Children of Time Read online

  It could have been far worse. Lain had said the place had been poisoned, infected with some kind of electronic plague that had destroyed the original life support and a great deal of the station’s core systems. The Gilgamesh had turned out to be too much of a poor imitation of the Old Empire’s elegant technology, though. Their technology had proved stony ground, the virtual attack frustrated by their primitive systems. Whether Kern had known and sent them into a trap was a subject of some debate amongst everyone except Engineering, who had been tasked with jury-rigging as much of the station’s systems as possible into giving up their secrets.

  A sound behind Holsten brought him abruptly out of his reverie. It had been a quiet, stealthy sound, and for a moment he had a nightmare flash of memory of that distant green world with its giant arthropods. No monster, though: behind him was only Guyen.

  ‘It’s all going well, I trust?’ the ark ship commander inquired, regarding Holsten as though suspecting him of something disloyal. He was leaner and greyer now than he had been when leaving the moon colony behind. Whilst Holsten had slumbered peacefully, the commander had been waking up, on and off, to oversee the operation of his ship. Now he looked down on his chief classicist with an actual seniority in age to match his rank.

  ‘Steadily,’ Holsten confirmed, wondering what this visit was about. Guyen wasn’t a man for pleasantries.

  ‘I’ve been looking over your catalogue.’

  Holsten fought down the temptation to express surprise at anyone doing such a thing, let alone Guyen.

  ‘I’ve a list of items I want to read,’ the commander told him. ‘At your earliest convenience, of course. Engineering requests take precedence.’

  ‘Of course.’ Holsten tilted his head at the screen. ‘Do you want to . . . ?’

  Guyen passed over a tablet displaying half a dozen numbers entered neatly there, in the format of Holsten’s homegrown indexing system. ‘Direct to me,’ he pressed. He didn’t actually say, Don’t tell anyone else about this, but everything in his manner hinted at it.

  Holsten nodded mutely. The numbers gave him no suggestion as to what it was all about, or why any of this needed to be requested in person.

  ‘Oh, and you might want to come listen. Vitas is going to tell us the news about the planet here, and how far along the terraforming got.’

  That would be welcome, and something Holsten had been impatiently waiting for. Eagerly he got up and followed after Guyen. Enough of the secrets of the past for now. He wanted to hear a little more of the present and the future.

  4.2 DEATH COMES RIDING

  Portia looks out across the vast, interconnected complexity that was Great Nest and sees a city just beginning to die.

  In the last few generations, Great Nest’s population has swelled to somewhere near a hundred thousand adult spiders, and countless – uncounted – young. It spreads through several square miles of forest, reaching from the earth to the canopy, a true metropolis of the spider age.

  The city Portia sees now is depopulated. Although the dying has only just started, hundreds of females are abandoning Great Nest for other cities. Others simply strike out into the remaining wilderness to take their chances, relying on centuries-old Understandings to recapture the lifestyle of their ancient huntress ancestors. Many males have fled too. Already the delicate structures of the city are showing some disrepair as basic maintenance is disregarded.

  Plague is coming.

  In the north, a handful of great cities are already in ruins. A global epidemic is leaping from community to community. Hundreds of thousands are already dead from it, and now Great Nest has seen its own first victims.

  She knows this was inevitable, for this current Portia is a priestess and a scientist. She has been working to try and understand the virulent disease, and to find a cure.

  She does not quite understand why this disease has had such an impact. Aside from its highly contagious nature, and its ability to spread by contact – and somewhat less reliably through the air – the sheer concentration of bodies in the cities of Portia’s people have turned a minor, controllable infection into something more virulent than the Black Death. Such great concentrations of bodies have led to all manner of squalor and health problems; Portia’s people were only beginning to grasp the need for collective responsibility for such issues when the spread of the plague caught them unawares. Their casual, almost anarchic form of government is not well suited to taking the sort of harsh measures that might be effective.

  Another factor in the deadliness of the disease is the practice, increasingly common in the last century, of females choosing males born within their own peer group as mates, in an attempt to concentrate and control the spread of their Understandings. This practice – well meaning and enlightened in its way – has led to inbreeding that has weakened the immune systems of many powerful peer houses, meaning that those who might possess the power to take action are often first to come down with the plague when it erupts. Portia is aware of this pattern, though not the cause, and she is also aware that her own peer group fits that pattern all too well.

  She is aware that there are tiny animicules associated with disease, but her magnifying lenses are not acute enough to detect the viral culprit for the plague. She has the results of experiments carried out by fellow scientists from other cities, many of whom are dead of the plague themselves, now. Some even arrived at a theory of vaccination, but the immune system of Portia’s people is not the efficient and adaptive machine that humans and other mammals can boast. Exposure to a contagion simply does not prepare them for later, kindred infections in the same way.

  The world is falling apart, and Portia is shocked at how little it has taken for this to occur. She had never realized that her whole civilization was such a fragile entity. She hears the news from other cities where the plague is already rife. Once the population begins to drop – from death and desertion – the whole structure of society collapses swiftly. The elegant and sophisticated way of life that the spiders have built for themselves has always been strung over a great abyss of barbarism, cannibalism and a return to primitive, savage values. After all, they are predators at heart.

  She retreats to the Temple, picking her way past the mass of citizens who have taken refuge therein, seeking some certainty from beyond. There are not as many as the day before. Portia knows this is not just because there are fewer of her people left in the city: she is also aware that there is a slowly growing disillusionment with the Messenger and Her message. What good does it do us? they ask. Where is the fire sent from heaven to purge the plague?

  Touching the crystal with her metal stylus, Portia dances to the music of the Messenger as it passes overhead, her complex steps describing perfectly the equations and their solutions. As always, she is filled by that measureless assurance that something is out there: that just because she cannot understand something now does not mean that it cannot be understood.

  One day I will comprehend you, is her thought directed to the Messenger, but it rings hollow now. Her days are numbered. All their days are numbered.

  She finds herself entertaining the heretical thought, If only we could send our own message back to you. The Temple acts fiercely against that sort of thinking, but it is not the first time Portia has considered the idea. She is aware that other scientists – even priestess-scientists – have been experimenting with some means of reproducing the invisible vibrations by which the message is spread. Publicly, the Temple cannot condone such meddling, of course, but the spiders are a curious species, and those who are drawn to the Temple are the most curious of all. It was inevitable that the hothouse flower of heresy would end up nurtured by those very guardians of the orthodox.

  On this day, Portia finds that she believes that if they could somehow speak across that vast and empty space to the Messenger, then She would surely have an answer for them, a cure for the plague. Portia finds, just as inexorably, that no such dialogue is possible, no answer will come, and so she must
find her own cure before it is too late.

  After Temple, she returns to her peer house, a great, sprawling many-chambered affair slung between three trees, to meet with one of her males.

  Since the ravages of the plague began, the role of the male in spider society has changed subtly. Traditionally the best lot in life for a male was to hitch his star to a powerful female and hope to be looked after, or else – for those born with valuable Understandings – to end up a pampered commodity in a seraglio, ready to be traded away or mated off as part of the constantly shifting power games between peer houses. Other than that, the lot of a male came down to being a kind of underclass of urban scavengers constantly fighting each other over scraps of food, and always at risk without female patronage. However, from being a host of the useless and the unnecessary, decorative and fit for menial labour at best, a furtive meal at worst, they have become a desperate resource in time of need. Males are less independent, less able to fend for themselves out in the wilds, and so they tend to stay when females flee. That Great Nest and many other cities remain functioning at all is due to the number of males who have taken the chance to step into traditionally female roles. There are even male warriors, hunters and guards now, because someone must take up the sling and the shield and the incendiary grenade, and often there is nobody else to do so.

  Females in Portia’s position have long had their pick of male escorts and, whilst some keep them about merely to dance attendance – literally – and add to a female’s apparent importance, others have trained them as skilled assistants. The Bianca of old, with her male laboratory assistants, had uncovered something of a truth about spider gender politics when she complained that working with females involved far too much competition for dominance, and old instincts lie shallowly under the civilized surface. This current Portia, too, has come reluctantly to trust in males.

  Not long ago she sent out a band of males, a gang of adventurers that she had made frequent use of before. They were all capable, used to working together from their youngest days as abandoned spiderlings on the streets of Great Nest. Their mission was one that Portia felt no female would accept; their reward was to be the continued support of Portia’s peer group: food, protection, access to education, entertainment and culture.

  One of them has returned: just the one. Call him Fabian.

  He comes to her now at the peer house. Fabian is missing a leg, and he looks half-starved and exhausted. Portia’s palps flick, sending one of the immature males from the crèche to find some food for them both.

  Well? An impatient twitch as she watches him.

  Conditions are worse than you thought. Also, I had difficulty re-entering Great Nest. Travellers suspected of coming from the north are being turned away if female, killed out of hand if male. His speech is a slow shuffle of feet, slurred and uneven.

  Is that what happened to your comrades?

  No. I am the only one to return. They’re all dead. Such a brief eulogy this, for those that he had spent most of his life with. But then it is well known in Portia’s society that males do not really feel with the same acuity as females, and certainly they cannot form the same bonds of attachment and respect.

  The juvenile male returns with food: trussed live crickets and vegetable polyps gathered from the farms. Gratefully, Fabian scoops up one of the bound insects and inserts a fang. Too exhausted to bother using venom, he sucks the spasming creature dry.

  There are survivors in the plague cities, as you had thought, he continues, as he eats. But they retain nothing of our ways. They live like beasts, merely spinning and hunting. There were females and males. My companions were taken and devoured, one by one.

  Portia stamps anxiously. But were you successful?

  Fabian’s ordeal has sufficiently affected him that he does not immediately respond to her enquiry, but asks back, Are you not worried that I might have brought the plague to Great Nest? It seems likely I must have contracted it.

  It is already here.

  His palps flex slowly, in a gesture of resignation. I have succeeded. I have brought three spiderlings taken from the plague zone. They are healthy. They are immune, as those others living there must be. You were right, for what good it may do us.

  Take them to my laboratory, she instructs him. Then, seeing his remaining limbs tremble, she continues: After that, the peer house is yours to roam. You will be rewarded for this great service. Merely ask for whatever you wish.

  He regards her, eye to eye, a bold move – but he was always a bold male, and why else would he have made such a useful tool? Once I have rested I would assist you in your work, if you would let me, he tells her. You know I have Understandings of the biochemical sciences, and I have studied also.

  The offer surprises Portia, who shows it in her posture.

  Great Nest is my home, too, Fabian reminds her. All I am is contained here. Do you truly believe that you can defeat the plague?

  I believe that I must try or we are all lost, anyway. A sombre thought, but the logic is undeniable.

  4.3 NOTES FROM A GREY PLANET

  Holsten was taken aback by the number of people who had gathered to hear the news. The Gilgamesh was short of auditoriums, so the venue was a converted shuttle bay, bare and echoing. He wondered if the absent shuttles were currently clamped to the derelict station, or whether this was where he and Lain had been kidnapped and brought to by the mutineers. All the bays looked the same, and any damage had presumably been repaired by now.

  In his solitary labours he had lost track of just how many people had been woken up to assist with the reclamation effort. At least a hundred were sitting around the hangar, and he was struck with an almost phobic response to them: too many, too close, too enclosed. He ended up hovering next to the doorway, realizing that some part of his mind had resigned itself to a future of dealing only with a few other humans, and had perhaps preferred that.

  And why are we all here, anyway? There was no actual requirement for physical attendance, after all. He himself could have continued his work and watched Vitas’s presentation on a screen, or had her warbling away in his ear. Nobody needed to shift their pounds of flesh over here just to trust to their antiquated eyes and ears. Vitas herself had no practical need to give a presentation in person. Even back home, this sort of academic status-mongering had been conducted at a distance, most of the time.

  So why? And why did I come? Looking over the crowd gathered there, hearing the murmur of their excited conversation, he could speculate that many of them must have come just to be sociable, to be with their fellows. But that’s not me, is it?

  And he realized that it was, of course. He was tethered inextricably to a social species, however much he might fancy himself as a loner. There was, even in Holsten, a desire to interact with other human beings, preserving a bond between himself and everyone else here. Even Vitas was present not for scholarly prestige or for status amongst the crew, but because she needed to reach out and know there was something she could reach out to.

  Looking over the crowd, Holsten could see few familiar faces. Aside from Vitas’s own science team, most of Key Crew were occupied on the station, and almost everyone here had last opened their eyes way back on Earth, so could know nothing of Kern or the green planet or its terrible inhabitants save what they were told, or from what unclassified material was available in the Gil’s records. Whilst it was true that a lot of them were young, it was the knowledge gap that made him feel old, as though he had been awake for centuries longer than they, rather than just a few strung-out days passed in another solar system.

  Guyen had found a place at the back, keeping similarly aloof, and now Vitas stepped forward, precise and fastidious, looking over her audience as though not entirely sure she had come into the right room.

  The screen her team had installed, taking up much of the wall behind her, shifted from a dead to a lambent grey. Vitas regarded it critically, and then managed a thin smile.

  ‘As you know, I have bee
n overseeing a survey of the planet that we are currently in orbit around. It seems unarguable now,’ and she was good enough to throw a tiny nod Holsten’s way, ‘that we have arrived at one of a string of terraforming projects that the Old Empire was pursuing immediately before its dissolution. The previous project we saw was complete, and under a quarantine imposed for unknown purposes by an advanced satellite. As we are discovering, work at our current location appears to have been arrested during the terraforming process itself, and the control facility abandoned. I am aware that Engineering has been undertaking the formidable task of investigating that facility, whilst I have been investigating the planet itself to see if it might serve us in any fashion as a home.’

  There was nothing in this clipped, dry delivery to give any clue as to her conclusions, if conclusions there were. This was not showmanship or a desire for suspense, simply that Vitas considered herself a pure scientist first and foremost, and would report positive and negative results with equal candour without judging the value or desirability of the outcome. Holsten was familiar with that particular academic school, which had grown more and more popular towards the end on Earth, as positive results became harder to find.

  Vitas looked out over the gathering, and Holsten tried to interpret her expression, her body language, anything to get an idea of where this was going. Do we stay here? Are we heading onwards? Are we going back? That last possibility was his major concern, for he was one of the very small number who had first-hand experience of Kern’s green world.

  The screen brightened, grey to grey to grey, and then there was the curve of a dark horizon, and they were now looking at the grey planet.