Adrian Tchaikovsky - Children of Time

The Sky Nest is making good progress on its historic mission, rising steadily into the atmosphere. The onboard colony reports on its own radio frequency to Bianca, confirming that all is well, and data from three other distant transmitters triangulate the airship’s position. This is the easy stage of the journey. Barring unforeseen weather, the Sky Nest should reach its effective operational ceiling on schedule.

The Messenger will be clearing the horizon, and Bianca sends a signal to Her, inviting dialogue. She includes a certain amount of the formalities that Temple once used, not because she believes there is any need for them, but because God is better disposed towards those who feign the right humility.

The Messenger is patient enough to outlast generations of Bianca’s kind, and Her thoughts have a momentum that does not take note of developments on the world below – or so runs the theory. Bianca is not so sure. It is certainly a matter of fact that, despite the fall in Temple’s fortunes, the Messenger continues to exhort its congregation to work further on its machine. The demands have become all the more insistent since Bianca’s peers of a generation or so ago essentially ceased to make progress on any literal translation of the Messenger’s desires: neither faith nor ingenuity being able to bridge the gap between divine will and mortal comprehension. Bianca is well aware of the threats and imprecations that have come from on high. The Messenger has preached the coming of a terrible catastrophe. These days, Bianca’s peers believe that this is little more than a crude attempt to motivate them into throwing further resources at an impossible errand.

Again, Bianca is not so sure. She has a gift for seeing problems from unusual angles, and imagining radical possibilities.

The difficulty now, she believes, is not understanding the Messenger, but getting the Messenger to understand her. She needs to break through what appears to be a deeply ingrained train of thought. Historical example – remembered blurrily through the medium of Understanding – shows that the Messenger was not always so single-minded. Obsession or frustration have made Her so. Or perhaps desperation , Bianca reflects.

She intends to show the Messenger something new.

One of the giants whose shoulders she stands on is a still-living colleague who has bred a colony of seeing ants. Their sight is feeble compared to the spiders’ own, but the individual pinpoints of what the colony perceives can be assembled, by fearful mathematical effort, into a complete picture. Moreover, this picture can be encoded into a signal. The code is simple: a sequence of dark and light dots, spiralling outwards from a central point, that together build up into a wider picture. It is as universal a system as Bianca can conceive of.

She has just such an encoded image that has been received into her working colony. Appropriately, it is a view of the Sky Nest itself, viewed just as it was lifting away from the city.

She tells the Messenger that she intends to transmit a picture. There is no obvious sign that she has been understood – since God’s needy tirade continues unabated – but Bianca can only hope that some part of the celestial presence understands. She then instructs her colony to transmit, knowing that several hundred of her species’ top scientists will be listening in on any reply.

The Messenger falls silent.

Bianca cannot contain her excitement, and she races frantically around the silken walls of the room. Whilst it’s not the reaction she was hoping for, it is at least a reaction.

Then the Messenger speaks, requesting clarification. The scientific world holds its breath. God has understood, at least, that something new is in the air, and has replied in that odd unemotional style that Bianca recalls from antique conversations, when She was teaching this common language to Her chosen. This is God at Her most procedural, seeking to understand what has just been received.

Bianca tries, and tries again. The Messenger can grasp that the information transmitted is intended to be a visual image, but decoding it seems insurmountable. In the end Bianca breaks down the task into its simplest elements, bringing the whole operation as close to that universal mathematics as she can, by sending out formulae to describe the spiral that is the blindingly obvious way the image should be read.

Bianca can almost feel the moment when the fulcrum of God’s awareness tilts. A moment later, the response arrives and she learns that God’s language already contains a word for airship.

By this time the Messenger has passed beyond the horizon, but God is insatiable. Show me more is the unmistakable meaning, but Bianca transmits to her peers, cautioning them from further feeding the fire just yet. Privately, she is jealous of her newfound privilege in finally cracking the composure of God. She could continue speaking to God across the far side of the planet, by passing her signal hand-to-hand across other transmitters until it could be sent out towards space once again, but she is willing to wait until God returns to communicate directly with herself, and her peers grudgingly defer to her suddenly elevated eminence.

The Messenger bombards the planet insistently for more information, during which time Bianca comes to a startling conclusion: that the Messenger cannot see what goes on upon the planet right beneath Her. Far from being all-seeing, and despite being readily familiar with the concept of sight, the Messenger is blind. Radio is Her only means of sight.

Bianca has another picture sent to her ant colony, and she transmits it as soon as God returns to the skies above her. It is a simple enough sight, a view of Seven Trees from within, showing the intricate splendour of its scaffolding and the bustling industry of its inhabitants. The developer of the encoded picture originally used it as a test image in her experiments.

God is silent.

Far distant, the Sky Nest finally reaches the heights it was designed for, and finds equilibrium in the upper reaches of the air, its gasbag now expanded to half a kilometre in length. Bianca absently monitors its progress, knowing that the ship’s crew will be testing their mechanisms and colony conditioning in the thin air, ensuring everything is ready for the most dangerous part of the mission, to be undertaken by Portia. Despite the double-hulled insulation of the cabin, the cold is causing some discomfort. Their species has some ability to regulate its body heat and keep its metabolic rate up, but they still grow sluggish whenever the temperature drops. Viola, in charge of the mission, reports that the work is going more slowly than anticipated, but is proceeding within tolerance.

Bianca is still waiting. The progress of the Sky Nest is now of secondary concern. She has silenced the Messenger. Nobody in all the history of her kind has done the like. The eyes of the world are on her with a judgemental gaze.

So she waits.

High above the green world, high above the Sky Nest and all the other industrious endeavours of its inhabitants, Doctor Avrana Kern tries to come to terms with what she has just been shown.

She has seen these things before, these scuttling, spinning monsters. The drone sent from the Gilgamesh saw one briefly, before its demise. Cameras from the shuttle that she downed caught sight of some before it burned. She has known that there were things , unintended things, down on Kern’s World, the serpents in her garden. They were not part of the plan: the ecosystem so carefully designed to provide a home for her chosen.

She has known for lifetimes that they were there, but she has found within herself an almost infinite capacity to overlook. She can reel back in horror one moment, demanding, What have you done with my monkeys? and a mere decade later she has almost forgotten, hidden subroutines coating this offending memory until it no longer irritates the oyster of her mind. The electronic interior of the Sentry Pod is cluttered with such cast-off memories, the understandings that she cannot bear to have as part of herself. They are lost thoughts of the home that she will never see, they are pictures of arachnid monsters, they are images of a barrel burning as it strikes atmosphere. All gone, excised from her functioning mind, and yet not lost. Eliza never throws anything away.