Adrian Tchaikovsky - Children of Time

‘Doctor Mason,’ said one of them, with that relentless, brutal courtesy. ‘We are Engineering. We are crew.’ And the woman he had singled out added, ‘Ailen was my grandmother.’

‘ Engineering? ’ Holsten got out.

‘We are fixing the ship,’ explained another of the youngsters, so very earnestly.

This new information spun about inside Holsten’s skull like a flock of bats trying to find a way out. Engineering. Grandmother. Fixing. ‘And how long will it take,’ he said shakily, ‘to fix the ship?’

‘As long as it takes,’ said Ailen’s granddaughter.

Holsten sat down. All that strength, the rage and the righteousness and the fear, it all drained from him so viscerally that he felt he should be surrounded by a visible pool of spent emotions.

‘Why me?’ he whispered.

‘Your suspension chamber required urgent attention. You had to be retrieved,’ said the welcoming-committee man. ‘We were going to find you somewhere to wait while a new chamber was prepared, but now…’ He glanced at one of his fellows.

‘Special instructions,’ one of the newcomers confirmed.

‘Let me guess,’ Holsten broke in. ‘Your chief wants to see me.’

He could see he was right, although they stared at him with something approaching superstition.

‘It’s Lain, isn’t it,’ he said confidently, and the words unleashed a sudden jagged onset of doubt. My grandmother , not-Ailen had said. And where was Ailen now? ‘Isa Lain?’ he added, hearing a renewed tremble in his voice. ‘Tell me.’

In their eyes he could see himself: a terrified man out of his time.

‘Come with us,’ they urged him. And this time he went.

Bianca has spoken to the Messenger before, and she has taken on a set of Understandings donated by researchers who have distilled the wide history of contact with the artificial god into an easily analysed format. To Bianca, the results are fascinating, and she is not sure any other before her has come to quite the same conclusions.

The Messenger is plainly a sentient entity orbiting her world at a distance of around three hundred kilometres. The earliest extant Understandings record that, for an unknown period of time, the Messenger was sending a radio signal to the world consisting of a series of mathematical sequences. A relatively short time ago, historically speaking, an answering transmission was sent out by one of Bianca’s forebears, and a strange and unsatisfactory dialogue commenced.

It is the character of this dialogue that Bianca has been obsessing over. She has mulled over the second-hand experiences of those who came before, felt their distant conviction that the curious voice they heard belonged to some manner of intelligence, one that was deeply interested in her kind, intent on communicating, and that had a wider purpose. These conclusions seem unarguable from the facts. Bianca is also aware, from the Understandings she has known, that her ancestors constructed a number of beliefs that are, in retrospect, less verifiable. Many came to believe that the Messenger was responsible for their existence, a belief that their God actively fostered. Furthermore, they believed that the Messenger had their best interests at heart, and that the plan they were following so diligently – and, later, at such cost – was one that, could they only understand it, was for their express benefit.

Bianca has considered all of that, and finds none of it supported by fact. She is aware that a great many of her species are still invested in Temple, and the belief that the Messenger is in some way looking out for them, even though that belief is only a wishful shadow of the fervour that once existed. She has been relatively tactful about her conclusions, therefore, but she has made it plain that the traditional, antiquated view of the Messenger as something like their own kind writ large – some great spider in the sky – is absurd.

That the Messenger is an entity of great breadth of intellect, she cannot contest. Potentially it is a superior intellect, but that is a harder judgement to make because she can only conclude that it is a very different type of intelligence from her own. There is plainly a vast amount that the Messenger takes for granted which even Bianca, stretch her mind as she might, cannot grasp. Conversely, there is much that has been said to the Messenger that has evidently been misunderstood, or met with blank incomprehension on the part of God. The capabilities of the divine are apparently limited in curious ways. There are concepts that the most ignorant spiderling would intuitively understand that clearly pass the Messenger by.

And this, of course, is with a common language painstakingly hammered out between the two ends of the twitching radio waves. Ergo, as Bianca is not the first to consider, the Messenger is far from all-seeing or all-knowing. It must feel its way; it must work to understand, and all too often it fails.

Where comprehension is most lacking is in basic everyday matters. The Messenger is plainly unaware of most events occurring on the world it orbits. Moreover, descriptive language is usually lost on it. It is able to deal with visual descriptions in relatively basic ways, but any language coloured by the rich sensorium of a spider – the touch, the taste – tends to lose itself in translation. What is received most readily is numbers, calculations, equations: the stuff of arithmetic and physics.

Bianca is familiar with that sort of communication from other sources. Out in the sea is a thriving civilization of crustaceans that her species has been in sporadic contact with for centuries. A basic gestural language has been negotiated over the years, and the submerged stomatopod state has experienced its own dramas and crises, its upheavals, coups and revolutions. Now they have radio, and scientists of their own, albeit their technology is constrained by their environment and their limited ability to manipulate that environment. They are a world apart, though, not just in being aquatic but in their priorities and concepts. The one thing that Bianca can discuss with them readily is mathematics, something for which the stomatopods have a passion.

She has spent many years refining and elevating the complex architecture of the ant colonies in order to create the tools she needs for her cutting-edge experimentation. The most complex systems, such as the self-regulating flight control-colony aboard the Sky Nest, work on highly mathematical principles, and their chemical architecture is able to receive numerical information and act upon it, even to performing intricate calculations played out in ant bodies and the neurons of individual ant brains.

Bianca is living with a recurring thought concerning the theoretical similarity between the Messenger and an ant colony grown sufficiently advanced and complex. Would it feel the same, to communicate with both?

These days, active communication with the Messenger is strictly limited. There are always odd sects: recidivist peer houses who have somehow nurtured and become consumed by a deviant Understanding. As any reply from the Messenger is received wholesale across most of the planet, such closet zealots are quickly uncovered and hunted down the moment it becomes apparent that someone has opened an unauthorized channel to God. Instead, the major cities each have a say in who has access to the Messenger. Some temples, notwithstanding, attempt to find the divine truth behind the bewildering plan that is still broadcast entreatingly from time to time. Mostly, though, the privilege falls to enquiring scientists, and Bianca has schemed, plotted, flattered and performed favours to buy herself the chance for a free and frank exchange of views.