Adrian Tchaikovsky - Children of Time

‘There’s no evidence the ancients ever actually practised terraforming,’ Vitas told him, her tone an obvious putdown.

Let me take you through the archives: it’s mentioned a hundred times in their writings. But instead, Holsten just shrugged, recognizing the showmanship of it all. ‘There is ,’ he told them. ‘Out there. We’re heading straight towards it.’

‘Right!’ Guyen clapped his hands, perhaps annoyed that he had not been listening to his own voice for two minutes at a stretch. ‘You each have your tasks, so go and make ready. Vitas, run checks on our instrumentation, as you proposed. I want us to conduct a full inspection of the planet and satellite as we close. Lain, keep a close eye on ship’s systems as we approach the star’s gravity well – the Gil ’s not done anything but go in a straight line for a long time. Karst, get your people reacquainted with their kit, just in case we need you. Mason, you’re working with my people on monitoring that signal. If there’s anything active there to respond to us, I want to know about it.’

Hours later, and Holsten was almost the last person left in the Communications suite, his dogged academic patience having outlasted most of Guyen’s people. In his ear, the signal – full of static – still pulsed its single simple message, clearer now than it had been out beyond the system, and yet saying no more. He had been sending responses regularly, seeking to spur something new, an elaborate academic’s game where he formulated queries in formal Imperial C in the hope of seeming like the sort of caller that the beacon was crying out for.

He started at a sudden movement beside him, as Lain slumped into the neighbouring seat.

‘How’s life in Engineering?’ He took out the earpiece.

‘Not supposed to be about people management,’ she grunted. ‘We’re having to thaw out about five hundred coffins from cargo to run repairs on them. Then we’re having to tell five hundred recently awoken colonists that they need to go right back into the freezer. Security have been called in. It’s ugly. So, have you even worked out what it says yet? Who’s in distress?’

Holsten shook his head. ‘It’s not like that. Well, yes, it is. It says it’s a distress beacon. It’s calling for help, but there are no specifics. It’s a standard signal the Old Empire used for that purpose, intended to be clear, urgent and unmistakable – always assuming you’re even a member of the culture that produced it. I only know what it is because our early space-farers were able to reactivate some of the stuff they found in Earth orbit and extrapolate function from context.’

‘So say “Hi” to it. Let it know we’ve heard it.’

He sucked in the breath of the annoyed academic, starting off with the same pedantic, ‘It’s not…’ before her frown made him reconsider. ‘It’s an automated system. It’s waiting for a response it recognizes. It’s not like those extra-solar listening-post things we used to have – searching for any kind of signal pattern at all. And even those… I was never convinced by them – by the idea that we could necessarily recognize an alien transmission for what it was. That’s too rooted in our assumption that aliens will be in any way like us. It’s… you understand the concept of cultural specificity?’

‘Don’t lecture me, old man.’

‘It’s – will you stop with that? I’m, what, seven years older than you? Eight?’

‘You’re still the oldest man in the universe.’

Hearing that, he was very aware that he honestly did not know how the pair of them stood, one to another. So maybe I was just the last man in the universe, right then. Or me and Guyen, at most. Apparently it doesn’t matter now, anyway.

‘Yeah, well, you’d been up for how long, before they woke me?’ he goaded her. ‘Keep pulling those long hours and you’ll catch up real soon, won’t you?’

She had no ready comeback, and when he glanced at her, her face was long and pensive. This is no way to run a civilization , he thought. But of course, that’s not what we are, not any more. We’re a civilization in transport, waiting to happen somewhere else. Maybe here. We’re the last cutting of old Earth.

The pause stretched out between them, and he found he had no way of breaking its hold, until Lain abruptly shook herself and said, ‘So, cultural specificity. Let’s talk about that.’

He was profoundly grateful for the lifeline. ‘So I know it’s a distress beacon, but that is literally only because we’ve had prior contact with Imperial tech, and in sufficient context that we can make assumptions – some of which may be wrong, even. And this isn’t an alien species – this is us , our ancestors. And, in turn, they won’t recognize our signals, necessarily. There’s this myth that advanced cultures will be so expansively cosmopolitan that they’ll be able to effortlessly talk down to the little people, right? But the Empire never intended its tech to be forward-compatible with primitives – meaning us. Why would it? Like everyone else, they only ever intended to talk to each other. So I’m telling this thing, “Hello, here we are,” but I don’t know what protocols and what codes their system is expecting to receive from whatever rescuer would have been planned for, however many thousand years ago. They can’t even hear us. We’re just background static to them.’

She shrugged. ‘So what? We get there and send Karst over with a cutting torch and open her up?’

He stared at her. ‘You forget how many people died, in the early space years, trying to get at Empire tech. Even with all the systems fried by their old electromagnetic pulse weapons, there were still plenty of ways for it to kill you.’

Another lift of the shoulders, indicating a tired woman at the edge of her reserves. ‘Maybe you forget how much I don’t like Karst.’

Did I forget? Did I ever know that? He had a vertiginous sense that maybe he had, but that any such knowledge had fallen unnoticed from his head during the long, cold age of his suspension. And it genuinely had been an age . There had been whole discrete periods of human history that had not lasted so long. He found himself holding on to the console as though, at any moment, the illusion of gravity gifted by the Gilgamesh ’s deceleration would vanish, and he would simply slip away in some random direction, with all connection lost. These are all the people there are , with the image of that roomful of near-strangers he had never had a chance to get to know before they sealed him in the coffin. This is life and society and human contact, now and forever.

It seemed to be Lain’s turn to find the silence awkward, but she was a practical woman. She simply got up to go, drawing away sharply as he tried to put a hand on her arm.

‘Wait.’ It came out more as a plea than he had intended. ‘You’re here – and I need your help.’

‘On what?’

‘Help me with the signal – the beacon signal. There’s always been a lot of interference, but I think… it’s possible there’s actually a second signal clashing with it on a close frequency. Look.’ He passed a handful of analyses over to her screen. ‘Can you clean it up – compensate it out if it’s noise, or at least… something? I’m running out of things to try right now.’

She seemed relieved at actually getting a sensible request from him and resumed her seat. For the next hour the two of them worked wordlessly side by side, she with what was now her task, and he in sending increasingly desperate enquiries aimed at the satellite, none of which evinced any response. Eventually he felt that he might as well just be sending over gibberish, for all the difference it made.