Children of Time (55 page)

She is the general, the tactician. She is going to take her place amidst the bustling community known as Great Star Nest to mastermind the defence of her planet against the alien invaders: the Star Gods. She has ultimate responsibility for the survival of her species. A great many better minds than hers have formulated the plan that she will attempt to carry out, but it will be her own decisions that will make the difference between success and failure.

The journey up is a long one and Bianca has plenty of time to reflect. The enemy they face is the child of a technology she cannot conceive of, advanced beyond the dreams of her own kind’s greatest scientists, using a technology of metal and fire and lighting, all fit tools for vengeful deities. At her disposal is fragile silk, biochemistry and symbiosis, and the valour of all those who will put their lives at her disposal.

Fretting, she spins and destroys, spins and destroys, as she and her fellows are hauled towards the open darkness of space, and the gleaming grid of her people’s greatest architectural triumph.

Already in orbit on the globe-spanning three-dimensional sculpture they think of as Great Star Nest, Portia is steeling herself for a fight.

The great equatorial web is studded with habitats that trail out from one another, interconnect, are spun up or taken down. It has become a way of life for the spiders, and one they have taken to remarkably quickly. They are a species that is well made for a life of constant free-fall around a planet. They are born to climb and to orient themselves in three dimensions. Their rear legs give them a powerful capacity to jump to places that their keen eyes and minds can target precisely, and if they get it wrong, they always have a safety line. In a curious way, as Portia and many others have considered, they were born to live out in space.

The old cumbersome spacesuits, which once took those pioneering balloonists to the outer reaches of the atmosphere, are things of the past now. Portia and her squad traverse the lattice-strung vacuum quickly and efficiently, setting out on manoeuvres to ready themselves for the coming conflict. They carry most of their suit about their abdomens: book-lungs fed by an air supply that is chemically generated as needed, rather than stored in tanks. With their training and their technology and their relatively undemanding metabolisms, they can stay out in raw space for days. A chemical heating pack is secured beneath their bodies, along with a compact radio. A lensed mask protects their eyes and mouths. At the tip of each abdomen their spinnerets connect to a little silk factory spinning chemical silk that forms strands – formidably strong strands – in the airless void. Lastly, they have packs of propellant with adjustable nozzles, to guide their silent flight in the void.

Their exoskeletons have been coated in a transparent film, a single molecule thick, which prevents any decompression or moisture loss without diminishing much in the way of feeling. The tips of their legs are sheathed in insulating articulated sleeves to guard them from heat loss. They are the complete astronaut-soldiers.

As they cross from line to line, judging each leap effortlessly, they are swift and agile and utterly focused.

The enemy is coming at last, just as the Messenger foretold. The concept of holy war is alien to them, but this looming conflict has all the hallmarks. There is an ancient enemy that they know will negate their very existence if they cannot defend themselves. There are weapons that, try as they might, they cannot even conceive of. The Messenger did Her best to set out for them the technical and martial capabilities of the human race. The overwhelming impression received was of a terrifying and godlike arsenal, and Portia is under no illusions. The best defence her people have is that the invaders want their planet to live on – the worst excesses of Earth technology cannot be deployed without rendering the prize that both sides fight for worthless.

But there are still a great many unpredictable weapons the
Gilgamesh
could conceivably possess.

The spiders have done what they could in the generations allowed to them, having considered the threat and prepared what is to them the best technological and philosophical response.

There is an army: Portia is one of hundreds who will serve on the front line, one of tens of thousands whose turn will likely come to fight. They will die, many of them, or at least that is what they expect. The stakes are so high, though: individual lives are ever the chaff of war, but if there was ever a just cause, it is this. The survival of an entire species, of a whole planet’s evolutionary history, is now at stake.

She has heard that Bianca is on her way up. Everyone is glad, of course, that the commander of their global defence will be up here alongside them, but the simple fact that their leader is
on her way
brings it home to all of them. The time is finally here. The battle for tomorrow is beginning. If they lose, then there will be no future for them and, with that severed tomorrow, all their yesterdays will be undone as well. The universe will turn, but it will be as though they had never existed.

Portia knows that the great minds of her species have considered many diverse weapons and plans. She must take it on faith that the strategy she has now been given is the best: the most achievable and the most acceptable.

She and her squad gather, watching other bands of soldiers surge and spring across distant sections of the webbing. Her eyes stray to the high heavens. There is a new star up above, now, and it foretells a time of terrible cataclysm and destruction simply by its appearance. There is no superstitious astrology in such predictions. The end times are truly here, the moment when one great cycle of history grinds inexorably into the next.

The humans are coming.

7.3
MAIDEN, MOTHER, CRONE

‘What do you mean, “Wake Lain”?’

Karst and Alpash turned to Holsten, trying to read his suddenly agonized expression.

‘What it sounds like,’ the security chief replied, baffled.

‘She’s
alive
?’ Holsten’s fingers crooked, fighting the urge to grab one or other of them and shake. ‘Why didn’t anyone . . . why didn’t you . . . why only wake her
now
? Why isn’t she in charge?’

Karst obviously took issue with that, but Alpash stepped in quickly. ‘To wake Grandmother is not something to be done lightly, by her own orders. Only in matters of emergency, she said. She told us: when I next wake, I want to walk upon a green planet.’

‘She told you that, did she?’ Holsten demanded.

‘She told my mother, when she was very young,’ the engineer replied, meeting the classicist’s challenging stare easily. ‘But it is recorded. We have records of many of Grandmother’s later pronouncements.’ He bent over a console, calling up a display that shuddered patchily. ‘But we should go now. Commander . . . ?’

‘Yeah, well, I’ll hold the fort here, shall I?’ Karst said, plainly still smarting somewhat. ‘You get the woman up and on her feet, and then link to me. Give her the situation and tell her that Vitas and I need to touch heads with her.’

Alpash headed off into the ship, away from Key Crew and most of the living areas that Holsten was familiar with. The classicist hurried after him, not much wanting to be left with Karst, still less wanting to get lost within the flickering, ravaged spaces of the
Gilgamesh
. Everywhere told the same story of slow autolysis, a cannibalism of the self as less important parts and systems were ripped out to fix higher-priority problems. Walls were laid open, the ship’s bones exposed. Screens flared static or else were dark as wells. Here and there huddled small pockets of the Tribe, still about the essential business of keeping the ship running, despite the immediate crisis, their heads close together like priests murmuring doctrine.

‘How do you even know how to fix the ship?’ Holsten asked of Alpash’s back. ‘It’s been . . . I don’t know how long it’s been. Since Guyen died, even, I don’t know. And you think you can still keep the ship running? Just by . . . ? What do you . . . ? You’re learning how to make a spaceship run by rote or . . . ?’

Alpash looked back at him, frowning. ‘Don’t think I don’t know what the commander means, when he says “Tribe”. The chief scientist, too. It pleases them to think of us as primitives, inferiors. We, in turn, are bound to respect their – your – authority, as our precursors. That is what our grandmother laid down. That is one of our laws. But we do nothing “by rote”. We learn, all of us, from our youngest age. We have preserved manuals and lectures and tutorial modules. Our grandmother has provided for us. Do you think we could do all we have done if we did not
understand
?’ He stopped, clearly angry. Holsten had obviously touched a nerve already rubbed raw by the other Key Crew. ‘We are of the line of those who gave their lives –
all
of their lives – to preserve this vessel. That was and is our task, one to be undertaken without reward or hope of relief: an endless round of custodianship, until we reach the planet we were promised. My parents, their parents and theirs, all of them have done nothing but ensure that
you
and all the other cargo of this ship shall live, or as much of them as we could save. And it pleases you to call us “Tribe” and consider us children and savages, because we never saw Earth.’

Holsten held his hands up appeasingly. ‘I’m sorry. You’ve taken this up with Karst? I mean, he’s kind of depending on you. You could . . . make demands.’

Alpash’s look was incredulous. ‘At this time? With the future of our home – our old home and our new – hanging in the balance? Would you say that was a good time for us to start arguing amongst ourselves?’

For a moment Holsten studied the young man as though he was some completely new species of hominid, separated by a yawning cognitive gulf. The feeling passed, and he shook himself. ‘She did well when she set down your laws,’ he murmured.

‘Thank you.’ Alpash apparently took this as a validation of his entire culture – or whatever it was that had developed amongst his weird, claustrophobic society. ‘And now at last I get to meet her, here at the end of everything.’

They passed on through a wide-open space that Holsten suddenly recognized, the remembrance coming to him halfway across it, looking at the raised stage at one end where stubs of broken machinery still jutted. Here Guyen had stood and made his bid for eternity. Here the earliest progenitors of Alpash’s line had fought alongside their warrior queen and Karst’s security team – some of whom were surely recently reawakened, possessing living memories of events that for Alpash must be song and story and weirdly twisted legend.

A lone screen hung at an angle above the torn-up roots of the upload facility, flickering malevolently with scattered patterns.
As though Guyen’s ghost is still trapped inside there,
Holsten thought. Almost immediately, he thought he did see, for a broken moment, the rage-torn face of the old commander in the flurrying striations of the screen. Or perhaps it had been Avrana Kern’s Old Empire features. Shuddering, he hurried on after Alpash.

The place he ended up in had been a storeroom, he guessed. Now they stored only one thing there: a single suspension chamber. At the foot of the pedestal was a huddle of little objects – icons heat-moulded in plastic into an approximation of the female form: offerings from her surrogate children, and their children, to the guardian-mother of the human race. Above that desperate little display of hope and faith were tacked little scraps of cloth torn from shipsuits, each bearing some close-written message. This was a shrine to a living goddess.

Not only living but awake. Alpash and a couple of other young engineers were standing back respectfully while Isa Lain found her balance, leaning on a metal spar.

She was very frail, her earlier heaviness eaten away from her frame, leaving skin that was bagged and wrinkled and hung from her bones. Her near-bald scalp was mottled with liver spots, and her hands were like bird’s claws, almost fleshless. She stood with a pronounced hunch, enough that Holsten wondered if they’d altered the suspension chamber to let her sleep out the ages lying on her side. When she looked up at him, though, her eyes were Lain’s eyes, clear and sharp and sardonic.

If she had said, then, ‘Hello, old man,’ like she used to, he was not sure that he could have borne it. She just nodded, however, as though nothing was to be more expected than to find Holsten Mason standing there, looking young enough to be her son.

‘Stop your bloody staring,’ she snapped a moment later. ‘You don’t look such a picture yourself, and what’s your excuse?’

‘Lain . . .’ He approached her carefully, as though even a strong movement of air might blow her away.

‘No time for romance now, lover boy,’ she said drily. ‘I hear Karst’s fucked up and we’ve got the human race to save.’ And then she was in his arms, and he felt that fragile, thin-boned frame, felt her shaking suddenly as she fought the memories and the emotions.

‘Get off me, you oaf,’ she said, but quietly, and she made no move to push him away.

‘I’m just glad you’re still with us,’ he whispered.

‘For one more roll of the dice, anyway,’ she agreed. ‘I really did think that I might get some honest natural gravity and decent sunlight when they cracked me open. Was that too much to ask for? But apparently it was. I can’t believe that I even have to do Karst’s job these days.’

‘Don’t be too hard on Karst,’ Holsten cautioned her. ‘The situation is . . . unprecedented.’

‘I’ll be the judge of that.’ At last she shook him off. ‘I swear, sometimes I think I’m the only competent person left in the whole human race. I think that’s the only thing keeping me going.’ She made to stride past him, but stumbled almost immediately, and her next step was decidedly less ambitious, a careful hobble while leaning on her stick. ‘Never grow old,’ she muttered. ‘Never grow old and then go into suspension, that’s for sure. You dream young dreams. You forget what you’re coming back to. Fucking disappointment, believe me.’

‘You don’t dream in suspension,’ Holsten corrected her.