legs with Her by simply doing so?
The crew cabin of the Star Nest is terribly cramped. The ceiling is swollen with the airship’s systems: its heater, chemical factory, transmitter/receiver and a population of ants of limited capacity, dedicated only to keeping it all running. Portia and Fabian settle themselves as best they can, nestling into the limited give that the walls allow them.
The radio pulses the instructions from Viola, back in the long crew compartment of the Sky Nest, putting Portia through a long series of checks, cross-referenced with the reports of both vessels’ onboard colonies that are, in any event, mother and daughter, which kinship aids in linking communications between the colonies.
Viola signals that the crisis moment is reached: given best estimations of air-current movement, this is when the craft must separate for the Star Nest to obtain the optimum chance of success. Viola’s words, transmitted as electronic pulses that strip the information of all the sender’s character and personality, sound dreadfully efficient.
Portia responds that she and Fabian are ready for separation. Viola starts to say something, then stills the words. Portia knows that she has just reined in some platitude concerning the Messenger’s goodwill. Such sentiments seem inappropriate just at this moment.
Down on the surface, dozens of observatories and radio receivers are awaiting developments, agog.
Star Nest has been clinging to the upper surface of Sky Nest’s gasbag like a benign parasite. Now its crew have effected the climb to it and set themselves in place, it is detached gently by the Sky Nest ants, a host of tiny lines severed, so that all at once the Star Nest’s superior buoyancy tells, and it floats free of the mothership with jellyfish-like grace. Immediately it ascends higher than the more robust vehicle could follow, caught in the upper air currents, holding – for now – to the models of its movements set out by scientists who are not having to trust their own lives to the thing.
Portia and Fabian make regular radio reports back to Viola, and the wider world. In between, they mostly amuse themselves. Their ability to communicate is limited to palp-signalling, any greater subtlety being stifled by their close quarters and the cumbersome suits. The cold is infiltrating despite the layers of silk cosseting the crew compartment. They are already breathing stored air, which is a limited resource. Portia is aware that there is a strict timetable by which their mission must be fulfilled.
The chemical light of her instruments tells her of their swift ascent. The radio confirms the Star Nest’s position. Portia feels that curious sensation that is so much of what she is: she is walking where no other has walked. This sense of opportunistic curiosity that has been with her ancestors since they were tiny, thoughtless huntresses, is strong in her. For Portia there is always another horizon, always a new path.
It is around this time that the Messenger breaks radio silence. Portia is not tuned to God’s frequency, but the tumultuous response from the ground tells her what has happened. She herself is not fluent in God’s difficult, counter-intuitive language, but translations come through swiftly, passing across the face of the planet as swift as thought.
God has apologized.
God has explained that She has previously misunderstood some key elements of the situation, but has now gained a clearer understanding of how things are.
God invites questions.
Portia and Fabian, locked in their tiny, ascending bubble, wait anxiously to hear what will be said. They know that Bianca and her fellows on the ground must be feverishly debating what comes next. What question can possibly mark the start of this new phase of communication with the Messenger?
But of course, there is only one vital question. Portia wonders if Bianca will actually canvass anyone else’s opinion in the end, or whether she will simply send off her own demand to God to prevent anyone else doing likewise. It must be a grand temptation to every other spider with access to a transmitter.
What Bianca asks is this:
What does it mean that you are there and we are here? Is there meaning or is it random chance? Because what else does one ask even a broken cybernetic deity but, Why are we here?
From her high vantage point Doctor Avrana Kern readies herself to make full disclosure: here is a question she can answer in more detail than all the spiders in the world could ever want. She, Avrana Kern, is history itself.
She takes the equivalent of a deep breath, but no answers come to mind. She is replete with the assurance that she knows, but such confidence is not backed by the knowledge itself. The archive of data that she thinks of as my memories is unavailable. Error messages leap out when she seeks the answers. It is gone. That trove of what-once-was has gone. She is the only witness to a whole age of mankind, yet she has forgotten. The unused records have been overwritten in her thousands of years of sleep, in her centuries of waking.
She knows she knows, and yet in truth she does not know. All she has is a patchwork of conjecture, and memories of times when she once remembered the things she can no longer recall first-hand. If she is to answer the planet, it will be with those pieces stitched together into a whole cloth. She will be giving them belated creation myths, high on dogma but low on detail.
But they are so desperate to know, and it is the right question. Would she have them ask for technical specifications or serial numbers? No. They must know the truth, as best as she can tell it.
So she tells them.
She asks them what they think those lights in the sky are: those below are astronomers enough to know that they are unthinkably distant fires.
They are like your sun, she says. And around one such was a world much like your own, on which other eyes looked up at those distant lights, and wondered if anything looked back down. She has slipped into the p
ast tense naturally, although her concept of a linear past is a little at odds with the spiders’ own concepts. Earth itself is dead to her.
The creatures that lived on that world were quarrelsome and violent, and most of them strove only to kill and control and oppress each other, and resist anyone who tried to improve the lot of their fellows. But there were a few who saw further. They travelled to other stars and worlds and, when they found a world that was a little like their own, they used their technology to change it until they could live upon it. On some of these worlds they lived, but on others they conducted an experiment. They seeded those worlds with life, and made a catalyst to quicken that life’s growth; they wanted to see what would emerge. They wanted to see if that life would look back at them, and understand.
Something moves within what is left of Avrana Kern, some broken mechanism she has not used for such a long, long time.
But while they were waiting, the destructive and wasteful majority fought with the others, the right-thinkers, and started a great war. She knows now that her audience will understand ‘war’ and ‘catalyst’, and the bulk of the concepts she is using. And they died. They all died. All the people of Earth save just a few. And so they never did come to see what grew on their new-made worlds.
And she does not say it, but she thinks: And that is you. My children, it is you. You are not what we wanted, not what we planned for, but you are my experiment, and you are a success. And that jagged-edged part moves once again and she knows that some part of her, some locked-away fleshy part, is trying to weep. But not from sorrow; rather from pride, only from pride.
In her tiny, insulated world, Portia listens to what God has to say, and tries to assimilate it – as other spider minds across the world must also be trying to grasp what is being said. Some of it is incomprehensible – just as so much of the Messenger’s message is – but this is clearer than most: God is really trying to be understood, this time.
Children of Time Page 39
