Children of Time Read online

  There was an interesting split in the listeners then. Command and Security remained mostly unmoved whilst Science and Engineering were thrown into sudden debate: what did the voice mean by ‘expert system’? Was Holsten sure that was the proper translation? Was it actually an intelligent machine, or just something pretending to be one?

  Holsten himself was busy piecing together that background message, although he felt less and less happy about it. The words, the very tone of horror and desperation in his ears, were making him feel ill.

  Good evening, travellers. I am Eliza Kerns, composite expert system of the Second Brin Sentry Habitat. I’m sorry. I may have missed the import of some communications that you have already sent to me. Would you please summarize what was said?

  What are you doing what are you in my mind taking taking why can’t I wake up what am I seeing the void only alone and nobody nothing there is no ship why is there no ship where are there is no Eliza Kerns has stolen me stolen mine stolen mind

  Holsten re-sent the Gilgamesh’s last substantive transmission: We are the ark ship Gilgamesh, carrying five hundred thousand humans in suspension. It is of utmost priority that we are able to establish a presence on your planet. This is a matter of the survival of the human species. We require your assistance in preserving our cargo.

  And the reply:

  I’m sorry, it will not be possible for you to approach or contact Kern’s World in any way. This is an absolute interdiction in line with Exaltation Program guidelines. Please let me know if any other assistance may be given.

  Avrana I’m Avrana’s monkeys are all that matters if everyone’s gone what do we have to exalt in save exaltation itself there can be no contact contamination Sering will not win we will exalt but must it be so cold slow hard to think

  ‘Same words from a different computer,’ Guyen spat angrily.

  Lain was looking over Holsten’s shoulder, staring at his translation of the second, hidden voice. He saw her mouth the words, The fuck . . . ?

  ‘Mason, I don’t care how you phrase it – dress it up as fancy as you like. It needs to understand that we are human and that we need its help,’ Guyen said. ‘If there’s some old-world way of overriding its programming, of getting through to whatever that is, we need you to find it.’

  No pressure, then; but Holsten was already planning out his response. It was not a linguistics problem, no matter what Guyen might think. It was a technological problem, but one that even Lain was surely little better equipped to deal with than he was. They were speaking to a functioning, autonomous Imperial system. The EMP-blasted hulks in orbit around Earth had contained nothing like it.

  Eliza, he sent back, we are in desperate need. We have travelled far from Earth to find a new home for that part of the human race we are responsible for. If we cannot locate such a home, then hundreds of thousands of human beings will die. Does your system of priorities allow you take responsibility for such a result? The Gilgamesh archives did not contain them, but Holsten had an idea that he had read somewhere of some philanthropic rules imposed on the fabled old artificial intelligences.

  I’m sorry, but I cannot permit you to compromise the exaltation experiment at this time. I understand that you have other concerns and I am allowed to tender such help as my priorities allow. If you attempt to influence the planet then you will leave me no choice but to take action against your vessel.

  What ship let me see the ship is coming from Earth but is it Sering’s Earth or my Earth or no Earth is left for any ship to come silently they stopped sending so long so cold so let me out you bitch you witch Eliza you stole my mind my name can’t keep me here let me wake let me speak let me die let me be something

  So much for that. ‘It really is just the same line as before. We’ve got nowhere, except . . .’

  ‘What?’ Guyen demanded.

  ‘I want to try something a bit lateral,’ Holsten explained.

  ‘Is it likely to get us blown up ahead of schedule?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘Then you try whatever you’ve got, Mason.’

  Holsten steeled himself and transmitted a simple, surreal question: Is there anybody else there we could talk to?

  ‘You’re taking the piss,’ Lain said in his ear.

  ‘Better ideas?’

  ‘I’m Engineering. We don’t do ideas.’

  He managed a weak smile at that one. Everyone else was on tenterhooks, awaiting the response, save for Guyen who was glowering at Holsten as though his fierce regard could somehow inspire the classicist to greater efforts of antiquarianism.

  Would you like to speak to my sister?

  Please please please please please please

  Lain swore again, and Guyen stared down at his own screen. Another murmur of baffled speculation was rising around them.

  ‘Right, look, I have a theory,’ Holsten explained. ‘We’re talking to some sort of automated system still, obviously, even if it’s programmed to respond in a human-like manner. But there’s something else there. It’s . . . different. It seems less rational. So we could see if it will let us do things that the main expert system won’t. Worst comes to worst, we could even turn it against the main system, somehow, I don’t know.’

  ‘But what is “it”?’ Vitas asked him. ‘Why would they have two systems?’

  ‘Failsafe?’ Holsten suggested, because he was keeping his worst suspicions very much to himself.

  ‘Try it,’ Guyen said. ‘Karst, I want some solutions if this turns ugly. Our current course will bring us into the planet’s attraction at the right speed to make orbit. The only alternative is to stop decelerating now and just fly past, and then . . . and then what?’ The question was plainly rhetorical, the hard-pressed commander showing the working of his sums. ‘Then we set course for the next point on the star maps, and somehow hope there’s something different there? We’ve seen this planet now. This is going to be our home. Mason, tell it.’

  Why, yes, Eliza, please let us talk to your sister. Holsten tried to match the expert system’s polite and formal manner of speech.

  He was not sure what they would get back, and he was ready to shut down the comms if it was just that anguished mad babbling, because there could be no dialogue with that – no possibility of negotiating with that internalized storm of insanity.

  ‘We’re being told to stand by,’ he reported, when the instruction came. After that there was nothing else for a long time; the Gilgamesh continued to fall inexorably towards the green planet’s gravity well. The satellite was still silent when Lain and her team began their anxious watch over ship’s systems, as the ancient ark ship began to creak and strain at the unnatural imposition of an external source of mass, large and close enough to claw at the vessel’s structure. Everyone there felt a subtle shifting: for the whole waking portion of the journey, their perception of gravity had come from the ship’s gradual deceleration. Now an alien force was reaching for them, subtly tugging with insubstantial ghost fingers, the first touch of the world below.

  ‘All signs suggest stable orbit for now,’ Lain reported tensely. There followed a slow-motion comedy as deceleration ceased and then rotation began, gravity creeping across the floor to make a new home against the wall, and the Gilgamesh’s consoles and fittings shudderingly adjusting. For a minute there was no point of reference; a room full of weightless people trying to remember their long-ago training, hauling on each other to get to the right surface before they could be slammed into it. In the commotion, awkwardness, and a series of minor medical calls, the whole business of their imminent destruction was almost forgotten.

  ‘New transmission,’ Holsten alerted them, as the signal came in. In his ear those same female tones sounded, but the intonation, the rhythm of the speech was quite different, and stripped free of that tortured backing.

  I am Doctor Avrana Kern, chief scientist and administrator of the Second Brin Exaltation Project, was his translation. Even through the filter of archaic Imperial
C, the voice was stern and proud. What are you? What is your provenance?

  ‘That doesn’t sound like a computer,’ Lain murmured.

  ‘Of course it’s a computer,’ Vitas snapped. ‘It’s simply a more sophisticated approximation of—’

  ‘Enough.’ Guyen cut through the argument. ‘Mason?’

  We are an ark ship from Earth, Holsten sent, seeking permission to establish a colony on Kern’s World. If the thing he was talking to was in any way human, he guessed that a little flattery couldn’t harm.

  Whose Earth, though? Sering’s Earth or my Earth? came the swift reply. Now that they were in orbit, there was barely any delay: it was almost like a real conversation.

  Real conversation with a faceless machine mind, Holsten reminded himself. He sent his translation round the room, looking for help, but nobody had any suggestion as to what the satellite meant. Before he could give any kind of answer, a new transmission came in.

  I do not recognize you. You are not human. You are not from Earth. You have no business here. Eliza shows me all that she sees of you and there is nothing of Earth in you but why can I not see you for myself why can I not open my eyes where are my eyes where are my eyes where are my eyes. And then an abrupt cessation of the message, leaving Holsten shaken because that was it: a segue straight into the voice of madness, without a moment’s warning.

  ‘I don’t think it’s a computer,’ he said, but soft enough that only Lain heard him. She was reading over his shoulder still, and nodded soberly.

  Our vessel is the ark ship Gilgamesh from Earth. This ship was built after your time, he prepared and sent, with a bitter awareness of the sheer understatement implicit in that. He was dreading what they might receive back.

  Good evening, I am Eliza Kern, composite expert system of the of the of the am instructed to require you to return to your point of origin.

  Send them away I don’t want them if they say they came from Earth they can go back go back go back I don’t won’t can’t no no no no no

  ‘It’s completely deranged,’ Karst stated flatly, and that with the benefit of only half of what was being said. ‘Can we keep the planet between us, or something?’

  ‘Not and retain stable orbit,’ one of Guyen’s team reported. ‘Seriously, remember how big the Gil is. We can’t just flit him about like your drones.’

  Holsten was already sending, because Guyen had stopped dictating and it now seemed to be down to him. Return to Earth is not possible. Please may we speak to your sister again, Eliza?, pleading for the life of humanity in a dead language – having to make the call between artificial intransigence and what he was increasingly sure was real human crazy.

  That other voice again, delivering a rant that he got down as: Why can’t you just go back where you came from? Are you Sering’s people? Did we win? Did we throw you out? Are you here to finish what he started?

  ‘What happened here?’ demanded Vitas incredulously. ‘What’s Sering? A warship?’

  Earth is no longer habitable, Holsten sent, even as Lain warned, ‘That’s going to push her over the edge for sure, Mason.’

  He had dispatched the message even as she said it, the hollow feeling in his stomach arriving a moment later. She’s right, at that.

  But there was a measure more sanity in Doctor Avrana Kern’s voice when it replied. Nonsense. Explain.

  The Gilgamesh archives had histories, but whoever would have thought they would need translating into a language only historians were now interested in? Instead, Holsten did his best: History 101 for the lost time traveller, based on best guesses as to what had actually happened beyond the dawn of his recorded time, back when the Old Empire had held sway. There was so little he could actually say. The gap between the last thing Kern must know and the earliest definite fact that Holsten could rely on was insuperable.

  There was a civil war between factions of the Empire, he explained. Both sides unleashed weapons the nature of which I do not understand, but which were effective in devastating higher civilization on Earth and completely destroying the colonies. He remembered seeing the eggshell ruins on Europa. The in-system colonies had all predated any apparent later expertise in terraforming that the Empire had come to possess. They had been hothouse flowers on planets and moons haphazardly altered to better support life, reliant on biospheres that must have required constant adjustment. On Earth people had lapsed back into barbarism. Elsewhere, when the power had failed, when the electromagnetic weapons had destroyed the vital engines, or the electronic viruses murdered the artificial minds, they had died. They had died in alien cold, in reverting atmospheres, under corrosive skies. Often, they had died still fighting each other. So little had been left intact.

  He typed it all out. As though writing an abstract to a history text, he noted with dry precision that a post-war industrial society may have persisted for almost a century, and may even have been regaining some of the sophistication of its predecessors, when the ice came. The choked atmosphere that had smothered the planet in gloom had shouldered out the sun, resulting in a midnight glacial cold that had left very little of that abortive rebirth. Looking back down the well of time, Holsten could make no definite statements about those who were left, nor about the frozen age that followed. Some scientists had speculated that, when the ice was at its height, the entire remnant human population of Earth had been no more than ten thousand all told, huddling in caves and holes around the equator and staring out at a horizon rigid with cold.

  He went on into more certain waters, the earliest unearthed records of what he could truly think of as his people. The ice had been retreating. Humanity had sprung back swiftly, expanded, fought its small wars, re-industrialized, tripping constantly over reminders of what the species had previously achieved. Human eyes had looked to the skies again, which were crossed by so many moving points of light.

  And he told Kern why they could not go back: because of the war, the Empire’s war from thousands of years before. For so long, scholars had taught that the further the ice receded, the better for the world, and yet nobody had guessed what poisons and sicknesses had been caught up in that ice, like insects in amber, the encroaching cold protecting the shivering biosphere from the last excesses of Empire.

  There is no returning to Earth, he sent to the pensively silent satellite. In the end, we could not counterbalance the increasing toxicity of the environment. So we built the ark ships. In the end all we had was old star maps to guide us. We are the human race. And we’ve had no transmissions from any other arks to say that they’ve found anywhere to stay. Doctor Avrana Kern, this is all we have. Please may we settle on your planet?

  Because he was thinking in human terms, he expected a decent pause then for his opposite number to digest all that potted history. Instead, one of the science crew shouted out, ‘New energy readings! It’s activating something!’

  ‘A weapon?’ Guyen demanded, and all the screens briefly went blank, then flared to life again with nonsense scattering across them: fragments of code and text and simple static.

  ‘It’s got into the Gilgamesh control system!’ Lain spat. ‘It’s attacking our security – no, it’s through. Fuck, we’re open. It’s got full control. This is what it did to your drones, Karst, the ones it didn’t just vaporize. We’re fucked!’

  ‘Do what you can!’ Guyen urged her.

  ‘What the fuck do you think I can do? I’m locked out! Balls to your “cultural specificity”, Mason. It’s all over our fucking system like a disease.’

  ‘How’s our orbit?’ someone asked.

  ‘I have no feedback, no instrumentation at all.’ Vitas sounded very slightly tense. ‘However, I’ve not felt any change in thrust, and mere loss of power or control should not affect our position relative to the planet.’

  Like all those hulks orbiting Earth, Holsten thought helplessly. Those fried, dead ships, with the vacuum-dried bodies of their crew still in place after thousands of years.

  Abruptly the lights jum
ped and flickered, and then a face appeared on every screen.

  It was a bony, long-jawed face; that it was a woman’s was not immediately obvious. Details kept filling in: dark hair drawn back, skin shaded and textured, harsh lines about the mouth and eyes; unflattering by modern criteria but who could name the ancient aesthetics that this face acknowledged? It was a face from an era and a society and an ethnicity that time had otherwise erased. The kinship between it and the crew of the Gilgamesh seemed tenuous, coincidental.

  The voice that rang out through the speakers was unmistakably the same, but this time it was speaking the crew’s own common language, although the lips did not sync.

  ‘I am Doctor Avrana Kern. This is my world. I will brook no interference with my experiment. I have seen what you are. You are not from my Earth. You are not my humanity. You are monkeys, nothing but monkeys. You are not even my monkeys. My monkeys are undergoing uplift, the great experiment. They are pure. They will not be corrupted by you mere humans. You are nothing but monkeys of a lesser order. You mean nothing to me.’

  ‘Can she hear us?’ Guyen asked quietly.

  ‘If your own systems can hear you, then I can hear you,’ Kern’s voice spat out.

  ‘Are we to understand that you are condemning the last survivors of your own species to death?’ It was a remarkably mannered, patient display from Guyen. ‘Because it seems that is what you are saying.’

  ‘You are not my responsibility,’ Kern pronounced. ‘This planet is my responsibility.’

  ‘Please,’ Lain said, ignoring Guyen when he gestured at her to shut up. ‘I don’t know what you are, if you’re human or machine or whatever, but we need your help.’