Adrian Tchaikovsky - Children of Time

Then: ‘Mason?’ from Lain, and there was something new in her tone.

‘Hmm?’

‘You’re right. It is another signal.’ A pause. ‘But we’re not getting it from the satellite.’

He waited, seeing her fingers move over the panels, checking and rechecking.

‘It’s from the planet.’

‘Shit! You’re serious?’ And then, with a hand to his mouth. ‘Sorry, I’m sorry. Not language befitting the dignity of etcetera, but…’

‘No, no, this is definitely a shit-worthy moment.’

‘It’s a distress call? It’s repeated?’

‘It’s not like your distress signal. Much more complex. It must be actual live talk. It’s not repeating…’

For a moment Holsten actually felt her hope peak, pulling the air between them taut with the untold potential of the future, and then she hissed. ‘Bollocks.’

‘What?’

‘No, it is repeating. It’s longer and more complicated than your distress call, but this is the same sequence again.’ Hands on the move once more. ‘And it’s… we’re…’ Her bony shoulders sagged. ‘It’s… I think it’s bounce.’

‘Come again?’

‘I think this other signal is bouncing from the planet. I… Well, most likely hypothesis: the satellite is sending a signal to the planet, and we’re catching bounce-back. Fuck, I’m sorry. I really thought…’

‘Lain, are you sure?’

She cocked an eyebrow at him, because he was not joining in her dejection. ‘What?’

‘The satellite is communicating with the planet,’ he prompted. ‘It’s not just a bounce-back of the distress call – it’s something longer. A different message sent to the planet than for the rest of the universe.’

‘But it’s just on a loop, same as…’ She slowed down. ‘You think there’s someone down there?’

‘Who knows?’

‘But they’re not broadcasting.’

‘Who knows? It’s a terraform world, whatever Vitas says. It was created to be lived on. And, even if the satellite is nothing but a call for help these days, if they seeded the world with people… So maybe they really are savages. Maybe they don’t have the tech to receive or transmit, but they could still be there… on a world specifically made for humans to live on.’

She stood up suddenly. ‘I’m off to fetch Guyen.’

For a moment he looked at her, thinking, Seriously, that was the first thing you thought of? But he nodded resignedly and she was off, leaving him to listen in on the newfound contact between satellite and planet, and try to work out what it signified.

To his great surprise it took him very little time to do so.

‘It’s what?’ Guyen demanded. The news had brought along not just the commander but most of the Key Crew as well.

‘A series of mathematics problems,’ Holsten explained to them all. ‘The only reason it took me as long as it did was that I was expecting something more… sophisticated, something informative, like the beacon. But it’s maths.’

‘Weird maths, too,’ Lain commented, looking over his transcription. ‘The sequences get quite complicated, but they’re set out step by step from first principles, basic sequences.’ She was frowning. ‘It’s like… Mason, you mentioned extra-solar listening posts before…?’

‘It’s a test, yes,’ Holsten agreed. ‘An intelligence test.’

‘But you said it was pointed at the planet?’ Karst stated.

‘Which raises all kinds of questions, yes.’ Holsten shrugged. ‘I mean, this is very old technology. This is the oldest working tech that anyone anywhere ever discovered. So what we’re seeing could just be the result of a break-down, an error. But, yes, makes you think.’

‘Or not,’ Lain put in drily. When the others just stared at her, she continued in her snide tone: ‘Come on, people, am I the only one thinking it? Come on, Mason, you’ve been trying to get the thing to notice you for how long now? We’ve rounded the star on our approach to the planet, and you’re still drawing blanks. So now you say it’s setting some sort of maths test for the planet?’

‘Yes, but—’

‘So send in the answers,’ she suggested.

Holsten stared at her for a long time, then glanced sideways at Guyen. ‘We don’t know what—’

‘Do it,’ Guyen ordered.

Carefully, Holsten called up the answers he had compiled, the early problems solved easily on his fingers, the later ones only with artificial help. He had been sending plaintive signals to the distant satellite for hours. It was simple enough to dispatch the string of numbers instead.

They waited, all of the Key Crew. It took seven minutes and some seconds for the message to reach its intended destination. There was some shuffling. Karst cracked his knuckles. One of the science team coughed.

A little over fourteen minutes after sending, the distress beacon ceased.

Portia’s people are natural explorers. As active carnivores with a considerably more demanding metabolism than their forebears, too many of them in one place will quickly over-hunt any home territory. Traditionally their family units fragment often; the females who are weakest, with the fewest allies, are the ones who venture further afield to establish new nests. Such diasporas happen regularly for, although they lay far fewer eggs than their ancestors, and although their standards of care are far below human so that infant mortality rates remain high, the species population is in colossal expansion. They are spreading across their world, one broken family at a time.

Portia’s own expedition is something different, though. She is not seeking a nesting ground, and there is a home that her present plans require her to return to. In her mind and her speech, it is the Great Nest by the Western Ocean, and several hundred of her kind – most but not all relatives of one degree or another – reside there. The basic domestication of the aphids and their husbandry by the spiders has allowed the Great Nest to grow to unprecedented size, without the shortages that would prompt migration or expulsion.

Over several generations the social structure of the Great Nest has grown exponentially more complex. Contact has been made with other nests, each of which has its own way of feeding the modest multitudes. There has been some halting trade, sometimes for food but more often for knowledge. Portia’s people are ever curious about the further reaches of their world.

That is why Portia is travelling now, following the paths of stories and rumours and third-hand accounts. She has been sent .

The three of them are entering already claimed territory. The signs are unmistakable – not merely regularly maintained web bridges and lines amid the trees, but patterns and designs stating by sight and scent that these hunting grounds are spoken for.

This is exactly what Portia has been looking for.

Ascending as high as they can go, the travellers can see that, to the north, the character of the formerly endless forest changes dramatically. The great canopy thins, fading away in patches to reveal startling stretches of cleared ground; beyond that there are still trees, but they are of a different species and regularly spaced, in a manner that looks jarringly artificial to their eyes. This is what they have come to see. They could simply avoid this little piece of family turf that they have come across and go look. Portia’s plan, however – the step-by-step route that she has plotted from the start of their trek to its successful conclusion – specifically calls for her to gather information. For her ancestors, this would mean painstaking visual reconnaissance. For her it means asking questions of the locals.