Children of Time (Children of Time #1)

Part 7 – Collision

‘What do you mean, “Wake Lain”?’

Karst and Alpash turned to Holsten, trying to read his suddenly agonized expression.

‘What it sounds like,’ the security chief replied, baffled.

‘She’s alive?’ Holsten’s fingers crooked, fighting the urge to grab one or other of them and shake. ‘Why didn’t anyone . . . why didn’t you . . . why only wake her now? Why isn’t she in charge?’

Karst obviously took issue with that, but Alpash stepped in quickly. ‘To wake Grandmother is not something to be done lightly, by her own orders. Only in matters of emergency, she said. She told us: when I next wake, I want to walk upon a green planet.’

‘She told you that, did she?’ Holsten demanded.

‘She told my mother, when she was very young,’ the engineer replied, meeting the classicist’s challenging stare easily. ‘But it is recorded. We have records of many of Grandmother’s later pronouncements.’ He bent over a console, calling up a display that shuddered patchily. ‘But we should go now. Commander . . . ?’

‘Yeah, well, I’ll hold the fort here, shall I?’ Karst said, plainly still smarting somewhat. ‘You get the woman up and on her feet, and then link to me. Give her the situation and tell her that Vitas and I need to touch heads with her.’

Alpash headed off into the ship, away from Key Crew and most of the living areas that Holsten was familiar with. The classicist hurried after him, not much wanting to be left with Karst, still less wanting to get lost within the flickering, ravaged spaces of the Gilgamesh. Everywhere told the same story of slow autolysis, a cannibalism of the self as less important parts and systems were ripped out to fix higher-priority problems. Walls were laid open, the ship’s bones exposed. Screens flared static or else were dark as wells. Here and there huddled small pockets of the Tribe, still about the essential business of keeping the ship running, despite the immediate crisis, their heads close together like priests murmuring doctrine.

‘How do you even know how to fix the ship?’ Holsten asked of Alpash’s back. ‘It’s been . . . I don’t know how long it’s been. Since Guyen died, even, I don’t know. And you think you can still keep the ship running? Just by . . . ? What do you . . . ? You’re learning how to make a spaceship run by rote or . . . ?’

Alpash looked back at him, frowning. ‘Don’t think I don’t know what the commander means, when he says “Tribe”. The chief scientist, too. It pleases them to think of us as primitives, inferiors. We, in turn, are bound to respect their – your – authority, as our precursors. That is what our grandmother laid down. That is one of our laws. But we do nothing “by rote”. We learn, all of us, from our youngest age. We have preserved manuals and lectures and tutorial modules. Our grandmother has provided for us. Do you think we could do all we have done if we did not understand?’ He stopped, clearly angry. Holsten had obviously touched a nerve already rubbed raw by the other Key Crew. ‘We are of the line of those who gave their lives – all of their lives – to preserve this vessel. That was and is our task, one to be undertaken without reward or hope of relief: an endless round of custodianship, until we reach the planet we were promised. My parents, their parents and theirs, all of them have done nothing but ensure that you and all the other cargo of this ship shall live, or as much of them as we could save. And it pleases you to call us “Tribe” and consider us children and savages, because we never saw Earth.’

Holsten held his hands up appeasingly. ‘I’m sorry. You’ve taken this up with Karst? I mean, he’s kind of depending on you. You could . . . make demands.’

Alpash’s look was incredulous. ‘At this time? With the future of our home – our old home and our new – hanging in the balance? Would you say that was a good time for us to start arguing amongst ourselves?’

For a moment Holsten studied the young man as though he was some completely new species of hominid, separated by a yawning cognitive gulf. The feeling passed, and he shook himself. ‘She did well when she set down your laws,’ he murmured.

‘Thank you.’ Alpash apparently took this as a validation of his entire culture – or whatever it was that had developed amongst his weird, claustrophobic society. ‘And now at last I get to meet her, here at the end of everything.’

They passed on through a wide-open space that Holsten suddenly recognized, the remembrance coming to him halfway across it, looking at the raised stage at one end where stubs of broken machinery still jutted. Here Guyen had stood and made his bid for eternity. Here the earliest progenitors of Alpash’s line had fought alongside their warrior queen and Karst’s security team – some of whom were surely recently reawakened, possessing living memories of events that for Alpash must be song and story and weirdly twisted legend.

A lone screen hung at an angle above the torn-up roots of the upload facility, flickering malevolently with scattered patterns. As though Guyen’s ghost is still trapped inside there, Holsten thought. Almost immediately, he thought he did see, for a broken moment, the rage-torn face of the old commander in the flurrying striations of the screen. Or perhaps it had been Avrana Kern’s Old Empire features. Shuddering, he hurried on after Alpash.

The place he ended up in had been a storeroom, he guessed. Now they stored only one thing there: a single suspension chamber. At the foot of the pedestal was a huddle of little objects – icons heat-moulded in plastic into an approximation of the female form: offerings from her surrogate children, and their children, to the guardian-mother of the human race. Above that desperate little display of hope and faith were tacked little scraps of cloth torn from shipsuits, each bearing some close-written message. This was a shrine to a living goddess.

Not only living but awake. Alpash and a couple of other young engineers were standing back respectfully while Isa Lain found her balance, leaning on a metal spar.

She was very frail, her earlier heaviness eaten away from her frame, leaving skin that was bagged and wrinkled and hung from her bones. Her near-bald scalp was mottled with liver spots, and her hands were like bird’s claws, almost fleshless. She stood with a pronounced hunch, enough that Holsten wondered if they’d altered the suspension chamber to let her sleep out the ages lying on her side. When she looked up at him, though, her eyes were Lain’s eyes, clear and sharp and sardonic.

If she had said, then, ‘Hello, old man,’ like she used to, he was not sure that he could have borne it. She just nodded, however, as though nothing was to be more expected than to find Holsten Mason standing there, looking young enough to be her son.

‘Stop your bloody staring,’ she snapped a moment later. ‘You don’t look such a picture yourself, and what’s your excuse?’

‘Lain . . .’ He approached her carefully, as though even a strong movement of air might blow her away.

‘No time for romance now, lover boy,’ she said drily. ‘I hear Karst’s fucked up and we’ve got the human race to save.’ And then she was in his arms, and he felt that fragile, thin-boned frame, felt her shaking suddenly as she fought the memories and the emotions.

‘Get off me, you oaf,’ she said, but quietly, and she made no move to push him away.

‘I’m just glad you’re still with us,’ he whispered.

‘For one more roll of the dice, anyway,’ she agreed. ‘I really did think that I might get some honest natural gravity and decent sunlight when they cracked me open. Was that too much to ask for? But apparently it was. I can’t believe that I even have to do Karst’s job these days.’

‘Don’t be too hard on Karst,’ Holsten cautioned her. ‘The situation is . . . unprecedented.’

‘I’ll be the judge of that.’ At last she shook him off. ‘I swear, sometimes I think I’m the only competent person left in the whole human race. I think that’s the only thing keeping me going.’ She made to stride past him, but stumbled almost immediately, and her next step was decidedly less ambitious, a careful hobble while leaning on her stick. ‘Never grow old,’ she muttered. ‘Never grow old and then go into suspension, that’s for sure. You dream young dreams. You forget what you’re coming back to. Fucking disappointment, believe me.’

‘You don’t dream in suspension,’ Holsten corrected her.

‘Look at you, the fucking expert.’ She glowered at him. ‘Or am I not allowed to swear now? I suppose you expect some sort of fucking decorum?’ Behind her defiance there was a terrible desperation: a woman who had always been able to simply physically impose her will on the world, who now had to ask its permission and the permission of her own body.

Holsten brought her up to date with developments on the way back to join Karst. He could see her determinedly fitting each piece into place, and she wasn’t slow to stop him and ask for clarification.

‘These transmissions,’ she prompted. ‘Do we reckon they’re actually from the planet, then?’

‘I have no idea. It’s . . . it explains why most of it’s completely incomprehensible, I suppose. It doesn’t explain the stuff that sounds a bit like Imperial C – so maybe that is Kern.’

‘Have we tried talking to Kern?’

‘I think Karst was pinning everything on mounting a sneak attack.’

‘How subtle of him,’ she spat. ‘I reckon now’s about the time to talk to Kern, don’t you?’ She paused, breathing heavily. ‘In fact, go do it now. Just get on with it. When we hit comms, I’ll talk guns with Karst. You can talk whatever-the-fuck with Kern, find out what she’s saying. Maybe she doesn’t actually like spiders crawling all over her. Maybe she’s an ally now. You never know until you ask.’

She had so much of her old sense of purpose still clinging to her, like the tatters of a once-magnificent garment, that Holsten was considerably heartened up until the moment that she reached comms and saw what the drones were transmitting. Then Lain stopped in the hatchway and stared, exactly as aghast and lost as all the rest of them. For a moment all eyes were fixed on her, and if she had declared it all a lost cause then and there, there might have been nobody else willing to take up the baton.

But she was Lain. She endured and she fought, whether satellites or spiders or time itself.

‘Fuck,’ she said expressively, and then repeated it a few more times, as if taking strength from the word. ‘Holsten, get on the comms to Kern. Karst, get Vitas over here, and then you can start telling me just what the fuck we can do about that mess.’

With the comms at his disposal – or at least after Alpash had explained half a dozen workarounds the engineers had come up with to deal with system instability – Holsten wondered what he could possibly send. He had the satellite’s frequency, but the space around the planet was alive with whispering ghosts: those faint transmissions that were, he had to admit now, not just signals from the satellite bouncing off the planet below it.

He tried to feel some sort of awe about that, and about the unprecedented position that he was in. The only emotion he could muster was a worn-out dread.

He began to assemble a message in his impeccable Imperial C, the dead language that looked to be about to survive the human race. This is the ark ship Gilgamesh calling for Doctor Avrana Kern . . . He stumbled over ‘Do you require assistance,’ his mind thronging with inappropriate possibilities. Doctor Kern, you’re covered in spiders. He took a deep breath.

This is the ark ship Gilgamesh calling Doctor Avrana Kern. And, face it, she knew them and they knew her; they were old adversaries, after all. We are now without any option but to land on your planet. The survival of the human race is at stake. Please confirm that you will not impede us. It was a wretched plea. He knew that, even as he let the message fly off at the speed of light towards the planet. What could Kern say that would satisfy them? What could he say that would dissuade her from her monomaniacal purpose?

Vitas had arrived by then, and she, Karst and Lain had their heads close together, discussing the important stuff, whilst Holsten was left babbling into the void.

Then a reply arrived, or something like it.

It was sent from the point in the web that Karst had figured to be the satellite, and it was far stronger than the feeble transmissions he had been analysing before. There seemed little doubt that it was directed at and intended for the Gilgamesh. If it was Kern, it seemed she was long gone: it was not her crisp, antique speech, but more of the weird, almost-Imperial that he had caught before, a jumble of nonsense and letter-strings that looked like words but weren’t, and in the midst of them all a few words and what might even be sentence fragments, like an illiterate aping writing from memory. An illiterate with access to a radio and the ability to encode a signal.

He re-sent his signal, asking for Eliza this time. What was there to lose?

The return was more of the same. He contrasted it with its predecessor: some repeated sections, some new ones, and by now his professional eye was seeing certain recurring patterns in those sections he could not interpret. Kern was trying to tell them something. Or at least something was trying to tell them something. He wondered if it was still simply ‘Go away’ and, if that was the case, would it now be a warning for their benefit? Turn back before it’s too late?

But there was no back for them. They were now on a oneway journey towards the only potentially viable destination they could possibly reach.

He pondered what he might be able to send, so as to jolt Kern into some semblance of comprehensible sentience. Or was Kern, too, now a failing machine. Was the end coming for all of the works of human hands, even as it was for their masters?

It seemed intolerable that the universe could be left to the creators of that planet-spanning web, to a legion of insensate crawling things that could never know the trials and hardships that poor humanity had suffered.

A new message was being broadcast at them on the same frequency. Holsten listened to it dully: not even a mimicry of language now, just numerical codes.

To his shame, it was the Gilgamesh that recognized it, rather than he himself. It was the signal that Kern had, once upon a time, been sending down towards the planet. It was her intelligence test for monkeys.

Without much examination of his motives, Holsten composed the answers – with help from the Gilgamesh towards the end – and sent it back.

Another battery of questions followed – new ones this time.

‘What is it?’ Lain was at his shoulder, just like old times. If he didn’t look back, he could even fool himself that rather less water had flowed under the bridge since they were first playing this game.

‘Kern’s testing us,’ he told her. ‘Maybe she wants to see if we’re worthy?’

‘By setting us a maths exam?’

‘She never made much sense at the best of times. So why not?’

‘Get her the answers, then. Come on.’

Holsten did so – finding it so much quicker to assemble a response once the complexities of actual language were removed from the equation. ‘Of course, we have no idea of the purpose of this,’ he pointed out.

‘But we can still hope it has a purpose,’ she replied crisply. Holsten was vaguely aware of Vitas and Karst hovering in the background, impatient to get on with talking about the offensive.

There was no third round of the test. Instead they got another blast of the maddeningly near-to-Imperial C that Holsten had seen before. He analysed it swiftly, passing it through his decoders and pattern-recognition functions. It seemed simpler than before, and with more repeated patterns. The phrase came to him, like talking to a child, and he experienced another of those vertiginous moments, wondering who or what it was that was speaking, far out there. Kern, surely? But Kern made strange – stranger – by the curdling effects of time and distance. But, even though Kern’s little Sentry Habitat was the origination point of the signal, a part of him understood already that this was not so.

‘I can identify some words used frequently,’ he announced hoarsely, after he and his suite of programs had finished their work. He could not keep the quaver out of his tones. ‘I’ve found what’s definitely a form of the verb “approach” and the word “near”, and some other indicators I’d associate with “permission” or “agreement”.’

That pronouncement got the thoughtful silence it deserved.

‘They’ve changed their tune, then,’ Karst remarked at last. ‘You said it was all “fuck off” before.’

‘It was.’ Holsten nodded. ‘It’s changed.’

‘Because Kern’s in desperate need of our superior maths skills?’ the security chief demanded.

Holsten opened his mouth, then shut it, unwilling to make his suspicions real by voicing them aloud.

Lain did it for him. ‘If it’s actually Kern.’

‘Who else?’ but there was a raw edge to Karst’s voice that showed he was not such a blunt tool, after all.

‘There’s no evidence that anything but Kern exists to transmit from there,’ Vitas said sharply.

‘What about that?’ Holsten jabbed a finger at the screen still showing the drone’s images.

‘We have no way of knowing what has transpired down on that planet. It was an experiment, after all. It may be that what we are seeing is an aberration of that experiment, just as was the grey planet and its fungal growth. The point remains that the Kern satellite is still present there, and it’s where the signal comes from,’ Vitas set out doggedly.

‘Or it may be—’ Lain started.

‘It’s possible,’ Vitas cut her off. The very suggestion seemed abhorrent to her. ‘It changes nothing.’

‘Right,’ Karst backed her up. ‘I mean, even if they’re – if Kern’s – saying, yeah, come on down, what do we do? Because, if she’s got all her stuff, she can cut us up as we touch orbit. And that’s not even thinking about that bastard mess and what that could do. I mean, if it’s something that’s grown up from the planet, well, it’s Kern’s experiment, isn’t it? Maybe it does what she says.’

There was an awkward pause, everyone waiting to see if someone, anyone, would argue the other side, just for the form of it. Holsten turned the words over, trying to put together a sentence that didn’t sound flat-out crazy.

‘There was a tradition the Old Empire once had,’ Vitas stated slowly. ‘It was a choice they gave to their criminals, their prisoners. They would take two of them and ask them to spare or to accuse each other, each making the decision quite alone without a chance to confer. All went very well indeed if they both chose to spare one another, but they suffered some degree of punishment if they both accused each other. But, oh, if you were the prisoner who decided to spare his friend, only to find you’d been accused in turn . . .’ She smiled, and in that smile Holsten saw suddenly that she had grown old, but that it showed so little on her face – kept at bay by all the expressions she did not give rein to.

‘So what was the right choice?’ Karst asked her. ‘How did the prisoners get out of it?’

‘The logical choice depended on the stakes: the weighting of punishments for the different outcomes,’ Vitas explained. ‘I’m afraid the facts and the stakes here are very stark and very plain. We could approach the planet in the hope that we were, against all past experience, now being welcomed. As Karst says, that will leave us vulnerable. We will put the ship at risk if it turns out that this is really a trick, or even that Mason has simply made some error in his translation.’ Her eyes passed over Holsten, daring him to object, but in truth he was by no ways that confident of his own abilities. ‘Or we attack – use the drones now, and prepare to back up that first strike when the Gilgamesh reaches the planet. If we do that, and we are wrong, we are throwing away a priceless chance to reach an accommodation with an Old Empire intelligence of some sort.’ There was genuine regret in her voice. ‘If we go in peace, and we are wrong, we are most likely all dead, all of us, all the human race. I don’t think we can argue with the weighting that we have been given. For me there is only one rational choice at this point.’

Karst nodded grimly. ‘That bitch never liked us,’ he pointed out. ‘No way she’d suddenly change her mind.’

Several centuries later and a lot of spiders is a long way from ‘suddenly’, Holsten thought, but the words stayed unspoken in his head. Lain was looking at him, though, obviously expecting a contribution. So now people actually want to listen to the classicist? He just shrugged. He suspected that the loss, if they went to war on false pretences, might be far greater than Vitas claimed, but he could not argue with her assessment of the complete total loss of everything there was if they erred too far on the path of peace.

‘More importantly, the logic is universal,’ Vitas added, looking from face to face. ‘It truly doesn’t matter what is waiting for us at the planet. It’s mathematics, that’s all. Our adversary faces the same choice, the same weighting. Even if to welcome us with open arms and have us then play the responsible guest may give the best results all round, the cost of being betrayed is too high. So we can look into the minds of our opponents. We know that they must make the same decision that we must make: because the cost of fighting needlessly is so much less than the cost of opting for peace and getting it wrong. And that same logic will inform the decision of whatever is there, whether it’s a human mind or a machine, or . . .’

Spiders? But it was plain that Vitas wouldn’t even utter the word, and when Lain spoke it for her, the science chief twitched ever so slightly.

So Vitas doesn’t like spiders, Holsten considered morosely. Well, she wasn’t down on the bloody planet, was she? She didn’t see those bloated monsters. His eyes strayed to the image of the webbed world. Can it be sentience? Or is Vitas right and it’s just some mad experiment gone wrong – gone right, even? Would the Old Empire have wanted giant space-spiders for some purpose? Why not? As a historian I must concur that they did a lot of stupid things.

‘Come on, then,’ Karst prompted. ‘I’m pressing the button, or what?’

In the end everyone was looking at Lain.

The old engineer took a few careful steps forward, stick clacking on the floor, staring at the drone’s camera image of the shrouded planet. Her eyes, that had witnessed centuries pass in a kind of punctuated stop-motion, tried to take it all in. She had the look of a woman staring bleak destiny in the eye.

‘Take out the satellite,’ she decided at last, quietly. ‘We go in fighting. You’re right, there’s too much at stake. There’s everything at stake. Bring it down.’

Karst sent the order briskly, as though afraid that someone would get cold feet or change their mind. Millions of kilometres away, in the direction of the Gilgamesh’s inexorable progress, the drones received their instructions. They already had the metal fist of the satellite targeted, trapped as it was in that vast equatorial web.

They carried the best lasers that the Tribe had been able to restore, linked to the remote vessels’ little fusion reactors. They had already drifted as close as they dared, jockeying for geostationary orbit above the trapped satellite with as little expenditure of energy as they could get away with.

They loosed, the two of them together, striking at the same spot on the satellite’s hull. Somewhere far distant, Karst would be tensing, but the image he would be reacting to would already be old by the time he saw it.

For a moment nothing happened, as energy was poured into the ancient, ravaged shell of the Brin 2 Sentry Pod. Karst would have his fists clenched, staring at the screens with veins standing out on his forehead, as though his will could cross space and time in order to make things happen.

Then, with a silent flowering of fire almost instantly extinguished, the drilling beams reached something vital within, and the millennia-old home of Doctor Avrana Kern was ripped open, the webs on either side shrivelling and springing away under the sudden excess of heat. Still gouting out its contents into the hungry emptiness of space, the shattered satellite slipped free from its tangle of moorings, burning a hole in the great web, and was propelled away from the drones by the outrush of material from its jagged wounds.

The drones themselves had given their all, the discharge of their weapons leaving their reactors cold and draining them dry. They tumbled off across the face of the web, to fall or to drift away.

The satellite, though, had a more definite fate. It fell. Like Kern’s experimental subjects so very very long before, it was jolted out of its orbit, to be gathered up by the arms of the planet’s gravity, spiralling helplessly into the atmosphere, where it streaked across the sky, just an old barrel with a single ancient monkey in withered residence, delivering a final message to the anxious eyes below.