Adrian Tchaikovsky - Children of Time

By dark, they have brought down an orb-web builder, and the male jumps on an unwary mouse, neither of which makes a hearty meal. Portia’s active lifestyle and altered anatomy mean that she needs considerably more food than her predecessors, pound for pound. If they were to be forced to live by hunting alone, then their journey would take far longer than it should. Amongst her baggage, however, Bianca has a quartet of live aphids. She lets the little creatures out to suck sap, fending the male off in case he forgets that they are not for eating – or not yet. After dusk, when Portia has spun a makeshift tent in the canopy, complete with warning lines in all directions, the aphids produce glutinous honeydew, which the spiders can drink as though it was the nourishing liquidized innards of their prey. The domesticated creatures meekly return to Bianca’s webbing afterwards, understanding only that they are safe with her, not realizing that, in extremis, they themselves will become the meal.

Portia is still hungry – honeydew is subsistence stuff, nourishing without the satisfaction of taking real prey. It is difficult for her to crouch there, knowing that there are aphids – and the male – within reach, but she can look ahead and see that her long-term plan will suffer if those are consumed now. Her lineage has always specialized in looking ahead.

And in looking beyond, too. Now she squats at the entrance to the makeshift tent forming their camp, Bianca and the male nestling beside her for warmth, and looks out through the gaps in the canopy at the lights populating the night sky. Her people know them and see paths and patterns in them and realize that they, too, move. Portia understands that their celestial journeys are predictable enough to use when navigating her own. One, though, is special. One light does not tread a slow and year-long course over the heavens, but hurries past, a genuine traveller just as she is. Portia looks up now and sees that tiny glint of reflected light passing overhead, a solitary motile speck in the vast dark, and she feels a kinship with it, lending to that orbiting pinpoint as much of an arachnomorphic personality as she can conceive of.

This time they had all of Key Crew out of the morgue – Holsten almost the last one to appear, stumbling on numb feet and shivering. He looked better than a lot of them, though. His little jaunt – mere moments of personal time and over a century ago – had loosened him up. Most of the people he was now looking at had last opened their eyes while the Gilgamesh shared a solar system with the failing husk of Earth.

They were crammed into the briefing room, all grey faces and shaven heads, some of them looking malnourished, others bloated. A few had pale mottling across their skins: some side-effect of the sleep process that Holsten couldn’t guess at.

He saw Guyen, looking more alert than anyone else there, and guessed the mission commander had ordered himself to be woken early, so that he could assert his bright, brisk dominance over this room full of zombies.

Holsten checked off the departments: Command, Engineering, Science, and what looked like the whole of Security too. He tried to catch Lain’s eye but she barely glanced at him, nothing in her manner admitting to any century-ago liaison.

‘Right.’ Guyen’s sharp tone drew all ears as a final few stumbled in. ‘We’re here. We’ve made it with five per cent loss of cargo, and around three per cent system deterioration according to the engineers. I consider that the greatest vindication of the human spirit and strength of will that history has ever known. You should all be proud of what we’ve achieved.’ His tone was adversarial, certainly not congratulatory, and sure enough he went on, ‘But the real work is yet to come. We have arrived and, as you all know, this was supposedly a system the Old Empire spacefleet frequented. We set our course for here because these were the closest extra-solar coordinates where we could hope to find a liveable habitat, and perhaps even salvageable tech. You all know the plan: we have their star maps, and there are other such locations within a relatively short journey of here – just a short hop compared to the distances we’ve already travelled without mishap.’

Or with just five per cent mishap , Holsten thought, but did not say. Guyen’s belief in the extent of the Imperial presence within this system was also highly speculative, from the classicist’s own perspective – and even ‘Old Empire’ was a maddeningly inaccurate term. Most of the others looked too groggy to really think beyond the words themselves, though. Again he glanced at Lain, but she seemed to be focused only on the commander.

‘What most of you do not know is that the Gilgamesh intercepted transmissions emanating from this system on our way in, which have been identified as an automatic distress beacon. We have functioning technology.’ He hurried on before anyone could get a question in. ‘The Gilgamesh has therefore plotted a flightpath solution that will brake us around the star, and on the way out we’ll come by slow enough for a meaningful pass close to the source of that signal – the planet there.’

Now his audience started waking up, and there was a rising babble of questions that Guyen waved down. ‘That’s right. A planet in the sweet spot, just like we were promised. It’s been thousands of years, but space doesn’t care. It’s there, and the Old Empire has left a present for us too. And that could be good or it could be bad. We’re going to have to be careful. Just so you know: the signal isn’t from the planet itself but from some sort of satellite – maybe just a beacon, maybe something more. We’re going to try and open communications with it, but no guarantees.’

‘And the planet?’ someone asked. Guyen indicated Renas Vitas, the head of the scientific team.

‘We’re loathe to commit so far,’ the slender woman began – another who’d obviously been up for a while, or perhaps by nature unflappable. ‘The analysis made by Gilgamesh on our way in suggests something only slightly smaller than Earth, at close to Earth’s distance from the star, and with all the right components: oxygen, carbon, water, minerals…’

‘So why not commit? Why not say it?’ Holsten identified the speaker: big Karst, who led the security detail. His chin and cheeks were raw, red and peeling horribly, and Holsten remembered suddenly how the man had refused to lose his beard for the suspension chamber, and was now apparently paying the price.

I remember him arguing with Engineering over that , he thought. It should have seemed just days before, according to his personal waking history but, as he had noticed last time, there was clearly something imperfect about suspension. Certainly, Holsten could not feel the centuries that had passed since they abandoned Earth, but something in his mind acknowledged that lost time: the sense of a yawning, terrible wasteland, a purgatory of the imagination. He found himself reluctant to consider ever going back under.

‘Why, in all honesty?’ Vitas replied brightly. ‘It’s too good to be true. I want to overhaul our instruments. That planet is too Earth-like to be believed.’

Looking around at all the suddenly sour faces, Holsten raised his hand. ‘But of course it’s like Earth,’ he got out. The looks turned on him were not encouraging: some merely creased with dislike, but rather more with exasperation. What’s the bloody classicist want now? Desperate for some attention already?

‘It’s a terraforming project,’ he explained. ‘If it’s like Earth, that just shows it’s finished – or near finished.’