Children of Time (11 page)

Holsten was already sending, because Guyen had stopped dictating and it now seemed to be down to him.
Return to Earth is not possible. Please may we speak to your sister again, Eliza?
, pleading for the life of humanity in a dead language – having to make the call between artificial intransigence and what he was increasingly sure was real human crazy.

That other voice again, delivering a rant that he got down as:
Why can’t you just go back where you came from? Are you Sering’s people? Did we win? Did we throw you out? Are you here to finish what he started?

‘What
happened
here?’ demanded Vitas incredulously. ‘What’s Sering? A warship?’

Earth is no longer habitable
, Holsten sent, even as Lain warned, ‘That’s going to push her over the edge for sure, Mason.’

He had dispatched the message even as she said it, the hollow feeling in his stomach arriving a moment later.
She’s right, at that.

But there was a measure more sanity in Doctor Avrana Kern’s voice when it replied.
Nonsense. Explain.

The
Gilgamesh
archives had histories, but whoever would have thought they would need translating into a language only historians were now interested in? Instead, Holsten did his best: History 101 for the lost time traveller, based on best guesses as to what had actually happened beyond the dawn of his recorded time, back when the Old Empire had held sway. There was so little he could actually say. The gap between the last thing Kern must know and the earliest definite fact that Holsten could rely on was insuperable.

There was a civil war between factions of the Empire
, he explained.
Both sides unleashed weapons the nature of which I do not understand, but which were effective in devastating higher civilization on Earth and completely destroying the colonies.
He remembered seeing the eggshell ruins on Europa. The in-system colonies had all predated any apparent later expertise in terraforming that the Empire had come to possess. They had been hothouse flowers on planets and moons haphazardly altered to better support life, reliant on biospheres that must have required constant adjustment. On Earth people had lapsed back into barbarism. Elsewhere, when the power had failed, when the electromagnetic weapons had destroyed the vital engines, or the electronic viruses murdered the artificial minds, they had died. They had died in alien cold, in reverting atmospheres, under corrosive skies. Often, they had died still fighting each other. So little had been left intact.

He typed it all out. As though writing an abstract to a history text, he noted with dry precision that a post-war industrial society may have persisted for almost a century, and may even have been regaining some of the sophistication of its predecessors, when the ice came. The choked atmosphere that had smothered the planet in gloom had shouldered out the sun, resulting in a midnight glacial cold that had left very little of that abortive rebirth. Looking back down the well of time, Holsten could make no definite statements about those who were left, nor about the frozen age that followed. Some scientists had speculated that, when the ice was at its height, the entire remnant human population of Earth had been no more than ten thousand all told, huddling in caves and holes around the equator and staring out at a horizon rigid with cold.

He went on into more certain waters, the earliest unearthed records of what he could truly think of as his people. The ice had been retreating. Humanity had sprung back swiftly, expanded, fought its small wars, re-industrialized, tripping constantly over reminders of what the species had previously achieved. Human eyes had looked to the skies again, which were crossed by so many moving points of light.

And he told Kern why they could not go back: because of the war, the Empire’s war from thousands of years before. For so long, scholars had taught that the further the ice receded, the better for the world, and yet nobody had guessed what poisons and sicknesses had been caught up in that ice, like insects in amber, the encroaching cold protecting the shivering biosphere from the last excesses of Empire.

There is no returning to Earth
, he sent to the pensively silent satellite.
In the end, we could not counterbalance the increasing toxicity of the environment. So we built the ark ships. In the end all we had was old star maps to guide us. We are the human race. And we’ve had no transmissions from any other arks to say that they’ve found anywhere to stay. Doctor Avrana Kern, this is all we have. Please may we settle on your planet?

Because he was thinking in human terms, he expected a decent pause then for his opposite number to digest all that potted history. Instead, one of the science crew shouted out, ‘New energy readings! It’s activating something!’

‘A weapon?’ Guyen demanded, and all the screens briefly went blank, then flared to life again with nonsense scattering across them: fragments of code and text and simple static.

‘It’s got into the
Gilgamesh
control system!’ Lain spat. ‘It’s attacking our security – no, it’s through. Fuck, we’re open. It’s got full control. This is what it did to your drones, Karst, the ones it didn’t just vaporize. We’re fucked!’

‘Do what you can!’ Guyen urged her.

‘What the fuck do you think I can do? I’m locked out! Balls to your “cultural specificity”, Mason. It’s all over our fucking system like a disease.’

‘How’s our orbit?’ someone asked.

‘I have no feedback, no instrumentation at all.’ Vitas sounded very slightly tense. ‘However, I’ve not felt any change in thrust, and mere loss of power or control should not affect our position relative to the planet.’

Like all those hulks orbiting Earth
, Holsten thought helplessly.
Those fried, dead ships, with the vacuum-dried bodies of their crew still in place after thousands of years.

Abruptly the lights jumped and flickered, and then a face appeared on every screen.

It was a bony, long-jawed face; that it was a woman’s was not immediately obvious. Details kept filling in: dark hair drawn back, skin shaded and textured, harsh lines about the mouth and eyes; unflattering by modern criteria but who could name the ancient aesthetics that this face acknowledged? It was a face from an era and a society and an ethnicity that time had otherwise erased. The kinship between it and the crew of the
Gilgamesh
seemed tenuous, coincidental.

The voice that rang out through the speakers was unmistakably the same, but this time it was speaking the crew’s own common language, although the lips did not sync.

‘I am Doctor Avrana Kern. This is my world. I will brook no interference with my experiment. I have seen what you are. You are not from
my
Earth. You are not
my
humanity. You are monkeys, nothing but monkeys. You are not even
my
monkeys. My monkeys are undergoing uplift, the great experiment. They are pure. They will not be corrupted by you mere humans. You are nothing but monkeys of a lesser order. You mean nothing to me.’

‘Can she hear us?’ Guyen asked quietly.

‘If your own systems can hear you, then I can hear you,’ Kern’s voice spat out.

‘Are we to understand that you are condemning the last survivors of your own species to death?’ It was a remarkably mannered, patient display from Guyen. ‘Because it seems that is what you are saying.’

‘You are not my responsibility,’ Kern pronounced. ‘This planet is my responsibility.’

‘Please,’ Lain said, ignoring Guyen when he gestured at her to shut up. ‘I don’t know what you are, if you’re human or machine or whatever, but we need your help.’

The face froze, nothing but a still image for a handful of heartbeats.

‘Lain, if you’ve—’ Guyen started, and then abruptly Kern’s image began to break up, distorting and corrupting on screen, features bloating or atrophying and then flickering into nothing.

The voice spoke again, a plaintive whisper in its native tongue, and only Holsten could know what it was saying.
I am human. I must be human. Am I the system? Am I the upload? Is there anything of me left? Why can I not feel my body? Why can I not open my eyes?

‘The other thing, the Eliza thing, it was mentioning some other help,’ Lain murmured, although surely even a whisper would be overheard. ‘Can we just ask it—?’

‘I will help you,’ Kern said, speaking their language again, sounding calmer now. ‘I will help you leave. You have all the universe except this world of mine. You can go anywhere.’

‘But we can’t—’ Guyen started.

Then Lain broke in. ‘I’m back in. Checking all systems.’ A tense minute to ensure that, at the very least, the ship’s computer was telling her that everything was still working. ‘We’ve got new data flagged up. It’s just dumped a whole load of stuff on us. It’s . . . the
Gilgamesh
recognizes star maps. Mason, I’ve received some stuff in that jabber of yours.’

Holsten scanned over the jumble of data. ‘I, ah . . . not sure, but it’s linked to the star maps. It’s . . . I think it’s . . .’ His mouth was dry. ‘Other terraforming projects? I think the . . . I think we’ve been given the keys to the next system. It’s giving us destinations.’
It’s selling out its neighbours
, was what he did not say, given that
it
was listening,
it’s bribing us to go away
. ‘I think . . . something here might even be access codes.’

‘How far?’ Guyen demanded.

‘Just under two light years,’ Vitas reported briskly. ‘Just a step, really.’

Through a long, stressed silence, they waited for Guyen’s decision. The face of Avrana Kern was back on some of the screens, glowering at them; twitching, distorting, reforming.

2.6
METROPOLIS

Negotiations with the locals have gone sufficiently well – now that Portia and her party have established their superiority – and the incumbents have lent the three travellers a male to serve as a guide in the lands to the north. The creature is slightly smaller than Portia’s own male companion, but of a quite different character, bold to the point of impudence by Portia’s standards. He has a name: call him Fabian. Portia, whilst aware that males give themselves names, has very seldom needed to know any, even with the concentration of that gender to be found at Great Nest. She guesses that in a small family unit such as these locals, males are likely to be more self-reliant, therefore both more capable and more independently minded. Still, she finds his brashness off-putting. Bianca appears to find him less objectionable and, on their trip north, Portia catches Fabian displaying for her, a tentative offer to gift her his sperm. Bianca has not yet shown herself receptive, but Portia notes that she has not chased him off either.

Portia herself has put several clutches of eggs behind her – females seldom depart Great Nest without having passed on their lineage – and she feels this current behaviour is distracting from their mission. On the other hand, Bianca has fought for her and probably considers playing with this new male her reward. Portia only hopes she can keep her desires in check. It would be more diplomatically advantageous if Fabian was not killed and eaten during the throes of passion.

They do not have to travel far to the north to see just what has been growing here at the edge of the Great Nest’s web of awareness. Soon they begin coming across felled trees – their trunks showing a combination of blackening, chewing and surprisingly clean cuts, often painstakingly scissored into sections. Frequently the entire root system has been unearthed as well, ensuring that nothing will regrow. The forest is under wide-scale attack, its fringes being gnawed away. Fabian can remember when there were more trees, he communicates. The clearing of land continues year to year, and Fabian’s inherited Understanding suggests that it is happening faster now than in his mother’s time.

Beyond that ragged edge, the other trees – the foreign trees – are set out in discrete stands. They are small and squat and bulbous, with fleshy leaves and trunks that are warty with protrusions. The exaggerated space between each copse is a firebreak – something the spiders are very familiar with. Their planet’s oxygen levels are higher than Earth’s – lightning-sparked fires are a constant threat.

What they are seeing is no work of nature. This is a plantation on a grand scale, and the labourers tending it are plainly visible. Everywhere Portia turns her eyes there are more of them and, if she looks beyond the chequerboard of groves, she can make out a steep-sided mound that must be the upper reaches of the plantation-owners’ colony, the bulk of it being hidden underground. A pall of smoke hangs over it like bad weather.

Portia’s kin are well aware that they are not the sole inheritors of their world. Whilst they cannot know how the nanovirus has been reshaping life here for millennia, there are certain species she shares the planet with, that her people recognize as something more than animals. The Spitters are a low-end example, barely removed from a state of brute nature, but to look into their small, weak eyes is nonetheless to recognize that here is a thing of intellect – and hence, danger.

The western oceans that Portia’s Great Nest looks over are home to a type of stomatopod with which her people have cautious, ritualized relations. Their ancestors were fierce, inventive hunters, equipped with unparalleled eyesight and deadly natural weapons, and used to living in colonies where negotiations over living space were common. They, too, proved fertile ground for the virus, and have developed on parallel lines with Portia’s own kin. Perhaps because of their aquatic environment, perhaps because they are by nature prone to wait for prey, their society is simple and primitive by Portia’s standards, but the two species have nothing to compete over, and in the littoral zone they sometimes swap gifts, the fruits of the land in exchange for the fruits of the sea.

Of more pressing concern are the ants.

Portia understands the nature of ants. There are colonies near the Great Nest, and she has both personal and genetically encoded dealings with them to draw upon. It is the Great Nest’s collective experience that ant colonies are complicated neighbours. They must be dealt with decisively – left to themselves they will always expand in a manner detrimental to any species that the ants themselves have no use for, which would naturally include Portia’s own. They can be destroyed – her inherited Understandings include chronicles of such conflicts – but war with even a small colony is costly and wasteful. Alternatively, preferably, they can be accommodated and limited by careful manipulation of their decisions.