Adrian Tchaikovsky - Children of Time

‘I… what am I supposed to be doing?’

‘You’re supposed to be telling me what this thing is.’

‘For this, you need me here ?’ Holsten’s rare temper sparked a little. ‘Chief, I could just—’

‘Your translation is mostly incomprehensible,’ Guyen began.

‘Well, technical details—’

‘No, that’s all to the good. This way it can be just between you and me. So I want you to go through this again and confirm – tell me just what this is. And we’re here specifically so the device can help you understand it.’

Guyen turned back to the coffin and hunched over it, reaching into the toolbelt that he had slung from his suit harness. Holsten’s anxiety spiked and he very nearly broadcast his worries directly to Guyen, before remembering to switch channel over to Lain.

‘He’s turning something on,’ he got out, and then the whole array around the coffin lit up like a festival: screens and panels flaring and stuttering into life, and the humanoid space at its heart ghosting with a pale blue glow.

‘I see it.’ Lain’s voice blurred with static, then stabilized. ‘Look, I’ve got my people right outside. Any trouble they’ll be all over you. But I want to see.’

So do I , Holsten realized, leaning closer to the displays.

‘These are… error messages?’ Guyen murmured.

‘Missing connections… The engineers think the main computer was gutted by the virus,’ Holsten speculated, ‘so all we’ve got are isolated systems.’ And that all we’ve got was still an overstuffed library of esoteric knowledge. ‘It looks like it’s trying to link up to something that’s not there. It’s basically listing a whole load of… somethings that it can’t find.’

Guyen examined the control panels, his bulky, gloved hands approaching the surfaces occasionally but not committing to a touch. ‘Get it to tell me what it is,’ he said. He had left the channel open, and Holsten was not sure whether those words had been intended for export.

‘Listen carefully,’ Lain said clearly in Holsten’s ear. ‘I want you to try something with the panel. It’s a routine we developed, when we started up here, for cutting through this sort of shit. Seems to work on most of the kit here. You’ll have to blag it to Guyen that it’s your idea, or that you read it somewhere on our reports or something.’

‘Sure.’

Guyen let him take over at the panel, bathed in the pale illumination from the coffin, and he followed each of Lain’s commands carefully, hesitating every time to let her correct him where necessary. The sequence was only fifteen steps, touching the screen carefully to unlock new cascades of options and complaints until he had somehow stripped away all of the device’s plaintive demands for its lost links and pared it down to what was left.

Which was…

‘Emergency upload facility,’ Holsten translated, a little uncertainly. He stared at that human-shaped absence at the heart of the machine. ‘Upload of what?’

He glanced at Guyen then and saw a swiftly hidden expression on the man’s face, clear even within the gloom of his helmet. The commander’s face had been all triumph and hunger. Whatever he was really looking for, he had found it here.

Plague has worked its way thoroughly into the heart of Great Nest until physical contact between peer houses has almost ceased. Only the desperate and the starving roam the streets. There have been attacks – the healthy assaulting those they believe to be sick, the hungry stealing food, the incurably deranged attacking whatever their inner demons prompt them to.

And yet the straining strands of the community have not quite parted, the trickling exodus has not become a flood – due in no small part to Portia and her peers. They are working on a cure. They can save Great Nest and, by extension, civilization itself.

Portia has enlisted not only Bianca but every scientist – Temple and otherwise – that she has faith in. This is no time for reserving the glory to her peer group, after all.

And, in contacting them all, she has made sure that they all know who she is, and that she, as instigator, is their leader. Her dictates twang out across Great Nest on taut wires, received and relayed by diligent male attendants. Normally cooperation between peer houses does not work smoothly at this level: too many egos, too many females vying for dominance. The emergency has focused them wonderfully.

This is my new Understanding , Portia had explained to them. There is a quality that these immune children have that marks them out from their fallen peers. They were born into a plagued city, but they survived. It seems likely, given how long the plague had been rife in their home, that they must have been born from eggs laid by progenitors likewise resistant to the infection. In short, it is a resistance that they inherited. It is an Understanding.

This prompted a storm of objection. The process by which new Understandings were laid down was not fully understood, but those Understandings related only to knowledge – a recollection of how to do things, or how things were. Where was the evidence that a reaction to a disease could also be passed on to offspring?

These spiderlings are the evidence , Portia had informed them. If you doubt that, then I have no use for you. Reply to me only if you will help.

She lost perhaps a third of her correspondents, who have since sought answers elsewhere, and with no success. Portia herself, however, whilst having made advances enough to justify her area of research, is running into the very limits of her people’s technology and also the boundaries of their comprehension.

One of the other scientists who chose to support Portia – call her Viola – has studied the mechanism of Understandings for years, and passed on to Portia all she knew: great tangled nets of notes setting out her procedures and results. The spiders are very reliant on the effortless generational spread of knowledge that their Understandings produce. Their written language, a system of knots and ties, is awkward, long-winded and hard to preserve and store, and this has slowed Portia’s progress greatly. She cannot wait for offspring to inherit her colleague’s grasp of the subject; she needs that acumen now. Viola herself was initially unwilling to even cross the city, for fear of infection.

Today, confirmation arrived that Viola has entered the second stage of the plague, and knowing that is a keen incentive in Portia’s mind: her colleagues are falling one by one to the enemy they seek to defeat. It can only be a matter of time before Portia feels the stirring of it within her own joints.

Bianca is already infected, she believes. In private the maverick scientist has confessed to Portia that she is feeling those elusive first-stage symptoms. Portia has kept her close anyway, knowing that by now there may be no spider in the whole of Great Nest that is not incubating the same disease.

Except for those maddeningly few who are somehow immune.

Thanks to her failing colleague, however, she has a tool formerly denied her. Viola’s peer group operates an ant colony that has been nurtured to the task of analysing the physiological stigmata of Understandings.

This is another great advance that Portia’s society is built on, and yet one that has become a serious limiter of their further advancement. There are hundreds of tamed ant colonies within Great Nest, not counting those in the surrounds that undertake the day-to-day business of producing food, clearing ground or fending off incursions of wild species. Each colony has been carefully trained, by subtle manipulation of punishment, reward and chemical stimulus, to perform a specific service, giving the great minds of the spiders access to a curious kind of analytical engine, using the cascading decision trees of the colony’s own governance as gearing. Each colony is good for a very limited set of related calculations – a vastly skilled yet vastly specialized idiot savant – and retraining a community of ants is a long and painstaking task.