Children of Time

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  ‘I know,’ the Tribe engineer confirmed. ‘We’re masked. Won’t work for long, though. This is emergency kit.’ His voice sounded weirdly exhilarated, despite it all.

  ‘Lain’s preparing a . . .’ the proper words fell into place just in time ‘. . . fall-back position. Have you seen any—?’

  ‘We just shot the fuck out of one bunch of them,’ Alpash confirmed fiercely. It occurred to Holsten that the fight was different for the Tribe. Yes, intellectually he knew that the Gil was the only haven for all mankind, and that his species’ survival depended on it right now, but it was still just a ship to him, a means of crossing from one place to another. To Alpash and his people it was home. ‘Right, well you should fall back to . . .’ and by that time Lain had prepared a route, working with furious concentration while her breath wheezed in and out between her lips.

  ‘Vitas?’ the old engineer barked.

  ‘Still here.’ The bodiless voice sounding no more distant than the scientist’s usual tones.

  ‘All this compartmentalization is going to hamper your own weapon’s dispersal, I take it?’

  Vitas made a curious noise: perhaps it was meant as a laugh, but there was a knife edge of hysteria to sabotage it. ‘I’m . . . behind enemy lines. I’m cut off, Lain. If I can brew something up, I can get it to the . . . to them. And I’m close. I’ll poison the lot of them.’

  Holsten made contact with another band of fighters, heard a brief cacophonic slice of shouting and screaming, and then lost them. ‘I think you’d better hurry,’ he said hoarsely.

  ‘Fuck,’ Lain spat. ‘I’ve lost . . . we’re losing safe areas.’ She bunched her crabbed hands. ‘What’s—?’

  ‘They’re moving through the ship,’ came Vitas’s ghostly voice. ‘They’re cutting through the doors, the walls, the ducts.’ The shakiness was growing in her tone. ‘Machines, they’re just machines. Machines of a dead technology. That’s all they can be. Biological weapons.’

  ‘Who the fuck would make giant spiders as biological weapons?’ Lain growled, still recalibrating her sealed areas, sending fresh instructions for Holsten to relay to the rest of the crew.

  ‘Lain . . .’

  There was something in the scientist’s voice that made the two of them stop.

  ‘What is it?’ Lain demanded.

  There was a long gap into which Lain spoke Vitas’s name several times without response, and then: ‘They’re here. In the lab. They’re here.’

  ‘You’re safe? Sealed off?’

  ‘Lain, they’re here,’ and it was as though all the human emotion that Vitas so seldom gave rein to had been saved up for this moment, just to cram into her quivering voice and scream out of every word. ‘They’re here, they’re here, they’re looking at me. Lain, please, send someone. Send help, someone, please. They’re coming towards me, they’re—’ And then a shriek so loud that it cut the transmission into static for a second. ‘They’re on the glass! They’re on the glass! They’re coming through! They’re eating through the glass! Lain! Lain, help me! Please, Lain! I’m sorry! I’m sorry!’

  Holsten never got to know what Vitas was sorry for, and there were no more words. Even over the woman’s screaming, they actually heard the almighty crack as the spiders broke into her test chamber.

  Then Vitas’s voice abruptly died away, just a shuddering exhalation left out of all that terrified noise. Lain and Holsten exchanged glances, neither of them finding much to be hopeful about.

  ‘Alpash,’ the classicist tried. ‘Alpash, report?’

  No more words from Alpash. Either the ambusher had become the ambushed, or perhaps the radio wasn’t functioning any more. Like everything else, like their defence of the ship itself, it was falling apart.

  The lights were going out all over the Gilgamesh, one by one. The safe zones that Lain set up were compromised just as quickly, or were not as safe as the computers told her. Each band of defenders encountered its final battle, the spiders within the ship becoming only more numerous, more confident.

  And in the hold, the tens of thousands who were the balance of the human race slept on, never knowing that the battle for their future was being lost. There were no nightmares in suspension. Holsten wondered if he should envy them. He didn’t, though. Rather face the final moment with open eyes.

  ‘It’s not looking good.’ It was a rather laboured piece of understatement, an attempt to lighten Lain’s mind just for a moment. Her creased, time-worn face turned to him, and she reached out and clasped his hand with her own.

  ‘We’ve come so far.’ No indication as to whether she meant the ship or just the two of them.

  They each spent a few moments in assessment of the spreading damage, and when they next spoke, it was almost together.

  ‘I can’t raise anyone,’ from Holsten.

  ‘I’ve lost integrity in the next chamber,’ from Lain.

  Just us left. Or the computers are on the blink again. We lasted too long, in the end. Holsten the classicist felt that he was a man uniquely qualified to look down the road that time had set them all on. What a history! From monkey to mankind, through tool-use, family, community, mastery of the environment around them, competition, war, the ongoing extinction of so many of the species who had shared the planet with them. There had been that fragile pinnacle of the Old Empire then, when they had been like gods, and walked between the stars, and created abominations on planets far from Earth. And killed each other in ways undreamt of by their monkey ancestors.

  And then us; the inheritors of a damaged world, reaching for the stars even as the ground died beneath their feet, the human race’s desperate gamble with the ark ships. Ark ship, singular now, as we’ve not heard from the rest. And still they had squabbled and fought, given way to private ambition, to feuding, to civil war. And all that while our enemy, our unknown enemy has grown stronger.

  Lain had stalked over to the hatch, her stick clacking on the floor. ‘It’s warm,’ she said softly. ‘They’re outside. They’re cutting.’

  ‘Masks.’ Holsten had located some, and held one out to her. ‘Remember?’

  ‘I don’t think we’ll need a private channel any more.’

  He had to help her with the straps, and eventually she just sat down, hands trembling before her, looking small and frail and old.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said at last. ‘I led us all to this.’

  Her hand was in his, cold and almost fleshless; like soft, worn leather over bone.

  ‘You couldn’t have known. You did what you could. Nobody could have done any better.’ Just comforting platitudes, really. ‘Any weapons in here?’

  ‘It’s amazing what you don’t plan for, isn’t it?’ something of Lain’s dry humour returning. ‘Use my stick. Squash a spider for me.’

  For a moment Holsten thought she was joking, but she proffered him the metal rod, and at last he accepted it, hefting its surprising weight. Was this the sceptre that had kept the nascent society of the Tribe in line, from generation to generation? How many challengers for leadership had Lain beaten down with it, through the ages? It was practically a holy relic.

  It was a club. In that sense, it was a quintessentially human thing: a tool to crush, to break, to lever apart in the prototypical way that humanity met the universe head-on.

  And how do they meet the world? What does the spider have as its basic tool?

  Briefly he entertained the thought, They build. And it was a curiously peaceful image, but then his console sounded, and he almost fell over the stick in lunging for it. A transmission? Someone was alive out there.

  For a moment he found himself trying to drag his hand back, thinking that it would be some message from them, some garbled mess of almost-Imperial C within which that inhuman intelligence, malign and undeniable, would be hiding.

  ‘Lain . . . ?’ came a soft and wavering voice. ‘Lain . . . ? Are you . . . ? Lain . . . ?’

  Holsten stared. There was something dreadful about the words, something shuddering,
damaged, unformed.

  ‘Karst,’ Lain identified it. Her eyes were wide.

  ‘Lain, I’m coming back,’ Karst continued, sounding calmer than he had ever been. ‘I’m coming back in now.’

  ‘Karst . . .’

  ‘It’s all right,’ came the voice of the security chief. ‘It’s all right. It’s all going to be all right.’

  ‘Karst, what happened to you?’ Holsten demanded.

  ‘It’s fine. I understand now.’

  ‘But the spiders—’

  ‘They’re . . .’ and a long pause, as though Karst was fumbling through the contents of his own brain for the right words. ‘Like us . . . They’re us. They’re . . . like us.’

  ‘Karst—!’

  ‘We’re coming back in now. All of us.’ And Holsten had the terrifying, irrational thought of a sucked-dry, withered husk within an armoured suit, but still impossibly animate.

  ‘Holsten,’ Lain clutched at his arm. There was a kind of haze in the air now, a faint chemical fog – not the killer weapon of the spiders, but whatever was eating away the hatch.

  Then there was a hole near its lower edge, and something was coming through.

  For a moment they regarded one another: two scions of ancient tree-dwelling ancestors with large eyes and inquisitive minds.

  Holsten hefted Lain’s stick. The spider was huge, but only huge for a spider. He could smash it. He could sunder that hairy shell and scatter pieces of its crooked legs. He could be human in that last moment. He could exalt in his ability to destroy.

  But there were more of them crawling through the breach, and he was old, and Lain was older now, and he sought that other human quality, so scarce of late, and put his arms around her, holding the woman as tightly to him as he dared, the stick clattering to the floor.

  ‘Lain . . .’ came Karst’s ghostly voice. ‘Mason . . .’ and then, ‘Come on, pick up the pace,’ to his own people. ‘Cut yourself free if you’re stuck.’ And the spark of impatience there was Karst’s, through and through, despite his newfound tranquillity.

  The spiders spread out a little, those huge saucer eyes fixed on the two of them from behind the clear masks the creatures were wearing. Meeting that alien gaze was a shock of contact Holsten had only known before in confronting his own kind.

  He saw one of the creatures’ rear legs bunch and tense.

  The spiders leapt, and then it was over.

  7.10 THE QUALITY OF MERCY

  The shuttle seems to take forever to fall from the clear blue sky.

  There is quite a crowd gathered here, on a cleared field beyond the edge of the Great Nest district of Seven Trees City. On the ground and in the surrounding trees and silk structures, thousands of spiders are clustered close and waiting. Some are frightened, some are exhilarated, some are less than well informed regarding what precisely is about to happen.

  There are several dozen seeing-eye colonies, too, and these capture and send images to chromatopore screens across the green world – to be viewed by millions of spiders, to be pored over by stomatopods beneath the waves, to be gazed at with varying degrees of incomprehension by a number of other species who stand close to the brink of sentience. Even the Spitters – the neo-Scytodes on their wilderness reservations – may see images of this moment.

  History is being made. Moreover, history is beginning: a new era.

  Doctor Avrana Kern watches, omnipresent, as her children prepare themselves. She is still not convinced, but so many millennia of cynicism will take time to wash away.

  We should have destroyed them, is her persistent thought, but then, and despite the dispersed form she currently inhabits, she is only human.

  Her surviving files on human neurochemistry, together with the spiders’ own investigations of their long-ago captive, have wrought this. She has not been its prime mover, though. The spiders themselves argued long and hard over how to respond to the long-awaited invaders, discounting her advice more than following it. They were aware of the stakes. They accepted her assessment of the path the humans would follow, if given free rein over the planet. Genocide – of other species and of their own – was ever a tool in the human kit.

  The spiders have been responsible for a few extinctions along the way, too, but their early history with the ants has led them down a different road. They have seen the way of destruction, but they have seen the way the ants made use of the world, too. Everything can be a tool. Everything is useful. They never did wipe out the Spitters, just as they never exterminated the ants themselves, a decision that later would become the basis of their burgeoning technology.

  Faced with the arrival of humanity, the creator-species, the giants of legend, the spiders’ thought was not How can we destroy them? but How can we trap them? How can we use them?

  What is the barrier between us that makes them want to destroy us?

  The spiders have equivalents of the Prisoners’ Dilemma, but they think in terms of intricate interconnectivity, of a world not just of sight but of constant vibration and scent. The idea of two prisoners incapable of communication would not be an acceptable status quo for them, but a problem to overcome: the Prisoners’ Dilemma as a Gordian knot, to be cut through rather than be bound by.

  They have long known that, within their own bodies and in other species across their planet, there is a message. In ancient times, when they fought the plague, they recognized this as something distinct from their own genetic code, and took it to be the work of the Messenger. In a manner of speaking they were correct. Long ago, they isolated the nanovirus in their systems.

  It had not escaped their notice that creatures formed like the giants – mice and similar vertebrates seeded across their world – did not carry the nanovirus, and so lacked a commonality that seemed to bind the spiders to each other and to other arthropod species. Mice were just animals. There seemed no possibility of them ever becoming anything else. Compared to them, the Paussid beetles – or a dozen other similar creatures – were practically bursting with potential.

  The spiders have worked long and hard to craft and breed a variant of the nanovirus that attacks mammalian neurology – not the full virus in all its complexity but a simple, single-purpose tool that is virulent, transmissible, inheritable and irreversible. Those parts of the nanovirus that would bolster evolution have been stripped out – too complex and too little understood – leaving only one of the virus’s base functions intact. It is a pandemic of the mind, tweaked and mutated to rewrite certain very specific parts of the mammal brain.

  The very first effect of the nanovirus, when it touched the ancient Portia labiata spiders so many thousands of generations ago, was to turn a species of solitary hunters into a society. Like calls out to like, and those touched by the virus knew their comrades even when they did not have enough cognitive capacity to know themselves.

  Kern – and all the rest – watches the shuttle land. Up on the Gilgamesh, orbiting a hundred kilometres beyond the equatorial web and its space elevators, there are many humans, all infected, and thousands still sleeping who will need to have the virus introduced to them. That task will take a long time, but then this landing is the first step towards integration, and that will also take a long time.

  Even within the spiders, the nanovirus has fought a long battle against ingrained habits of cannibalism and spouse-slaying. Its notable success has been mostly within-species, though. Portiids have always been hunters, and so pan-specific empathy would have crippled them. This was the true test of their biochemical ingenuity. The spiders have done their best, conducting what tests they can on lesser mammals, but only after Portia and her peers had taken control of the ark ship and its crew could the truth be known.

  The task was not just to take a cut-down version of the virus and reconfigure it so as to attack a mammal brain: difficult enough on its own, but essentially useless. The real difficulty for that legion of spider scientists, working over generations and each inheriting the undiluted learning of the last, was t
o engineer the human infection to know its parents: to recognize the presence of itself in its arachnid creators, and call out to that similarity. Kinship at the submicrobial level, so that one of the Gilgamesh’s great giants, the awesome, careless creator-gods of prehistory, might look upon Portia and her kin and know them as their children.

  Once the shuttle has landed, the spiders press closer, a seething, hairy greyish tide of legs and fangs and staring, lidless eyes. Kern watches the hatch open, and the first humans appear.

  There is a handful of them only. This is, in itself, an experiment simply to see if the nanovirus fragment has produced the desired effect.

  They step down among the tide of spiders, whose hard, bristly bodies bump against them. There is no evident revulsion, no sudden panic. The humans, to Kern’s reconfigured eyes, seem entirely at ease. One even puts her hand out, letting it brush across the thronging backs. The virus in them is telling them all, This is us; they are like us. It tells the spiders the same, that crippled fragment of virus calling out to its more complete cousins: We are like you.

  And Kern guesses, then, that the spiders’ meddling might go further than they had thought. If there had been some tiny bead present in the brain of all humans, that had told each other, They are like you; that had drawn some thin silk thread of empathy, person to person, in a planet-wide net – what might then have happened? Would there have been the same wars, massacres, persecutions and crusades?

  Probably, thinks Kern sourly. She wants to discuss it with Fabian, but even her faithful acolyte has crept out into the sunlight to watch this first-hand.

  At the shuttle’s hatch, Portia steps out after the humans, along with some of her peer group. The enormity of what she has played a part in is mostly lost on her. She is glad to be alive: many of her fellows are not so lucky. The cost of bringing the human race around to their point of view has been high.

  But worth it, Bianca had assured her, when she aired that thought. After this day, who knows what we may accomplish