Adrian Tchaikovsky - Children of Time

At least half the suspension chambers were lying open, he saw. Some others remained closed, the panels on their exteriors displaying the cool blue glow of good functioning. Others were shading into green, and even towards the yellow that his own had perhaps been displaying. He went over to one, looking down at the face of a man he thought he recalled as being on Karst’s team. The panels had a host of little alerts indicating what Holsten assumed was probably bad news at some level.

‘Yes,’ one of the women explained, noting his gaze. ‘We have a lot of work to do. We have to prioritize. That’s why we need you to come with us.’

‘Look…’ Holsten leant forwards to peer at the name on her shipsuit, ‘Ailen, I want to know what the situation is with the Gil and… you’re not Ailen.’ Because abruptly he remembered the real Ailen, one of the science team: a sharp-faced woman who hadn’t got on much with Vitas, or with anyone else.

He was backing away again. ‘How long is it?’ he demanded of them.

‘Since when?’ They were advancing on him slowly, as if trying not to spook an excitable animal, fanning out around the broken coffin to pin him.

‘Since I… Since Guyen…’ But they wouldn’t know. Probably they didn’t even remember who Guyen was, or perhaps he was some demon figure in their myth cycles. These people were ship-born, Gilgamesh ’s children. All that smooth patter, the shipsuits, the appearance of neat competence, it was all an act. They were nothing but monkeys aping their long-vanished betters. The ‘new suspension chamber’ they would take him to, after destroying the real thing, would be nothing but a box with a few wires attached to it: a cargo cult coffin built by credulous savages.

He looked around for something to use as a weapon. There was nothing to hand. He had a mad idea of waking up others of the Key Crew, of popping out the security man like some sort of guardian monster to scare them away. He had a feeling that his persecutors were unlikely to wait patiently while he worked out how to do it.

‘Please, Doctor Mason,’ one of the women asked patiently, as though he was just some confused old man who wouldn’t go back to his bed.

‘You don’t know who I am!’ Holsten yelled at them, and then he ducked and somehow came up holding the whole jagged-hinged lid of the suspension chamber, the unbalancing weight of it a weird reassurance that there was something solid in the world that he had control over.

He threw it. Later, he would look back with amazement, watching this raging stranger he had briefly become, heaving the ungainly missile over the open coffin towards them. He got it bang on target, striking their upraised arms, knocking them out of the way, and then he rushed past them, sleep-suit flapping open at the back as he dashed out of Key Crew.

There was absolutely nowhere he could think of heading, so he just went, stumbling and staggering and pelting down the corridors that he remembered, but that had been transformed in his absence into something strange and broken. Everywhere there were wall panels removed, wiring exposed, some of it ripped out or cut through. Someone had been flaying the Gilgamesh from the inside, exposing its organs and inner workings at countless junctures. Holsten was irresistibly put in mind of a body giving way to the last virulent stages of some disease.

There were two people ahead of him, yet more manicured savages in orange shipsuits. They had been tinkering with a mess of tangled wiring, but stood up abruptly at the shouts issuing from behind Holsten.

He would have to go through them, he knew. At this stage his only hope was to keep running, because that might at least get him somewhere other than this . This was not a place he could be. This was all too clearly a great and delicate space vehicle that was being torn apart from the inside, and how could any of them last after that?

What happened? he was asking himself frantically. Lain was working to contain the Guyen infection. There was nothing I could do. I had to go back to sleep, in the end. So how did it come to this? He felt that he was developing some hitherto unknown ailment, some equivalent of motion sickness caught from too many dissociated moments of history crammed into too little personal time.

Is this the end, then? Is this the human race in the end?

He got ready to put his shoulder up against the two primitives ahead of him, but they refrained from getting in his way, and he just stumbled on past them as they stared at him blankly. For a moment he saw himself through their eyes: a wild-eyed old man bouncing off the walls, with his arse hanging out.

‘Doctor Mason, wait!’ they were calling from behind him, but there was no waiting permitted to him. He ran and he ran, and eventually they cornered him in the observation cupola, with the starfield drifting behind him, as though he was about to hold them off by threatening to jump.

There were more than three of them, by then: the commotion had brought along maybe a dozen – more women than men, and all of them unfamiliar people in old shipsuits with dead names on them. They watched him cautiously, even though there was nowhere else he could go. The three who had woken him were notably neater than the rest, whose garments and faces looked decidedly more lived-in. Welcoming committee , he thought drily. Awards for the best-dressed cannibals of whatever stupid year this is .

‘What do you want?’ he demanded breathlessly, feeling himself at bay against the universe.

‘We need to reallocate you a chamber—’ started the man from the welcoming committee, in those same bright, calm, false tones.

‘No,’ said one of the others. ‘I told you, not this one. Special instructions for this one.’

Oh, of course .

‘So, tell me?’ Holsten broached to them. ‘Tell me who you really are. You!’ He pointed at not-Ailen. ‘Who are you? What happened to the real Ailen that you’re wearing her skin – clothes , her clothes?’ He could feel a deep craziness trying to shake itself loose inside him. This crowd of serious, well-mannered people in stolen shipsuits was beginning to frighten him more than the mutineers, more than the ragged robes of the cultists. And why was it always like this? ‘What’s wrong with us?’ And only from their expressions did he realize that he had just spoken aloud, but the words wouldn’t stop. ‘What is it about us that we cannot live together in this fucking eggshell ship without tearing at each other? That we have to try and control one another and lie to one another and hurt one another? Who are you that you’re telling me where I have to be and what to do? What are you doing to the poor Gilgamesh ? Where did all you freaks come from?’ The last came out as a shriek that appalled Holsten, because something in him seemed to have snapped beyond any control or repair. For a moment he stared at his audience of the young and alien, with his mouth open, everyone including himself waiting to see if more words would be forthcoming. Instead he could feel the shape of his mouth deforming and twisting, and sobs starting to claw and suck at his chest. It was too much. It had been too much. He, who had translated the madness of a millennia-old guardian angel. He who had been abducted. He who had seen an alien world crawling with earthly horrors. He had feared. He had loved. He had met a man who wanted to be God. He had seen death.

It had been a rough few weeks. The universe had been given centuries to absorb the shock, but not him. He had been woken and pounded, woken and pounded, and the rigid stasis of suspension offered him no capacity to recover his balance.