Adrian Tchaikovsky - Children of Time

She would have to harden her heart.

Phase two of the uplift program was a contact exercise. Once the monkeys had developed their own singular culture to the extent that they could send radio transmissions, they were ready for contact with the wider universe. And now I am the wider universe. The Sentry Pod would begin developing a means of communication, starting with the simplest binary notation and using each stage to bootstrap up to a more complex language, just as if a computer was being programmed from scratch. It would take time, depending on the willingness and ability of the monkeys to learn, generation to generation.

‘But first send them a message,’ Avrana decided. For all that the inhabitants of the planet could not possible understand her, right now, she wanted to set the tone. She wanted them to understand what they were in for when she and they could finally communicate.

‘Awaiting your message,’ Eliza prompted.

‘Tell them this,’ Avrana declared. Perhaps, in their simian ignorance, they would record it and later re-read it, and understand it all.

Tell them this: I am your creator. I am your god.

Holsten was pondering his relationship with time.

Not long ago, it seemed that time was becoming something that happened to other people – or, as other people had then been in short supply, to other parts of the universe. Time was a weight that he seemed to have been cut free from. He stepped in and out of the forward path of its arrow, and was somehow never struck down. Lain might call him ‘old man’ but in truth the span of objective time that had passed between his nativity and this present moment was ridiculous, unreal. No human ever bestrode time as he had done, in his journey of thousands of years.

Now, in his cell, time weighed him down and dragged at his heels, chaining him to the grindingly slow pace of the cosmos where before he had leapt ahead across the centuries, skipping between the bright points of human history.

They had hauled him from the suspension chamber and thrown him in this cage. It had been twenty-seven days before anyone gave him even an indication of what was going on.

At first, he’d thought it was a dream of the mutineers kidnapping him. He had been quite sanguine before he realized that the people dragging him through the Gilgamesh were not the long-dead Scoles and company, but total strangers. Then he had entered the living quarters.

The smell had assailed him – an utterly unfamiliar, sick reek that even the Gil ’s ventilation had not been able to purge. It was the scent of close-packed human habitation.

He had a blurred recollection of a former operations room now festooned with grey cloth, a veritable shanty town of makeshift drapes and hangings and close partitions – and people, lots of people.

The sight had shocked him. Some part of him had grown comfortably used to being part of a small and select population, but he registered at least a hundred unfamiliar faces in that brief moment. The press of them, the closeness of their living conditions, the smell, the sheer raucous noise, all of it merged into the sense of confronting a hostile creature, something fierce and inimical and all-consuming.

There had been children.

His wits had started to come to him by then, with the thought: The cargo’s got loose!

His captors all wore robes of the same sheer, grey material that the squatters were also using for their amateurish tents – something that the Gilgamesh had presumably been storing for some other purpose entirely, or that had been synthesized in the workshops. Holsten had spotted a few shipsuits during his hurried passage through the living quarters, but most of the strangers had been wearing these shapeless, sagging garments. They were all thin, malnourished, underdeveloped. They wore their hair long, very long, past the shoulders. The whole scene had a weirdly primal feel to it, a resurgence of the primitive days of mankind.

They had seized him, locked him up. This was not just some room in the Gil that they had secured. Within one of the shuttle bays they had welded together a cage, and this had become his home. His captors had fed him and sporadically removed the pail provided for his other functions, but for twenty-seven days that was all he had. They seemed to be waiting for something.

For his part, Holsten had eyed the shuttle airlock and begun to wonder if his future did not include some kind of space-god sacrifice. Certainly the manner of his captors was not simply that of oppressors or kidnappers. There was a curious respect, almost reverence to be observed amongst some of them. They did not like to touch him – those who had manhandled him to the cage had worn gloves – and they refused to meet his eyes. All this reinforced his growing belief that they were a cult and he was some sort of sacred offering, and that the last hope for humanity was even now vanishing away beneath a tide of superstition.

Then they set him to work, and he realized that he must surely be dreaming.

One day he woke up in his cell to find that his captors had brought in a mobile terminal: a poor, lobotomized sort of a thing, but at least a computer of sorts. He leapt on it eagerly, only to find it linked with nothing, entirely self-contained. There was data there, though, files of familiar proportions written in a dead language that he was frankly coming to loathe.

He looked up to find one of his captors peering in – a thin-faced man, at least a decade younger than Holsten but small-framed like most of them and with pockmarked skin suggesting the aftermath of some manner of disease. As with all these bizarre strangers, he had long hair, but it was carefully plaited and then coiled at the back of his neck in an intricate knot.

‘You must explain it.’

It was the first time any of them had spoken to Holsten. He had begun to think that he and they shared no common language.

‘Explain it,’ Holsten repeated neutrally.

‘Explain it so it can be understood. Make it into words. This is your gift.’

‘Oh, for… you want me to translate it?’

‘Even so.’

‘I need access to the Gil ’s main systems,’ Holsten stated.

‘No.’

‘There are translation algorithms I wrote. There are my earlier transcriptions I’ll need to refer to.’

‘No, you have all you need in here .’ With great ceremony the robed man pointed at Holsten’s head. ‘Work. It is commanded.’

‘Commanded by whom?’ Holsten demanded.

‘Your master.’ The robed man stared coldly at Holsten for a moment, then suddenly broke off his gaze, as though embarrassed. ‘You will work or you shall not eat. This is commanded,’ he muttered. ‘There is no other way.’

Holsten had sat down at the terminal and looked at what they wanted from him.

That was the beginning of his understanding. Obviously he was dreaming. He was trapped within a dream. Here was a nightmarish environment, both familiar and unfamiliar. Here was a task without logic that was nonetheless the cracked mirror of what he had undertaken when last awake, when the Gilgamesh had been in orbit over the grey planet. He was in the suspension chamber still, and dreaming.

But of course one did not dream in suspension. Even Holsten remembered enough about the science to know that. One did not dream because the cooling process brought brain activity to an absolute minimum, a suspension of even the subconscious movements of the mind. This was necessary because unchecked brain activity during the enforced idleness of a long sleep would drive the sleeper insane. Such a situation arose out of faulty machinery. Holsten remembered clearly that they had lost human cargo already: perhaps this is how it had been for those martyrs.