Children of Time

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  She asks the next question almost simultaneously with Bianca:

  So you are our creator? With all the baggage that comes with it: made why? For what purpose?

  And the Messenger responds: You are made of My will, and you are made of the technology of that other world, but all of this has been to speed you on a path you might have taken without me, given time and opportunity. You are Mine, but you also belong to the universe, and your purpose is whatever you choose. Your purpose is to survive and grow and prosper and to seek to understand, just as my people should have taken these things as their purpose, had they not fallen into foolishness, and perished.

  And Portia, for all that she was never a temple-goer, feels that she – as she ascends into the sparse reaches of the upper air – is fulfilling that very mandate in pushing the frontiers of understanding.

  Their ascent has been rapid; God has been long-winded.

  They are slowing now, and the colour of the altimeter suggests that even the tenacious Star Nest, which is merely a thin skin around a great mass of hydrogen from which dangles a very little weight, is reaching its ceiling, out where the atmosphere is almost nothing, and therefore there is nothing for the light gas to be lighter than. They are still far, far short of the orbiting Messenger – barely a third of the distance to that distant spark – but this is as far as they themselves can go.

  Their payload, however, is intended to go further. Deploying it is the riskiest part of a risky journey, out here where no spider was ever intended to travel. Portia will be sending into orbit the first ever artificial object originating on her world. The spiders have built a satellite.

  It is a double-hulled glass ball containing a radio transmitter/receiver and two colonies: one of ants, one of algae. The algae is a special breed cultivated by the sea-going stomatopods, designed to adjust its metabolism to regulate the proportions of the surrounding environment. It will flourish in the sunlight, expanding into the hollow silk vanes that the satellite will spread, and regulated by the ant colony who will feed on it as well as breathe its oxygen. The satellite is a tiny biosphere, intended to last perhaps a year before falling out of balance in some way. It will act as a radio relay, and the ants can be conditioned from the ground to perform a number of analytical tasks. In respect of its capabilities, it is not revolutionary, but in what it represents it is the dawn of a new era.

  It is intended to detach itself from beneath the gondola, where it has been hanging, as the single densest part of the Star Nest expedition. It has chemical rockets to push it that little step further into a stable orbit, the ants already pre-armed with the calculations they will need to adjust its trajectory as it flies. Despite their chemical expertise, the spiders have a limited ability to produce combustion-based rockets, hence the entire Sky Nest/Star Nest project. Kern and her people never considered this, but life on the green planet is young by geological standards – too young to have produced anything in the way of fossil fuels. Biotechnology and mechanical ingenuity have had to take up the slack.

  The payload is not detaching.

  Portia registers the fact dully. She and Fabian are weathering the conditions only with difficulty. The long cold ascent has taken a great deal out of them both. As a species, they are inefficient endotherms. By now both of them are ravenously hungry, consuming their internal food stores yet still growing sluggish with the cold. Now something has gone wrong, and Portia must leave the crew cabin and go out into the vanishingly thin air to see if it can be rectified. The danger is increasing every moment: if it is the satellite that has malfunctioned, it may try to fire its rockets without detaching from the Star Nest, which would shrivel away the cabin and then ignite the hydrogen cells. Fabian informs the ground of their situation, breaking into the general babble that the Messenger’s revelations have sparked off. Bianca and her peers, those directly involved in the Star Nest project, quieten down rapidly.

  Communication is difficult. Fabian repeats himself over and over as Portia prepares her suit for exit into the hostile near-space around them. The Star Nest’s transmitter is having difficulties reaching as far as the planet’s surface, another piece of technology creaking under the strain.

  Portia positions herself where she intends to exit, near the bottom of the crew cabin. She spools out a safety line attached to the cabin interior, then spins a second wall over herself, before sealing her spinnerets inside her suit. Then she cuts her way out of the cabin and into the space between the hulls, next repairs the rip left behind her, and then performs the same procedure again to let herself out into the killing cold of beyond.

  Her suit inflates instantly, her internal air supply reacting to the thin atmosphere and expanding, mostly about her abdomen, mouth, eyes and joints: those parts which might suffer from a sudden loss of pressure. Portia has several advantages over a vertebrate right now: her open circulation is less vulnerable to frostbite and to gas bubbles caused by changes of pressure, and her exoskeleton retains fluids more readily than skin. Even so, the inflated suit reduces her movement to a crippled shuffle. Worse, she starts to heat up almost immediately. She has – just – been able to keep her body temperature up, but she has no ready way to bring it down. The heat that she is generating has nowhere to go, being surrounded by so little air. She begins the slow process of boiling within her own skin.

  She crawls painfully down to find the satellite, seeing through her filmy viewport that it is glued to the hull with ice. She has no way of communicating this to anyone, and can only hope that the payload itself is still functioning. Grimly she begins chipping and cutting at the ice with her forelimbs. Still the glass sphere remains anchored to the silk of the Star Nest. Portia is distantly aware that its rockets may trigger at any moment, and will likely burn up the entire Star Nest before melting the ice. Even as this thought fights its way into her broiling mind, she sees the first dull glow, a mixing of chemicals giving rise to sudden heat.

  This is her job. This is why they chose her. She is a pioneer, a risk-taker, a spider never satisfied with simply sitting and waiting for the world to come to her. She is a hero, but one more envied than emulated.

  She clumsily enfolds the satellite, and succeeds in finally wrenching it away from its icy holdfast. Bunching her rear legs, she takes aim into clear space and puts everything she has into one grand jump.

  She feels her suit rip about one of her rear legs, the sudden leap having been more than the stressed silk can take. The chill that now seizes the exposed limb is almost welcome. Then she is springing out and into the thin, thin air, out and arcing downwards towards the patient pull of the planet beneath them. With a spasmodic motion of six limbs she throws the satellite away from her.

  Its rockets flare. The extreme edge of their fiery tail singes her as the satellite corkscrews madly away, under and out from the over-reaching canopy of the Star Nest. She has no idea if it will be able to correct its course enough to make the intended orbit.

  In her mind arises the surprisingly rational thought: There must be an easier way than this.

  Then she is falling, and falling, and although her legs go through the stuttering motions of spinning a parachute, she creates nothing.

  Her descent comes to a sudden jolting stop, dangling beneath the Star Nest. Her safety line has caught her, but it doesn’t matter. The air in her suit is depleted, and she is too hot now to move or think. She gives herself up for lost.

  Fabian is already at work by this time. He has followed very little of what has gone on, but the sudden pull on Portia’s line alerts him, and he follows it out, self-made airlock by airlock, until – his own suit puffed out and constricting – he can haul her up. With what feels like the last of his strength he is able to roll her inside, and then uses his fangs to tear open both their suits once the cabin is re-sealed.

  He lies there on his back, limbs tangled with Portia’s. She is not moving save for a shallow pulsing of her abdomen.

  Somehow he reaches the radio transmitter, sending a se
mi-incoherent report of their situation. He catches a faint confirmation that the satellite has been successfully deployed, but no indication that they have heard him.

  He tries again, sends gibberish with shaking palps, and eventually manages: Can you receive me? Can anybody receive me?

  Nothing from the ground. He does not even know if the radio is working now. He is desperately hungry, and Portia’s extra-vehicular excursions mean that they have very little air left. He has initiated venting of the hydrogen, as swift as is safe, but there is still a long way to go down. He and Portia do not have either the energy or the oxygen to reach hospitable altitudes.

  Then the voice comes: Yes, I receive you.

  The Messenger is listening. Fabian feels a religious awe. He is the first male ever to speak with God.

  I understand your position, the Messenger tells him. I cannot help you. I am sorry.

  Fabian explains that he has a plan. He spells his scheme out carefully. Can you explain to them all?

  That I can do, the Messenger promises, and then, with a sudden access of old memory, When my ancestors reached for space, there were deaths among those pioneers too. It is worth it. The next phrase is alien to Fabian. He will never know what was meant by, I salute you.

  He turns to Portia, who has nothing more left to give. She lies on her back, senseless, stripped of everything but her most basic reflexes.

  With slow, difficult movements, Fabian begins to court her. He moves his palps before her eyes and touches her, as if he were seeking to mate, triggering slow instinct that has been built over by centuries of civilization but has never quite gone away. There is no food to restore her, save one source. There is not enough air for two, but perhaps sufficient for one.

  He sees her fangs unclench and lift, shuddering. For a moment he contemplates them, and considers his regard for this crewmate and companion. She will never forgive him or herself, but perhaps she will live nonetheless.

  He gives himself up to her automatic embrace.

  Later, Portia returns to consciousness aboard the Sky Nest, feeling gorged, damaged, strangely sensual. She has lost one rear leg entirely, and two sections of another limb, and one of her secondary eyes is out. She lives, though.

  When they tell her what Fabian did to secure her survival, she refuses to believe it for a long time. In the end, it is the Messenger Herself who brings her to an acceptance of what happened.

  Portia will never fly again, but she will be instrumental in planning further flights: safer and more sophisticated methods of reaching orbit.

  For now that the Messenger has found the patience and perspective to properly understand Her children, She can finally communicate Her warning in a way they can understand. At last the spiders appreciate that, even aside from their orbiting God, they are not alone in the universe, and that this is not a good thing.

  7

  COLLISION

  7.1 WAR FOOTING

  They were packed into the briefing room. It was like déjà vu, but these days that seemed a good thing. Holsten was a citizen of a tiny world of cycles and repetitions, and where events failed to repeat themselves, it meant deterioration.

  Some of the lights were out and that really brought it home to him. All the miracles of technology that had made the Gilgamesh possible, all the tricks they had stolen from the gods of the Old Empire . . . and right now they either couldn’t get all the lights working, or there were simply too many higher-priority things to be doing.

  He recognized a surprising number of faces. This was clearly a Command meeting. These were Key Crew – or who was left of them. He saw the science team, a handful of Engineering, Command, Security, all people who had got on board when Earth was still a place where humans lived. These were people who had been granted custodianship over the rest of the human race.

  With some notable omissions. The only department chief present – assuming you discounted Holsten himself and his department of one – was Vitas, orchestrating the bleary, recently awoken muster, ordering people according to some idiolectic system of her own. There were a handful of young faces in old shipsuits helping her – Lain’s legacy, Holsten guessed. They could have passed for the mob that he remembered from so recently, but he guessed they must be at least a generation further on from that. They had persevered, though. They had not turned into cannibals or anarchists or monkeys. Even that fragile appearance of stability gave him some hope.

  ‘Classicist Mason, there you are.’ It was hard to say what Vitas felt about seeing him present. Indeed it was hard to say what she felt about anything. She had aged, but gracefully and only a little it seemed. Holsten found himself indulging in the bizarre speculation that she was not human at all. Perhaps she was her own self-aware machine. Controlling the medical facilities, she would be able to hide her secret forever, after all . . .

  He had seen a lot of mad things since setting foot on the Gilgamesh, but that would have been a step too far. Even the Old Empire . . . unless she was Old Empire, some anachronistic ten-thousand-year survival, fusion-driven and eternal.

  Finding himself momentarily adrift from reason, he grasped for Vitas’s hand and snagged it, feeling the human warmth, willing himself to trust to his own perceptions. The scientist raised her eyebrows sardonically.

  ‘Yes, it’s really me,’ she remarked. ‘Amazing, I know. Can you use a gun?’

  ‘I very much doubt it,’ Holsten blurted out. ‘I . . . What?’

  ‘The commander wanted me to ask that of everyone. I had already guessed the answer in your case.’

  Holsten became cold and still, all at once. The commander . . .

  Vitas watched him with dry amusement, letting him hang in suspense for a few long seconds before explaining. ‘Lem Karst is the acting commander, for your information.’

  ‘Karst?’ Holsten felt that was hardly better. ‘How bad has it got that Karst gets to call the shots?’

  There were a lot of looks from the rest of Key Crew at that remark, some frowning, others plainly sharing his opinion – including even one of the security team. It was a rare moment when Holsten would far rather be in the minority.

  ‘We’re travelling into the Kern system,’ Vitas explained. She turned to the console behind her, gesturing for Holsten’s attention. ‘Not to put too fine a point on it, but once we’re in orbit around the green planet, the Gilgamesh’s wandering days are likely to be done.’ The oddly poetic turn of phrase gave her clipped tones an unexpected gravitas. ‘Lain’s tribe have done a remarkable job in keeping him together, but it really has been damage control, quite literally. And the damage has begun to win. There’s quite a population of ship-born now, because the suspension chambers are failing beyond the point of repair. Nobody’s going to be heading off on another interstellar jaunt.’

  ‘Which means . . . ?’

  ‘Which means there’s only one place left for us all, yes, Mason.’ Vitas’s smile was precise and brief. ‘And we’re going to have to fight the Old Empire for it.’

  ‘You seem to be looking forward to it,’ Holsten observed.

  ‘It’s been the goal of a long, long plan, Mason, and centuries in the making. The longest of long games in the history of our species, except for whatever that Kern thing has been doing. And you were right, in a way, about the commander. He’s not here to see it but it’s Guyen’s plan. It was so from the moment he set eyes on that planet.’

  ‘Guyen?’ Holsten echoed.

  ‘He was a man with vision,’ Vitas asserted. ‘He cracked under the strain at the end, but given what he’d gone through that’s hardly surprising. The human race owes him a great deal.’

  Holsten stared at her, remembering how she had treated the disastrous upload of Guyen’s mind as some sort of hobby experiment. In the end he just grunted, and something of his feelings were plainly visible on his face, judging by the scientist’s reaction.

  ‘Karst and some of the tribe have jury-rigged a control centre in the comms room,’ Vitas said, somewhat coldly.
‘You’re Key Crew, so he’ll want you there. Alpash!’

  One of the young engineers appeared at her elbow.

  ‘This is Alpash. He’s ship-born,’ Vitas explained, as though excusing some congenital defect. ‘Get Mason here, and the rest of Key Crew, up to the commander, Alpash.’ She spoke to the young man as though he was something less than human, something more like a pet or a machine.

  Alpash nodded warily at Mason. If Vitas was his exemplar for Key Crew, he probably didn’t expect much in the way of manners. There was a distinct skittishness about him as he gathered up the recently woken engineers, security men and the like. It reminded Holsten of the way that Guyen’s cultists had treated him. He wondered what legends of Key Crew had Alpash been brought up on.

  Over in comms, Karst looked refreshingly the same. The big security chief had been given the time to get some stubble going on his ravaged face, and he had obviously not been wheeled out much since Holsten last saw him, because he had barely aged.

  As the surviving Key Crew filed in, he grinned at them, an expression equally of anticipation and strain.

  ‘Come in and find a seat, or stand, whatever you like. Vitas, can you hear me?’

  ‘I hear,’ the science chief’s voice crackled and spat from an unseen speaker. ‘I’ll continue to supervise the unpacking, but I’m listening.’

  Karst grimaced, shrugged. ‘Right,’ he turned to address them all, looking from face to face. When he met Holsten’s eyes there was none of the expected dislike. Gone was any hint that the security man had never much cared for Holsten Mason. Absent, too, was the expected air of dismissal, that of a man of action who had no use for the man of letters. Instead, Karst’s grin dwindled to a smaller but much more sincere smile. It was a look of things shared, a commonality between two people who had been there right at the start, and were still here now.

  ‘We’re going to fight,’ the security chief told them all. ‘We’ve basically got just one good chance at it. You all know the score, or you should do. There’s a satellite out there that can probably rip open the Gil in a blink if we give it the chance. Now, we bolted on some sort of diffusion shielding, back when we were pirating that terraforming station – some of you maybe weren’t awake for that, but there’s a summary in the system of the changes we made. We also hardened our computer systems, so that bitch – so the satellite – can’t just shut us down or open the airlocks, that sort of trick. We’ve taken every precaution, and I still reckon toe-to-toe we might be screwed.’ He was grinning again, though.