Children of Time (33 page)

It is not Portia herself who first grasps the wider import of her cure. It is hard to say which scientist was first to the mark: it is one of those ideas that seems simultaneously to be everywhere, exciting every enquiring mind. Portia’s treatment has allowed living adult spiders to benefit from a foreign Understanding. Yes, what was transferred was an immunity, but surely the process would work with other Understandings, if they can only be separated out and their page noted in Viola’s great book of the body. No longer will the spread of knowledge be held down by the slow march of generations or by laborious teaching.

The need for this technology is great. The depredations of the plague have made Understandings hard to find: where once a given idea might be held within scores of minds, now there are just a handful at best. Knowledge has become more precious than ever.

It is only a few years after the plague that the first idea is transferred between adults. A somewhat garbled Understanding of astronomy is imparted to a male test subject (as are all such, given some failures in earlier experiments). From there on, any spider may learn anything. Every scientist of Portia’s generation and beyond will stand on the shoulders of the giants that she chooses to reside within her. What one knows, any can know, for a price. An economy of modular, tradable knowledge will swiftly develop.

But that is not all.

After she is recovered, Portia presents Bianca to the Temple. She explains about her fellow’s contribution to the cure. Bianca is permitted to address the assembled priestesses.

There has been a shift of orthodoxy in the wake of the plague. Everyone is having to stretch their minds to fill the gaping void left by all those who did not survive. Old ideas are being revisited, old prohibitions reconsidered. There is a great feeling of destiny, but it is a self-made destiny. They have passed the test. They are their own saviours. They wish to communicate something to that one point of intellect outside their sphere: the most basic, essential signal.

They wish to tell the Messenger,
We are here
.

Bianca’s battery, in and of itself, does not make a radio transmitter. Whilst the experiments with the transmission of Understandings between spiders progress, so does the investigation into the transmission of vibrations across the invisible web that is strung from their world to the distant satellite and beyond.

Years later, an ageing Bianca and Portia are amongst a crowd of the intimates of the temple, now ready to speak to the unknown, to cast their electromagnetic voice into the ether. The replies to the Messenger’s mathematical problems – that every spider knows and understands – are ready for transmission. They wait for the Messenger to appear in the night sky above, and then they send that unequivocal first transmission.

We are here.

Within a second of the last solution being sent, the Messenger ceases its own transmissions, throwing the whole of Portia’s civilization into a panic that their hubris has angered the universe.

Several fraught days later, the Messenger speaks again.

4.9
EX MACHINA

The signal from the green planet resonated through the Brin 2’s Sentry Pod like an earthquake. The ancient systems had been waiting for just this moment – it seemed forever. Protocols laid down in the days of the Old Empire had gathered dust through the ages, through the entire lifespan of the new species that was even now announcing its presence. They had grown corrupted. They had lost their relevance, been overwritten, been infiltrated by the diseased spread of the uploaded Kern persona that the Sentry Pod had been incubating like a culture all these years.

The systems received the signal, checked over the sums and found them within tolerance, recognized that a critical threshold had been passed with respect to the planet below. Its purpose, rusty with aeons-long disuse, was abruptly relevant again.

For a recursive, untimed moment, the systems of the Sentry Pod – the sea of calculation that boiled behind the human mask of Eliza – were unable to make a decision. Too much had been lost, misfiled, edited out of existence within its mind.

It attacked the discontinuities within its own systems. Whilst it was not truly a self-aware artificial intelligence, it nevertheless knew itself. It restored itself, worked around insoluble problems, reached the right conclusion by estimate and circuitous logic.

It did its best to awaken Avrana Kern.

The distinction between living woman, uploaded personality construct and pod systems was not finely drawn. They bled into one another, so that the frozen sleep of the one leaked nightmarish dreams into the cold logic of the others. A lot of time had passed. Not all of Avrana Kern remained viable. Still, the pod did its best.

Doctor Kern awoke, or she dreamt of waking, and in her dream Eliza hovered at her bedside like an angel and provided a miraculous annunciation.

This day is a new star seen in the heavens. This day is born a saviour of life on Earth.

Avrana fought with the trailing weeds of her horrors, struggling to resurface enough to understand what was really being told to her. She had not been truly conscious for some time – had she ever been? She had confused recollections of some dark presence, intruders attacking her charge, the planet below that had become her purpose, the sum total of her legacy. A traveller had come to steal the secret of her project – to rob her of the immortality represented by her new life, by her progeny, by her monkey-children. Had it? Or had she dreamed it? She could not separate the fact from the long cold years of sleep.

‘I was supposed to be dead,’ she told the watchful pod. ‘I was supposed to be locked away, oblivious. I was never supposed to dream.’

‘Doctor, the passage of time appears to have led to a homogenization of information systems within the Sentry Pod. I apologize for this, but we are operating beyond our intended parameters.’

The Sentry Pod was designed to lie dormant for centuries. Avrana remembered that much. How long would it take the virus to spark intellect into generations of monkeys? Did that mean that her experiment was a failure?

No, they had signalled at last. They had reached out and touched the ineffable. And time was suddenly no longer the currency it once had been. She remembered now why she was in the Sentry Pod at all, performing this function that had been meant for someone far more disposable. Time didn’t matter. Only the monkeys mattered, because the future was theirs now.

Yet those troubling half-dreams recurred to her. In her dream there had come a primitive boat of travellers claiming to be her kin, but she had looked at them and seen them for what they truly were. She had scanned through their histories and their understandings. They were the mould that had grown on the corpse of her own people. They were hopelessly corrupted with the same sickness that had killed Kern’s own civilization. Better to start anew with monkeys.

‘What do you want of me?’ she demanded of the entity/entities that surrounded her. She looked into their faces and saw an infinite progression of stages between her and the cold logic of the pod systems, and nowhere could she say where she herself ended and where the machine began.

‘Phase two of the uplift project is now ready,’ Eliza explained. ‘Your authority is required to commence.’

‘What if I’d died?’ Avrana choked out. ‘What if I’d rotted? What if you couldn’t wake me?’

‘Then your uploaded persona would inherit your responsibilities and authority,’ Eliza replied, and then, as if remembering that it was supposed to show a human face, ‘but I am glad that has not occurred.’

‘You don’t know what “glad” means,’ but, even as she said this, Kern was not sure that it was true. There was enough of her smeared up that continuum towards the life electronic that perhaps Eliza knew more of human emotion than Kern herself was now left with.

‘Proceed with the next phase. Of course, proceed with the next phase,’ she snapped into the silence that followed. ‘What else are we here for? What else is there?’
In a very real sense, indeed, what else is there?

She remembered when the false humans, that disease that had outlived her people, had approached the planet. Had they? Had that actually happened? She had spoken to them. The
her
that had interacted with them must have recognized enough humanity in them to bargain, to spare them, to allow them to rescue their own. Each time she was awoken, it seemed some different assortment of thoughts took the helm of her mind. She had been in a giving vein, then. She had recognized them to be human enough to show mercy to.

She had been sentimental that day. Thinking back on it, she regained those memories of how it had felt. And they had been as good as their word, she assumed, and they had gone. There was no sign of them, or of any transmissions, within the solar system.

She had an uncomfortable feeling that it was not that simple. She had a feeling that they would be back. And now she had so much more to lose. What devastation would those false humans wreak on her nascent monkey civilization?

She would have to harden her heart.

Phase two of the uplift program was a contact exercise. Once the monkeys had developed their own singular culture to the extent that they could send radio transmissions, they were ready for contact with the wider universe.
And now I am the wider universe.
The Sentry Pod would begin developing a means of communication, starting with the simplest binary notation and using each stage to bootstrap up to a more complex language, just as if a computer was being programmed from scratch. It would take time, depending on the willingness and ability of the monkeys to learn, generation to generation.

‘But first send them a message,’ Avrana decided. For all that the inhabitants of the planet could not possible understand her, right now, she wanted to set the tone. She wanted them to understand what they were in for when she and they could finally communicate.

‘Awaiting your message,’ Eliza prompted.

‘Tell them this,’ Avrana declared. Perhaps, in their simian ignorance, they would record it and later re-read it, and understand it all.

Tell them this: I am your creator. I am your god.

5.1
THE PRISONER

Holsten was pondering his relationship with time.

Not long ago, it seemed that time was becoming something that happened to other people – or, as other people had then been in short supply, to other parts of the universe. Time was a weight that he seemed to have been cut free from. He stepped in and out of the forward path of its arrow, and was somehow never struck down. Lain might call him ‘old man’ but in truth the span of objective time that had passed between his nativity and this present moment was ridiculous, unreal. No human ever bestrode time as he had done, in his journey of thousands of years.

Now, in his cell, time weighed him down and dragged at his heels, chaining him to the grindingly slow pace of the cosmos where before he had leapt ahead across the centuries, skipping between the bright points of human history.

They had hauled him from the suspension chamber and thrown him in this cage. It had been twenty-seven days before anyone gave him even an indication of what was going on.

At first, he’d thought it was a dream of the mutineers kidnapping him. He had been quite sanguine before he realized that the people dragging him through the
Gilgamesh
were not the long-dead Scoles and company, but total strangers. Then he had entered the living quarters.

The smell had assailed him – an utterly unfamiliar, sick reek that even the
Gil
’s ventilation had not been able to purge. It was the scent of close-packed human habitation.

He had a blurred recollection of a former operations room now festooned with grey cloth, a veritable shanty town of makeshift drapes and hangings and close partitions – and people, lots of people.

The sight had shocked him. Some part of him had grown comfortably used to being part of a small and select population, but he registered at least a hundred unfamiliar faces in that brief moment. The press of them, the closeness of their living conditions, the smell, the sheer raucous noise, all of it merged into the sense of confronting a hostile creature, something fierce and inimical and all-consuming.

There had been children.

His wits had started to come to him by then, with the thought:
The cargo’s got loose!

His captors all wore robes of the same sheer, grey material that the squatters were also using for their amateurish tents – something that the
Gilgamesh
had presumably been storing for some other purpose entirely, or that had been synthesized in the workshops. Holsten had spotted a few shipsuits during his hurried passage through the living quarters, but most of the strangers had been wearing these shapeless, sagging garments. They were all thin, malnourished, underdeveloped. They wore their hair long, very long, past the shoulders. The whole scene had a weirdly primal feel to it, a resurgence of the primitive days of mankind.

They had seized him, locked him up. This was not just some room in the
Gil
that they had secured. Within one of the shuttle bays they had welded together a cage, and this had become his home. His captors had fed him and sporadically removed the pail provided for his other functions, but for twenty-seven days that was all he had. They seemed to be waiting for something.

For his part, Holsten had eyed the shuttle airlock and begun to wonder if his future did not include some kind of space-god sacrifice. Certainly the manner of his captors was not simply that of oppressors or kidnappers. There was a curious respect, almost reverence to be observed amongst some of them. They did not like to touch him – those who had manhandled him to the cage had worn gloves – and they refused to meet his eyes. All this reinforced his growing belief that they were a cult and he was some sort of sacred offering, and that the last hope for humanity was even now vanishing away beneath a tide of superstition.