Children of Time (Children of Time #1)

Part 6 – Zenith / Nadir

He woke to the smell of burning. For a moment, lying there with the faint reek of overstressed-electrics infiltrating his nostrils, he began thinking, quite calmly: cold suspension, hot smell, cold suspension, hot smell, funny . . .

Then he realized it wasn’t funny at all. It was the opposite of funny, and once again here he was in his coffin, only the burial had now become a cremation and he’d come back to life at just the wrong moment.

He opened his mouth to cry out, and instead choked helplessly on the acrid fumes that were filling his tiny allotment of world.

Then the lid came off, with a shriek of tortured metal and snapping plastic, even as he pressed against it. It was as though he had briefly been given superhuman strength.

Holsten yelled: no words, not even a sound that had any particular emotion behind it – neither fear, triumph nor surprise. It was just a noise, loud and pointless, as though his mouth had been left tuned to a dead channel. Kicking and clawing, he slid over the edge of the suspension chamber, and nobody caught him this time.

The hard impact brought him back to himself properly, to find he was lying on the floor of Key Crew feeling not only like a fool, but a fool in pain and with an audience. There were three other people there, who had stepped back prudently as he flailed his way to freedom. For a moment he didn’t even want to look at them. They might be mutineers. They might be weird Guyenites here to offer him up to their dead but ever-living cybernetic god. They might be spiders in disguise. It seemed to him that there was precious little good that could come of there being other people around him, just then.

‘Classicist Doctor Holsten Mason,’ said a voice, a woman’s voice. ‘Do you answer to your name?’

‘I . . . Yes, what?’ The question was on the pivot point between normal and strange.

‘Note that as a positive,’ a man said. ‘Doctor Holsten Mason, please stand up. You are being relocated. There is no cause for alarm, but your suspension chamber has become unstable and is in need of repair.’ Nothing in this speech made any acknowledgement of the fact that these clowns had just had to rip the lid off his coffin to get at the meat within. ‘You will be taken to another chamber and returned to suspension or, if no functioning chamber is available, you will be taken to temporary accommodation until one is. We understand that this must be distressing for you, but we assure you that everything is being done to restore normal ship operation.’

At last, Holsten looked up at them.

They were wearing shipsuits, and that had to be a good thing. He had half expected them to be dressed in hides and skins, a doubly unpleasant thought given that the Gilgamesh had only one animal in abundance.

They were two women and one man, and they looked surprisingly neat and clean. For a moment he could not work out why that alarmed him so. Then he clicked that, had this been some random emergency, and if these were crew, he would have expected them to be dishevelled and tired about the eyes, and for the man to be unshaven. Instead, they had taken the time to smarten themselves up. The shipsuits, on the other hand, were plainly not new: worn and scuffed and patched – and patched again.

‘What’s going on?’

The man who had reeled off his reassuring little speech opened his mouth again, but Holsten put up a hand to stop him, hauling himself to his feet.

‘Yes, yes, I got it. What’s going on?’

‘If you would come with us, Doctor Mason,’ one of the women told him.

He found his hands had formed pathetic little fists and he was backing away. ‘No . . . No, I’ve had enough of being hauled out every century by another band of halfwit clowns who’ve got some stupid idea of what they want to do, without telling me anything. You tell me what’s going on or I’ll . . . I swear I’ll . . .’ And that was really the problem, because he’d what? What would the great Holsten Mason then do? Would he throw a tiny tantrum, out here in the vastness of space? Would he go back to his lidless coffin and fold his arms across his chest and pretend to be sleeping the sleep of the dead?

‘So help me, I’ll . . .’ he tried again, but his heart wasn’t in it.

The three of them exchanged glances, trying to communicate by grimace and eyebrow. At least they were not trying to haul him anywhere by force, just yet. He cast a desperate glance around Key Crew to see what there was to see.

At least half the suspension chambers were lying open, he saw. Some others remained closed, the panels on their exteriors displaying the cool blue glow of good functioning. Others were shading into green, and even towards the yellow that his own had perhaps been displaying. He went over to one, looking down at the face of a man he thought he recalled as being on Karst’s team. The panels had a host of little alerts indicating what Holsten assumed was probably bad news at some level.

‘Yes,’ one of the women explained, noting his gaze. ‘We have a lot of work to do. We have to prioritize. That’s why we need you to come with us.’

‘Look . . .’ Holsten leant forwards to peer at the name on her shipsuit, ‘Ailen, I want to know what the situation is with the Gil and . . . you’re not Ailen.’ Because abruptly he remembered the real Ailen, one of the science team: a sharp-faced woman who hadn’t got on much with Vitas, or with anyone else.

He was backing away again. ‘How long is it?’ he demanded of them.

‘Since when?’ They were advancing on him slowly, as if trying not to spook an excitable animal, fanning out around the broken coffin to pin him.

‘Since I . . . Since Guyen . . .’ But they wouldn’t know. Probably they didn’t even remember who Guyen was, or perhaps he was some demon figure in their myth cycles. These people were ship-born, Gilgamesh’s children. All that smooth patter, the shipsuits, the appearance of neat competence, it was all an act. They were nothing but monkeys aping their long-vanished betters. The ‘new suspension chamber’ they would take him to, after destroying the real thing, would be nothing but a box with a few wires attached to it: a cargo cult coffin built by credulous savages.

He looked around for something to use as a weapon. There was nothing to hand. He had a mad idea of waking up others of the Key Crew, of popping out the security man like some sort of guardian monster to scare them away. He had a feeling that his persecutors were unlikely to wait patiently while he worked out how to do it.

‘Please, Doctor Mason,’ one of the women asked patiently, as though he was just some confused old man who wouldn’t go back to his bed.

‘You don’t know who I am!’ Holsten yelled at them, and then he ducked and somehow came up holding the whole jagged-hinged lid of the suspension chamber, the unbalancing weight of it a weird reassurance that there was something solid in the world that he had control over.

He threw it. Later, he would look back with amazement, watching this raging stranger he had briefly become, heaving the ungainly missile over the open coffin towards them. He got it bang on target, striking their upraised arms, knocking them out of the way, and then he rushed past them, sleep-suit flapping open at the back as he dashed out of Key Crew.

There was absolutely nowhere he could think of heading, so he just went, stumbling and staggering and pelting down the corridors that he remembered, but that had been transformed in his absence into something strange and broken. Everywhere there were wall panels removed, wiring exposed, some of it ripped out or cut through. Someone had been flaying the Gilgamesh from the inside, exposing its organs and inner workings at countless junctures. Holsten was irresistibly put in mind of a body giving way to the last virulent stages of some disease.

There were two people ahead of him, yet more manicured savages in orange shipsuits. They had been tinkering with a mess of tangled wiring, but stood up abruptly at the shouts issuing from behind Holsten.

He would have to go through them, he knew. At this stage his only hope was to keep running, because that might at least get him somewhere other than this. This was not a place he could be. This was all too clearly a great and delicate space vehicle that was being torn apart from the inside, and how could any of them last after that?

What happened? he was asking himself frantically. Lain was working to contain the Guyen infection. There was nothing I could do. I had to go back to sleep, in the end. So how did it come to this? He felt that he was developing some hitherto unknown ailment, some equivalent of motion sickness caught from too many dissociated moments of history crammed into too little personal time.

Is this the end, then? Is this the human race in the end?

He got ready to put his shoulder up against the two primitives ahead of him, but they refrained from getting in his way, and he just stumbled on past them as they stared at him blankly. For a moment he saw himself through their eyes: a wild-eyed old man bouncing off the walls, with his arse hanging out.

‘Doctor Mason, wait!’ they were calling from behind him, but there was no waiting permitted to him. He ran and he ran, and eventually they cornered him in the observation cupola, with the starfield drifting behind him, as though he was about to hold them off by threatening to jump.

There were more than three of them, by then: the commotion had brought along maybe a dozen – more women than men, and all of them unfamiliar people in old shipsuits with dead names on them. They watched him cautiously, even though there was nowhere else he could go. The three who had woken him were notably neater than the rest, whose garments and faces looked decidedly more lived-in. Welcoming committee, he thought drily. Awards for the best-dressed cannibals of whatever stupid year this is.

‘What do you want?’ he demanded breathlessly, feeling himself at bay against the universe.

‘We need to reallocate you a chamber—’ started the man from the welcoming committee, in those same bright, calm, false tones.

‘No,’ said one of the others. ‘I told you, not this one. Special instructions for this one.’

Oh, of course.

‘So, tell me?’ Holsten broached to them. ‘Tell me who you really are. You!’ He pointed at not-Ailen. ‘Who are you? What happened to the real Ailen that you’re wearing her skin – clothes, her clothes?’ He could feel a deep craziness trying to shake itself loose inside him. This crowd of serious, well-mannered people in stolen shipsuits was beginning to frighten him more than the mutineers, more than the ragged robes of the cultists. And why was it always like this? ‘What’s wrong with us?’ And only from their expressions did he realize that he had just spoken aloud, but the words wouldn’t stop. ‘What is it about us that we cannot live together in this fucking eggshell ship without tearing at each other? That we have to try and control one another and lie to one another and hurt one another? Who are you that you’re telling me where I have to be and what to do? What are you doing to the poor Gilgamesh? Where did all you freaks come from?’ The last came out as a shriek that appalled Holsten, because something in him seemed to have snapped beyond any control or repair. For a moment he stared at his audience of the young and alien, with his mouth open, everyone including himself waiting to see if more words would be forthcoming. Instead he could feel the shape of his mouth deforming and twisting, and sobs starting to claw and suck at his chest. It was too much. It had been too much. He, who had translated the madness of a millennia-old guardian angel. He who had been abducted. He who had seen an alien world crawling with earthly horrors. He had feared. He had loved. He had met a man who wanted to be God. He had seen death.

It had been a rough few weeks. The universe had been given centuries to absorb the shock, but not him. He had been woken and pounded, woken and pounded, and the rigid stasis of suspension offered him no capacity to recover his balance.

‘Doctor Mason,’ said one of them, with that relentless, brutal courtesy. ‘We are Engineering. We are crew.’ And the woman he had singled out added, ‘Ailen was my grandmother.’

‘Engineering?’ Holsten got out.

‘We are fixing the ship,’ explained another of the youngsters, so very earnestly.

This new information spun about inside Holsten’s skull like a flock of bats trying to find a way out. Engineering. Grandmother. Fixing. ‘And how long will it take,’ he said shakily, ‘to fix the ship?’

‘As long as it takes,’ said Ailen’s granddaughter.

Holsten sat down. All that strength, the rage and the righteousness and the fear, it all drained from him so viscerally that he felt he should be surrounded by a visible pool of spent emotions.

‘Why me?’ he whispered.

‘Your suspension chamber required urgent attention. You had to be retrieved,’ said the welcoming-committee man. ‘We were going to find you somewhere to wait while a new chamber was prepared, but now . . .’ He glanced at one of his fellows.

‘Special instructions,’ one of the newcomers confirmed.

‘Let me guess,’ Holsten broke in. ‘Your chief wants to see me.’

He could see he was right, although they stared at him with something approaching superstition.

‘It’s Lain, isn’t it,’ he said confidently, and the words unleashed a sudden jagged onset of doubt. My grandmother, not-Ailen had said. And where was Ailen now? ‘Isa Lain?’ he added, hearing a renewed tremble in his voice. ‘Tell me.’

In their eyes he could see himself: a terrified man out of his time.

‘Come with us,’ they urged him. And this time he went.