Children of Time (50 page)

‘The spiders?’ Holsten demanded immediately, all of a sudden imagining the ship infested with some stowaways from the green planet, no matter how impossible that seemed.

Lain gave him an exasperated look. ‘Time, old man. This ship’s close to two and a half thousand years old. Things fall apart. Time is what we’re running out of.’ She rubbed at her face. The mannerism made her look younger, not older, as though all those extra years might just be scrubbed away. ‘I kept thinking I’d got a lid on it. I kept going back to sleep, but there was always something else. My original crew . . . we tried taking it in shifts, parcelling out the time. There was just too much work. I lose track of how many generations of engineers there have been now, under my guidance. And a lot of people didn’t want to go back under. Once you’ve seen a few failed suspension chambers . . .’

Holsten shuddered. ‘You didn’t think about . . . about upload?’

She eyed him sidelong. ‘Seriously?’

‘You could watch over everything forever, then, and still stay . . .’
Young
. But he couldn’t quite say that, and he had no other way of ending the sentence.

‘Well, apart from adding to the computer problem about a hundredfold, fine,’ she said, but it was plain that wasn’t it. ‘And, it’s just . . . that copy, the upload, over all those years . . . I’d have set it on a task that would include killing itself off, at the end, leave no survivors in the mainframe. And would it? Because if it wanted to live, it could sure as hell make sure
I
died in my sleep. And would it even remember, in the end, who was the real me?’ There was a haunted look on her face that told Holsten she had thought long and hard about this. ‘You don’t know what it’s like . . . When those bits of Guyen got loose, when they hijacked the comms, listening to them . . . even now I don’t think the system’s right. And the radio ghosts, mad transmissions from that fucking satellite or something, I don’t know . . . and . . .’ Her shoulders slumped: the iron woman taking her mail off, when it was just him and her. ‘You don’t know what it’s been like, Holsten. Be thankful.’

‘You could have woken me,’ he pointed out. It was not the most constructive thing to say, but he resented being cast as the lucky survivor with no choice in the matter. ‘When you woke, you could have woken me.’

Her gaze was level, terrible, uncompromising. ‘I could. And I thought of it. I came so close, you wouldn’t believe, when it was just me and these know-nothing kids I was trying to teach my job to. Oh, I could have had you at my beck and call, couldn’t I? My personal sex-toy.’ She laughed harshly at his expression. ‘In and out of sleep, and in and out of me, is that it?’

‘Well I . . . ah, well . . .’

‘Oh, grow up, old man.’ Abruptly she ceased finding herself so funny. ‘I wanted to,’ she said softly. ‘I could have used you, leant on you, shared the burden with you. I’d have burned you up like a candle, old man – and for what? For this moment when I’d still be old, and you’d be dead? I wanted to spare you. I wanted to . . .’ she bit her lip, ‘keep you. I don’t know. Something like that. Perhaps knowing I wasn’t putting you through this shit helped keep me going.’

‘And now?’

‘Now we had to wake you, anyway. Your chamber was fucked. Irreparable, they tell me. We’ll find you another.’

‘Another? Seriously, now that I’m out—’

‘You go back. I’ll have you drugged and stuffed into a pod by force, if I have to. Long way to go yet, old man.’ When she smiled like that, a hard woman about to get brutal with whatever part of the universe stood in her way, he saw where a lot of the new lines on her face had come from.

‘Go where?’ he demanded. ‘Do what?’ he demanded.

‘Come on, old man, you know the plan. Guyen surely explained it to you.’

Holsten boggled. ‘
Guyen?
But he . . . you killed him.’

‘Best crew appraisal ever,’ she agreed mirthlessly. ‘But his
plan
, yes. And he was thinking that up without realizing how the ship was starting to fail. What else is there, Holsten? We’re it. This is us, the human race, and we’ve done really fucking well to make it this far against all the odds. But this piece of machinery simply cannot keep going forever. Everything wears out, old man, even the
Gilgamesh
, even . . .’

Even me
, was the unspoken thought.

‘The green planet,’ Holsten finished. ‘Avrana Kern. The insects and things?’

‘So we burn them out a bit, get ourselves established. Hell, maybe we can domesticate the fuckers. Maybe you can milk a spider. If the bastards are big enough, maybe we’ll be riding around on them. Or we could just poison the fucks, scrub the planet clean of them. We’re humans, Holsten. It’s what we’re good at. As for Kern, Guyen had put in most of the groundwork before. He spent generations fucking with the
Gil
, shielding the system from her. That old terraforming station she sent us to, it had all the toys. She can try taking over and she can try frying us, and we’ll be ready for both. And it’s not like we have anywhere else to go. And, as luck would have it, we’re already on the way there, so it all lines up nicely.’

‘You’ve got it all worked out.’

‘I reckon I’ll let Karst sort out the frontier-spirit end of things, once we’re there,’ she told him. ‘I reckon I’ll be ready for a rest by then.’

Holsten said nothing, and the pause lengthened uncomfortably. She did not meet his eyes.

At last the words fought themselves free, ‘Promise me—’

‘Nothing,’ she snapped instantly. ‘No promises. The universe promises us nothing; I extend the same to you. This is the human race, Holsten. It needs me. If Guyen hadn’t fucked us up so badly with his immortality scheme, then maybe things could have gone differently. But he did and they haven’t, and here we are. I’m going back to bed soon, just like you, but I’m setting my alarm early, because the next generation’s going to need someone to check their maths.’

‘Then let me stay with you!’ Holsten told her fiercely. ‘It doesn’t sound like anyone’s going to need a classicist any time soon. Or at all, ever. Even Guyen only wanted me as his biographer. Let’s—’

‘If you say grow old together I am going to thump you, Holsten,’ Lain returned. ‘Besides, there’s still one thing you’ll be needed for. One thing I need you to do.’

‘You want your life story set down for posterity?’ he needled, as nastily as he felt able.

‘Yeah, you’re right, I always was the funny one. So shut the fuck up.’ She stood up, leaning against the consoles, and he heard her joints pop and creak. ‘Come with me, old man. Come and see the future.’

She led him through the cluttered, half-unmade chambers and passageways of the crew area, heading towards what he recalled were the science labs.

‘We’re going to see Vitas?’ he asked.

‘Vitas,’ she spat. ‘Vitas I made use of right at the start, but she’s been sleeping the sleep of the not particularly trusted ever since. After all, she’d not soil her hands with maintenance, and I’ve not forgotten how she was egging Guyen on all the while before. No, I’m taking you to see our cargo extension.’

‘You’ve put in new chambers? How?’

‘Just shut up and wait, will you?’ Lain paused, and he could see she was catching her breath, but trying not to show it. ‘You’ll see soon enough.’

In fact, he did not
see
, when she eventually showed him. Here was one of the labs, and here, taking up much of one wall, was a specimen chamber: a great rack of little containers, hundreds of little organic samples kept on ice. Holsten stared and stared, and shook his head. And then, just as Lain was about to lay into his lack of perception, he suddenly connected the dots and said, ‘Embryos.’

‘Yes, old man. The future. All the new life that our species couldn’t stop itself putting out but that we had no space to raise and bring up. As soon as some over-eager girl decides she wants a family that I, in my wisdom, don’t think we can afford, it’s out with the surgery and it comes here. Harsh world, ain’t it?’

‘Alive?’

‘Of course, alive,’ Lain snapped at him. ‘Because right now I’m still hoping the human race has a future, and we are frankly still kind of short on people from a historical perspective. So we put them on ice, and hope that one day we can fire up the artificial wombs and bequeath a load of orphans to the universe.’

‘The parents must have . . .’

‘Argued? Fought? Kicked and screamed?’ Her stare was barren. ‘Yeah, you could say that. But also they knew what would happen ahead of time, and they still did it. Biological imperative’s a funny thing. The genes just want to squeeze themselves into another generation, no matter what. And, of course, we’ve had generations growing up here. You know how kids are. Even when you offer ’em countermeasures, they won’t use them half the time. Ignorant little fucks, so to speak.’

‘I don’t understand why you thought I so desperately needed to see all this,’ Holsten pointed out.

‘Oh, yeah, right.’ Lain bent over the console and skimmed through various menus until she highlighted one of the embryo containers. ‘That one, see it?’

Holsten frowned, wondering if there was some mutation or defect that he was supposed to be noticing.

‘What can I say?’ Lain prompted. ‘I was young and foolish. There was this lusty young classicist, he swept me off my feet. We had dinner by the light of dying stars in a ten-thousand-year-old space station. Oh, the romance.’ Her deadpan delivery never wavered.

Holsten stared at her. ‘I don’t believe you.’

‘Why?’

‘But you . . . you never said. When we were up against Guyen, you could have . . .’

‘Right then I wasn’t sure we
had
a future, and if Guyen had found out, and got control of the system . . . It’s a girl, by the way. She’s a girl.
Will
be a girl.’ And it was that repetition that told Holsten how close to the edge Lain was now skating. ‘I made the choice, Holsten. When I was with you, I chose. I made this happen. I was going to . . . I thought there would be time later . . . I thought there would be a tomorrow when I could go back to her and . . . but there was always some other damned thing. The tomorrow I was waiting for never came. And now I’m not sure I . . .’

‘Isa—’

‘Listen, Holsten, you’re going back under as soon as they find you a chamber, right? You’re priority, fuck all the rest. There are some perks to being me right now, and first off is that I call the shots. You go under. You wake up when we hit the green planet system. You make planetfall, and you make sure everything is done to make that place
ours
, come crazy computers or monster spiders or whatever. And you make it somewhere
she
can live. You hear me, old man?’

‘But you—’

‘No, Holsten, this thing you get to take responsibility for. I’ll have done all I can. I’ll have done everything humanly possible to bring about this tomorrow. It’ll be down to you after that.’

Only later, after she saw him to his newly restored suspension chamber, did he glimpse the name still tagged on the ragged shawl of shipsuit she wore about her shoulders. The sight of it froze him just as he was about to get a leg up into the refurbished coffin.
Really? For all this time?
Facing that long, cold oblivion, with no certainty that he would wake up again, it was curiously warming to know that someone, even if it was this cynical bitter woman, had been holding a torch for him all those unfelt years.

6.6
AND TOUCHED THE FACE OF GOD

Portia wants to go out along with the rest of the crew, but Viola has forbidden it. She is being saved for her own private ideal. Until then, Portia is to be as cosseted and pampered as a sacrificial king.

This high up, the Sky Nest’s colony needs physical help to keep the airship envelope in shape, and to keep the ship maintained. Even working from within, the cold is getting to the ants. Tiny and unable to regulate their own temperature, they cannot accomplish much outside the core of the ship itself, and so the spiders have donned their special suits and gone out to crawl about the exterior of their floating home, entering and leaving through pressure doors of their own weaving and re-weaving, temporary airlocks appearing and disappearing as needed. They stumble and stutter back in twos and threes, their work done for the moment. Some return bound to their comrades’ backs, overcome by the cold, despite the layers of silk swathing their bodies and the chemical heaters slung beneath their bellies. Portia feels uncomfortable at not being able to assist, for all she understands that she is being saved for another ordeal.

There were a few who had clung to the idea that being closer to the sun would be to feel its unmitigated heat. They have been roundly disabused of this notion. Up here the thin air leaches at their bodies like a sightless vampire. And, despite this, Portia would have joined them, worked knee to knee alongside them and pulled her weight, even as the airship is pulling all of their weights.

The other reason that she wants to work is to take her mind off what is going on down below – or up above, depending on perspective. The sudden silence of the Messenger has affected them all. Reason dictates that their mission is no more than peripherally connected – in that both events involve the erratic brilliance of Bianca – but, like humans, the spiders are quick to see patterns and make connections, to extract untoward significance from coincidence. There has been a curious anxiety about the crew, for all that those glory days of Temple are long gone. Being this much closer to the essential mystery of the Messenger, and so cut off from all they know, arouses strange thoughts.

At last Viola is confident that the Sky Nest will coast stably in the thin air, and she liaises with radio beacons on the ground. The air currents – that have been mapped out crudely over the last few years – are carrying them closer to the crisis point.

Portia, Fabian, go to your station
, she orders.

Portia questions her respectfully, signalling with terse passes of her palps that she feels the mission could be achieved single-handed as easily as it could with two. It is not a lack of faith in Fabian’s abilities that moves her, but a fear for him. Males are so frail, and she feels protective.