Adrian Tchaikovsky - Children of Time

‘Look, you can see where we’re putting the new stuff in. All looks a bit tatty, doesn’t it? All those micro-impacts on the way, all that vacuum erosion. The old boy’s certainly not what he was,’ Lain remarked softly.

Holsten said nothing.

‘I thought it would be…’ Lain started. She tried a smile, then began another one. He realized that she was unsure of him, nervous even.

He navigated his way across the table to touch her hand, because frankly neither of them was good with those sort of words, nor were they young enough to have the patience to fumble through them.

‘I can’t believe how fragile he looks.’ The future, or lack of it, decided by the fate of that metal egg – tatty, patched and, from this vantage point, how small the Gilgamesh looked.

They ate thoughtfully, Lain progressing from brief moments where she talked far too fast, trying to force on a conversation for the patent reason that she felt they should be having one, then subsiding into longer stretches of companionable quiet.

At last, Holsten grinned at her, out of one of those periodic silences, feeling the youth of the expression stretch his face. ‘This is good.’

‘I hope it is. We’re shipping tons of the stuff over to the Gil .’

‘I don’t mean the food. Not just that. Thank you.’

After they had eaten, and with the rest of Lain’s crew tactfully out of sight and out of mind, they retired to another room she had carefully prepared. It had been a long time since their previous liaison on the Gilgamesh . It had been centuries, of course – long, cold spacefaring centuries. But it seemed a long time, also. They were part of a species that had become unmoored from time, only their personal clocks left with any meaning for them while the rest of the universe turned to its own rhythms and cared nothing for whether they lived or died.

There had been those back on Earth who claimed the universe cared, and that the survival of humanity was important, destined, meant . They had mostly stayed behind, holding to their corroding faith that some great power would weigh in on their behalf if only things became so very bad. Perhaps it had: those on the ark ship could never know for sure. Holsten had his own beliefs, though, and they did not encompass salvation by any means other than the hand of mankind itself.

‘What’s he after?’ Lain asked him later, as they lay side by side beneath a coverlet that had perhaps been some ancient terraformer’s counterpane thousands of years before.

‘I don’t know.’

‘I don’t know either.’ She frowned. ‘That worries me, Holsten. He’s even got his own engineers doing all the work, you know that? He took his pick from the cargo, woke up a bunch of second-stringers and made them his own personal tech crew. Now they’re installing all that stuff you’re helping him with, fitting the Gil with it. And I don’t know what it does. I don’t like having things on my ship that do things I don’t know about.’

‘Are you asking me to betray the commander’s trust?’ Holsten was joking as he said it, but then he was suddenly stung by the thought, ‘Is that what this is about?’

Lain stared at him. ‘Do you think that?’

‘I don’t know what to think.’

‘What this is about , old man, is me wanting to scratch an itch without messing up the way my crew works and…’ He could hear her trying to harden the edge in her voice, and hear it crack a little, even as she did so. ‘And you know what? I’ve been on my own a lot over the last… what? Two hundred fucking years, is what. I’ve been on my own, walking around the Gil and keeping him together. Or with some of my crew, sometimes, to fix stuff. Or sometimes Guyen was there, like that’s better than being on your own. And there was all that mad stuff… the mutiny, the planet… and I feel like I forget how to talk to people, sometimes, when it’s not – not the job. But you…’

Holsten raised an eyebrow.

‘You’re fucking awful at talking to people too,’ she finished viciously. ‘So maybe when you’re around it doesn’t feel so bad.’

‘Thank you very much.’

‘You’re welcome.’

‘Guyen’s thing, it’s for uploading people’s brains into a computer.’ It felt oddly good for him to no longer be the sole custodian of that information. Otherwise, only Guyen knew, as far as Holsten was aware. Even his tame engineers were just working to rote, each on their own piece.

Lain considered that. ‘I’m not sure if that’s a great thing.’

‘It could be very useful.’ Holsten’s tone of voice did not even convince himself.

Lain merely made a sound – not a word, not anything really – just to show him she’d heard him. It left Holsten turning over in his mind what little he had learned about the device from the technical manuals Guyen had set him to work on. They had all been written for people who already knew what the device did, of course. There was no handy moment when the authors had stopped and gone back to explain the basics for their unthinkably distant monkey descendants.

Holsten was becoming sure that he now knew what the upload facility was, though. More, he thought that he might have seen the result of one, and what happened when someone was mad enough to make themselves its subject.

For out there, in the distant dark around another world, in her silent metal coffin, was Doctor Avrana Kern.

Ever afterwards, Bianca has suffered from momentary fits, stumblings in speech and gait, sudden epilepsies when she is cut adrift from her surroundings for varying periods of time, her legs drumming and spasming as if trying urgently to impart a message in some idiolectic code.

But she has survived the plague and, when a fit is not upon her, retained her mind. For Viola, whose biochemical genius furnished the means, the cure came too late. Many others, great minds, great warriors, leading females of peer houses, starving males in the gutter, all have been struck down. Great Nest has been saved, but thousands of its inhabitants were not so lucky. Other cities were similarly affected, even with production of the cure taking over the work of every suitable ant colony, and the theoretical basis being sung down the lines that link the spider communities together. The disaster has been averted, but narrowly. It is now a new world, and Portia’s people recognize the fragility of their place in it. A great many things are poised on the point of change.

It is not Portia herself who first grasps the wider import of her cure. It is hard to say which scientist was first to the mark: it is one of those ideas that seems simultaneously to be everywhere, exciting every enquiring mind. Portia’s treatment has allowed living adult spiders to benefit from a foreign Understanding. Yes, what was transferred was an immunity, but surely the process would work with other Understandings, if they can only be separated out and their page noted in Viola’s great book of the body. No longer will the spread of knowledge be held down by the slow march of generations or by laborious teaching.

The need for this technology is great. The depredations of the plague have made Understandings hard to find: where once a given idea might be held within scores of minds, now there are just a handful at best. Knowledge has become more precious than ever.

It is only a few years after the plague that the first idea is transferred between adults. A somewhat garbled Understanding of astronomy is imparted to a male test subject (as are all such, given some failures in earlier experiments). From there on, any spider may learn anything. Every scientist of Portia’s generation and beyond will stand on the shoulders of the giants that she chooses to reside within her. What one knows, any can know, for a price. An economy of modular, tradable knowledge will swiftly develop.