Adrian Tchaikovsky - Children of Time

Yes, you have heard , he echoes. And yet I would make the opposite exchange. I would have my own peer house, however poor. I would give away all of Portia’s in exchange for some small territory of my own.

She makes a disgusted gesture. How happy I am that you came here merely to tell me this. I wish you a swift journey.

Perhaps you will accompany me?

You will have to wait until Portia exiles me then, and hope that whatever they taint me with will not see the ants of Seven Trees becoming as hostile to me as those of our home , Bianca taps out bitterly.

You have been in communication with Seven Trees already. Fabian feels he must come out and say it.

For a moment, Bianca is still. Then a short gesture prompts him to continue.

I went to your chambers after you were exposed as a heretic, after they took you captive. I read some of the knot-books you had made your notes in. They fit with philosophies and ideas that Portia’s agents report are current in Seven Trees. I saw many parts and pieces in your workshop. It occurred to me that one could construct many useful things with them, and not just the telescopes that you were known for. A radio, perhaps?

Bianca regards him stonily. Her words are stepped out stiffly. You are a dangerous little monster.

I am just a male who has been allowed to use his brain. Will you come with me?

You have some trick to come and go, if you are not here at Portia’s orders , Bianca understands.

I have some tricks, yes. I have some tricks that Seven Trees may be glad of, if we reach there.

Seven Trees , Bianca considers. Seven Trees will be the first city to feel the bite of Great Nest. I know what Portia has been planning, even down here. You may not enjoy your new home long.

Then I will go somewhere else. Anywhere else but here. Fabian skips a little dance at the time-wasting, feeling that eventually someone will come to look for him, or simply to look in on Bianca. Perhaps it will even be Portia. What would she make of these two conspirators together?

Come, then , Bianca confirms. Great Nest has lost its appeal for me now it has shrunk to the confines of this chamber . Show me your trick.

He shows her more than that, for rather than exit upwards into Great Nest he reprograms twenty of the guards into miners. Bianca’s own insect custodians dig her escape tunnel, and by morning the two of them are well on the way to Seven Trees.

Holsten had assumed it would be the cage for him, but apparently things had moved on somewhat in Crazyville. The weird shanty town of makeshift partitions and tents that he had glimpsed briefly before was now all around him. It baffled him really. There was no weather in the Gilgamesh , and any extremes of temperature were likely to prove fatal. And yet everywhere people here had put up makeshift cover against the non-existent elements, draped lines and blankets and cannibalized wall panels to demarcate personal territories that were barely big enough to lie down in. It was as if, after so many centuries spent in cold coffins, the human race was unwilling to be freed from their confines.

He had previously only got a decent look at those votaries who had overseen his captivity. Now he was being held, under guard, in what he recognized as the Communications suite. How long ago – how short a remembered time ago – he had sat here trying to initiate contact with the Brin Sentry Habitat. Now the consoles were folded away – or ripped out – and the very walls were invisible beneath layers of encrusting humanity. They peered out at him, these long-haired, grimy inheritors of the ark. They talked to one another. They stank. He was ready to loathe them, and be loathed right back, observing these degenerate savages locked in the bowels of a ship that they were slowly destroying. He could not do it, though. It was the children that dissuaded him. He had almost forgotten children.

The adults all seemed to possess some disconcerting quality, people who had been fed a narrow range of lies that had slowly locked their faces into expressions of desperate tranquillity, as though to admit to the despair and deprivation that so clearly weighed on them would risk losing them the favour of God. The children, though – the children were still children. They fought and chased each other and shouted and behaved in all the ways he remembered children doing, even back on toxic Earth where their generation had no future but a slow death.

Sitting there, he watched them peeping out, running at the sight of him, then creeping back. He saw them fabricate their little half-worlds between them, malnourished and frail and human in a way that Holsten felt neither their parents nor he himself still were.

It had been a long road to here from Earth, but not as far as he himself had travelled from their state of innocence. The burden of knowledge in his head burned like an intolerable coal: the certainty of dead Earth, of frozen colonies, a star-spanning empire shrunk to one mad brain in a cold satellite… and the ark overrun by the monkeys.

Holsten felt himself coming adrift, cut loose from any emotional anchor. He had found a point where he could look forward – future-wards – and see nothing that he could possibly want, no hoped-for outcome that was remotely conceivable. He felt as though he had reached the end of all useful time.

When the tears came, when his shoulders unexpectedly began shaking and he could not stop himself, it felt like two thousand years of grief taking hold of him and twisting at him, wringing out his exhausted body over and over until there was nothing left.

When two large men eventually came for him, one of them touched his shoulder almost gently, to get his attention. That same reverence he had noticed when he had been their caged pet was still present, and his outburst seemed only to have deepened it, as though his tears and his misery were worth vastly more than any of theirs.

I should make a speech , he thought wryly. I should stand up and urge them: Throw off your chains! You don’t have to live like this! Except what do I know about it? They shouldn’t be here at all, not three generations of ship-rats living in all the spare space of the ship, breathing all the air, eating all the food. He had no promised land he could lead them to, not even the green planet . Full of spiders and monsters, and would the ship even survive the journey there? Not according to Lain. He wondered whether Guyen had thought past the point of his own ascension. Once some corrupted, half-demented copy of his mind was uploaded into the Gilgamesh ’s systems, would he watch the suffering and death of his grey followers with equanimity? Had he promised that he would take them along with him to life everlasting? Would he care when the adults that these children grew into starved, or were cut short by the failure of the Gil ’s life-support?

‘Take me to him,’ he said, and they helped him hobble away. The denizens of the tent city watched him as though he was going to intercede for them with a malign deity, perhaps one whose supplicants could only carry the messages of the faithful after their hearts had been torn out.

Shuttle bays were some of the largest accessible spaces on board. His cage had been in one, and now here was another. The shuttle was missing, again, but more than half the space was cluttered with a vast bank of machinery, a bastard chimera comprised of salvage from the Gil and ancient relics from the terraform station. At least half of what Holsten was looking at did not seem to be connected to anything or fulfilling any purpose – just scrap that had been superseded but not disposed of. At the heart of it, actually up on a stepped dais constructed unevenly of metal and plastic, was the upload facility, the centre of a web of cables and ducts that spilled from its coffin space, and the focus of a great deal of the supporting machinery.