Adrian Tchaikovsky - Children of Time

Holsten shuddered. ‘You didn’t think about… about upload?’

She eyed him sidelong. ‘Seriously?’

‘You could watch over everything forever, then, and still stay…’ Young . But he couldn’t quite say that, and he had no other way of ending the sentence.

‘Well, apart from adding to the computer problem about a hundredfold, fine,’ she said, but it was plain that wasn’t it. ‘And, it’s just… that copy, the upload, over all those years… I’d have set it on a task that would include killing itself off, at the end, leave no survivors in the mainframe. And would it? Because if it wanted to live, it could sure as hell make sure I died in my sleep. And would it even remember, in the end, who was the real me?’ There was a haunted look on her face that told Holsten she had thought long and hard about this. ‘You don’t know what it’s like… When those bits of Guyen got loose, when they hijacked the comms, listening to them… even now I don’t think the system’s right. And the radio ghosts, mad transmissions from that fucking satellite or something, I don’t know… and…’ Her shoulders slumped: the iron woman taking her mail off, when it was just him and her. ‘You don’t know what it’s been like, Holsten. Be thankful.’

‘You could have woken me,’ he pointed out. It was not the most constructive thing to say, but he resented being cast as the lucky survivor with no choice in the matter. ‘When you woke, you could have woken me.’

Her gaze was level, terrible, uncompromising. ‘I could. And I thought of it. I came so close, you wouldn’t believe, when it was just me and these know-nothing kids I was trying to teach my job to. Oh, I could have had you at my beck and call, couldn’t I? My personal sex-toy.’ She laughed harshly at his expression. ‘In and out of sleep, and in and out of me, is that it?’

‘Well I… ah, well…’

‘Oh, grow up, old man.’ Abruptly she ceased finding herself so funny. ‘I wanted to,’ she said softly. ‘I could have used you, leant on you, shared the burden with you. I’d have burned you up like a candle, old man – and for what? For this moment when I’d still be old, and you’d be dead? I wanted to spare you. I wanted to…’ she bit her lip, ‘keep you. I don’t know. Something like that. Perhaps knowing I wasn’t putting you through this shit helped keep me going.’

‘And now?’

‘Now we had to wake you, anyway. Your chamber was fucked. Irreparable, they tell me. We’ll find you another.’

‘Another? Seriously, now that I’m out—’

‘You go back. I’ll have you drugged and stuffed into a pod by force, if I have to. Long way to go yet, old man.’ When she smiled like that, a hard woman about to get brutal with whatever part of the universe stood in her way, he saw where a lot of the new lines on her face had come from.

‘Go where?’ he demanded. ‘Do what?’ he demanded.

‘Come on, old man, you know the plan. Guyen surely explained it to you.’

Holsten boggled. ‘ Guyen? But he… you killed him.’

‘Best crew appraisal ever,’ she agreed mirthlessly. ‘But his plan , yes. And he was thinking that up without realizing how the ship was starting to fail. What else is there, Holsten? We’re it. This is us, the human race, and we’ve done really fucking well to make it this far against all the odds. But this piece of machinery simply cannot keep going forever. Everything wears out, old man, even the Gilgamesh , even…’

Even me , was the unspoken thought.

‘The green planet,’ Holsten finished. ‘Avrana Kern. The insects and things?’

‘So we burn them out a bit, get ourselves established. Hell, maybe we can domesticate the fuckers. Maybe you can milk a spider. If the bastards are big enough, maybe we’ll be riding around on them. Or we could just poison the fucks, scrub the planet clean of them. We’re humans, Holsten. It’s what we’re good at. As for Kern, Guyen had put in most of the groundwork before. He spent generations fucking with the Gil , shielding the system from her. That old terraforming station she sent us to, it had all the toys. She can try taking over and she can try frying us, and we’ll be ready for both. And it’s not like we have anywhere else to go. And, as luck would have it, we’re already on the way there, so it all lines up nicely.’

‘You’ve got it all worked out.’

‘I reckon I’ll let Karst sort out the frontier-spirit end of things, once we’re there,’ she told him. ‘I reckon I’ll be ready for a rest by then.’

Holsten said nothing, and the pause lengthened uncomfortably. She did not meet his eyes.

At last the words fought themselves free, ‘Promise me—’

‘Nothing,’ she snapped instantly. ‘No promises. The universe promises us nothing; I extend the same to you. This is the human race, Holsten. It needs me. If Guyen hadn’t fucked us up so badly with his immortality scheme, then maybe things could have gone differently. But he did and they haven’t, and here we are. I’m going back to bed soon, just like you, but I’m setting my alarm early, because the next generation’s going to need someone to check their maths.’

‘Then let me stay with you!’ Holsten told her fiercely. ‘It doesn’t sound like anyone’s going to need a classicist any time soon. Or at all, ever. Even Guyen only wanted me as his biographer. Let’s—’

‘If you say grow old together I am going to thump you, Holsten,’ Lain returned. ‘Besides, there’s still one thing you’ll be needed for. One thing I need you to do.’

‘You want your life story set down for posterity?’ he needled, as nastily as he felt able.

‘Yeah, you’re right, I always was the funny one. So shut the fuck up.’ She stood up, leaning against the consoles, and he heard her joints pop and creak. ‘Come with me, old man. Come and see the future.’

She led him through the cluttered, half-unmade chambers and passageways of the crew area, heading towards what he recalled were the science labs.

‘We’re going to see Vitas?’ he asked.

‘Vitas,’ she spat. ‘Vitas I made use of right at the start, but she’s been sleeping the sleep of the not particularly trusted ever since. After all, she’d not soil her hands with maintenance, and I’ve not forgotten how she was egging Guyen on all the while before. No, I’m taking you to see our cargo extension.’

‘You’ve put in new chambers? How?’

‘Just shut up and wait, will you?’ Lain paused, and he could see she was catching her breath, but trying not to show it. ‘You’ll see soon enough.’

In fact, he did not see , when she eventually showed him. Here was one of the labs, and here, taking up much of one wall, was a specimen chamber: a great rack of little containers, hundreds of little organic samples kept on ice. Holsten stared and stared, and shook his head. And then, just as Lain was about to lay into his lack of perception, he suddenly connected the dots and said, ‘Embryos.’

‘Yes, old man. The future. All the new life that our species couldn’t stop itself putting out but that we had no space to raise and bring up. As soon as some over-eager girl decides she wants a family that I, in my wisdom, don’t think we can afford, it’s out with the surgery and it comes here. Harsh world, ain’t it?’

‘Alive?’

‘Of course, alive,’ Lain snapped at him. ‘Because right now I’m still hoping the human race has a future, and we are frankly still kind of short on people from a historical perspective. So we put them on ice, and hope that one day we can fire up the artificial wombs and bequeath a load of orphans to the universe.’

‘The parents must have…’