Children of Time (Children of Time, #1)

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

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.

Like many of her kind, she has grown comfortable with what she is, and loathe to change if there is no grand need for it.

Can you receive me? Can anybody receive me? Nothing from the ground. He does not even know if the radio is working now. He is desperately hungry, and Portia’s extra-vehicular excursions mean that they have very little air left. He has initiated venting of the hydrogen, as swift as is safe, but there is still a long way to go down. He and Portia do not have either the energy or the oxygen to reach hospitable altitudes. Then the voice comes: Yes, I receive you. The Messenger is listening. Fabian feels a religious awe. He is the first male ever to speak with God. I understand your position, the Messenger tells him. I cannot help you. I am sorry. Fabian explains that he has a plan. He spells his scheme out carefully. Can you explain to them all? That I can do, the Messenger promises, and then, with a sudden access of old memory, When my ancestors reached for space, there were deaths among those pioneers too. It is worth it. The next phrase is alien to Fabian. He will never know what was meant by, I salute you.

Karst’s mouth hung open. At this moment, even the ability to curse seemed to have deserted him. He fumbled backwards for a seat, and then sat down heavily. Everyone in comms had stopped work, instead staring at the screen, at what had been done to their paradise. Kern’s satellite was not alone in its vigil. Around the circumference of the planet, girdling its equator in a broad ring, was a vast band of tangled lines and strands and nodes: not satellites, but a whole orbiting network, interconnected and continuous around the entire world. It flared bright in the sunlight, opening green petals towards the system’s star. There were a thousand irregular nodes pulled into taut, angular shapes by their connecting conduits. There was a bustle to it, of constant activity. It was a web. It was as though some unthinkable horror had begun the job of cocooning the planet before it fed on it. It was a single vast web in geostationary orbit about the planet, and Kern’s metal home was just one pinpoint within its myriad complexity. Holsten thought about those thousand, thousand transmissions from Kern’s World, but not from Kern herself. He thought about those hateful whispers telling the Gilgamesh, impossibly, to turn around and go away. Abandon hope, all ye who enter … The drones were arrowing in now, still seeking out Kern’s satellite, because their programming had somehow not prepared them for this. “Spiders …” said Karst slowly. His eyes were roving around, seeking desperately for in...

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.

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.

Although active Messenger-worship was almost non-existent in these more enlightened times—what need of faith when there was ample proof of the precise nature of God?—the spiders watched that fiery trail, either with their own eyes or through the surrogate eyes of their biological systems, and knew that something had gone out of their world. The Messenger had always been there. They retained the memories of distant, primitive times when that moving light in the heavens had been both compass and inspiration to them. They recalled the heady days of Temple, and the earliest communications shared between God and Her congregation. Something that has been a part of their cultural consciousness from their earliest times; something that they know, rationally, to be older than their very species; and now it is gone.