Adrian Tchaikovsky - Children of Time

She had so much of her old sense of purpose still clinging to her, like the tatters of a once-magnificent garment, that Holsten was considerably heartened up until the moment that she reached comms and saw what the drones were transmitting. Then Lain stopped in the hatchway and stared, exactly as aghast and lost as all the rest of them. For a moment all eyes were fixed on her, and if she had declared it all a lost cause then and there, there might have been nobody else willing to take up the baton.

But she was Lain. She endured and she fought, whether satellites or spiders or time itself.

‘Fuck,’ she said expressively, and then repeated it a few more times, as if taking strength from the word. ‘Holsten, get on the comms to Kern. Karst, get Vitas over here, and then you can start telling me just what the fuck we can do about that mess.’

With the comms at his disposal – or at least after Alpash had explained half a dozen workarounds the engineers had come up with to deal with system instability – Holsten wondered what he could possibly send. He had the satellite’s frequency, but the space around the planet was alive with whispering ghosts: those faint transmissions that were, he had to admit now, not just signals from the satellite bouncing off the planet below it.

He tried to feel some sort of awe about that, and about the unprecedented position that he was in. The only emotion he could muster was a worn-out dread.

He began to assemble a message in his impeccable Imperial C, the dead language that looked to be about to survive the human race. This is the ark ship Gilgamesh calling for Doctor Avrana Kern… He stumbled over ‘ Do you require assistance,’ his mind thronging with inappropriate possibilities. Doctor Kern, you’re covered in spiders. He took a deep breath.

This is the ark ship Gilgamesh calling Doctor Avrana Kern. And, face it, she knew them and they knew her; they were old adversaries, after all. We are now without any option but to land on your planet. The survival of the human race is at stake. Please confirm that you will not impede us. It was a wretched plea. He knew that, even as he let the message fly off at the speed of light towards the planet. What could Kern say that would satisfy them? What could he say that would dissuade her from her monomaniacal purpose?

Vitas had arrived by then, and she, Karst and Lain had their heads close together, discussing the important stuff, whilst Holsten was left babbling into the void.

Then a reply arrived, or something like it.

It was sent from the point in the web that Karst had figured to be the satellite, and it was far stronger than the feeble transmissions he had been analysing before. There seemed little doubt that it was directed at and intended for the Gilgamesh . If it was Kern, it seemed she was long gone: it was not her crisp, antique speech, but more of the weird, almost-Imperial that he had caught before, a jumble of nonsense and letter-strings that looked like words but weren’t, and in the midst of them all a few words and what might even be sentence fragments, like an illiterate aping writing from memory. An illiterate with access to a radio and the ability to encode a signal.

He re-sent his signal, asking for Eliza this time. What was there to lose?

The return was more of the same. He contrasted it with its predecessor: some repeated sections, some new ones, and by now his professional eye was seeing certain recurring patterns in those sections he could not interpret. Kern was trying to tell them something. Or at least something was trying to tell them something. He wondered if it was still simply ‘Go away’ and, if that was the case, would it now be a warning for their benefit? Turn back before it’s too late?

But there was no back for them. They were now on a oneway journey towards the only potentially viable destination they could possibly reach.

He pondered what he might be able to send, so as to jolt Kern into some semblance of comprehensible sentience. Or was Kern, too, now a failing machine. Was the end coming for all of the works of human hands, even as it was for their masters?

It seemed intolerable that the universe could be left to the creators of that planet-spanning web, to a legion of insensate crawling things that could never know the trials and hardships that poor humanity had suffered.

A new message was being broadcast at them on the same frequency. Holsten listened to it dully: not even a mimicry of language now, just numerical codes.

To his shame, it was the Gilgamesh that recognized it, rather than he himself. It was the signal that Kern had, once upon a time, been sending down towards the planet. It was her intelligence test for monkeys.

Without much examination of his motives, Holsten composed the answers – with help from the Gilgamesh towards the end – and sent it back.

Another battery of questions followed – new ones this time.

‘What is it?’ Lain was at his shoulder, just like old times. If he didn’t look back, he could even fool himself that rather less water had flowed under the bridge since they were first playing this game.

‘Kern’s testing us,’ he told her. ‘Maybe she wants to see if we’re worthy?’

‘By setting us a maths exam?’

‘She never made much sense at the best of times. So why not?’

‘Get her the answers, then. Come on.’

Holsten did so – finding it so much quicker to assemble a response once the complexities of actual language were removed from the equation. ‘Of course, we have no idea of the purpose of this,’ he pointed out.

‘But we can still hope it has a purpose,’ she replied crisply. Holsten was vaguely aware of Vitas and Karst hovering in the background, impatient to get on with talking about the offensive.

There was no third round of the test. Instead they got another blast of the maddeningly near-to-Imperial C that Holsten had seen before. He analysed it swiftly, passing it through his decoders and pattern-recognition functions. It seemed simpler than before, and with more repeated patterns. The phrase came to him, like talking to a child , and he experienced another of those vertiginous moments, wondering who or what it was that was speaking, far out there. Kern, surely? But Kern made strange – stranger – by the curdling effects of time and distance. But, even though Kern’s little Sentry Habitat was the origination point of the signal, a part of him understood already that this was not so.

‘I can identify some words used frequently,’ he announced hoarsely, after he and his suite of programs had finished their work. He could not keep the quaver out of his tones. ‘I’ve found what’s definitely a form of the verb “approach” and the word “near”, and some other indicators I’d associate with “permission” or “agreement”.’

That pronouncement got the thoughtful silence it deserved.

‘They’ve changed their tune, then,’ Karst remarked at last. ‘You said it was all “fuck off” before.’

‘It was.’ Holsten nodded. ‘It’s changed.’

‘Because Kern’s in desperate need of our superior maths skills?’ the security chief demanded.

Holsten opened his mouth, then shut it, unwilling to make his suspicions real by voicing them aloud.

Lain did it for him. ‘If it’s actually Kern.’

‘Who else?’ but there was a raw edge to Karst’s voice that showed he was not such a blunt tool, after all.

‘There’s no evidence that anything but Kern exists to transmit from there,’ Vitas said sharply.

‘What about that?’ Holsten jabbed a finger at the screen still showing the drone’s images.

‘We have no way of knowing what has transpired down on that planet. It was an experiment, after all. It may be that what we are seeing is an aberration of that experiment, just as was the grey planet and its fungal growth. The point remains that the Kern satellite is still present there, and it’s where the signal comes from,’ Vitas set out doggedly.