Adrian Tchaikovsky - Children of Time

‘Argued? Fought? Kicked and screamed?’ Her stare was barren. ‘Yeah, you could say that. But also they knew what would happen ahead of time, and they still did it. Biological imperative’s a funny thing. The genes just want to squeeze themselves into another generation, no matter what. And, of course, we’ve had generations growing up here. You know how kids are. Even when you offer ’em countermeasures, they won’t use them half the time. Ignorant little fucks, so to speak.’

‘I don’t understand why you thought I so desperately needed to see all this,’ Holsten pointed out.

‘Oh, yeah, right.’ Lain bent over the console and skimmed through various menus until she highlighted one of the embryo containers. ‘That one, see it?’

Holsten frowned, wondering if there was some mutation or defect that he was supposed to be noticing.

‘What can I say?’ Lain prompted. ‘I was young and foolish. There was this lusty young classicist, he swept me off my feet. We had dinner by the light of dying stars in a ten-thousand-year-old space station. Oh, the romance.’ Her deadpan delivery never wavered.

Holsten stared at her. ‘I don’t believe you.’

‘Why?’

‘But you… you never said. When we were up against Guyen, you could have…’

‘Right then I wasn’t sure we had a future, and if Guyen had found out, and got control of the system… It’s a girl, by the way. She’s a girl. Will be a girl.’ And it was that repetition that told Holsten how close to the edge Lain was now skating. ‘I made the choice, Holsten. When I was with you, I chose. I made this happen. I was going to… I thought there would be time later… I thought there would be a tomorrow when I could go back to her and… but there was always some other damned thing. The tomorrow I was waiting for never came. And now I’m not sure I…’

‘Isa—’

‘Listen, Holsten, you’re going back under as soon as they find you a chamber, right? You’re priority, fuck all the rest. There are some perks to being me right now, and first off is that I call the shots. You go under. You wake up when we hit the green planet system. You make planetfall, and you make sure everything is done to make that place ours , come crazy computers or monster spiders or whatever. And you make it somewhere she can live. You hear me, old man?’

‘But you—’

‘No, Holsten, this thing you get to take responsibility for. I’ll have done all I can. I’ll have done everything humanly possible to bring about this tomorrow. It’ll be down to you after that.’

Only later, after she saw him to his newly restored suspension chamber, did he glimpse the name still tagged on the ragged shawl of shipsuit she wore about her shoulders. The sight of it froze him just as he was about to get a leg up into the refurbished coffin. Really? For all this time? Facing that long, cold oblivion, with no certainty that he would wake up again, it was curiously warming to know that someone, even if it was this cynical bitter woman, had been holding a torch for him all those unfelt years.

Portia wants to go out along with the rest of the crew, but Viola has forbidden it. She is being saved for her own private ideal. Until then, Portia is to be as cosseted and pampered as a sacrificial king.

This high up, the Sky Nest’s colony needs physical help to keep the airship envelope in shape, and to keep the ship maintained. Even working from within, the cold is getting to the ants. Tiny and unable to regulate their own temperature, they cannot accomplish much outside the core of the ship itself, and so the spiders have donned their special suits and gone out to crawl about the exterior of their floating home, entering and leaving through pressure doors of their own weaving and re-weaving, temporary airlocks appearing and disappearing as needed. They stumble and stutter back in twos and threes, their work done for the moment. Some return bound to their comrades’ backs, overcome by the cold, despite the layers of silk swathing their bodies and the chemical heaters slung beneath their bellies. Portia feels uncomfortable at not being able to assist, for all she understands that she is being saved for another ordeal.

There were a few who had clung to the idea that being closer to the sun would be to feel its unmitigated heat. They have been roundly disabused of this notion. Up here the thin air leaches at their bodies like a sightless vampire. And, despite this, Portia would have joined them, worked knee to knee alongside them and pulled her weight, even as the airship is pulling all of their weights.

The other reason that she wants to work is to take her mind off what is going on down below – or up above, depending on perspective. The sudden silence of the Messenger has affected them all. Reason dictates that their mission is no more than peripherally connected – in that both events involve the erratic brilliance of Bianca – but, like humans, the spiders are quick to see patterns and make connections, to extract untoward significance from coincidence. There has been a curious anxiety about the crew, for all that those glory days of Temple are long gone. Being this much closer to the essential mystery of the Messenger, and so cut off from all they know, arouses strange thoughts.

At last Viola is confident that the Sky Nest will coast stably in the thin air, and she liaises with radio beacons on the ground. The air currents – that have been mapped out crudely over the last few years – are carrying them closer to the crisis point.

Portia, Fabian, go to your station , she orders.

Portia questions her respectfully, signalling with terse passes of her palps that she feels the mission could be achieved single-handed as easily as it could with two. It is not a lack of faith in Fabian’s abilities that moves her, but a fear for him. Males are so frail, and she feels protective.

Viola indicates that everything will proceed according to the plan, and that plan calls for two of them to enter the smaller craft mounted atop the Sky Nest. The Star Nest, they call it, and it will carry them where no spider has ever been – into regions that have been the province of myth and imagination since their records began. Some small unpiloted vessels have coasted close to that boundary. Now, the scientists believe they have come to an understanding of the conditions at the very edge of the world’s reach, and have planned accordingly. Portia and Fabian will have to wrestle with the truth of their beliefs, and they go as a pair in case one of them should fail.

The Sky Nest is robust, able to survive the hectic and turbulent weather conditions extending all the way down to the surface of their world. It is still a great, almost weightless object: a cloud of silk and wood and hydrogen; a small crew of spiders and a handful of engines are the heaviest things aboard. Still it is not light enough. When fully inflated, the Star Nest will be a reasonable fraction of the Sky Nest’s size, and carry a much smaller fraction of its weight: a truncated onboard colony to handle life-support, a radio, two crew, the payload.

This is one of the things that Bianca and her peers have discovered, that there is a tapering edge to the sky, that the air diminishes as a traveller grows more distant from their world, thinner and colder and more unreliable until… Well, there remains some disagreement as to whether it actually ends , or whether it simply grows so rarefied that no instrument exists able to detect it. How many molecules of air in a square kilometre of space constitute a continuation of the atmosphere, after all?

Portia makes her way to the robing chamber, to be fitted into her suit. This is not simply an insulating covering, such as the sailors have worn, but a cumbersome and curious outfit that is bulky about the joints, and bloated about the abdomen where the air tanks are housed. At the moment it is depressurized, and hangs flaccid about her, feeling surprisingly heavy, interfering with her movements and making a mumble out of her attempts to speak. On this mission she will be reduced to palp signals and radio.