Adrian Tchaikovsky - Children of Time

‘I’m sorry, I—’

‘We’re here.’

They had reached Communications. Until he actually stood there, he had not realized where they were going.

‘But what—?’

‘Just go in.’ Not-Terata gave him quite a hard shove, and then she walked away.

For a long time Holsten stood outside the door to Comms, obscurely fearful of crossing the threshold, until at last the hatch slid aside of its own accord and he met the gaze of the woman inside.

He had not known what to expect. He had thought there might be no living being at all, just a face on a screen that was perhaps something like Lain’s death mask, perhaps with taints inherited from Guyen and Avrana Kern and who-knew-what-else that was rattling about in the system. If not that, then he had been terrified that what would meet his gaze might be something like Guyen had become: a withered lich that had once been human, sustained by and inseparable from the mechanisms of the ship itself, harbouring dreams of immortality in its curdling skull. To see the woman he had known curtailed to that would have been bad. Worse would be for the door to open and show him someone else entirely.

But this was Lain – Isa Lain. She was older, of course. She must have been fifteen years his senior by now, a veteran of the long battle against entropy and hostile computer intrusion that she had been fighting, on and off, since they last parted. Fifteen more years would have been almost nothing to the people of the Old Empire. All the myths of that elder age confirmed that the ancients had lived far longer than a natural human span. In these reduced days, however, fifteen more years had made Lain old.

Not ancient, not decrepit – not yet. She was a working woman in the last days of her strength, staring down time’s inevitable slope which would rob her of her abilities piecemeal with every step. She was heavier than she had been, and her face was written over in that universal human language of hardship and care. Her hair was grey, long, tied back in a severe bun. He had never seen her with long hair before. She was Lain, though: a woman he had seen evolve in snapshot over the course of so short a time for him, but a lifetime for her. He felt an upsurge of feeling in just looking at her face, the lines and weathering doing their best to hide her familiarity from him, and failing.

‘Look at you, old man,’ she said faintly. She seemed as affected by his years as he was by hers.

She was wearing a shipsuit with the name ripped off, a garment fraying at the elbows, patched at the knees. The ragged remains of another suit hung about her shoulders, reduced to something like a shawl that she fingered thoughtfully, while looking at him.

Holsten stepped inside, looking at comms, noting two dark panels and one that had been gutted, but the rest of the stations seemed to be operational. ‘You’ve been busy.’

A nameless expression flickered across her face. ‘That’s it, is it? All this time, and it’s still the old flip remarks?’

He gave her a level look. ‘Firstly, it’s not been “all this time”. Secondly, it was always you ready with the lip, not me.’

He was smiling as he said it, because that kind of banter he was used to from her was something he dearly wanted to hear just now, but she just stared at him as though he was a ghost.

‘You haven’t changed.’ And, as she said it, it was plain she knew how fatuous a remark it was, but still something she needed to get out. Holsten Mason, historian, had now outlived the histories. Here he was, bumbling through time and space, making mistakes and being ineffectual, the one stable point in a moving universe. ‘Oh, fuck, come here, Holsten. Just come here.’

He didn’t expect the tears, not from her. He didn’t expect the fierce strength of her arms as she held him to her, the shaking of her shoulders as she fought against herself.

She held him out at arm’s length, and he was struck with how alien this situation must be for her. How normal for him to meet an old friend and find her changed and aged, and search the lines of her face for the woman she had been. How wrenching it must be for her to try and find the older man he might one day become in his untouched features.

‘Yes,’ she said at last, ‘I’ve been busy. Everyone’s been busy. You’ve no idea how lucky you are that you get to travel freight.’

‘Tell me,’ he encouraged her.

‘What?’

‘Tell me what’s going on. Please somebody tell me something, at least.’

She lowered herself carefully into what had once been Guyen’s seat, gesturing to another for him. ‘What? Situation report? You’re the new commander? The scholar doesn’t like being kept in the dark?’ And that sounded so like the old – the young – Lain that he smiled.

‘The scholar does not,’ he confirmed. ‘Seriously, of all the people left in the… on the ship, it’s you I trust. But you’re… I don’t know what you’re doing with the ship, Lain. I don’t know what you’re doing with these… your people here.’

‘You think I’ve gone like him .’ No need to name any names there.

‘Well, I wondered.’

‘Guyen fucked over the computer,’ she spat out. ‘All his upload nonsense, it went just about like I said it would. Every time he tried to grow, in there, it shut off more of the Gil ’s systems. I mean, a human mind, that’s a fuckload of data – and there were four or five separate incomplete copies fighting for space in there. So I set to work, trying to contain them. Trying to keep the essentials running: keeping the cargo cold; stopping the reactor getting too hot. You remember, that was the plan when you went under.’

‘Seemed like a good plan. I remember you said you’d be going into suspension yourself, soon enough,’ Holsten noted.

‘That was the plan,’ she confirmed. ‘Only there were complications. I mean, we had to find cargo space for Guyen’s crazies. Karst had great fun rounding them up and putting them on ice. And by then some of them were working with my people in keeping a lid on the hardware situation. And Guyen – the fucking Guyen archipelago strung out through the system – kept getting out, trying to copy itself, eating up even more space. We purged and we isolated and we set packs of viruses on the bastard, but he was seriously entrenched by then. And when my team was up and running and I had faith in them, I went under like I said I would. And I set myself a wake-up call. And when I woke again, things were worse.’

‘Guyen still?’

‘Yeah, still him, still clinging on by his electronic fucking fingernails, but my people were finding all sorts of other shit going wrong too.’ Holsten had always found Lain’s swearing faintly shocking, but weirdly attractive in a taboo sort of way. Now, from her old lips, it was as though she had been practising all those years for just this level of bitter world-weariness. ‘Problems from losing more cargo, and other systems going down that Guyen and his halfwit reflections weren’t responsible for. There was a bigger enemy out there all along, Holsten. We were just kidding ourselves that we’d got it beaten.’

‘The spiders?’ Holsten demanded immediately, all of a sudden imagining the ship infested with some stowaways from the green planet, no matter how impossible that seemed.

Lain gave him an exasperated look. ‘Time, old man. This ship’s close to two and a half thousand years old. Things fall apart. Time is what we’re running out of.’ She rubbed at her face. The mannerism made her look younger, not older, as though all those extra years might just be scrubbed away. ‘I kept thinking I’d got a lid on it. I kept going back to sleep, but there was always something else. My original crew… we tried taking it in shifts, parcelling out the time. There was just too much work. I lose track of how many generations of engineers there have been now, under my guidance. And a lot of people didn’t want to go back under. Once you’ve seen a few failed suspension chambers…’