Children of Time (38 page)

‘And Guyen?’

‘If he’s got any sense, he’s doing the same, but I’m better at it. I’m Engineering, after all.’

‘Lain, are you sure you want a war?’

She stopped. The regard she turned on Holsten was a look from another time – that of a martyr, a warrior queen of legend.

‘Holsten, this isn’t just about me not liking Guyen. It isn’t because I want his job or I think he’s a bad person. I have taken my own best professional judgement, and I believe that if he goes ahead with uploading his mind, then he will overload the
Gilgamesh
’s system, causing a fatal clash of both our tech and the Empire stuff we’ve salvaged. And when that happens, everyone dies. And I mean everyone. I don’t care if Vitas wants to make notes for some non-existent posterity, or if Karst won’t get off the fucking fence. It’s up to me – it’s up to me and my crew. You’re lucky. You woke late, and then you got to sit in a box for a bit. Some of us have been pushing every which way for a long time, trying to turn this around. And now I’m basically an outlaw on my own ship, at open war with my commander, whose crazy fanatic followers will kill me on sight. And I’m going to lead my engineers into fucking
battle
and actually
kill
people, because if someone doesn’t, then Guyen kills everyone. Now are you with me?’

‘You know I am.’ The words sounded tremulous and hollow to Holsten himself, but Lain seemed to accept them.

They were attacked as they were crossing into what Lain seemed to consider her territory. The interior of the
Gilgamesh
made for odd tactics: a network of small chambers and passages fitted into the torus of the crew area, bent and twisted like an afterthought around the essential machinery that had been put in first. They had just reached a heavy safety door that Lain – in the lead – obviously expected to open automatically. When it slid a shuddering inch, then stopped, there was no obvious suspicion amongst the engineers. It seemed to Holsten that, under the present regime, little things must be going wrong all the time.

With a tool case already in hand, one of them pried off a service plate, and Holsten heard the words, ‘Chief, this has been tampered with,’ before a hatch above them was kicked open and three ragged figures dropped upon them with ear-splitting howls.

They had long knives – surely nothing from the armoury, so Guyen’s people had been improvising – and they were absolutely berserk. Holsten saw one of Lain’s people reel back, blood spitting from a broad wound across her body, and the rest were down to grappling hand-to-hand almost immediately.

Lain had her gun out but was denied a target, a lack that was rectified when another half-dozen appeared, running full-tilt from the direction they had come. The weapon barked three times, colossally loud in the confined space. One of the robed figures spun away, his battle-cry abruptly turning into a scream.

Holsten just ducked, hands over his head, his view of the fight reduced to a chaos of knees and feet. Historian to the last, his thought was:
This is what it must have been like on Earth at the very end, when all else was lost. This is what we left Earth to avoid. It’s been following after us all this time.
Then someone kicked him in the chin, probably entirely without malice, and he was sent sprawling, trampled and stamped on, under the thrashing feet of the melee. He saw Lain’s gun smashed from her hand.

Someone fell across his legs heavily, and he felt one knee being wrenched as far as it would go, a shockingly distinct and insistent pain amidst all the confusion. He struggled to get free and found himself furiously kicking at the expiring weight of one of Guyen’s mad monks. His mind, which had temporarily given up any illusion of control, was wondering whether the commander had promised some sort of posthumous reward for his minions, and whether that promise was any consolation with a torn-open stomach.

Suddenly he was clear, and scrabbling at the wall to regain his feet. His twisted knee savagely resisted bearing any of his weight, but he was adrenalined to the eyeballs right then, and overrode it. That got him all of two steps away from the skirmish, whereupon he was grabbed. Without warning, two of Guyen’s bigger goons were on him, and he saw a knife glinting in one hand. He screamed, something to the tune of begging for his life, and then they bounced him off the wall for good measure. He was convinced he was about to die, his imagination leaping ahead, trying to brace him against the coming thrust by picturing the blade already in him in agonizing detail. He lived through the sickening lurch of impact, the cold keening of the knife, the warm upsurge of blood as those parts of him that his skin had kept imprisoned for so very, very long finally took their chance at freedom.

He was living it, in his head. Only belatedly did he realize that they had not stabbed him at all. Instead, the two of them were hurrying him away from the fight, heedless of his staggering, limping gait. With a start of horror – as though this was worse than a stabbing – he realized that this was not just random gang warfare, Guyen vs. Lain.

This was the high priest of the
Gilgamesh
recovering his property.

5.4
THE RIGHT TO LIFE

Fabian is brought into Portia’s presence after his escorts return him to the peer house. Her reaction on seeing him is a mixture of relief and frustration. He has been missing for most of the day. Now he is brought into a room of angled sides deep within the peer group’s domain, where Portia hangs from the ceiling and frets.

This is not the first time that he has evaded his custodians and gone walkabout, but today he was retrieved from the lower reaches of Great Nest, closest to the ground, a haunt of hungry females who either lack or have left their peer groups; the habitat of the busy multitudes of maintenance colonies whose insect bodies keep the city free from refuse; an abode of the numberless, hopeless, unwanted males.

For someone like Fabian, it is a good place to go to die.

Portia is furious, but there is a genuine streak of fear for his wellbeing that he can read in her jittery body language.
You could have been killed!

Fabian himself is very calm.
Yes, I could.

Why would you do such a thing?
she demands.

Have you ever been there?
He is crouching by the room’s entrance, his round eyes staring up at her, still as stones when he is not actually speaking. With her elevated stance that would let her leap on him and pin him in an instant, there is a curious tension between them: hunter and prey; female and male.

The ground down there is a tattered mess of broken silk,
he tells her;
of hastily built shacks where dozens of males sleep each night. They live like animals, day to day. They prey on the ants and are preyed on in turn. The ground is littered with the drained husks where the females have made meals of them.

Portia’s words thrum towards him through the boundaries of the room.
All the more reason to be grateful for what you have, and not risk yourself.
Her palps flash white anger.

I could have been killed
, he echoes, matching her stance, and therefore her intonation, perfectly.
I could have lived my entire life there, and died without memory or achievement. What separates me from them?

You are of value
, Portia insists.
You are a male of exceptional ability, one to be celebrated, to be protected and encouraged to prosper. What have you ever been denied that you have asked for?

Only one thing
. He walks forwards a few careful steps, as though he is feeling out the strands of a web that only he can see. His palps move lazily. His progress is almost a dance, something of the courtship but laced with bitterness. Theirs is a voiceless language of many subtle shades.
They are like us, and you know it. You cannot know what they might have achieved if they had been allowed to live and to prosper.

For a moment she does not even know what he means, but she sees his mind is still focused on that detritus of doomed males whose lives will take them no further than the foot of the trees.

They are of no value or worth.

But you cannot know that. There could be a dozen geniuses dying every day, who have never had an opportunity to demonstrate their aptitude. They think, as we do. They plan and hope and fear. Merely see them and that connection would strum between you. They are my brothers. No less so, they are yours.

Portia disagrees vehemently.
If they were of any quality or calibre, then they would ascend by their own virtues.

Not if there was no structure that they could possibly climb. Not if all the structure that exists was designed to disenfranchise them. Portia, I could have been killed. You yourself said it. I could have been taken by some starving female, and nothing in that would be seen as wrong, save that it might anger
you. He has stepped closer, and she feels the predator in her twitch, as if he were some blind insect blundering too close, inviting the strike.

Portia’s rear legs close up, building muscle tension for the spring that she is fighting against.
And still you are not grateful that I think enough of you that your life is preserved.

His palps twitch with frustration.
You know how many males busy themselves around Great Nest. You know that we fulfil thousands of small roles, and even some few great ones. If we were to leave the city all at once, or if some plague were to rid you of all your males, the nest would collapse. And yet every one of us has nothing more than we are given, and that can be taken away from us just as swiftly. Each one of us lives in constant fear that our usefulness will come to an end and that we will be replaced by some more elegant dancer, some new favourite, or that we will please too much and mate, and then be too slow to escape the throes of your passion.

That is the way things are.
Following her argument with Bianca, Portia is finding this polemic too much to deal with. She feels as though her beloved Great Nest is under assault from all sides, and most from those who ought to be her allies.

Things are the way we make them.
Abruptly his pose changes, and he is stepping sideways, away from her, loosening that taut bond of predation that was building between them.
You asked about my discovery, before. My grand project.

Playing his game, Portia comes down from her roost, one leg at a time, while still keeping that careful distance.
Yes?
she signals with her palps.

I have devised a new form of chemical architecture.
His manner has changed completely from the intensity of a moment before. Now he seems disinterested, cerebral.

To what end?
She creeps closer, and he steps away again, not fleeing her but following that unseen web of his own invention.

To any end. To no end. In and of itself, my new architecture carries no instructions, no commands. It sets the ants no tasks or behaviours.

Then what good is it?

He stops, looking up at her again, having lured her this close.
It can do anything. A secondary architecture can be distributed to the colony, to work within the primary. And another, and another. A colony could be given a new task instantly, and its members would change with the speed of the scent, as it passes from ant to ant. Different castes could be made receptive to different instructions, allowing the colony to pursue multiple tasks all at once. A single colony could follow sequences of separate tasks without the need for lengthy reconditioning. Once my base architecture is in place, every colony can be reconfigured for every new task, as often as needed. The efficiency of mechanical tasks would increase tenfold. Our ability to undertake calculations would increase at least a hundredfold, perhaps a thousandfold, depending on the economy of the secondary architecture.

Portia has stopped still, stunned. She understands enough of how her kind’s organic technology works to grasp the magnitude of what he is proposing. If it can be done, then Fabian will have surpassed the chief limiting factor that is frustrating the Temple even now, and that is preventing them from giving true reality to the Messenger’s plan. The brake will come off the advancement of their species.
You have this Understanding, now?

I do. The primary architecture is actually surprisingly simple. Building complex things out of simple things is the basis of the idea. It’s like building a web. I also have a system for constructing any secondary architecture, fit for any task required. It is like a language, a concise mathematical language.
He stalks forwards a few steps, as if teasing her.
You will appreciate it. It is as beautiful as the first Message.

You must pass this Understanding to me immediately.
For a moment Portia feels the strong desire to mate with him, to take his genetic material into herself, with its newfound Understanding, to set down immediately the first of the next generation who will rule the world. Perhaps she should instead have him distil his new knowledge so that she can drink it and Understand it herself, rather than leave it to her offspring, but the thought seems intimidating. How will the world look, when he gives her the secret of unlocking the future?

He does not speak. His shuffling feet and trembling palps suggest an odd coyness.

Fabian, you must pass on this Understanding
, she repeats.
I cannot imagine how you thought risking yourself could be acceptable, if you hold this knowledge.

He has ventured quite close, almost within the span of her forelegs. He is a little more than half her size: weaker, slower, more fragile and yet so valuable!

So unlike the rest of my kind?
It is as if he has read her mind.
But I am not, or you cannot know if I am or am not. How many Understandings are extinguished every day?

None like yours
, she tells him promptly.

You can never know. That is the problem with ignorance. You can never truly know the extent of what you are ignorant about. I will not do it.