Children of Time (51 page)

Viola indicates that everything will proceed according to the plan, and that plan calls for two of them to enter the smaller craft mounted atop the Sky Nest. The Star Nest, they call it, and it will carry them where no spider has ever been – into regions that have been the province of myth and imagination since their records began. Some small unpiloted vessels have coasted close to that boundary. Now, the scientists believe they have come to an understanding of the conditions at the very edge of the world’s reach, and have planned accordingly. Portia and Fabian will have to wrestle with the truth of their beliefs, and they go as a pair in case one of them should fail.

The Sky Nest is robust, able to survive the hectic and turbulent weather conditions extending all the way down to the surface of their world. It is still a great, almost weightless object: a cloud of silk and wood and hydrogen; a small crew of spiders and a handful of engines are the heaviest things aboard. Still it is not light enough. When fully inflated, the Star Nest will be a reasonable fraction of the Sky Nest’s size, and carry a much smaller fraction of its weight: a truncated onboard colony to handle life-support, a radio, two crew, the payload.

This is one of the things that Bianca and her peers have discovered, that there is a tapering edge to the sky, that the air diminishes as a traveller grows more distant from their world, thinner and colder and more unreliable until . . . Well, there remains some disagreement as to whether it actually
ends
, or whether it simply grows so rarefied that no instrument exists able to detect it. How many molecules of air in a square kilometre of space constitute a continuation of the atmosphere, after all?

Portia makes her way to the robing chamber, to be fitted into her suit. This is not simply an insulating covering, such as the sailors have worn, but a cumbersome and curious outfit that is bulky about the joints, and bloated about the abdomen where the air tanks are housed. At the moment it is depressurized, and hangs flaccid about her, feeling surprisingly heavy, interfering with her movements and making a mumble out of her attempts to speak. On this mission she will be reduced to palp signals and radio.

Fabian joins her, similarly caparisoned. He flicks her an encouraging gesture to keep her spirits up. He has been chosen as her second because they work well together, but also because, small even for a male, he is half her size and less than half her weight. The Star Nest has a long way to haul them; after all, the stars are very far away.

Even the Messenger is far away, passing across the sky far higher than the Star Nest could ever reach. Philosophical quibbles aside, there is no atmosphere there at all. The Messenger is a form of life dwelling in the harshest, most life-negating environment a spider can imagine.

And Portia cannot help wondering:
Have we silenced Her by reaching as high as we are? Are we measuring legs with Her by simply doing so?

The crew cabin of the Star Nest is terribly cramped. The ceiling is swollen with the airship’s systems: its heater, chemical factory, transmitter/receiver and a population of ants of limited capacity, dedicated only to keeping it all running. Portia and Fabian settle themselves as best they can, nestling into the limited give that the walls allow them.

The radio pulses the instructions from Viola, back in the long crew compartment of the Sky Nest, putting Portia through a long series of checks, cross-referenced with the reports of both vessels’ onboard colonies that are, in any event, mother and daughter, which kinship aids in linking communications between the colonies.

Viola signals that the crisis moment is reached: given best estimations of air-current movement, this is when the craft must separate for the Star Nest to obtain the optimum chance of success. Viola’s words, transmitted as electronic pulses that strip the information of all the sender’s character and personality, sound dreadfully efficient.

Portia responds that she and Fabian are ready for separation. Viola starts to say something, then stills the words. Portia knows that she has just reined in some platitude concerning the Messenger’s goodwill. Such sentiments seem inappropriate just at this moment.

Down on the surface, dozens of observatories and radio receivers are awaiting developments, agog.

Star Nest has been clinging to the upper surface of Sky Nest’s gasbag like a benign parasite. Now its crew have effected the climb to it and set themselves in place, it is detached gently by the Sky Nest ants, a host of tiny lines severed, so that all at once the Star Nest’s superior buoyancy tells, and it floats free of the mothership with jellyfish-like grace. Immediately it ascends higher than the more robust vehicle could follow, caught in the upper air currents, holding – for now – to the models of its movements set out by scientists who are not having to trust their own lives to the thing.

Portia and Fabian make regular radio reports back to Viola, and the wider world. In between, they mostly amuse themselves. Their ability to communicate is limited to palp-signalling, any greater subtlety being stifled by their close quarters and the cumbersome suits. The cold is infiltrating despite the layers of silk cosseting the crew compartment. They are already breathing stored air, which is a limited resource. Portia is aware that there is a strict timetable by which their mission must be fulfilled.

The chemical light of her instruments tells her of their swift ascent. The radio confirms the Star Nest’s position. Portia feels that curious sensation that is so much of what she is: she is walking where no other has walked. This sense of opportunistic curiosity that has been with her ancestors since they were tiny, thoughtless huntresses, is strong in her. For Portia there is always another horizon, always a new path.

It is around this time that the Messenger breaks radio silence. Portia is not tuned to God’s frequency, but the tumultuous response from the ground tells her what has happened. She herself is not fluent in God’s difficult, counter-intuitive language, but translations come through swiftly, passing across the face of the planet as swift as thought.

God has apologized.

God has explained that She has previously misunderstood some key elements of the situation, but has now gained a clearer understanding of how things are.

God invites questions.

Portia and Fabian, locked in their tiny, ascending bubble, wait anxiously to hear what will be said. They know that Bianca and her fellows on the ground must be feverishly debating what comes next. What question can possibly mark the start of this new phase of communication with the Messenger?

But of course, there is only one vital question. Portia wonders if Bianca will actually canvass anyone else’s opinion in the end, or whether she will simply send off her own demand to God to prevent anyone else doing likewise. It must be a grand temptation to every other spider with access to a transmitter.

What Bianca asks is this:

What does it mean that you are there and we are here? Is there meaning or is it random chance?
Because what else does one ask even a broken cybernetic deity but,
Why are we here?

From her high vantage point Doctor Avrana Kern readies herself to make full disclosure: here is a question she can answer in more detail than all the spiders in the world could ever want. She, Avrana Kern, is history itself.

She takes the equivalent of a deep breath, but no answers come to mind. She is replete with the assurance that she
knows
, but such confidence is not backed by the knowledge itself. The archive of data that she thinks of as
my memories
is unavailable. Error messages leap out when she seeks the answers. It is gone. That trove of what-once-was has
gone
. She is the only witness to a whole age of mankind, yet she has forgotten. The unused records have been overwritten in her thousands of years of sleep, in her centuries of waking.

She knows she knows, and yet in truth she does
not
know. All she has is a patchwork of conjecture, and memories of times when she once remembered the things she can no longer recall first-hand. If she is to answer the planet, it will be with those pieces stitched together into a whole cloth. She will be giving them belated creation myths, high on dogma but low on detail.

But they are so desperate to know, and it
is
the right question. Would she have them ask for technical specifications or serial numbers?
No
. They must know the truth, as best as she can tell it.

So she tells them.

She asks them what they think those lights in the sky are: those below are astronomers enough to know that they are unthinkably distant fires.

They are like your sun
, she says.
And around one such was a world much like your own, on which other eyes looked up at those distant lights, and wondered if anything looked back down.
She has slipped into the past tense naturally, although her concept of a linear past is a little at odds with the spiders’ own concepts. Earth itself is dead to her.

The creatures that lived on that world were quarrelsome and violent, and most of them strove only to kill and control and oppress each other, and resist anyone who tried to improve the lot of their fellows. But there were a few who saw further. They travelled to other stars and worlds and, when they found a world that was a little like their own, they used their technology to change it until they could live upon it. On some of these worlds they lived, but on others they conducted an experiment. They seeded those worlds with life, and made a catalyst to quicken that life’s growth; they wanted to see what would emerge. They wanted to see if that life would look back at them, and understand.

Something moves within what is left of Avrana Kern, some broken mechanism she has not used for such a long, long time.

But while they were waiting, the destructive and wasteful majority fought with the others, the right-thinkers, and started a great war.
She knows now that her audience will understand ‘war’ and ‘catalyst’, and the bulk of the concepts she is using.
And they died. They all died. All the people of Earth save just a few. And so they never did come to see what grew on their new-made worlds.

And she does not say it, but she thinks:
And that is you. My children, it is you. You are not what we wanted, not what we planned for, but you are my experiment, and you are a success.
And that jagged-edged part moves once again and she knows that some part of her, some locked-away fleshy part, is trying to weep. But not from sorrow; rather from pride, only from pride.

In her tiny, insulated world, Portia listens to what God has to say, and tries to assimilate it – as other spider minds across the world must also be trying to grasp what is being said. Some of it is incomprehensible – just as so much of the Messenger’s message is – but this is clearer than most: God is really
trying
to be understood, this time.

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.