Adrian Tchaikovsky - Children of Time

There are no aliens that her people ever met or heard from. Or, if there were, their signals were overlooked, passed by: alien in a way that meant no human could see them and recognize them as evidence of life from elsewhere. Kern’s faction and her ideology already knew this, which was why they intended to spread Earth life across the galaxy in as many varied forms as possible. Because it was the only life they had, they had a responsibility to help it survive.

She has lived lifetimes along with the people of the green planet. She and her host of companion systems have soared on their triumphs, shaken under their defeats, sought always to bridge what has ever been a troubled and incomplete understanding. She sees them now, yes. She sees them for what they are.

They are Earth. Their form does not matter.

They are her children.

She backtracks, calling up logs of centuries of conversations from where they are crammed into her electronic memories, having overwritten all the last desperate radio songs of old Earth. She reviews all the baffling mystery of the monkey dialogues now seen under a harsh and uncompromising new light. She stops trying to tell them things, and starts listening.

Much as the spiders can use their Understandings to write new knowledge into their minds – though Kern has no idea of this – so Kern’s current state means that she can rewire her own mind far more readily than a human brain could be reconditioned. She models generations of conversations, changes her perception of the senders, ceases trying to cast her protégés as something one step down from human.

She understands, not perfectly – for great swathes of their talk remain a mystery – but her comprehension of what they are saying, their preoccupations, their perceptions, all of it suddenly falls that much more into place.

And at last she answers them.

I am here. I am here for you.

They gave him a shipsuit. He could hardly present himself in his flimsy sleeping garb, open at the back where the tubes had gone in, for all he had already paraded his pockmarked old backside through half of the crew quarters before they caught him.

The name on his new outfit was ‘Mallori’. Searching his fragmented memory Holsten had no idea who Mallori might have been, and did not want to think about whether there was even a Mallori any more. Would he prefer to be wearing the clothes of a corpse, or those of someone who might any moment wake up and need them back?

He asked after his own suit, but apparently it had been taken away and worn out long ago.

When they were getting him clothes, he saw other people. This generation’s engineers left him in one of the science rooms that had been converted into a dormitory. At least forty people were crammed in there, the walls studded with hooks for hammocks that a few were still sleeping in. They looked frightened and desperate, like refugees.

He spoke with a few. When they found out he was actually crew, they bombarded him with questions. They were insistent. They wanted to know what was going on. So did he, of course, but that answer did not satisfy them. For most of them, their last memory was of a poisoned, dying old Earth. Some even refused to believe how much time had gone by since they had closed their eyes in the suspension chambers that first time. Holsten was appalled at how little some of these escapees had actually known about the endeavour they were embarking on.

They were young: most of the cargo would need to be young, after all, to be able to start anew in whatever circumstances they were thawed out for.

‘I’m just a classicist,’ Holsten told them. In truth there were a thousand things he knew that would be relevant to their predicament, none of which he felt like talking about or thought would much reassure them. The most important question – that of their immediate future – he could not help with, at all.

Then the ersatz engineers came with the shipsuit and led him off, against the complaints of the human cargo.

He had his own questions then; he was feeling calm enough to deal with the answers.

‘What will happen to them?’

The young woman who was leading him glanced grimly back the way they had come. ‘Returned to suspension as soon as chambers are available.’

‘And how long will that be?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘How long has it been?’ He was picking up ample cues from her expression alone.

‘The longest anyone has been out of suspension was two years.’

Holsten took a deep breath. ‘Let me guess: there are more and more you’re having to thaw out, right? Cargo storage is deteriorating.’

‘We’re doing all we can,’ she snapped defensively.

Holsten nodded to himself. They can’t manage it. It’s getting worse. ‘So where…?’

‘Look,’ the woman rounded on him. Her badge said, ‘Terata,’ another lost, dead name. ‘I’m not here to answer your questions. I have other work to get to, after this.’

Holsten spread his hands appeasingly. ‘Put yourself in my position.’

‘Friend, I have enough trouble just being in my own position. And what’s so great about you, anyway? Why the special treatment?’

He nearly responded with, ‘Don’t you know who I am?’ as though he was some grand celebrity. In the end he just shrugged. ‘I’m nobody. I’m just an old man.’

They passed a room of perhaps a score of children, a sight so unexpected that Holsten stopped and stared, and would not be moved on. They were aged around eight or nine, sitting on the floor with pads in their hands, watching a screen.

On the screen was Lain. Holsten choked at seeing her there.

There were other things, too: three-dimensional models, images of what might be the Gil ’s schematics. They were being taught. These were engineers in training.

Not-Terata tugged at his arm, but Holsten took a step into the room. The students were nudging each other, whispering, staring at him, but he had eyes only for the screen. Lain was explaining some piece of work, demonstrating by example and expanded diagram how to enact some particular sort of repair. She was older, on the screen: not the chief engineer, not the warrior queen, just… Isa Lain forever doing her best with the shoddy tools the universe gave her.

‘Where do they…?’ Holsten gestured at the now fatally distracted children. ‘Where do they come from?’

‘Friend, if you don’t know that , then I’m not explaining it to you,’ not-Terata told him acidly, and some of the kids smirked.

‘No, but seriously—’

‘They’re our children, of course,’ she told him sharply. ‘What did you think? How else were we going to keep the work going?’

‘And the… cargo?’ he asked her, because he was thinking about those people stuck outside suspension for months, for years.

By then she had managed to drag him away from the schoolroom, directing the students’ attention back to the teaching display with a stern gesture. ‘We have strict population controls,’ she told him, adding ‘We’re on a ship, after all,’ as if this was some sort of mantra. ‘If we need fresh material from cargo, then we take it, but otherwise any excess production…’ and here her clipped, professional voice faltered just a little, touching on some personal pain so unexpectedly that Holsten stumbled slightly in sympathy.

‘Embryos are put on ice, to await future need,’ she finished, with a scowl at him to cover up her own awkwardness. ‘It’s easier to store an embryo before a certain point in its development than it is a full human being.’ Again, this sounded like some rote-learned dogma that she had grown up with.