Children of Time

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  ‘Someone tell me what is going on,’ he demanded, although it came out sounding like babble.

  ‘We need you—’ the woman started.

  ‘Shut up,’ snapped Scoles, and she did.

  By that time, Holsten reckoned he could have stumbled along under his own power, but they were hustling him along faster than he could get his feet under him. A moment later he heard some loud noises from back the way they had come, as if someone had dropped something heavy. It was only when the gunman turned back and began returning fire that he realized the sound had been shooting. The pistol made little tinny noises that were oddly unimpressive, like a big dog with a tiny bark. The answering sounds were thunderous booms that shook the air and rattled Holsten’s eardrums, as though the wrath of God was being unleashed in the next room. Disruptors, he recognized: crowd-control weapons relying on detonating packets of air. Theoretically non-lethal and certainly less dangerous to the ship.

  ‘Who’s shooting at us?’ he got out, and this time the words sounded clear enough.

  ‘Your friends,’ Scoles told him shortly, which ranked amongst the world’s least comforting answers, in the circumstances, leaving Holsten with the twin assurances that his current company did not consider him a friend, and that his actual friends – whoever they were – were ambivalent at best about hurting him.

  ‘Is the ship . . . is something wrong with the ship?’ he demanded, his tone telling him second-hand how frightened he must be. His emotions seemed to be buzzing about somewhere else in his mind, kept apart from his higher brain by the slowly thawing wall of the suspension chamber.

  ‘Shut up or I will hurt you,’ Scoles told him, in a tone suggesting that he would enjoy doing so. Holsten shut up.

  The one with the withered face had been lagging behind them, and then suddenly he was down on the ground. Holsten thought the man had tripped – he even made an abortive, automatic motion to try and help before he himself was dragged away. Withered-face was not getting up, though, and the gunman knelt by his corpse, dragged a second pistol from the back of the dead man’s belt and then levelled both weapons at attackers Holsten had not even seen.

  Shot. No disruptor burst for withered-face. Someone on the other side – Holsten’s friends purportedly – had apparently run short of patience, prudence or mercy.

  Then there were two other people passing by to give the gunman assistance – a man and a woman, both armed – and the amount of gunfire from behind increased dramatically, but it was plain from Scoles’s slowing pace that he reckoned he was safer now. Whether that translated into any greater safety for Holsten himself seemed to remain a live question. His mouth instinctively thronged with all manner of protests, questions, pleas and even threats, but he bit them all back.

  He was hauled on past another half-dozen armed people – all strangers, all in shipsuits – before being shoved through a hatch, and sent sprawling unceremoniously across the floor of a small systems room, which was just a narrow space between two consoles with a single screen taking up most of the back wall.

  There was another gunman there, whose startled reaction to his appearance was probably the closest Holsten had yet come to actually being shot. There was also another prisoner, sitting with her back to one of the consoles, with hands secured behind her. The prisoner was Isa Lain, chief engineer.

  They dumped him beside her, restraining his arms in the same way. Scoles then seemed to lose all interest in him, stepping outside to join a hushed but heated discussion with some of the others, of which Holsten could only catch the odd word. He heard no more gunfire.

  The woman and the gunman who had brought him in were still in the room, meaning that there was barely space for anyone else. The air was stuffy and close, smelling strongly of sweat and faintly of urine.

  For a moment Holsten caught himself wondering if he had simply dreamt all that he remembered since leaving Earth – if some defect of the suspension chamber had drawn him into some grand hallucination where he, the classicist, was suddenly considered a necessary and useful figure among the crew.

  He glanced at Lain. She was regarding him miserably. It struck him that there were lines on her face that were foreign to him, and her hair had grown to something more than mere stubble. She is – she’s catching me up. Am I still the oldest human in the universe? Perhaps just.

  He eyed their guards, who seemed to be paying far more attention to what Scoles was saying outside than to their two charges. He essayed a whisper: ‘What’s going on? Who are these maniacs?’

  Lain eyed him bleakly. ‘Colonists.’

  He considered that one word, which opened a door on to a hidden past where someone – Guyen probably – had royally screwed up. ‘What do they want?’

  ‘Not to be colonists.’

  ‘Well, yes, I could have guessed that, but . . . they’ve got guns.’

  Her expression should have curdled into contempt – stating the obvious when every word might count – but instead she just shrugged. ‘They got into the armoury before it kicked off. So much for Karst’s fucking security.’

  ‘They want to take over the ship?’

  ‘If they have to.’

  He guessed that Karst and the security detail were trying to redeem themselves by doing their best to stop that happening, which had apparently now escalated to pitched gun battles in the fragile corridors of the ship. He had no idea of the numbers involved. The moon colony would house several hundred colonists at least, perhaps with more being kept in suspension there. Surely there weren’t half a thousand mutineers currently running loose on the Gilgamesh? And how many did Karst have? Was the man waking up secondary crew to use as foot-soldiers and shoving guns into their cold hands?

  ‘What happened?’ he demanded, the question aimed more at the universe than anyone in particular.

  ‘Glad you asked.’ Scoles pushed into the room, virtually elbowing the gunman out to give himself space. ‘What was it you said, when we hauled you out of bed? “I don’t want to go,” was it? Well, join the club. Nobody here signed on for this journey to end up freezing in some death-trap on a moon without an atmosphere.’

  Holsten stared at him for a moment, noticing the lean man’s long hands clenching, seeing the skin round his eyes and mouth twitch involuntarily – he guessed it was the mark of some drug or other that had been keeping the man awake and going since who knew how long. Scoles himself held no gun, but here was a dangerous, volatile man who had been pushed about as far as he could go.

  ‘Ah, sir . . .’ Holsten began, as calmly as he could manage. ‘You probably know that I’m Holsten Mason, classicist. I’m not sure if you actually wanted me, or if you were just after whoever you could get for . . . for a hostage, or . . . I don’t really know what’s going on here. If there’s anything . . . any way that I—’

  ‘Can get out with your skin intact?’ Scoles interjected.

  ‘Well, yes . . .’

  ‘Not up to me,’ the man replied dismissively, seeming about to turn away, but then he refocused and looked at Holsten again as if with fresh eyes. ‘Fine, last time you were about, things were different. But, believe me, you do know things – very valuable things. And I appreciate you’re not to blame, old man, but there are lives at stake here, hundreds of lives. You’re in this, like it or not.’

  Not, decided Holsten grimly, but what could he say?

  ‘Signal the comms room,’ Scoles ordered, and the woman twisted her way over to one of the consoles, virtually sitting on Holsten’s shoulder as she sent the commands.

  A long moment later, Guyen’s louring face appeared on the wall screen, glaring thunderously at all and sundry. He, too, looked older to Holsten’s eyes, and even more lacking in human kindness.

  ‘I take it you’re not about to lay down your arms,’ the Gilgamesh’s commander snapped.

  ‘You take it right,’ Scoles replied levelly. ‘However, there’s a friend of yours here. Perhaps you want to renew your acquaintance.’ He prodded Holsten in th
e head to make his point.

  Guyen remained impassive, narrow-eyed. ‘What of it?’ There was no real clue that he recognized Holsten at all.

  ‘I know you need him. I know where you’re intending to jaunt off to, once you’ve consigned us all to that wasteland,’ Scoles told him. ‘I know you’ll need your vaunted classicist when you find all that old tech you’re so sure of. And don’t bother searching the cargo manifests,’ this was said with bitter emphasis, by a man who until recently had been merely a part of that cargo, ‘because Nessel here is the next best thing – not an expert like your old man, but she knows more than anyone else.’ He clapped the woman beside him on the shoulder. ‘So let’s talk, Guyen. Or else I wouldn’t give much for your classicist and your chief engineer’s chances.’

  Guyen regarded him – all of them – without expression. ‘Engineer Lain’s team is quite capable of covering for her, in her absence,’ he said, as though she had simply gone down with some transient infection. ‘As for the other, we have the codes now to activate the Empire installations. The science team can handle it. I will not negotiate with those who defy my authority.’

  His face vanished, but Scoles stared at the empty screen for a long time afterwards, hands clenched into fists.

  3.2 FIRE AND THE SWORD

  Generations have passed this green world by, in hope, in discovery, in fear, in failure. A future long foreseen is coming to pass.

  Another Portia from the Great Nest by the Western Ocean, but a warrior this time, in the manner of her kind.

  Her surroundings right now are not Great Nest but a different metropolis of the spiders: one she thinks of as Seven Trees. Portia is here as an observer, and to lend what aid she might. All around her, the community is a hive of furious activity as the inhabitants scurry and leap and abseil about their frantic business, and she watches them, her scatter of eyes taking in the chaos on all sides, and compares the sight to a disturbed ant’s nest. She is capable of the bitter reflection that circumstances have now dragged her people down to the level of their enemy.

  She feels fear, a building anxiety that makes her stamp her feet and twitch her palps. Her people are more suited to offence than defence, but they have been unable to retain the initiative in this conflict. She will have to improvise. There is no plan for what comes next.

  She may die, and her eyes look into that abyss and feed her with a terror of extinction, of un-being, that is perhaps the legacy of all life.

  There are signals being flagged by messengers and lookouts posted high in the trees above, as high up as Seven Trees’ silk scaffolding extends. They signal regularly. The signal is time counting down: how long this place now has left before the enemy comes. The message wires that are strung between the trunks and their multitude of spun dwellings thrum with speech, as though the community is raging against the inevitability of its destruction.

  Neither Portia’s death nor Seven Trees’ destruction is inevitable. The community has its own defenders – for in this time, in this age, every spider conurbation has dedicated fighters who spend their time training for nothing other than to fight – and Portia is here along with a dozen from Great Nest, in support of their kin. They wear armour of wood and silk, and they have their slingshots. They are the diminutive knights of their world, facing an enemy that outnumbers them by hundreds to one.

  Portia knows she needs to calm herself, but the agitation within her is too great to be suppressed. She needs some external reassurance.

  At the high point of the nest’s central tree she finds it. Here is an expansive tent of silk whose walls are woven with complex geometric patterns, the crossing threads drawn out according to an exacting plan. Another handful of her kind are already there, seeking the reassurance of the numinous, the certainty that there is something more to the world than their senses can readily grasp; that there is a greater Understanding. That, even when all is lost, all need not be lost.

  Portia crouches down with them and begins to spin, forming knots of thread that make a language out of numbers, a holy text that is written anew whenever one of her people kneels in contemplation, and that is then consumed when they arise. She was born with this Understanding, but she has learned it anew as well, coming to Temple at an early age just as she has come here now. The innate, virus-hardwired Understanding of these mathematical transformations that she inherited did not inspire her in the same way as being guided through the sequences by her teachers, slowly coming to the revelation that what these apparently arbitrary strings of figures described was something beyond mere invention – was a self-evident and internally consistent universal truth.

  Of course in Great Nest, her home, they have a crystal that speaks these truths in its own ineffable way – just as most of the greatest nests have now, that pilgrims from lesser communities often journey great distances to see. She has watched as the votive priestess touches the crystal with her metal probe, feeling the pulsing of the message from the heavens, dancing out that celestial arithmetic for the benefit of the congregation. At such times, Portia knows, the Messenger itself would be in the skies overhead, going about her constant journey – whether at night and visible, or hidden by the brightness of the daytime sky.

  Here in Seven Trees there is no crystal, but to simply repeat that message, in all its wondrous but internally consistent complexity, to spin and consume and spin again, is a calming ritual that settles Portia’s mind, and allows her to face whatever must soon come, with equanimity.

  Her people have solved the mathematical riddles posed by the orbiting satellite – the Messenger, as they think of it – learning the proofs first by rote and then in true comprehension, as a civic and religious duty. The intrusion of this signal has seized the attention of much of the species in a relatively short period of time, because of their inherent curiosity. Here is something demonstrably from beyond, and it fascinates them; it tells them that there is more to the world than they can grasp; it guides their thinking in new ways. The beauty of the maths promises a universe of wonders if they can but stretch out their minds that bit further: a jump they can almost, but not quite, make.

  Portia spins and unravels and spins, soothing away the trepidation consuming her, replacing it with the undeniable certainty that there is more. Whatever happens this day, even if she should fall beneath the iron-clad mandibles of her foes, there is a depth to life beyond the simple dimensions that she can perceive and calculate in, and so . . . who knows?

  Then it is time, and she backs out of temple and goes to arm herself.

  There is considerable variation in the settlements of Portia’s people, but to human eyes they would look messy, possibly nightmarish. Seven Trees now encompasses more than the original seven, the thicket of trunks interlinked by hundreds of lines, each part of a plan, each assigned a specific purpose, whether structural, as a thoroughfare, or for communication. The vibratory language of the spiders transmits well down silk threads over some distance, and they have developed nodes of tensioned coils that amplify the signal so that speech can pass for kilometres between cities in calm weather. The dwelling places of her kin are silk tents pulled taut by support lines into a variety of shapes, suitable to a species that lives its life in three dimensions and can hang from a vertical surface as easily as resting on a horizontal one. Meeting places are broad webs where a speaker’s words can be transmitted to a crowd of listeners along the dancing of the strands. In the high centre, shadowing much of the city, is the reservoir: a watertight net spread wide that catches rain and run-off from a grand area around Seven Trees, the water channelling to it through troughs and pipes from a multitude of smaller rain-catchers.

  Around Seven Trees the forest has been cut back by the semi-domesticated local ants. Previously this has been a firebreak. Soon it will be a killing ground.

  Portia crawls and leaps her way through Seven Trees, and sees that the sentries are signalling first contact with the enemy: the settlement’s automated defences have been triggered. All a
round her the evacuation is ongoing, those who are not dedicated fighters gathering what they can – supplies and those few possessions they cannot simply recreate – and abandoning Seven Trees. Some carry clutches of eggs glued to their abdomens. Many have spiderlings clinging to them. Those young that are not sensible enough to hitch a ride are likely to die.

  Portia swiftly draws herself up to one of the lofty watch towers, looking out towards the treeline. Out there is an army of hundreds of thousands advancing towards Seven Trees. It is an independent arm of the same great ant colony her ancestress once scouted out; a centuries-old composite life form that is taking over this part of the world day by day.

  The nearby forest is riddled with traps. There are webs to catch incautious ants. There are springlines, pulled taut between ground and canopy, that will stick to a passing insect, then detach and whip the luckless creature upwards, to trap it in the high branches. There are deadfalls and pits, but none of them will be enough. The advancing colony will meet these dangers as it meets all dangers, by sacrificing enough of itself to nullify them, with the main thrust of its attack barely slowing. There is a particular caste of expendable scout now ranging ahead of the ants’ main column, specifically to suicidally disarm these defensive measures.

  Now there is movement in the trees. Portia focuses on it, seeing those scouts that survive washing forwards in a chaotic mass, obeying their programming. The ground between them and Seven Trees is only lightly trapped, but they have other difficulties to face. The local ants are on them instantly, sallying forth valiantly to bite and sting, so that within metres of the treeline the ground becomes messy with knots of fighting insects, insensately dismembering each other and being dismembered in turn. To human eyes, the ants of the two colonies would seem indistinguishable, but Portia can discern differences in colouration and pattern, extending into the ultraviolet. She is ready with her slingshot.