Adrian Tchaikovsky - Children of Time

There are some who say that the perpetrator was Portia herself, whose name has since acquired a curious mystique – often spoken of but never seen, her final whereabouts and fate a mystery.

By then, however, Fabian’s new architecture cannot be put back in its box. His extensive peer house, mostly but not uniformly male, has spread well beyond Seven Trees, the Understanding carefully guarded, but its advantages aggressively exported as stock in trade. A technological revolution is sweeping the globe.

Already it has reached those who speak to the Messenger. The application of Fabian’s genius to matters of the divine is still in its infancy, but his wartime revelation – that his new architecture could in some way approximate to what God wishes them to build – is the dream of a number of other enquiring minds.

And out in cold orbit is the fused thing that is Avrana Kern and the Sentry Pod, its computer system and the Eliza mask that it sporadically dons. She is desperate to communicate with her creation. She has taught her monkeys, as she thinks of them, a common language. Originally a stripped-down Imperial C, it has mushroomed into a dense field of unfamiliar concepts, as the monkeys have run away with it. She is aware that, in opening communications with the inhabitants of the green planet, she has broken new ground in the long history of the human race. Having no other humans (in her view) to share it with, she finds the triumph lacking. She is also increasingly aware that the frame of reference of her new people seems very different. Although they share a language, she and they do not seem to have the commonality of concept that she would have expected.

She is increasingly concerned about them. They seem further away from her than she would have anticipated from fellow primates.

She is aware that direct interference from her, in the sense of shoehorning her desires directly into their nascent culture, is entirely against the dictates of the Brin’s mission, which was to gently encourage them, and always let them come to her. There is no time. She has been away for far too long, aware that the Sentry Pod’s power reserves have dwindled during her long sleep, and have subsequently been drained almost to nothing by her showdowns with the Gilgamesh , its drones and its shuttles. The solar cells recharge slowly, but the energy deficit has already taken its toll, starving the auto-repair systems which have slowly accumulated a colossal and continual workload just to keep the pod’s vital systems going.

She is increasingly, miserably aware that she herself is now better classified as a vital system than anything truly living. There is no line where the machine leaves off and she begins, not any more. Nothing of Avrana Kern is so viable as to be able to stand on its own. Eliza and the upload and the withered walnut that is her biological brain are inseparable.

She has been trying to transmit to the monkeys her plans for an automated workshop, which she could then instruct to start building things down on the planet. She could then transfer herself, datum by datum, down into the gravity well. She could finally meet her arboreal people. Most importantly, she could communicate with them properly. She could look into their eyes and explain herself.

The monkeys have made draggingly slow progress, and time is one of many things that Avrana Kern simply does not have enough of. She cannot understand it, but the technology that seems to have arisen on her planet has gone in a wildly different direction to that of Earth. They do not even seem to have invented the wheel, yet they have radios. They are slow to understand much of the task she has set them. She, in turn, cannot follow much of what they say to her. Their technical language is a closed book.

And that is a shame, because she needs to prepare them. She needs to warn them.

Her people are in danger.

The Gilgamesh is coming back.

Portia is watching art being made.

She is fidgety, nervous – not the fault of the art itself, but she has a great task in front of her, which occupies most of her mind. She never had much patience with sculpture-telling at the best of times. A shame that all this is being done in her honour.

Not just hers, of course. All twelve of her crew are here, being seen and being lauded. Portia is not even nominally in command of the voyage. However, hers is the task of greatest risk. Hers is the name being drummed about the Great Nest district of Seven Trees.

She tries to shrug off her nerves and concentrate solely on the performance. Three nimble male artists are telling the story of the martyr Fabian, the great scientist and enfranchiser. Starting with just a few support lines they have spun themselves a three-dimensional narrative, their threads crossing and knotting and intersecting in a constantly evolving kinetic sculpture of silk that suggests scenes from the famous pioneer’s life, and finally death. Each scene is built on the bones of the last, so that the ephemeral and delicate sculpture they create grows and branches, a constantly evolving visual narrative.

Portia is ashamed to find she is bored. She does not have that poetic turn of mind to properly appreciate this art form – the allusions and memes required to follow the story are not found in her Understandings. She is a pragmatic creature of simple, visceral pleasures. She hunts, she wrestles, she climbs, she mates; traditional pursuits and perhaps a little old-fashioned. She prefers to think of them as timeless.

She could, of course, go to the city library and obtain an Understanding that would immediately allow her to appreciate this art in all its glory, but what would she lose? Some less-regarded ability or knowledge would be shouldered out, for her mind has finite limits on what it can retain. Like many of her kind, she has grown comfortable with what she is, and loathe to change if there is no grand need for it.

She stays still for as long as she can bear, politely eyeing the ever-more-complex structure, while feeling the appreciative stir and tremble of the audience, knowing only that it is something denied to her. At last, she simply cannot stay any longer in that crowd under that grand, tented ceiling, and creeps out as covertly as possible. This is her night, after all. Nobody is going to deny her.

Outside, she finds herself in the centre of the great conurbation that is Seven Trees’ scientific district. Struck by a need for greater height and clear air, she ascends limb over limb, by line and by branch, until she can see the darkness of the sky above, seeking out the pinpoint bright dots that are stars. She knows, by learning and by Understanding, that they are so far away as to make any concept of the real distance meaningless. She recalls nights spent in the wilderness, though – for there is still wilderness despite the growth of the spider communities and their attendant support structures. Once away from the constant glare of the bioluminescent city lights, the stars can seem clear and close enough to touch.

Here, though, she can barely see them at all, with everything around her lit up in a hundred shades of green and blue and ultraviolet. A strange thing that she, whose work places her at the very fang-point of scientific advance, feels that life is outstripping her, actually leaving her behind.

Within her she has Understandings that were first held by some distant hunting ancestress whose life was constant toil: working to feed herself and her kin, fighting off ancient enemies who are now safely domesticated or extinct or driven to the wildest corners of the map. Portia – this Portia – can look back at the simplified, even romanticized, recollections of that time that she has inherited, and yearn for a less complex life.