Adrian Tchaikovsky - Children of Time

‘Because you need to fight the Kern satellite, the Brin habitat thing?’ Holsten filled in for him, between mouthfuls.

‘I have to save the species,’ Guyen confirmed, as though that meant the same thing. ‘And we did it. We did it, all of us. All those lives weren’t wasted, after all. We have Empire tech defences, physical and electronic. There’s not a weak point left where Kern can sneak in and switch us all off. But by then I realized that I was old , and I realized how much the ship needed me, and so we got the upload facility and started work on that. I’ve given everything, Mason. I’ve given so many years to the Gilgamesh project. I want… I really want to just close my eyes and let go.’ The artificial voice fell to a static whisper. Holsten recognized this as a sacrosanct pause, and he didn’t try to insert any words.

‘If I thought there was no need of me,’ Guyen murmured. ‘If I thought they – you – could manage without my guidance, then I would go. I don’t want to be here. Who would want to be this dying, intubated thing? But there’s nobody else. The human race stands on my shoulders, Mason. I am the shepherd. Only through me will our people find their true home.’

Mason nodded, and nodded, and thought that Guyen might or might not believe all of that, but knew that he detected a thread of mendacity nonetheless. Guyen had never been a man to take advice or to share command. Why should he now be a man who would hand it over, especially when a kind of immortality was his for the taking if this upload business worked?

If the uploader didn’t wreck the Gilgamesh ’s systems.

‘Why not Lain?’ he asked Guyen.

The old man twitched at the name. ‘What about Lain?’

‘She’s chief engineer. You wanted all this work doing, so why not pop her out sooner? I’ve seen her. She’s older, but not…’ not as much as you , ‘not that much older. You can’t have sprung her from the chambers that long ago. Why not start with her?’

Guyen glowered at him for a moment, or perhaps some machine glowered at him on Guyen’s blind behalf. ‘I don’t trust Lain,’ he snapped. ‘She has ideas.’

There was no real answer to that. By now Holsten had already formed distinct ideas about whether Guyen was crazy, and whether Lain was sane. Unfortunately that did not seem to translate into an equal certainty about which of them was right .

He had one arrow left in the quiver. There was a sequence of recordings that Lain had played for him, before that meeting with Karst and Vitas: the last transmissions of the moon colony they had set up back in Kern’s system. It had been Lain’s secret weapon, to persuade him that Something Must Be Done. It had worked, at the time. She had been merciless, and Holsten had been left as depressed and miserable as he ever had been. He had heard the desperate, panicking voices of the people Guyen had left behind: their pleas, their reports. Everything had been failing, the infrastructure of the colony had simply not been self-sustaining. Long decades after the base was established, it began to die.

Guyen had left a community there, some awake, some in suspension. He had abandoned them to live there, and to raise their children to replace them at the helm of that doomed venture. Then the Gil ’s commander had listened to their dying cries, their frantic begging, enduring the cold, the foul air… The lucky ones would have just rotted in their cold coffins once the power failed.

The last message had been a distress beacon, automated, repeated over and over: the successor – humanity’s version of Kern’s thousand-year call. Finally even that had ceased. Even that had not stood the test of that little span of time.

‘I heard the recordings from the moon base,’ he told Guyen.

The commander’s leathery visage swung towards him. ‘Did you?’

‘Lain played them to me.’

‘I’m sure she did.’

Holsten waited, but there was nothing more forthcoming. ‘You’re… what? You’re denying it? You’re saying Lain faked it?’

Guyen shook his head, or something else shook it for him. ‘What was I supposed to do?’ he demanded. ‘Go back for them?’

Holsten was about to say that, yes, that was exactly what Guyen should have done. Instead, a little scientific awareness coloured his passion, and he began, ‘The time…’

‘We were decades away,’ Guyen agreed. ‘It would have taken decades to return to them. By the time they found there was a problem, they didn’t have anywhere near that long. You wanted me to go through the colossal exercise and waste of turning this ship around, just to bury them?’

Guyen almost managed it then. Holsten’s perceptions of right and wrong flipped and flopped, and he found he could look into that grey, dying face and see the saviour of mankind – a man who had been trained to make tough decisions, and had made them with regret but without hesitation.

Then a real expression finally clawed its way on to Guyen’s face. ‘And, besides,’ he added, ‘they were traitors.’

Holsten sat quite, quite still, staring at the horrible rearrangement of the commander’s features. A kind of childish, idiot satisfaction had gripped the old man, perhaps entirely without his knowledge.

There had been mutineers, of course, as Holsten had more cause than most to remember. He recalled Scoles, Nessel and all that rhetoric about being sacrificed to an icy grave.

And they were right.

And, of course, most of the actual mutineers had been killed. The cargo decanted out to form the moon base crew had not been traitors; in fact they would have had very little idea of what was going on before learning of their fate.

‘Traitors,’ Guyen repeated, as if savouring the word. ‘In the end, they got what they deserved.’ The transition from earnest, martyred leader to raving psychopath had simply happened without any discernible boundary being crossed.

Then people started entering the chamber, Guyen’s people. They shuffled about in their robes, and swirled and milled into a ragged congregation before the great mechanical majesty of Guyen’s dais. Holsten saw them arrive in their hundreds: men, women, children.

‘What’s happening?’ he demanded.

‘We’re ready,’ Guyen breathed. ‘The time has come.’

‘Your upload?’

‘My ascension, my eternal duty that will enable me to guide my people forever, in this world and the next.’ He began to take the steps stiffly, one at a time.

From somewhere, Vitas and a handful of her team had appeared, hovering about the machines like a priesthood. The science chief glanced once at Holsten, but incuriously. Around the edges of the wider chamber, there stood a score or so of men and women in armoured shipsuits – Karst’s security team. One of them must be the man himself, but they had their visors lowered.

So the old gang’s together again, all but one. Holsten was acutely aware that Lain would expect him to buy her some time, although he had no idea if she was even on her way.

‘Guyen,’ he called after the commander. ‘What about them?’ His gesture took in the massing congregation. ‘What happens to them when you’re… translated? Do they just keep multiplying until they overrun the ship? Until there’s nothing left to eat? What happens?’

‘I will provide for them,’ Guyen promised. ‘I will show them the way.’

‘It’ll be the moon colony all over again,’ Holsten snapped. ‘They’ll die. They’ll eat all the food. They’ll just… live everywhere until things break down. This isn’t a cruise ship. The Gil isn’t supposed to be lived in. They’re cargo. We’re all cargo.’ He took a deep breath. ‘But you’ll have your electronic avatar by then. So long as the power holds, you’ll be fine. Probably most of the ship’ll be fine, the cargo in suspension… but these people, and their children, and – then what? – maybe one generation after that, they’ll die. Your followers will die a drawn-out death of starvation and failing machinery, and cold, and suffocation, and all the other things that can happen because we’re out in fucking space !’ He had shocked himself with the vehemence of his tirade, thinking, Do I actually care about all these lunatics that much? But apparently he did.