Adrian Tchaikovsky - Children of Time

Why, yes, Eliza, please let us talk to your sister. Holsten tried to match the expert system’s polite and formal manner of speech.

He was not sure what they would get back, and he was ready to shut down the comms if it was just that anguished mad babbling, because there could be no dialogue with that – no possibility of negotiating with that internalized storm of insanity.

‘We’re being told to stand by,’ he reported, when the instruction came. After that there was nothing else for a long time; the Gilgamesh continued to fall inexorably towards the green planet’s gravity well. The satellite was still silent when Lain and her team began their anxious watch over ship’s systems, as the ancient ark ship began to creak and strain at the unnatural imposition of an external source of mass, large and close enough to claw at the vessel’s structure. Everyone there felt a subtle shifting: for the whole waking portion of the journey, their perception of gravity had come from the ship’s gradual deceleration. Now an alien force was reaching for them, subtly tugging with insubstantial ghost fingers, the first touch of the world below.

‘All signs suggest stable orbit for now,’ Lain reported tensely. There followed a slow-motion comedy as deceleration ceased and then rotation began, gravity creeping across the floor to make a new home against the wall, and the Gilgamesh ’s consoles and fittings shudderingly adjusting. For a minute there was no point of reference; a room full of weightless people trying to remember their long-ago training, hauling on each other to get to the right surface before they could be slammed into it. In the commotion, awkwardness, and a series of minor medical calls, the whole business of their imminent destruction was almost forgotten.

‘New transmission,’ Holsten alerted them, as the signal came in. In his ear those same female tones sounded, but the intonation, the rhythm of the speech was quite different, and stripped free of that tortured backing.

I am Doctor Avrana Kern, chief scientist and administrator of the Second Brin Exaltation Project , was his translation. Even through the filter of archaic Imperial C, the voice was stern and proud. What are you? What is your provenance?

‘That doesn’t sound like a computer,’ Lain murmured.

‘Of course it’s a computer,’ Vitas snapped. ‘It’s simply a more sophisticated approximation of—’

‘Enough.’ Guyen cut through the argument. ‘Mason?’

We are an ark ship from Earth, Holsten sent, seeking permission to establish a colony on Kern’s World. If the thing he was talking to was in any way human, he guessed that a little flattery couldn’t harm.

Whose Earth, though? Sering’s Earth or my Earth? came the swift reply. Now that they were in orbit, there was barely any delay: it was almost like a real conversation.

Real conversation with a faceless machine mind , Holsten reminded himself. He sent his translation round the room, looking for help, but nobody had any suggestion as to what the satellite meant. Before he could give any kind of answer, a new transmission came in.

I do not recognize you. You are not human. You are not from Earth. You have no business here. Eliza shows me all that she sees of you and there is nothing of Earth in you but why can I not see you for myself why can I not open my eyes where are my eyes where are my eyes where are my eyes. And then an abrupt cessation of the message, leaving Holsten shaken because that was it: a segue straight into the voice of madness, without a moment’s warning.

‘I don’t think it’s a computer,’ he said, but soft enough that only Lain heard him. She was reading over his shoulder still, and nodded soberly.

Our vessel is the ark ship Gilgamesh from Earth. This ship was built after your time , he prepared and sent, with a bitter awareness of the sheer understatement implicit in that. He was dreading what they might receive back.

‘It’s completely deranged,’ Karst stated flatly, and that with the benefit of only half of what was being said. ‘Can we keep the planet between us, or something?’

‘Not and retain stable orbit,’ one of Guyen’s team reported. ‘Seriously, remember how big the Gil is. We can’t just flit him about like your drones.’

Holsten was already sending, because Guyen had stopped dictating and it now seemed to be down to him. Return to Earth is not possible. Please may we speak to your sister again, Eliza? , pleading for the life of humanity in a dead language – having to make the call between artificial intransigence and what he was increasingly sure was real human crazy.

That other voice again, delivering a rant that he got down as: Why can’t you just go back where you came from? Are you Sering’s people? Did we win? Did we throw you out? Are you here to finish what he started?

‘What happened here?’ demanded Vitas incredulously. ‘What’s Sering? A warship?’

Earth is no longer habitable , Holsten sent, even as Lain warned, ‘That’s going to push her over the edge for sure, Mason.’

He had dispatched the message even as she said it, the hollow feeling in his stomach arriving a moment later. She’s right, at that.

But there was a measure more sanity in Doctor Avrana Kern’s voice when it replied. Nonsense. Explain.

The Gilgamesh archives had histories, but whoever would have thought they would need translating into a language only historians were now interested in? Instead, Holsten did his best: History 101 for the lost time traveller, based on best guesses as to what had actually happened beyond the dawn of his recorded time, back when the Old Empire had held sway. There was so little he could actually say. The gap between the last thing Kern must know and the earliest definite fact that Holsten could rely on was insuperable.

There was a civil war between factions of the Empire , he explained. Both sides unleashed weapons the nature of which I do not understand, but which were effective in devastating higher civilization on Earth and completely destroying the colonies. He remembered seeing the eggshell ruins on Europa. The in-system colonies had all predated any apparent later expertise in terraforming that the Empire had come to possess. They had been hothouse flowers on planets and moons haphazardly altered to better support life, reliant on biospheres that must have required constant adjustment. On Earth people had lapsed back into barbarism. Elsewhere, when the power had failed, when the electromagnetic weapons had destroyed the vital engines, or the electronic viruses murdered the artificial minds, they had died. They had died in alien cold, in reverting atmospheres, under corrosive skies. Often, they had died still fighting each other. So little had been left intact.

He typed it all out. As though writing an abstract to a history text, he noted with dry precision that a post-war industrial society may have persisted for almost a century, and may even have been regaining some of the sophistication of its predecessors, when the ice came. The choked atmosphere that had smothered the planet in gloom had shouldered out the sun, resulting in a midnight glacial cold that had left very little of that abortive rebirth. Looking back down the well of time, Holsten could make no definite statements about those who were left, nor about the frozen age that followed. Some scientists had speculated that, when the ice was at its height, the entire remnant human population of Earth had been no more than ten thousand all told, huddling in caves and holes around the equator and staring out at a horizon rigid with cold.