Children of Time

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  A hand on his shoulder woke him up. For a moment, stirred from dreams he could barely recall, he spoke a name from the old world, one a decade dead even before he embarked on the Gilgamesh, millennia dead now.

  Then: ‘Lain?’ because he heard a woman’s voice, but instead it was Nessel the mutineer.

  ‘Doctor Mason,’ she said, with that curious respect she seemed to hold for him, ‘they’re ready for you.’

  He undid his seatbelt, and allowed them to pass him unceremoniously hand over hand across the ceiling, until Lain could reach out and snag him, and drag him into the comms chair.

  ‘How far out are we?’ he asked her.

  ‘It’s taken me longer than I’d thought to make sure I cut every single connection to comms. And because our friends here don’t trust me, and kept getting me to stop in case I was doing something nefarious. We’ve shielded all the shuttle’s systems from any outside transmission, though. Nothing is accepting any connection that isn’t hardwired into the ship itself, except the comms – and the comms don’t interact with the rest of what we’ve got in here. The most Doctor Avrana Kern can manage now is to take over the comms panel and shout at us.’

  ‘And destroy us with her lasers,’ Holsten pointed out.

  ‘Yeah, well, and that. But you better get on with telling her not to, right now, because the sat’s started signalling.’

  Holsten felt a shudder go through him. ‘Show me.’

  It was a familiar message, identifying the satellite as the Second Brin Sentry Habitat and instructing them to avoid the planet – just what they’d got when they interrupted the distress beacon the first time. But that time we’d signalled it, and it hadn’t noticed us inbound. This time we’re in a much smaller ship and it’s taking the initiative. Something’s still awake over there.

  He remembered the electronic spectre of Avrana Kern appearing on the screens of the Gilgamesh comms room, her voice translated into their native tongue – a facility with language that neither he nor Lain had felt the need to comment on to the mutineers. Instead, though, he decided to keep matters formal just for now. He readied a message, May I speak to Eliza?, translated it into Imperial C and sent it, counting the shortening minutes until a response could be expected.

  ‘Let’s see who’s home,’ Lain murmured in his ear, peering over his shoulder.

  The response came back to him, and it was disturbing and reassuring in equal measures – the latter because at least the situation on the satellite was as he remembered.

  You are currently on a heading that will bring you to a quarantine planet and no interference with this planet will be countenanced. Any interference with Kern’s World will be met with immediate retaliation. You are not to make contact with this planet in any way.

  Monkeys the monkeys are back they want to take away my world is only for me and my monkeys are not as they say as they seem as much as they claim to be from Earth I know better vermin they are vermin leaving the sinking ship of Earth has sunk and no word no word none

  The translation came easily. Nessel, poised at his other shoulder, made a baffled noise.

  Eliza, we will not interfere with Kern’s World. We are a scientific mission come to observe the progress of your experiment. Please confirm permission to land. Holsten thought it was worth a try.

  Waiting for the reply was just as wearing on the nerves as he remembered. ‘Any idea when we’ll be in range of its lasers?’ he asked Lain.

  ‘Based on Karst’s drones, I think we have four hours nineteen minutes. Make them count.’

  Permission to approach the planet is denied. Any attempt to do so will be met with lethal force as per scientific devolved powers. Isolation of experimental habitat is paramount. You are respectfully requested to alter your course effective immediately.

  Filthy crawling vermin coming to infect my monkeys will not talk to me it has been so long so long Eliza why will they not speak why will they not call to me my monkeys are silent so silent and all I have to talk to is you and all you are is my broken reflection

  Eliza, I would like to speak to your sister Avrana, Holsten sent immediately, aware of time falling away, their limited stock of seconds dropping through the glass.

  ‘Brace yourselves,’ Lain warned. ‘If we didn’t get this right, we might be about to lose everything, possibly including life-support.’

  The voice that spoke through the comms panel – without anyone giving it permission – was sticking to Imperial C at that moment, though to Holsten its haughty tones were unmistakable. The content was little more than a more aggressive demand that they alter their course.

  Doctor Kern, Holsten sent, we are here to observe your great experiment. We will not alter anything on the planet, but surely some manner of observation is permitted. Your experiment has been running for a very long period of time. Surely it should have come to fruition by now? Can we assist you? Perhaps if we gather data you may be able to put it to use? In truth he had no certain idea what Kern’s experiment was – though by now he had formed some theories – and he was simply bouncing off what he had gleaned from Kern’s own stream-of-consciousness thoughts, transmitted along with Eliza’s sober words.

  You lie, came the reply, and his heart sank. Do you think I cannot hear the traffic in this system? You are fugitives, criminals, vermin amongst vermin. Already the vessel pursuing you has asked me to disable your craft so that they may bring you to justice.

  Holsten stared at the words, his mind working furiously. For a moment there he had been negotiating with Kern in good faith as though he was actually a mutineer himself. He had almost forgotten his status as hostage.

  His hands hovered, ready to send the next signal, Why don’t you do just that . . . ?

  Something cold pressed into his ear. His eyes flicked sideways to catch Nessel’s hard expression.

  ‘Don’t even think it,’ she told him. ‘Because if this ship gets stopped, you and the engineer won’t live to get rescued.’

  ‘Shoot a gun in here and you’re likely to punch a hole straight through the hull,’ Lain said tightly.

  ‘Then don’t give us an excuse.’ Nessel nodded at the console. ‘You might be the expert, Doctor Mason, but don’t think I’m not catching most of this.’

  Typical that now I find an able student, Holsten thought despairingly. ‘So what do you want me to say?’ he demanded. ‘You heard what I heard, then – that she knows what we are. She’s receiving all the transmissions from the Gilgamesh and the other shuttle.’

  ‘Tell her about the moon colony,’ Scoles snapped. ‘Tell her what they wanted us to do!’

  ‘Whatever we’re talking to now has been in a satellite smaller than this shuttle since the end of the Old Empire. You’re looking for sympathy?’ Lain demanded.

  Doctor Kern, we are human beings, like you, Holsten sent, wondering how true that latter part could possibly be. You could have destroyed the Gilgamesh and you did not. I understand how important your experiment is to you – another lie – but, please, we are human beings. I am a hostage on this vessel. I am a scholar like you. If you do as you say, they will kill me. The words passed into cold, dead Imperial C like a treatise, as though Holsten Mason was already a figure long consigned to history, to be debated over by academics of a latter age.

  The gaps between message and response were ever shorter as they closed with the planet.

  You are currently on a heading that will bring you to a quarantine planet and no interference with this planet will be countenanced. Any interference with Kern’s World will be met with immediate retaliation. You are not to make contact with this planet in any way.

  They are not my responsibility so heavy a whole planet is mine they must not interfere with the experiment must proceed or what was it all for nothing if the monkeys do not speak to me and my monkeys are all that’s left of the human now these vermin come these vermin

  ‘No,’ Holsten shouted, ‘not back to Eliza!’ startling the mutineers.

  ‘W
hat’s going on?’ Scoles demanded. ‘Nessel—?’

  ‘We’ve . . . dropped back a step or something?’

  Holsten sat back numbly, his mind quite blank.

  Suddenly Scoles was speaking in his ear. ‘Is that it, then? You’re out of ideas?’ in tones crammed with dangerous subtext.

  ‘Wait!’ Holsten said, but for a perilous moment his mind remained completely empty. He had nothing.

  Then he had something. ‘Lain, do we have the drone footage?’

  ‘Ah . . .’ Lain scrabbled and clawed her way over to another console, fighting for space with the mutineer already seated there. ‘Karst’s recording? I . . . Yes, I have it.’

  ‘Get it onto the comms panel.’

  ‘Are you sure? Only . . .’

  ‘Please, Lain.’

  Circumventing the comms isolation without opening the ship up to contamination was a surprisingly complex process, but Lain and one of the mutineers set up a second isolated dropbox with the data, and then patched it into the comms system. Holsten imagined the invisible influence of Doctor Kern flooding down the new connection only to find just another dead end.

  Doctor Avrana Kern, he readied his next message. I think you should reconsider the need of your experimental world for an observer. When our ship passed your world last, a remote camera captured some images from down there. I think you need to see this.

  It was a gamble, a terrible game to play with whatever deranged fragments of Kern still inhabited the satellite, but there was a gun to his head. And besides, he could not deny a certain measure of academic curiosity. How will you react?

  He sent the message and the file, guessing that Kern’s recent exposure to the Gilgamesh’s systems would allow her to decode the data.

  Bare minutes later there was an incomprehensible transmission from the satellite, very little more than white noise, and then:

  Please hold for further instructions. Please hold for further instructions.

  What have you done with my monkeys? What have you done with my monkeys?

  And then nothing, a complete cessation of transmission from the satellite, leaving those in the shuttle to fiercely debate what Holsten had done, and what he might have achieved.

  3.6 DULCE ET DECORUM EST

  Great Nest has no strict hierarchy. By human standards, in fact, spider society would appear something like functional anarchy. Social standing is everything, and it is won by contribution. Those peer groups whose warriors win battles, whose scholars make discoveries, who have the most elegant dancers, eloquent storytellers or skilled crafters, these garner invisible status that brings them admirers, gifts, favours, greater swarms of sycophantic males to serve as their workforce, petitioners seeking to add their talents to the group’s existing pool. Theirs is a fluid society where a capable female can manage a remarkable amount of social mobility. Or, in their own minds, their culture is a complex web of connections re-spun every morning.

  One key reason this all works is that the middling unpleasant labour is undertaken by males – who otherwise have no particular right to claim sanctuary within the Nest at all, if they lack a purpose or a patroness. The hard labour – forestry, agriculture and the like – is mostly undertaken by the domesticated ant colonies that the Great Nest spiders have manipulated into working with them. After all, the ants work by nature. They have no inclination or capacity to consider the wider philosophy of life, and so such opportunity would be wasted on them. From the point of view of the ant colonies, they prosper as best they can, given the peculiarly artificial environment they find themselves enmeshed in. Their colonies have no real concept of what is pulling their strings, or how their industry has been hijacked to serve Great Nest. It all works seamlessly.

  Portia’s is a society now pulled taut to breaking point. The fact of the encroaching ant column demands sacrifices, and there is no chain of command to determine who must make them and for whose benefit. If the situation becomes much worse, then Great Nest will start fraying apart, fragmenting into smaller fugitive units and leaving only a memory of the high point of spider culture. Alternatively some great leader might arise and take control of all, for the common good – and later, if human examples can be valid guidelines, for the personal good. But, either way, the Great Nest that Portia knows would cease to be.

  It would not be the first lost metropolis. In its ceaseless march across the continent, the ant colony has obliterated a hundred separate, distinct and unique cultures that the world will never know again, exterminating individuals and overwriting ways of life. It is no more than any conquering horde has ever done in pursuit of its manifest destiny.

  Portia’s military exploits have won some esteem for her peer group, but Bianca is currently their greatest asset: one of the Nest’s most admired and maverick scholars. She has improved the lives of her species in a dozen separate ways, for she has a mind that can see answers to problems others did not even realize were holding them back. She is also a recluse, wanting little more than to get on with her experiments – a common trait for those driven to build on their inherited Understandings – which suits Portia’s peers well, as otherwise Bianca might decide that she was owed rather more of the group’s good fortune.

  However, when she sends a messenger, her peers come running. Should Bianca suddenly feel unappreciated, she would have her pick of the peer groups of Great Nest to join.

  Bianca is not within Great Nest proper. True science demands a certain seclusion, if only so that its more unexpected results can be safely contained. Portia’s people are, by ancestry, born problem-solvers, and given to varying their approach until something succeeds. When dealing with volatile chemicals, this can have drawbacks.

  Bianca’s current laboratory, Portia discovers, is well within the territory of one of the local ants’ nests. Approaching the mound along a trail marked out for the ants to avoid, she feels herself reluctant, pausing often, sometimes lifting her forelegs and displaying her fangs without intending to. The old association between ants and conflict is hard to shake.

  The chamber she finds Bianca in would have been dug by the ants themselves, before being cordoned from their nest by the application of colony-specific scents. Such measures have been attempted in the past to ward a settlement from attack by the encroaching super-colony, but never successfully. The ants always find a way, and fire does not care about pheromones.

  Silk coats the walls of the chamber, and a complex distillery of webbing hangs from the ceiling, providing the mixing vessels of Bianca’s alchemy. A side-chamber houses a pen of some manner of livestock, perhaps part of the experiment, perhaps simply convenient sustenance. Bianca presides over the whole enterprise from up on the ceiling, her many eyes keeping track of everything, signalling to her underlings with palps and sudden stamping motions when her direction is required. Some light falls in from the entryway above, but Bianca is above the routines of night and day, and has cultured luminescent glands from beetle larvae to glitter amid the weave of her walls like ersatz constellations.

  Portia lets herself down into the chamber, aware that part of the floor is also open, giving on to the ant colony below. Through the thinnest skein of silk, she can see the constant, random bustle of those insects going about their business. Yes, they work tirelessly, if unknowingly, for Great Nest’s continued prosperity, but if Portia cut through that membrane and entered their domain, then she would meet the same fate the ants reserve for all intruders, unless she had some chemical countermeasure to preserve her.

  She greets Bianca with a flurry of palps to renew their acquaintance; the exchange contains a precisely calculated summary of their relative social standings, referencing their mutual peers, their differing expertise and the esteem that Bianca is held in.

  The alchemist’s reply is perfunctory without being discourteous. Asking Portia to wait, she turns her main eyes on the busy laboratory below them, checking that matters in hand can be left without her close attention for a few minutes.

 
Portia gives the activity below a second glance, and is shocked. Your assistants are male.

  Indeed, Bianca agrees, with a stance that suggests this topic is not a new one.

  I would have thought they would prove insufficient for the complexity of such work, Portia assays.

  A common misunderstanding. If well coached and born with the pertinent Understandings, then they are quite able to deal with the more routine tasks. I did once employ females, but that results in so much jostling for status and having to defend my preeminence; too much measuring of legs against each other – and me – to get the work done. So I settled on this solution.

  But surely they must be constantly trying to court you, Portia replies perplexedly. After all, what else did males actually want out of life?

  You have spent too long in the peer houses of the idle, Bianca reproaches her. I choose my assistants for their dedication to the work. And if I do accept their reproductive material from time to time, it’s only to preserve the new Understandings we come up with here. After all, if they know it, and I know it, the chances are good that any offspring should inherit that Understanding as well.

  Portia’s discomfort with this line of reasoning is evident in her shifting stance, the rapid movement of her palps. But males do not—

  That males can transmit to their offspring knowledge that they learn during their lives is an established fact, as far as I am concerned. Bianca stamped harder to impose her words over Portia’s. The belief that they can only pass on their mothers’ Understandings is without foundation. Be glad for our peer group that I at least comprehend this – I try to choose mates who hatched from our own crèche, as they’re more likely to already possess worthwhile Understandings to pass on, and the cumulative effect is to compound and enrich our stock overall. I believe this will become common practice, before either of us pass on. When I have time, I will start trading on the Understanding of it to those few in other peer groups who are likely to appreciate the logic.