Children of Time (46 page)

She understands, in a real and immediate way, how she stands on the backs of giants, and that her own back, too, will be strong enough to bear the weight of many generations to come.

Next morning Portia and her crew assemble at a point beyond where the last buildings of the city taper into nothing, in the midst of a great swathe of farmland, among stands of stubby, warty trees stretching to the horizon, separated by firebreaks and the well-trodden pathways of the farming ants. The weather is fine: cloudy but with only a little breeze, as predicted. This moment has already been put off twice previously owing to inclement conditions.

Portia remains tense and still. The others deal with their nervousness each in their own way. Some crouch, some run about, some tussle or talk nonsense, feet stamping out a fretting staccato. Viola, the leader, goes from each to each, with a touch, a stroke, a twitch of palps, reassuring them.

Fabian is the first to see the Sky Nest.

Even at this distance, it is absurdly huge as it floats majestically over Seven Trees, coasting smoothly over the Great Nest district like an optical illusion. The vast, silvery bulk of its gasbag is currently three hundred metres long, dwarfing the long, slender cabin suspended beneath. Later, they will extend the envelope to twice its current size until the lift-to-weight ratio reaches the extreme proportions that their project will require.

The spiders have been using silk for gliding since before the earliest Understanding, and their increasing intelligence has led to multiple refinements of this art. Their chemical synthesis meanwhile gives them access to as much hydrogen as they need. With a technology of silk and lightweight wood, even their experiments with powered heavier-than-air flight result in something feather-light and buoyant. Constructing dirigibles is something they have taken to readily.

Lines are dropped by the skeleton flight crew, unravelling a hundred metres to reach the ground. Glad to be in motion at last, Portia and the others scramble up, a climb barely worth mentioning. There is a brief, ceremonial handover from the flight leader to Viola, and then the flight crew abseil down their own lines and leave the Sky Nest to its new occupants.

The airship is a triumph of engineering, rugged enough to withstand the turbulent weather of the lower air, and yet – with the gasbag fully extended and filled – capable of ascending to previously inaccessible heights. The aerodynamic profile of the entire vessel is fluid, and determined, moment to moment, by the tensioned cords of its internal structure. Now it is lifting into a stiffening breeze, its structure shifting in automatic response as the new crew settles in.

Their target height is so far above their world that it barely qualifies as
height
at all. And even then there will be a greater journey for the most adventurous of them: for Portia.

Viola checks that her crew members are in place, and then joins Portia at the forward edge of the cylindrical crew compartment, gazing out through the faintest shimmer at the receding ground below. Already the gasbag is expanding further, bloating out with more hydrogen, its leading edge reshaping itself for streamlining, as the Sky Nest lifts away faster and faster. Here, in the bows, is the radio and also the main terminal for the airship’s brain.

Viola places her palps into paired pits in the lectern before her, and the Sky Nest tells her how it feels, how all its component pieces are holding up. It is almost like speaking on the radio, almost like talking to a living thing. She spoke to the Messenger once, did Viola, and communicating with the Sky Nest feels much like that.

Tiny antennae brush and twitch the sensitive hairs of her palps, feeding her information by touch and by scent. Two of her crew stand ready to give chemical commands to the terminal here, which will swiftly spread across the ship.

The ongoing calculations required to take an object of gossamer and hydrogen to the upper reaches of the atmosphere would challenge even the polymath Bianca, who therefore designed the ship to think for itself: a patient, dedicated intelligence subordinate to the commands of its spider crew. The airship is crawling with ants. This particular species is small – two centimetres at most for the workers – but bred to be receptive to complex conditioning. In fact the colony writes much of its own conditioning, its standing chemical architecture allowing it to receive direct information about the ship’s situation and constantly respond to it without the intervention of the crew.

Although the ants can go everywhere, their physical pace would be too slow to coordinate the vast ship’s constant metamorphoses. Spider bioengineering sidesteps this problem with cultured tissue. Just as, for generations, artificial muscle has been used as a motive source for their monorail capsules and other brute-force devices, so Bianca has pioneered artificial neural networks that link to chemical factories. Hence the ants in the crew capsule do not need to walk to the other widely spaced elements of their colony. Instead they send impulses through the ship’s nerves, and these are translated to chemical instructions at the other termini. The neural network – unliving and living all at once – is a part of the colony, as if it was some bizarrely over-specialized caste. The ants are even capable of altering its complex structure, severing links and encouraging the growth of others.

Bianca is probably the only spider to wonder if the thing she has created – or bred perhaps – may one day cross some nebulous line that separates the calculating but unaware from what she herself would understand as true intellect. The prospect, which will probably alarm her peers when they consider it, has been working on her mind for some time now. In fact, her current private project has a great deal to do with some of her more speculative thoughts in that direction.

Aboard the Sky Nest, the crew are preparing for the conditions of the upper atmosphere. The capsule is double-hulled, a layer of air between the sheets of silk providing the insulation they will need in the thinner reaches of the atmosphere. The outer skin of capsule and balloon is woven with silvery, glittering thread, an organic material that disperses and reflects the sunlight.

The Sky Nest carries them on up towards the light dusting of clouds. Two of the crew don suits of light silk to pass through the airlock and check on the operation of the god-engines, so called because they are a development of an idea apparently received direct from the Messenger. Before it was dictated as part of the old divine mandate, nobody had considered the idea of rotary motion. Now, bioelectric fields spin light metal propellers that steadily separate the Sky Nest from the ground.

Some of the crew gather at the shimmering windows, crowding for a view of the city as it shrinks from a vast swathe of layered civilization to an untidy scrawl like a child’s knotted picture. The mood is high and excitable. Portia is the only one there who does not share it. She remains serious, inward-looking, trying to prepare herself for her own task. She seeks solace away from the others, and carefully knots and picks her way through a mantra that has travelled alongside her people for centuries, the ancient, reassuring mathematics of the first Message. It is not that she is some atavistic true believer, but that tradition comforts and calms her, as it did her distant ancestors.

In the fore-cabin space, Viola gestures to her radio operator, and they signal that all’s well. Down in Great Nest district, Bianca will receive their message and then send a communication of her own, not to the Sky Nest but further still.

Bianca is hailing God with a simple announcement:
We are coming.

6.2
AN OLD MAN IN A HARSH SEASON

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.