Adrian Tchaikovsky - Children of Time

‘How do you even know how to fix the ship?’ Holsten asked of Alpash’s back. ‘It’s been… I don’t know how long it’s been. Since Guyen died, even, I don’t know. And you think you can still keep the ship running? Just by…? What do you…? You’re learning how to make a spaceship run by rote or…?’

Alpash looked back at him, frowning. ‘Don’t think I don’t know what the commander means, when he says “Tribe”. The chief scientist, too. It pleases them to think of us as primitives, inferiors. We, in turn, are bound to respect their – your – authority, as our precursors. That is what our grandmother laid down. That is one of our laws. But we do nothing “by rote”. We learn, all of us, from our youngest age. We have preserved manuals and lectures and tutorial modules. Our grandmother has provided for us. Do you think we could do all we have done if we did not understand ?’ He stopped, clearly angry. Holsten had obviously touched a nerve already rubbed raw by the other Key Crew. ‘We are of the line of those who gave their lives – all of their lives – to preserve this vessel. That was and is our task, one to be undertaken without reward or hope of relief: an endless round of custodianship, until we reach the planet we were promised. My parents, their parents and theirs, all of them have done nothing but ensure that you and all the other cargo of this ship shall live, or as much of them as we could save. And it pleases you to call us “Tribe” and consider us children and savages, because we never saw Earth.’

Holsten held his hands up appeasingly. ‘I’m sorry. You’ve taken this up with Karst? I mean, he’s kind of depending on you. You could… make demands.’

Alpash’s look was incredulous. ‘At this time? With the future of our home – our old home and our new – hanging in the balance? Would you say that was a good time for us to start arguing amongst ourselves?’

For a moment Holsten studied the young man as though he was some completely new species of hominid, separated by a yawning cognitive gulf. The feeling passed, and he shook himself. ‘She did well when she set down your laws,’ he murmured.

‘Thank you.’ Alpash apparently took this as a validation of his entire culture – or whatever it was that had developed amongst his weird, claustrophobic society. ‘And now at last I get to meet her, here at the end of everything.’

They passed on through a wide-open space that Holsten suddenly recognized, the remembrance coming to him halfway across it, looking at the raised stage at one end where stubs of broken machinery still jutted. Here Guyen had stood and made his bid for eternity. Here the earliest progenitors of Alpash’s line had fought alongside their warrior queen and Karst’s security team – some of whom were surely recently reawakened, possessing living memories of events that for Alpash must be song and story and weirdly twisted legend.

A lone screen hung at an angle above the torn-up roots of the upload facility, flickering malevolently with scattered patterns. As though Guyen’s ghost is still trapped inside there, Holsten thought. Almost immediately, he thought he did see, for a broken moment, the rage-torn face of the old commander in the flurrying striations of the screen. Or perhaps it had been Avrana Kern’s Old Empire features. Shuddering, he hurried on after Alpash.

The place he ended up in had been a storeroom, he guessed. Now they stored only one thing there: a single suspension chamber. At the foot of the pedestal was a huddle of little objects – icons heat-moulded in plastic into an approximation of the female form: offerings from her surrogate children, and their children, to the guardian-mother of the human race. Above that desperate little display of hope and faith were tacked little scraps of cloth torn from shipsuits, each bearing some close-written message. This was a shrine to a living goddess.

Not only living but awake. Alpash and a couple of other young engineers were standing back respectfully while Isa Lain found her balance, leaning on a metal spar.

She was very frail, her earlier heaviness eaten away from her frame, leaving skin that was bagged and wrinkled and hung from her bones. Her near-bald scalp was mottled with liver spots, and her hands were like bird’s claws, almost fleshless. She stood with a pronounced hunch, enough that Holsten wondered if they’d altered the suspension chamber to let her sleep out the ages lying on her side. When she looked up at him, though, her eyes were Lain’s eyes, clear and sharp and sardonic.

If she had said, then, ‘Hello, old man,’ like she used to, he was not sure that he could have borne it. She just nodded, however, as though nothing was to be more expected than to find Holsten Mason standing there, looking young enough to be her son.

‘Stop your bloody staring,’ she snapped a moment later. ‘You don’t look such a picture yourself, and what’s your excuse?’

‘Lain…’ He approached her carefully, as though even a strong movement of air might blow her away.

‘No time for romance now, lover boy,’ she said drily. ‘I hear Karst’s fucked up and we’ve got the human race to save.’ And then she was in his arms, and he felt that fragile, thin-boned frame, felt her shaking suddenly as she fought the memories and the emotions.

‘Get off me, you oaf,’ she said, but quietly, and she made no move to push him away.

‘I’m just glad you’re still with us,’ he whispered.

‘For one more roll of the dice, anyway,’ she agreed. ‘I really did think that I might get some honest natural gravity and decent sunlight when they cracked me open. Was that too much to ask for? But apparently it was. I can’t believe that I even have to do Karst’s job these days.’

‘Don’t be too hard on Karst,’ Holsten cautioned her. ‘The situation is… unprecedented.’

‘I’ll be the judge of that.’ At last she shook him off. ‘I swear, sometimes I think I’m the only competent person left in the whole human race. I think that’s the only thing keeping me going.’ She made to stride past him, but stumbled almost immediately, and her next step was decidedly less ambitious, a careful hobble while leaning on her stick. ‘Never grow old,’ she muttered. ‘Never grow old and then go into suspension, that’s for sure. You dream young dreams. You forget what you’re coming back to. Fucking disappointment, believe me.’

‘You don’t dream in suspension,’ Holsten corrected her.

‘Look at you, the fucking expert.’ She glowered at him. ‘Or am I not allowed to swear now? I suppose you expect some sort of fucking decorum ?’ Behind her defiance there was a terrible desperation: a woman who had always been able to simply physically impose her will on the world, who now had to ask its permission and the permission of her own body.

Holsten brought her up to date with developments on the way back to join Karst. He could see her determinedly fitting each piece into place, and she wasn’t slow to stop him and ask for clarification.

‘These transmissions,’ she prompted. ‘Do we reckon they’re actually from the planet, then?’

‘I have no idea. It’s… it explains why most of it’s completely incomprehensible, I suppose. It doesn’t explain the stuff that sounds a bit like Imperial C – so maybe that is Kern.’

‘Have we tried talking to Kern?’

‘I think Karst was pinning everything on mounting a sneak attack.’

‘How subtle of him,’ she spat. ‘I reckon now’s about the time to talk to Kern, don’t you?’ She paused, breathing heavily. ‘In fact, go do it now. Just get on with it. When we hit comms, I’ll talk guns with Karst. You can talk whatever-the-fuck with Kern, find out what she’s saying. Maybe she doesn’t actually like spiders crawling all over her. Maybe she’s an ally now. You never know until you ask.’