Adrian Tchaikovsky - Children of Time

But not all of it. Some of it appeared now to be keeping Guyen alive.

He sat on the steps before the uploader, as though he was a steward awaiting a vanished king, or a priest before a throne fit only for the celestial. But he was steward and king both, minister of his own divinity.

His appearance was plain proof that the ragged cult he had surrounded himself with was still capable of working with the Gil ’s technology, most especially the medical bay. Guyen sat there quite naturally, as though at any moment he might get up and go off for a stroll. But just as the upload facility was threaded through with connections to the ship, so was Guyen. He wore robes that lay open over a shipsuit that seemed to have been patched together from several older garments, but none of it hid the fact that two thick, ridged tubes had been shunted up under his ribs, and that one of the machines beside him seemed to be doing his breathing for him, its flaccid, rubbery sacs rising and falling calmly. A handful of thinner pipes issued from just past his left collarbone, like the flowering bodies of some fungal infection, before running into the mess of medical devices, and presumably cleansing his blood. It was all familiar to Holsten from back home, and he was aware that the Gil must store equipment like this for the extension of life in extreme cases. He had not expected to witness an extreme case, though. He was the oldest man in existence, after all, and if anyone was going to need this stuff, it would be him .

Guyen was an extreme case. Guyen had beaten him to that title by a comfortable margin. Lain had said he was old, but Holsten had not really processed the concept. He had thought he knew what ‘old’ meant. Guyen was old .

The commander’s skin was a shade of grey Holsten had never seen before, bagged and wrinkled about his face where his cheeks and eye sockets had sunk in. Those almost-hidden eyes did not seem to focus, and Holsten was suddenly sure that somewhere there was a machine that was seeing for Guyen as well, as though the man had just started outsourcing his biology wholesale.

‘Commander.’ Absurdly, Holsten felt a curious reverence creeping in on him as he spoke, as though he was about to be born again into Guyen’s ridiculous cult. The man’s sheer antiquity placed him beyond the realm of human affairs, and instead into that of the classicist.

Guyen’s lips twitched, and a voice came from somewhere amid that nest of botched technology.

‘Who is it? Is it Mason?’ It was not Guyen’s voice, particularly. It was not really anyone’s voice, but something dreamt up by a computer that thought it was being clever.

‘Commander, it’s me, Holsten Mason.’

The mechanical sound that followed was not encouraging, as though Guyen’s reaction was too foul-minded for his mechanical translator to pass on. Holsten was suddenly reminded that the commander had never particularly liked him.

‘I see you’ve got the uploader…’ Holsten petered out. He had no idea what the uploader was doing.

‘No thanks to you,’ Guyen croaked. Abruptly he stood up, some sort of servos or exoskeleton lifting him bonelessly to his feet and perching him there incongruously, almost on his toes. ‘Running off with your slut. I might have known I couldn’t depend on you.’

‘All the travelling I’ve been doing since your clowns woke me up has been entirely the idea of other people,’ Holsten shot back hotly. ‘But, seriously, you don’t expect me to ask questions, given what I’ve seen here? You’ve had people just… what, living out their lives here over the last hundred years? You’ve set yourself up like some kind of crazy god-emperor and conned all those poor bastards into being your slaves.’

‘Crazy, is it?’ For a moment Holsten thought Guyen would rush at him, pulling all those tubes out of himself on the way, but then the old man seemed to deflate a little. ‘Yes, well, I can see how it might look crazy. It was the only way, though. There was so much work. I couldn’t just burn through Science and Engineering, using up their lives like I’ve used up my own.’

‘But…’ Holsten waved a hand towards the cluttered mass of machinery at Guyen’s back. ‘How can this even happen? Okay, the uploader, it’s old tech. It’s going to need fixing up, troubleshooting, testing – that much I understand. But not a century of it, Guyen. How can you have been doing this for so long, and got nowhere?’

‘This?’ Guyen spluttered. ‘You think the uploader took all that time?’

‘Well, no I… yes…’ Holsten frowned, wrong-footed. ‘What did, then?’

‘I’ve gone over the whole damn ship , Holsten. The drive’s been upgraded, the system security, the hull shielding. I’d say you’d not recognize the specs of the Gilgamesh – if I thought you had any idea what they looked like before.’

‘But…’ Holsten waved his hands as if trying to encompass the magnitude of what the other man was saying. ‘Why?’

‘Because we’re going to war, and it’s important that we are ready for it when we arrive.’

‘To war with…’ sudden understanding struck. ‘With Kern? With the satellite?’

‘Yes!’ spat Guyen, his lips quivering, the artificial sound of the single word far grander than anything he could surely make on his own. ‘Because we’ve seen it now: the ice worlds, and that grey abomination we’ve left behind. And then there’s the green planet, the life planet, the planet our ancestors made for us, and we all thought the same when we saw that: we thought: “That’s going to be our home.” And it is! We’ll go back and take out the satellite, and we’ll finally be able to stop journeying. And then what you see here, that so offends you with how unnatural it is, all these people living and breeding, that will be right again. Normal service will resume. The human race can pick up at last, after a hiatus of two thousand years. Isn’t that something to strive for?’

Holsten nodded slowly. ‘Yes, I… I suppose it is.’

‘And when that’s all done – after I’ve worked a generation of specialists from cargo to death , Mason! To death from sheer old age! After I’ve taken their descendants and had them taught, and brought them in on my vision – brought them up on it! – and then prepared ourselves to defend against the satellite’s weapons and its attacks, why would I not go back to the upload facility and try to get it to work? Do you think any of this would have happened without me? Do you understand how important having a single vision is? This isn’t something to delegate to some committee; this is the survival of the human race. And I’m old, Mason. I’ve worked nobody harder than I’ve worked myself, and I’m on the brink of collapse, every scrap of medicine we have is needed just to keep my organs working, and it’s still not done , it’s not finished. I need to see it through. I’m going to upload myself into the machine, Mason. It’s the only way I have of being sure.’

‘You want to be immortal.’ It had been intended as an accusation but it came out as something else, something with a hint of respect.

There was a ghastly choking sound, and for a moment Holsten thought that Guyen was actually dying. But no: he was laughing.

‘You think that’s what this is? Mason, I’m dying . The uploader doesn’t change that. The “me” I live inside will die. And soon – before we see the green planet again. I can’t even go back to the coffins now. There’s no way I’d ever wake up. But now that I’ve got the uploader working, I can preserve a copy of me, to make sure things work out. I’m not some mad dictator, Holsten. I’m not some crazy man with delusions of divinity. I was given this task: to shepherd humanity to its new home. There’s nothing more important than that. Not my life, not yours.’