Children of Time (Children of Time, #1)

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

The virus would even recognize the presence of infection in other individuals of the same species, so as to promote selective breeding, the best of the best giving birth to even better.

Scifi eugenics

Kern nodded, pleased with that. Be a good monkey and finish up soon, Sering. Some of us have legacies to build.

ersatz gravity, though, it was one his forebears had somehow failed to evolve.

provide full details of your emergency situation so that habitat systems may analyse and advise. Any interference with Kern’s World will be met with immediate retaliation. You are not to make contact with this planet in any way. Cold so cold so very long waiting waiting why won’t they come what has happened can they all really have gone is there nobody nothing left at all of home so very cold coffin cold coffin cold nothing is working nothing working nothing left Eliza Eliza Eliza why won’t you answer me speak to me put me out of my misery tell me they’re

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

Holy fuck

Portia catches Fabian displaying for her, a tentative offer to gift her his sperm.

this would work on me, too

Her descendants will tell the story of how Portia entered the temple of the ants and stole the eye of their god.

Seven Trees starts to burn.

Yes, there was a gun pointing his way. Yes, the Gilgamesh was obviously playing host to a conflict that could plainly get him killed at any moment, but he was bored.

Males do not form such groups—for who would have any use for a large group of males?

Other than menial labour, this is the place of a male in Portia’s society: adornment, decoration, simply to add value to the lives of females.

girls will be girls, after

It must be difficult for males, who presumably undergo the ordeal alone, but then males are smaller, and less sensitive, and Portia is honestly not sure how capable they are of finer levels of thought and feeling.

“Now get strapped in!” Amateurs, Holsten thought with creeping horror. I am on a spacecraft intending to make a landing on an unknown planet, and not one of them knows what they’re doing.

“It’s Kern,” Lain declared. Seeing their baffled faces she explained, “That warning wasn’t just for us; it was for everyone. Kern’s got them—she’s seized their systems. But she can’t seize ours.” “Good work there,” Holsten muttered into the mask radio around his neck. “Shut up,” she returned by the same channel.

I hate her

Her world is one in which there is no great divide between the thinkers and the thoughtless, only a long continuum.

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

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.

“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.

Oh

moment she thinks he will enumerate the things he cannot have, no matter how favoured, or that he will raise the point (again!) that all he can have, he can attain only through her or some other dominant female. She feels frustrated with him: what does he want exactly? Does he not realize how fortunate he is compared to so many of his brothers?

Her purpose. Even if you have your personal doubts, you cannot deny that the traditions that have built Great Nest have allowed us to survive many threats. They have made us what we are.

“And what if I told you that Guyen’s withholding knowledge from you?” Lain pressed. “How about transmissions from the moon colony we left behind? Heard any of those lately?” Karst looked sidelong at Vitas. “Yeah? What’ve they got to say?” “Fucking little. They’re all dead.”

But you cannot know that. There could be a dozen geniuses dying every day, who have never had an opportunity to demonstrate their aptitude. They think, as we do. They plan and hope and fear. Merely see them and that connection would strum between you. They are my brothers. No less so, they are yours.

So unlike the rest of my kind? It is as if he has read her mind. But I am not, or you cannot know if I am or am not. How many Understandings are extinguished every day? None like yours, she tells him promptly. You can never know. That is the problem with ignorance. You can never truly know the extent of what you are ignorant about. I will not do it.

Within her, biology and custom are at war. There is a place in her mind where the nanovirus lurks and it tells her that all her species are kin, are like her in a way that other creatures are not, and yet the weight of society crushes its voice. Males have their place; she knows this.

So many good quotes

There is nothing about what we do that is natural. If we prized the natural we would still be hunting Spitters in the wilderness, or falling prey to the jaws of ants, instead of mastering our world. We have made a virtue of the unnatural. She does not trust herself

But no, it is that kind of gifting that he must break away from. A life lived entirely at the whim of another is no life at all. He has always been surprised at the large number of other males who see matters differently, revelling in their own cosseted captivity.

Spidey suffrage

When the tears came, when his shoulders unexpectedly began shaking and he could not stop himself, it felt like two thousand years of grief taking hold of him and twisting at him, wringing out his exhausted body over and over until there was nothing left.

They are performing that oldest of tricks: constructing a path by which to reach a destination, only in this case the destination is permanent security. With each step they take towards it, that security recedes. And, with each step they take, the cost of progressing towards such security grows, and the actions required to move forward become more and more extreme.

The transition from earnest, martyred leader to raving psychopath had simply happened without any discernible boundary being crossed.

Welcoming committee, he thought drily. Awards for the best-dressed cannibals of whatever stupid year this is.

“We need to reallocate you a chamber—” started the man from the welcoming committee, in those same bright, calm, false tones. “No,” said one of the others. “I told you, not this one. Special instructions for this one.” Oh, of course.

Bianca has another picture sent to her ant colony, and she transmits it as soon as God returns to the skies above her. It is a simple enough sight, a view of Seven Trees from within, showing the intricate splendour of its scaffolding and the bustling industry of its inhabitants. The developer of the encoded picture originally used it as a test image in her experiments. God is silent.

my monkeys where are my monkeys cannot help me now I’m cold so cold and Eliza never comes to see I can’t see can’t feel can’t act I want to die I want to die I want to die …

them now, yes. She sees them for what they are. They are Earth. Their form does not matter. They are her children.

I am here. I am here for you.

You are made of My will, and you are made of the technology of that other world, but all of this has been to speed you on a path you might have taken without me, given time and opportunity. You are Mine, but you also belong to the universe, and your purpose is whatever you choose. Your purpose is to survive and grow and prosper and to seek to understand, just as my people should have taken these things as their purpose, had they not fallen into foolishness, and perished.

Also, he might be drunk. Holsten realized he couldn’t tell.

Alpash moved to go, and for a moment Holsten was going to stop him, to ask him that impossible question that historians can never ask, regarding the things they study: What is it like to be you? A question nobody can step far enough out of their own frame of reference to answer.

Here, at this failing end of time, the classicist Holsten Mason was glad to be poring over some incomprehensible transmissions in a futile search for meaning.

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.

“We go in fighting. You’re right, there’s too much at stake. There’s everything at stake. Bring it down.”

Fuck

Everything is only information, if you have sufficient capacity to encompass it.

“No … not what they’re saying, but the structure. Isa, I’m a classicist, and a lot of that is a study of language—old languages, dead languages, languages from an age of humanity that doesn’t exist any more. I’d stake my life that these signals are actually language rather than just some sort of instructions. It’s too complex, too intricately structured. It’s inefficient, Isa. Language is inefficient. It evolves organically. This is language—real language.”

It was a club. In that sense, it was a quintessentially human thing: a tool to crush, to break, to lever apart in the prototypical way that humanity met the universe head-on.

Kinship at the sub-microbial level, so that one of the Gilgamesh’s great giants, the awesome, careless creator-gods of prehistory, might look upon Portia and her kin and know them as their children.

If there had been some tiny bead present in the brain of all humans, that had told each other, They are like you; that had drawn some thin silk thread of empathy, person to person, in a planet-wide net—what might then have happened? Would there have been the same wars, massacres, persecutions and crusades?

She is dying, the old human—the oldest human there ever was, if Kern has translated that correctly. But she is dying on a world that will become her people’s world: that her people will share with its other people. Portia cannot be sure, but she thinks this old human is content with that.

The two peoples of the green world work together in easy harmony now. There was a generation of wary caution on both sides, but once the nanovirus had taken down those barriers—between species and between individuals—so much potential tragedy was already averted. Life is not perfect, individuals will always be flawed, but empathy—the sheer inability to see those around them as anything other than people too—conquers all, in the end.

After all the years, the wars, the tragedies and the loss, the spiders and the monkeys are returning to the stars to seek their inheritance.