Children of Time (29 page)

Everything that Portia has tried has so far failed, and none of her fellows has obtained any better results. She is beginning to drift into ever more speculative sciences, desperate for that one lateral thought that will save her civilization from a collapse into dispersed barbarism.

She has now been working in her laboratory for the best part of a day. Fabian has departed with a new batch of solutions to pass to his counterparts within the sealed lazar-houses that the dwellings of infected peer groups have become. She has no particular belief that these solutions will work. She feels she has reached the end of her capabilities, frustrated with the great void of ignorance that she has found, while standing out here at the very edge of her people’s comprehension.

She now has a visitor. Under other circumstances she would turn this one away, but she is tired, so very tired, and she desperately needs some new perspective. And new – disturbingly new – perspectives are what this visitor is all about.

Her name is Bianca and she was formerly one of Portia’s peer group. She is a large, overfed spider with pale brindling all over her body, who moves with a fidgety, nervous energy that makes Portia wonder whether, if Bianca caught the disease, anyone would actually notice.

Bianca was formerly of the Temple, too, but she did not fulfil her duties with the proper respect. Her curiosity as a scientist overwhelmed her reverence as a priestess. She had begun experiments with the crystal and, when this was discovered, she came very close to being exiled for her disrespect. Portia and her other peers interceded on her behalf, but she effectively fell from those lofty levels of society, losing both her status and her friends. It was assumed that she would leave Great Nest, or perhaps die.

Instead, somehow Bianca has clung on and even thrived. She has always been a brilliant mind – perhaps that is another reason Portia, at the end of her own mental resources, lets her in – and she has bartered her skills like a male, by serving lesser peer houses, and eventually forming a new peer group of her own, drawn from other disaffected scholars. In better times, the major peer houses were always on the point of censuring or exiling the entire clutch of them, but now nobody cares. Portia’s people have other matters to concern them.

They say you are close to a cure?
However, Bianca’s stance and the slight delay in her movements convey scepticism very neatly.

I work. We all work.
Portia would normally exaggerate her prospects, but she is feeling too weary.
Why are you here?

Bianca shuffles slyly, eyeing Portia.
Why, sister, why am I ever anywhere?

This is not the time.
So Bianca is after her usual, then. Portia huddles miserably, the other spider stepping close to hear her muted speech.

From what I hear, there may be no other time
Bianca says, half-goading.
I know what messages come down the lines from the other cities. I know how many other cities have no messages left in them. You and I both know what we are facing.

If I had wanted to think further on that just now, I would have remained in my laboratory
, Portia tells her with an angry stamp.
I will not give you access to the Messenger’s crystal.

Bianca’s palps quiver.
I even had my own crystal, did you know? And the Temple found out, and took it away. I was close . . .

Portia does not need to know what she was close to. Bianca has one obsession, and that is speaking to the Messenger, sending a message
back
to that swift-moving star. It is a subject of debate within the Temple every generation – and in every generation there is one like Bianca who will not take no for an answer. They are watched, always.

Portia’s position is wretched because, left to herself, she would probably support Bianca. She is swayed by the majority, however, in the way that most large decisions fall out when the great and the good stand on the same web and debate. The Temple old guard, the priestesses of the former generation, hold the message sacrosanct and perfect. The path of Portia’s people is to better appreciate it, to learn the hidden depths of the message that have yet to be unlocked. It is not for them to try and howl into the darkness to attract the Messenger’s attention. Passing overhead, the Messenger observes all. There is an order to the universe, and the Messenger is proof of that.

Each generation a few more voices are raised in dispute, but so far that enduring meme has won out. After all, did the Messenger not intervene during the great war with the ants, with no need for anyone to
ask
for help? If it is within the Messenger’s plan to help Portia’s kind, then such help will come without being solicited.

Why come to me? I will not go against Temple
, Portia tells her as dismissively as she can manage.

Because I remember you from when we were still truly sisters. You want the same thing as me, only not quite enough.

I will not help you
, Portia declares, her weariness adding a finality to the phrase.
There is no speaking back to the Messenger anyway. Our people need the Temple as a source of reassurance. Your experiments would likely take that from them, and for what? You cannot achieve what you wish, nor is it a thing to be achieved.

I have something to show you.
Suddenly Bianca is signalling and some males are bringing in a heavy device slung between them, stepping in sideways to lower it to the taut floor, which stretches a little more to take the weight.

It has long been known that certain chemicals react with metals in curious ways
, Bianca noted.
When combined, linked properly, there is a force that passes along the metals and through the liquids. You remember such experiments from when we were learning together.

A curiosity, nothing more
, Portia recalled.
It is used for coating metals with other metals. I recall there was an ant colony induced to make the task work, and they produced remarkable goods.
This memory from her comparatively innocent youth lends her a little strength.
Many noxious fumes, though. Work fit for ants only. What of it?

Bianca is attending to her device, which resembles the experiments that Portia recalls in that it has compartments of chemicals within other chemicals, linked by rods of metal, but it has other metal parts too: metal painstakingly teased out until it is as fine as thick silk, coiled densely in a column. Something changes in the air and Portia feels her hair prickle, as though a storm is coming – an event that always inspires a very reasonable fear because of the damage that natural fires can cause to a city.

This toy of mine is at the heart of an invisible web
, Bianca tells her.
By careful adjustment, I can use it to pluck the strands of that web. Is that not remarkable?

Portia wants to say that it is nonsensical, but she is intrigued, and the idea of some all-encompassing web is attractive, intuitive. How else could they be connected with . . . ?

What you say is that this web is what the Messenger speaks to us through?

Bianca skitters about her novel device.
Well, there must be some connection or how could we receive the message? And yet the Temple does not speculate. The message simply ‘is’. Yes, I have found the great web of the universe, the web that the Messenger plucks its message upon. Yes, I can send our reply.

Even for Bianca this is a bold and fearful boast.

I do not believe you
, Portia decides.
You would have done it already, if it could be done.

Bianca stamps angrily.
What point in calling to the Messenger if I cannot hear her words? I need access to the temple.

You wish the Messenger to recognize you, to speak to you.
So it is Bianca’s ego that really drives this experiment. She was always thus: always ready to measure legs with the whole of creation.
This is not the time
. Portia feels exhausted once more.

Sister, we have no more time. You know that
, Bianca wheedles.
Let me fulfil my plan. I cannot leave this to future generations. Even if I could pass the Understanding on, there will be no future generations worth speaking of. Now is the only time.

There will be future generations
. Portia does not step out those words, only thinks them.
Fabian has seen them: living like beasts in the ruins of our cities, heads crowded with Understandings that they cannot use, because all the architecture of their mothers’ world has gone. What use is science then? What use the Temple? What use art when there are so few left that all they can do is feed and mate? Our great Understandings will die off, generation to generation, until none of those left alive will remember who we were.
But the thought is incomplete, something nagging at her. She finds herself thinking of the selection of Understandings – those lost survivors will presumably have some long-ago Understandings to assist them in their hunting, and those offspring that inherit such primal Understandings would become the new lords of the world. But that will not be all that they inherit . . .

Portia leaps up, electrified into wakefulness as though she had inadvertently touched the wrong end of Bianca’s machine. A mad thought has come to her. An impossible thought. A thought of science.

She signals one of her attendant males and demands to know if Fabian has returned. He has, and she has him sent for.

I must work in my laboratory
, she tells Bianca, and then hesitates. Bianca is half-mad already, a dangerous maverick, a potential revolutionary, but her brilliant intellect was never in doubt.
Will you assist me? I need all the help I can get.

Bianca’s surprise is evident.
It would be an honour to work with my sisters once more, but . . .
She does not quite articulate the thought, but she tilts her eyes over towards her machine, now inactive and no longer stressing the air with its invisible web.

If we succeed, if we survive, I will do all I can to take your plea to Temple.
And a rebellious thought of Portia’s own.
If we survive, it will be by our own merits, not because of the Messenger’s aid. We are now on our own.

4.5
DREAMS OF THE ANCIENTS

‘Mason.’

Holsten started, half asleep over his work, and almost fell off his chair. Guyen was standing right behind him.

‘I – ah – was there something?’ For a moment he was racking his brains to remember whether he had already finished the translations that the commander had been asking after. But yes, he’d sent those over for Guyen’s personal inspection yesterday, hadn’t he. Had the man read them
already
?

Guyen’s face gave no clues. ‘I need you to come with me.’ The tone could quite easily have accommodated the inference that Holsten was about to be shot for some treason committed against Guyen’s one-man regime. Only the lack of an accompanying security detail was reassuring.

‘Well, I . . .’ Holsten made a vague gesture towards the console before him but, in truth, the work had lost much of its interest for him over the last few days. It was repetitive, it was gruelling, and in a curiously personal way it was depressing. The chance to get a break from it, even in Guyen’s company, was inexpressibly attractive. ‘What do you need, chief?’

Guyen motioned for him to follow and, after a few turns along the
Gilgamesh
’s corridors, Holsten could guess that they were heading for the shuttle bays. This was not exactly a path that he remembered fondly. Here and there he even saw the odd bullet scar that the maintenance crews had yet to get around to dealing with.

He almost resurrected those long ago/recent days then, almost made the mistake of talking about old times with Guyen. He restrained himself just in time. Odds on, Guyen would just have stared at him blankly, but there was an outside chance that he actually
would
want to talk about the failed mutiny, and where would that leave Holsten? With that one question that had obsessed his thoughts for those long days after he and Lain were brought back to the
Gil
. As he sat in solitary decontamination – just like Lain and all of Karst’s crew – he had turned those events over and over, trying to work out which of Guyen’s words and deeds had been bluff, and what had been cold-heartedly meant. He had wanted to talk to Karst about it at the time, but had not been given the chance. How much of the way that desperate rescue mission had gone was Guyen’s plan; how much was Karst’s improvisation? He had always thought the security chief was a thug and yet, in the end, the man had gone to ridiculous lengths to get the hostages back alive.

I owe you, Karst
, Holsten acknowledged, but he did not know whether he owed Guyen.

‘Are we . . . ?’ he asked the commander’s back.

‘We are going to the station,’ Guyen confirmed. ‘I need you to look at something.’

‘Some text there, or . . . ?’ He envisaged spending the day translating warning notices and labels for an increasingly opaque Guyen.

‘You’re a classicist. You do more than translations, don’t you?’ Guyen rounded on him. ‘Artefacts, yes?’

‘Well, yes, but surely Engineering . . .’ Holsten was aware that Guyen had wrong-footed him often enough that he hadn’t really finished voicing a properly articulated thought since the man arrived.

‘Engineering want a second opinion. I want a second opinion.’ They came out into a shuttle bay to find a craft ready and waiting, with open hatch and a pilot kicking her heels beside it, reading something on a pad. Holsten guessed it was one of those approved works that Guyen had released from the
Gil
’s capacious library, although there was also a brisk trade in covert copies of unauthorized books – writing and footage supposedly locked down in the system. Guyen would get angry over it, but never seemed able to stem it, and Holsten privately suspected that was because the censorship he had ordered Lain to put in place was never going to be able to keep out the chief culprit – to wit, Lain herself.