Adrian Tchaikovsky - Children of Time

‘Tribe’ seemed to be the engineers, or those descendants of theirs currently keeping the ship together. The few of them still there now bolted off, with the air of people who had found the entire proceedings boring and unnecessary, but had been aware that they should be on their best behaviour nonetheless, like children during a religious service.

‘Right, Mason… Harlen?’

‘Holsten.’

‘Right.’ Karst nodded, unapologetic. ‘Something special for you, right? You actually get to do your job. The satellite’s transmitting all sorts of shit, and you’re the only person who might know what it’s saying.’

‘Transmitting… to us?’

‘Yes. Maybe. Alpash?’

‘Probably no,’ the young engineer confirmed.

‘Anyway, whatever, take Mason here and plug him in. Mason, if you can make anything out of it, let me know. Personally I reckon it’s just gone mad.’

‘Madder,’ Holsten corrected and, although this hadn’t been a joke, Karst laughed.

‘We’re all in the boat, aren’t we?’ he said almost fondly, glancing around at the battered confines of the Gilgamesh . ‘All of us on the same old boat.’ The mask slipped, and for a second Holsten was looking into the stress-fractures and botch-job repairs that made up Karst’s over-strained soul. The man had always been a follower, and now he was in charge, the last general of the human race facing unknown odds with the highest possible stakes. His somewhat disjointed briefing now looked in retrospect like a man fighting for his composure – and holding on to it, just. Against all expectations, Karst was coping. Come the hour, come the man.

Also, he might be drunk. Holsten realized he couldn’t tell.

Alpash led him to a console, still acting as though Holsten and Karst and the rest were heroes of legend brought to life, but turning out to be somewhat disappointing in the flesh. Holsten wondered, with a professional curiosity, whether some crazy myth cycle had grown up amongst the Tribe, with himself and the rest of Key Crew as a pantheon of fractious gods, trickster heroes and monsters. He had no idea how many generations had gone by since their last actual contact with anyone not born on the Gilgamesh , since…

He had been about to ask, but a piece clicked into place and he knew that he wouldn’t ask, not now. Not when he had thought of Lain at last. For Lain must have died long, long ago. Had she thought of him, at the end? Had she come to look into the cold stillness of his coffin, her sleeping prince who she had never permitted to come back for her?

Alpash gave a nervous cough, picking up on Holsten’s suddenly changed mood.

The classicist scowled, waved off the man’s concern. ‘Tell me about these transmissions.’

With a worried look, Alpash turned to the console. The machinery looked battered, something that had been taken apart and put back together more than once. There was some sort of symbol and some graffiti stencilled on the side, which looked new. Holsten stared at it for a moment before disentangling the words.

Do not open. No user-serviceable parts inside.

He laughed, thinking that he saw the joke, the sort of bleak humour that he recalled engineers resorting to in extremis. There was nothing on Alpash’s face to suggest that he saw any humour in it, though, or that the slogan was anything other than a sacred symbol of the Tribe. Abruptly Holsten felt bitter and sick again. He felt like Karst must feel. He was just a thing of the lost past trying to recapture an almost-lost future.

‘There’s a lot of it,’ Alpash explained. ‘It’s constant, on multiple frequencies. We can’t understand any of it. I don’t know what this Avrana Kern is, but I think the commander may be right. It sounds like madness. It’s like the planet is whispering to itself.’

‘The planet?’ Holsten queried.

‘We’re not getting these signals direct from the satellite, as far as we can understand.’ Now that Alpash began speaking more, Holsten heard unfamiliar rhythms and inflections in his words – a little of Lain, a little of the Gilgamesh ’s automatic systems, a little of something new. There was obviously a ship-born accent now.

Alpash brought up a numerical display that was apparently intended to be educational. ‘You can see here what we can tell from the transmissions.’ Holsten was used to the Gilgamesh sugar-coating that sort of data in a form that a layman could understand, but that concession was apparently not something the Tribe felt it needed.

Seeing his blank look, the engineer went on, ‘Our best bet is that these are transmissions being directed at the planet, just like the original numerical sequence, and we’re now catching bounce-back. They’re definitely coming to us by way of the planet, though.’

‘You’ve had any other classicists working on this, out of cargo? There must be a few students or…’

Alpash looked solemn. ‘I’m afraid not. We have searched the manifest. There were only a very few at the start. You are the last.’

Holsten stared at him for a long while, thinking through the implications of that: thinking about Earth’s long history before the fall, before the ice came. His society had possessed such a fragmented, imperfect understanding of the predecessors that they were constantly trying to ape, and did even that poor record now boil down to just himself, the contents of one old man’s head? All that history, and if… when I die…? He did not see anyone having time to attend history classes in Karst’s survivalist Eden.

He shivered – not from the usual human sense of mortality, but from a feeling of vast, invisible things falling away into oblivion, irretrievable and irreplaceable. Grimly he turned to the messages that Alpash was now showing him.

After some work, Holsten finally deciphered the display enough to register just how many of the recordings there were, and these presumably just a fraction of the total. What’s Kern playing at? Maybe she has gone off the deep end, after all. He accessed one, but it wasn’t anything like the other transmissions from the satellite which he remembered. Still… Holsten felt long-unused academic parts of his brain try to sit up and take notice, seeing complexity, repeated patterns. He performed whatever analysis and modelling the console allowed him. This wasn’t random static, but nor was it the Old Empire messages that Kern/Eliza had used previously. ‘Perhaps it’s encrypted,’ he mused to himself.

‘There’s a second type as well,’ Alpash explained. ‘This is how the majority go, but there are some that seem different. Here.’

Holsten listened to the chosen recording, another sequence of pulses, but this time seeming closer to what he would actually recognize as a message. ‘Just this, though? No distress signal? No number sequences?’

‘This – and as much of this as you could want,’ Alpash confirmed.

‘How much time do we have before… before things start?’

‘At least thirty hours.’

Holsten nodded. ‘Can I get something to eat?’

‘Of course.’

‘Then leave me with this and I’ll see if I can find anything in it for Karst.’ Alpash moved to go, and for a moment Holsten was going to stop him, to ask him that impossible question that historians can never ask, regarding the things they study: What is it like to be you? A question nobody can step far enough out of their own frame of reference to answer.

With some help from the Tribe, he was able to hunt through the Gilgamesh ’s systems for at least some of his electronic toolkit to try and unpick the messages. He was given what he wanted, then left alone to work. He had a sense that, across the ship, a great many ship-born and woken were bracing themselves for the moment their lives had been leading up to for generations, and during sleeping centuries, respectively. He was happy to be out of it. Here, at this failing end of time, the classicist Holsten Mason was glad to be poring over some incomprehensible transmissions in a futile search for meaning. He was not Karst. Nor was he Alpash, or his kin. Old, I’m old , in so many ways. Old, and yet still lively enough that he was even going to outlive the ark ship itself, by the look of things.