Adrian Tchaikovsky - Children of Time

Intent on trying to find pattern and plan in the scene before her, Portia’s hungry eyes note one more element, and she wonders, Is that important?

Like humans, Portia’s people are quick to see patterns, sometimes when there are none. Hence she makes the association quickly, seeing the timing as too close to be coincidental. When the gathering of ants breaks up and hurries inside, without warning and all at once, it is just as the traveller, the swift-moving star that she has often watched coursing across the sky, is passing beneath the horizon.

She makes a plan then, swiftly and without much forethought. She is intrigued, and her species is driven to investigate anything new, just as the ants are, though in very different ways.

Once most of the ants are gone she approaches the spire carefully, wary of triggering some alarm. Lifting her palps she lets the wind ruffle them, feeling its strength and direction, and matching her movements to it.

She ascends carefully, foot over foot, until she finds the crystal before her. It does not seem so large, not to her.

She sets to spinning a complex package of silk that she holds with her rear legs. She is keenly aware of being at the very centre of the great colony. A mistake at this point would go very badly.

She has left matters almost too late. Her presence – through the vibrations of her work – has been detected. From its hole at the spire’s base, the small ant that led the congregation abruptly emerges and touches one of her feet with its uncovered antenna.

Immediately it lets out an alarm, a chemical sharp with outrage and fury at finding an alien, an intruder, in this place. As the scent passes outwards it is picked up by tunnel guards and other castes that have remained close to the exterior. The message is passed on and multiplied.

Portia drops on the ant beneath her and kills it with one bite, removing its head as she did with the others, although she knows she cannot bluff her way out of this one. Instead she scuttles up the spire again, seeking as much height as it will give, and seizes the crystal from the top.

She secures her two trophies to her abdomen with webbing, even as the ants begin to swarm out over the exterior of their colony. She sees plenty there with tools and modifications that she is suddenly no longer sufficiently curious to investigate.

She jumps. An unassisted leap from the spire would land her in their very midst, to be savagely held and stung and dismembered alive. At the apex of her upward spring, though, her hind legs kick out their burden of carefully folded silk, forming a fine-spun net spread between them that catches the wind Portia was so carefully measuring earlier.

It is not taking her quite back towards Bianca and the others, but she has no control over that. At this moment her chief priority is to get away , gliding over the heads of the enraged insects as they lift their metal-sheathed mandibles and try to work out where she could have gone.

Her descendants will tell the story of how Portia entered the temple of the ants and stole the eye of their god.

Guyen took his time over his decision, as the Gilgamesh followed its long curving path around this solitary island of life in the vast desert of space, its trajectory constantly balanced between the momentum that would fling it away and the gravity that would draw it in.

The face of Doctor Avrana Kern – whoever and whatever she truly was – flickered and ghosted on their screens, sometimes inhuman in its stoic patience, at other times twisted by waves of nameless, involuntary emotions, the mad goddess of the green planet.

Knowing that Kern was listening, and could not be shut out, Guyen had no way to receive the counsel of his crew, but Holsten felt that the man would not have listened anyway: he was in command, the responsibility his alone to bear.

And of course there was only one answer, for all the agonized pondering that Guyen might give to the question. Even if the Sentry Habitat had not possessed weapons capable of destroying the Gilgamesh , the ark ship’s systems were at Kern’s mercy. The airlocks, the reactor, all the many tools they relied on to keep this bubble of life from the claws of the void; Kern could just switch it all off.

‘We’ll go,’ Guyen agreed at last, and Holsten reckoned he wasn’t the only one who was relieved to hear it. ‘Thank you for your help, Doctor Avrana Kern. We will seek out these other systems, and attempt to establish ourselves there. We will leave this planet in your care.’

Kern’s face sprang into animation on the screens, though still moving almost randomly, and completely divorced from the words. ‘Of course you will. Go take your barrel of monkeys elsewhere.’

Lain was murmuring, ‘What is this business about monkeys ?’ in his ear, and Holsten had been wondering the same thing.

‘Monkeys are a sort of animal. We have records regarding them – the Empire used them in scientific experiments. They looked something like people. Here, I’ve got images…’

‘ Gilgamesh has got a course plotted,’ Vitas stated.

Guyen looked it over. ‘Re-plot. I want us to swing by this planet here, the gas giant.’

‘We won’t be able to gain anything useful by slingshot-ting—’

‘Just do it,’ the commander growled. ‘Here… get me an orbit.’

Vitas pursed her lips primly. ‘I don’t see what would be served by an orbit—’

‘Make it happen,’ Guyen told her, glowering at one of Kern’s images as though waiting for it to challenge him.

They felt the change of forces as the Gilgamesh ’s fusion reactor brought the engines back online, ready to coax the vast mass of the ark ship off its comfortable orbit and hurl it out into space once more.

Without warning, Kern’s face was gone from the screens, and Lain quickly ran a check of all systems, finding no trace of the intruder’s presence there.

‘Which is no guarantee of anything,’ she pointed out. ‘We could be riddled with spy routines and security back doors and who knows what.’ She did not add, Kern could have set us to explode somewhere in deep space , which Holsten reckoned was generous of her. He saw the same thought on everyone’s face, but they had no leverage, no options. Just hope.

Pinning the whole future of the human race on hope , he considered. But, then, hadn’t the whole ark ship project been just that?

‘Mason, tell us about the monkeys,’ Lain suggested.

He shrugged. ‘Just speculation, but the thing was talking about an “exaltation program”. Exaltation of beasts, the old stories say.’

‘How do you exalt a monkey?’ Lain was studying the archive images. ‘Funny-looking little critters, aren’t they?’

‘The signal to the planet, and the mathematics,’ Vitas mused. ‘Are they expecting the monkeys to respond?’

Nobody had any answers.

‘You’ve set our course?’ Guyen demanded.

‘Naturally,’ came Vitas’s immediate reply.

‘Fine. So the whole universe is ours except the one planet worth living on,’ the commander stated. ‘So we don’t stake it all on whatever’s at this next project we’re being sent to. We’d be fools to – it could be as hostile as here. It could be worse. There might not be anything there. I want us – I want humanity to have a foothold here, just in case.’

‘A foothold where ?’ Holsten demanded. ‘You said yourself that was the only planet—’

‘Here.’ Guyen brought up a representation of one of the system’s other planets: a streaky, bloated-looking gas giant like some of the outer planets of Earth’s system, then narrowing in on a pallid, bluish moon. ‘The Empire colonized several moons back in Earth’s system. We have automated base units that can carve us out a home there: power, heat, hydroponics, enough to survive.’