Children of Time (63 page)

Faced with the arrival of humanity, the creator-species, the giants of legend, the spiders’ thought was not
How can we destroy them?
but
How can we trap them? How can we use them?

What is the barrier between us that makes them want to destroy us?

The spiders have equivalents of the Prisoners’ Dilemma, but they think in terms of intricate interconnectivity, of a world not just of sight but of constant vibration and scent. The idea of two prisoners incapable of communication would not be an acceptable status quo for them, but a problem to overcome: the Prisoners’ Dilemma as a Gordian knot, to be cut through rather than be bound by.

They have long known that, within their own bodies and in other species across their planet, there is a message. In ancient times, when they fought the plague, they recognized this as something distinct from their own genetic code, and took it to be the work of the Messenger. In a manner of speaking they were correct. Long ago, they isolated the nanovirus in their systems.

It had not escaped their notice that creatures formed like the giants – mice and similar vertebrates seeded across their world – did not carry the nanovirus, and so lacked a commonality that seemed to bind the spiders to each other and to other arthropod species. Mice were just animals. There seemed no possibility of them ever becoming anything else. Compared to them, the Paussid beetles – or a dozen other similar creatures – were practically bursting with potential.

The spiders have worked long and hard to craft and breed a variant of the nanovirus that attacks mammalian neurology – not the full virus in all its complexity but a simple, single-purpose tool that is virulent, transmissible, inheritable and irreversible. Those parts of the nanovirus that would bolster evolution have been stripped out – too complex and too little understood – leaving only one of the virus’s base functions intact. It is a pandemic of the mind, tweaked and mutated to rewrite certain very specific parts of the mammal brain.

The very first effect of the nanovirus, when it touched the ancient
Portia labiata
spiders so many thousands of generations ago, was to turn a species of solitary hunters into a society. Like calls out to like, and those touched by the virus knew their comrades even when they did not have enough cognitive capacity to know themselves.

Kern – and all the rest – watches the shuttle land. Up on the
Gilgamesh
, orbiting a hundred kilometres beyond the equatorial web and its space elevators, there are many humans, all infected, and thousands still sleeping who will need to have the virus introduced to them. That task will take a long time, but then this landing is the first step towards integration, and that will also take a long time.

Even within the spiders, the nanovirus has fought a long battle against ingrained habits of cannibalism and spouse-slaying. Its notable success has been mostly within-species, though. Portiids have always been hunters, and so pan-specific empathy would have crippled them. This was the true test of their biochemical ingenuity. The spiders have done their best, conducting what tests they can on lesser mammals, but only after Portia and her peers had taken control of the ark ship and its crew could the truth be known.

The task was not just to take a cut-down version of the virus and reconfigure it so as to attack a mammal brain: difficult enough on its own, but essentially useless. The real difficulty for that legion of spider scientists, working over generations and each inheriting the undiluted learning of the last, was to engineer the human infection to know its parents: to recognize the presence of itself in its arachnid creators, and call out to that similarity.
Kinship
at the submicrobial level, so that one of the
Gilgamesh
’s great giants, the awesome, careless creator-gods of prehistory, might look upon Portia and her kin and know them as their children.

Once the shuttle has landed, the spiders press closer, a seething, hairy greyish tide of legs and fangs and staring, lidless eyes. Kern watches the hatch open, and the first humans appear.

There is a handful of them only. This is, in itself, an experiment simply to see if the nanovirus fragment has produced the desired effect.

They step down among the tide of spiders, whose hard, bristly bodies bump against them. There is no evident revulsion, no sudden panic. The humans, to Kern’s reconfigured eyes, seem entirely at ease. One even puts her hand out, letting it brush across the thronging backs. The virus in them is telling them all,
This is us; they are like us
. It tells the spiders the same, that crippled fragment of virus calling out to its more complete cousins:
We are like you.

And Kern guesses, then, that the spiders’ meddling might go further than they had thought. If there had been some tiny bead present in the brain of all humans, that had told each other,
They are like you
; that had drawn some thin silk thread of empathy, person to person, in a planet-wide net – what might then have happened? Would there have been the same wars, massacres, persecutions and crusades?

Probably
, thinks Kern sourly. She wants to discuss it with Fabian, but even her faithful acolyte has crept out into the sunlight to watch this first-hand.

At the shuttle’s hatch, Portia steps out after the humans, along with some of her peer group. The enormity of what she has played a part in is mostly lost on her. She is glad to be alive: many of her fellows are not so lucky. The cost of bringing the human race around to their point of view has been high.

But worth it
, Bianca had assured her, when she aired that thought.
After this day, who knows what we may accomplish

together? They are responsible for our being here, after all. We are their children, though until now they did not know us.

Amongst the humans is one who Portia had thought was injured or ill, but now understands to be simply at the end of her long giant’s life. Another, a male, has carried her from the shuttle and laid her on the ground, with the spiders forming a curious, jostling but respectful circle around them. Portia sees the ailing human’s hands clench at the ground, gripping the grass. She stares up at the blue sky with those strange, narrow eyes – but eyes in which Portia can find a commonality, now that the bond of the nanovirus runs both ways.

She is dying, the old human – the oldest human there ever was, if Kern has translated that correctly. But she is dying on a world that will become her people’s world: that her people will share with its other people. Portia cannot be sure, but she thinks this old human is content with that.

8.1
TO BOLDLY GO

Helena Holsten Lain reclines in her webbing, feeling at ease in the zero gravity, whilst around her the rest of the crew complete their pre-launch checks.

The ship has two names and they both mean the same thing:
Voyager
. Helena does not know that this was once, in a long-ago age, the name for a pioneering human space vehicle, one that might, millennia after its launch, still be speeding through the cosmos somewhere, a silent record of achievement long forgotten by its makers’ descendants.

There is nothing of the long-dismantled
Gilgamesh
in the
Voyager
, save the ideas. The old technology of Earth, so painstakingly husbanded by Helena’s great-great-grandmother, has been resurrected, rediscovered, built upon and advanced. The scientists amongst the spiders first learned what the humans could teach, about their technology of metal and electricity, computers and fusion drives. After that, they taught it back to their tutors’ children, broadened and enhanced by a non-human perspective. In the same way, human minds have unravelled the threads of the spiders’ own complex biotechnology and offered their insights. Both species have limits they cannot easily cross: mental, physical, sensory. That is why they need each other.

The
Voyager
is a living thing with a fusion-reactor heart, a vast piece of bioengineering with a programmable nervous system and a symbiotic ant colony that regulates, repairs and improves it. It carries a crew of seventy, and the stored genetic material of tens of thousands of others, and hundreds of thousands of Understandings. This is a vessel of exploration, not a desperate ark ship, but the journey will last many sleeping years, and the precautions seemed wise.

The two peoples of the green world work together in easy harmony now. There was a generation of wary caution on both sides, but once the nanovirus had taken down those barriers – between species and between individuals – so much potential tragedy was already averted. Life is not perfect, individuals will always be flawed, but empathy – the sheer inability to see those around them as anything other than people too – conquers all, in the end.

Communication was always the great problem at the start, Helena knows. Spiders lack the ability to hear speech as anything more than a tickling of the feet; while humans lack the sensitive touch required to detect the wealth of arachnid language. Technology on both sides came to the rescue, of course, and there was always the sour, recalcitrant presence of Avrana Kern. The common language, everyone’s second language, is that curious mangled Imperial C that Kern and the spiders worked out between them when she was still the Messenger, and they her faithful. The dead language lives on. Helena’s great-great-grandfather would find that thought hilarious, no doubt.

All of the living ship’s systems are within tolerance, the organic readouts confirm. Helena adds her own confirmation to the chorus, waiting for the word. She is not the commander of this mission. That honour goes to Portia, the spiders’ first ever interstellar pioneer. Hunched in her own webbing slung from the ceiling – or at least the curved side of their chamber that faces Helena’s, the spider considers the moment for a few seconds, exchanges quick radio communication with the dock and with the world below, and then speaks to the ship itself.

When you wish
.

The ship’s response, though positive, has a fragment of the dry wit of Doctor Avrana Kern. Its biomechanical intelligence is extrapolated from what she once was: a child of Kern budded off her, with her blessing.

With awesome, colossal grace, the
Voyager
reconfigures its shape for optimum efficiency and detaches itself from the orbital web, a structure vastly grander than when the
Gilgamesh
first saw it, and now blooming with green solar collectors, dotted with other amorphous spacecraft that have already plotted the extent of the green planet’s solar system.

The
Voyager
is more fuel-efficient than the
Gilgamesh
– or even than the Old Empire’s vessels, according to Kern. Sometimes all it takes, to crack a problem, is a new perspective. The vessel’s reactor can accelerate smoothly and constantly for far longer, decelerate likewise, and the ship’s fluid internal structure will protect the crew from extremes of acceleration far more effectively. The journey out will be a sleep of mere decades, not millennia or even centuries.

Still, it is a grand step, and not to be taken lightly. Although returning to the stars was always a certainty that both species had worked hard towards, nobody would ever have suggested reaching out there quite yet, if it had not been for the signal, the message.

Out of all the points of light in the sky, one of them is talking. It is not saying anything comprehensible, but the message is plainly something more than mere static, something more structured than the orderly calls of pulsars or any other known phenomenon of the universe. The work, in short, of intelligence, where there should be none. How could the people of the green planet ignore such a beacon?

The
Voyager
begins its long acceleration, gently stressing the bodies of its crew, realigning its internal geometry. Soon they will sleep, and when they wake there will be a new world awaiting them. An unknown world of perils and wonders and mystery. A world that calls out for them. Not an alien world, though, not entirely. The ancient progenitors of the people of the green planet walked there once. It exists on the
Gilgamesh
’s star maps, another island in the strung-out terraformers’ archipelago that was left to its own devices by the collapse of the Old Empire.

After all the years, the wars, the tragedies and the loss, the spiders and the monkeys are returning to the stars to seek their inheritance.

Adrian Tchaikovsky was born in Woodhall Spa, Lincolnshire before heading off to Reading to study psychology and zoology. For reasons unclear even to himself he subsequently ended up in law and has worked as a legal executive in both Reading and Leeds, where he now lives. Married, he is a keen live role-player and occasional amateur actor, has trained in stage-fighting, and keeps no exotic or dangerous pets of any kind, possibly excepting his son. He is the author of the ten-book fantasy series Shadows of the Apt and
Guns of the Dawn
, a stand-alone historical fantasy novel.
Children of Time
is his first science fiction novel.

Catch up with Adrian at www.shadowsoftheapt.com for further information plus bonus material including short stories and artwork.

BY ADRIAN TCHAIKOVSKY

Shadows of the Apt

Empire in Black and Gold

Dragonfly Falling

Blood of the Mantis

Salute the Dark

The Scarab Path

The Sea Watch

Heirs of the Blade

The Air War

War Master’s Gate

Seal of the Worm

Guns of the Dawn

Children of Time

A big thank-you to my scientific advisors, including Stewart Hotston, Justina Robson, Michael Czajkowski, Max Barclay and the Entomology department of the Natural History Museum.