Children of Time (49 page)

There are no aliens that her people ever met or heard from. Or, if there were, their signals were overlooked, passed by: alien in a way that meant no human could see them and recognize them as evidence of life from elsewhere. Kern’s faction and her ideology already knew this, which was why they intended to spread Earth life across the galaxy in as many varied forms as possible. Because it was the only life they had, they had a responsibility to help it survive.

She has lived lifetimes along with the people of the green planet. She and her host of companion systems have soared on their triumphs, shaken under their defeats, sought always to bridge what has ever been a troubled and incomplete understanding. She sees them now, yes. She sees them for what they are.

They are Earth. Their form does not matter.

They are her children.

She backtracks, calling up logs of centuries of conversations from where they are crammed into her electronic memories, having overwritten all the last desperate radio songs of old Earth. She reviews all the baffling mystery of the monkey dialogues now seen under a harsh and uncompromising new light. She stops trying to tell them things, and starts listening.

Much as the spiders can use their Understandings to write new knowledge into their minds – though Kern has no idea of this – so Kern’s current state means that she can rewire her own mind far more readily than a human brain could be reconditioned. She models generations of conversations, changes her perception of the senders, ceases trying to cast her protégés as something one step down from human.

She understands, not perfectly – for great swathes of their talk remain a mystery – but her comprehension of what they are saying, their preoccupations, their perceptions, all of it suddenly falls that much more into place.

And at last she answers them.

I am here. I am here for you.

6.5
THINGS FALL APART

They gave him a shipsuit. He could hardly present himself in his flimsy sleeping garb, open at the back where the tubes had gone in, for all he had already paraded his pockmarked old backside through half of the crew quarters before they caught him.

The name on his new outfit was ‘Mallori’. Searching his fragmented memory Holsten had no idea who Mallori might have been, and did not want to think about whether there
was
even a Mallori any more. Would he prefer to be wearing the clothes of a corpse, or those of someone who might any moment wake up and need them back?

He asked after his own suit, but apparently it had been taken away and worn out long ago.

When they were getting him clothes, he saw other people. This generation’s engineers left him in one of the science rooms that had been converted into a dormitory. At least forty people were crammed in there, the walls studded with hooks for hammocks that a few were still sleeping in. They looked frightened and desperate, like refugees.

He spoke with a few. When they found out he was actually crew, they bombarded him with questions. They were insistent. They wanted to know what was going on. So did he, of course, but that answer did not satisfy them. For most of them, their last memory was of a poisoned, dying old Earth. Some even refused to believe how much time had gone by since they had closed their eyes in the suspension chambers that first time. Holsten was appalled at how little some of these escapees had actually known about the endeavour they were embarking on.

They were young: most of the cargo would need to be young, after all, to be able to start anew in whatever circumstances they were thawed out for.

‘I’m just a classicist,’ Holsten told them. In truth there were a thousand things he knew that would be relevant to their predicament, none of which he felt like talking about or thought would much reassure them. The most important question – that of their immediate future – he could not help with, at all.

Then the ersatz engineers came with the shipsuit and led him off, against the complaints of the human cargo.

He had his own questions then; he was feeling calm enough to deal with the answers.

‘What will happen to them?’

The young woman who was leading him glanced grimly back the way they had come. ‘Returned to suspension as soon as chambers are available.’

‘And how long will that be?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘How long has it been?’ He was picking up ample cues from her expression alone.

‘The longest anyone has been out of suspension was two years.’

Holsten took a deep breath. ‘Let me guess: there are more and more you’re having to thaw out, right? Cargo storage is deteriorating.’

‘We’re doing all we can,’ she snapped defensively.

Holsten nodded to himself.
They can’t manage it. It’s getting worse.
‘So where . . . ?’

‘Look,’ the woman rounded on him. Her badge said, ‘Terata,’ another lost, dead name. ‘I’m not here to answer your questions. I have other work to get to, after this.’

Holsten spread his hands appeasingly. ‘Put yourself in my position.’

‘Friend, I have enough trouble just being in my
own
position. And what’s so great about you, anyway? Why the special treatment?’

He nearly responded with, ‘Don’t you know who I am?’ as though he was some grand celebrity. In the end he just shrugged. ‘I’m nobody. I’m just an old man.’

They passed a room of perhaps a score of children, a sight so unexpected that Holsten stopped and stared, and would not be moved on. They were aged around eight or nine, sitting on the floor with pads in their hands, watching a screen.

On the screen was Lain. Holsten choked at seeing her there.

There were other things, too: three-dimensional models, images of what might be the
Gil
’s schematics. They were being taught. These were engineers in training.

Not-Terata tugged at his arm, but Holsten took a step into the room. The students were nudging each other, whispering, staring at him, but he had eyes only for the screen. Lain was explaining some piece of work, demonstrating by example and expanded diagram how to enact some particular sort of repair. She was older, on the screen: not the chief engineer, not the warrior queen, just . . . Isa Lain forever doing her best with the shoddy tools the universe gave her.

‘Where do they . . . ?’ Holsten gestured at the now fatally distracted children. ‘Where do they come from?’

‘Friend, if you don’t know
that
, then I’m not explaining it to you,’ not-Terata told him acidly, and some of the kids smirked.

‘No, but seriously—’

‘They’re our children, of course,’ she told him sharply. ‘What did you think? How else were we going to keep the work going?’

‘And the . . . cargo?’ he asked her, because he was thinking about those people stuck outside suspension for months, for years.

By then she had managed to drag him away from the schoolroom, directing the students’ attention back to the teaching display with a stern gesture. ‘We have strict population controls,’ she told him, adding ‘We’re on a ship, after all,’ as if this was some sort of mantra. ‘If we need fresh material from cargo, then we take it, but otherwise any excess production . . .’ and here her clipped, professional voice faltered just a little, touching on some personal pain so unexpectedly that Holsten stumbled slightly in sympathy.

‘Embryos are put on ice, to await future need,’ she finished, with a scowl at him to cover up her own awkwardness. ‘It’s easier to store an embryo before a certain point in its development than it is a full human being.’ Again, this sounded like some rote-learned dogma that she had grown up with.

‘I’m sorry, I—’

‘We’re here.’

They had reached Communications. Until he actually stood there, he had not realized where they were going.

‘But what—?’

‘Just go in.’ Not-Terata gave him quite a hard shove, and then she walked away.

For a long time Holsten stood outside the door to Comms, obscurely fearful of crossing the threshold, until at last the hatch slid aside of its own accord and he met the gaze of the woman inside.

He had not known what to expect. He had thought there might be no living being at all, just a face on a screen that was perhaps something like Lain’s death mask, perhaps with taints inherited from Guyen and Avrana Kern and who-knew-what-else that was rattling about in the system. If not that, then he had been terrified that what would meet his gaze might be something like Guyen had become: a withered lich that had once been human, sustained by and inseparable from the mechanisms of the ship itself, harbouring dreams of immortality in its curdling skull. To see the woman he had known curtailed to that would have been bad. Worse would be for the door to open and show him someone else entirely.

But this was Lain – Isa Lain. She was older, of course. She must have been fifteen years his senior by now, a veteran of the long battle against entropy and hostile computer intrusion that she had been fighting, on and off, since they last parted. Fifteen more years would have been almost nothing to the people of the Old Empire. All the myths of that elder age confirmed that the ancients had lived far longer than a natural human span. In these reduced days, however, fifteen more years had made Lain old.

Not ancient, not decrepit – not yet. She was a working woman in the last days of her strength, staring down time’s inevitable slope which would rob her of her abilities piecemeal with every step. She was heavier than she had been, and her face was written over in that universal human language of hardship and care. Her hair was grey, long, tied back in a severe bun. He had never seen her with long hair before. She was Lain, though: a woman he had seen evolve in snapshot over the course of so short a time for him, but a lifetime for her. He felt an upsurge of feeling in just looking at her face, the lines and weathering doing their best to hide her familiarity from him, and failing.

‘Look at you, old man,’ she said faintly. She seemed as affected by his years as he was by hers.

She was wearing a shipsuit with the name ripped off, a garment fraying at the elbows, patched at the knees. The ragged remains of another suit hung about her shoulders, reduced to something like a shawl that she fingered thoughtfully, while looking at him.

Holsten stepped inside, looking at comms, noting two dark panels and one that had been gutted, but the rest of the stations seemed to be operational. ‘You’ve been busy.’

A nameless expression flickered across her face. ‘That’s it, is it? All this time, and it’s still the old flip remarks?’

He gave her a level look. ‘Firstly, it’s not been “all this time”. Secondly, it was always you ready with the lip, not me.’

He was smiling as he said it, because that kind of banter he was used to from her was something he dearly wanted to hear just now, but she just stared at him as though he was a ghost.

‘You haven’t changed.’ And, as she said it, it was plain she knew how fatuous a remark it was, but still something she needed to get out. Holsten Mason, historian, had now outlived the histories. Here he was, bumbling through time and space, making mistakes and being ineffectual, the one stable point in a moving universe. ‘Oh, fuck, come here, Holsten. Just come here.’

He didn’t expect the tears, not from her. He didn’t expect the fierce strength of her arms as she held him to her, the shaking of her shoulders as she fought against herself.

She held him out at arm’s length, and he was struck with how alien this situation must be for her. How normal for him to meet an old friend and find her changed and aged, and search the lines of her face for the woman she had been. How wrenching it must be for her to try and find the older man he might one day become in his untouched features.

‘Yes,’ she said at last, ‘I’ve been busy. Everyone’s been busy. You’ve no idea how lucky you are that you get to travel freight.’

‘Tell me,’ he encouraged her.

‘What?’

‘Tell me what’s going on. Please
somebody
tell me something, at least.’

She lowered herself carefully into what had once been Guyen’s seat, gesturing to another for him. ‘What? Situation report? You’re the new commander? The scholar doesn’t like being kept in the dark?’ And that sounded so like the old – the young – Lain that he smiled.

‘The scholar does not,’ he confirmed. ‘Seriously, of all the people left in the . . . on the ship, it’s you I trust. But you’re . . . I don’t know what you’re doing with the ship, Lain. I don’t know what you’re doing with these . . . your people here.’

‘You think I’ve gone like
him
.’ No need to name any names there.

‘Well, I wondered.’

‘Guyen fucked over the computer,’ she spat out. ‘All his upload nonsense, it went just about like I said it would. Every time he tried to grow, in there, it shut off more of the
Gil
’s systems. I mean, a human mind, that’s a fuckload of data – and there were four or five separate incomplete copies fighting for space in there. So I set to work, trying to contain them. Trying to keep the essentials running: keeping the cargo cold; stopping the reactor getting too hot. You remember, that was the plan when you went under.’

‘Seemed like a good plan. I remember you said you’d be going into suspension yourself, soon enough,’ Holsten noted.

‘That
was
the plan,’ she confirmed. ‘Only there were complications. I mean, we had to find cargo space for Guyen’s crazies. Karst had great fun rounding them up and putting them on ice. And by then some of them were working with my people in keeping a lid on the hardware situation. And Guyen – the fucking Guyen archipelago strung out through the system – kept getting out, trying to copy itself, eating up even more space. We purged and we isolated and we set packs of viruses on the bastard, but he was seriously entrenched by then. And when my team was up and running and I had faith in them, I went under like I said I would. And I set myself a wake-up call. And when I woke again, things were worse.’

‘Guyen still?’

‘Yeah, still him, still clinging on by his electronic fucking fingernails, but my people were finding all sorts of other shit going wrong too.’ Holsten had always found Lain’s swearing faintly shocking, but weirdly attractive in a taboo sort of way. Now, from her old lips, it was as though she had been practising all those years for just this level of bitter world-weariness. ‘Problems from losing more cargo, and other systems going down that Guyen and his halfwit reflections weren’t responsible for. There was a bigger enemy out there all along, Holsten. We were just kidding ourselves that we’d got it beaten.’