Children of Time (Children of Time, #1)

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Portia only hopes she can keep her desires in check. It would be more diplomatically advantageous if Fabian was not killed and eaten during the throes of passion.

With ants, the nanovirus has simultaneously failed and succeeded. Amongst the ants’ network of reactive decision making it has inculcated a strategy of experimentation and investigation that approaches rigorous scientific method, but it has not led to intellect such as any human or spider would recognize. Ant colonies evolve and adapt, throw up new castes, investigate and make use of resources, devise new technologies, refine them and interrelate them, and all this without anything approaching a consciousness to direct it. There is no hive mind, but there is a vast and flexible biological difference engine, a self-perfecting machine dedicated to the continuance of itself. It does not understand how what it does functions, but it constantly expands its behavioural repertoire and builds upon those trial-and-error paths that prove fruitful.

The nanovirus speaks, each to each. Portia’s culture is strung between base spider nature and the new empathy the nanovirus has inflicted upon them.

Fear is a universal emotion, and she feels it keenly, desperately wanting to flee that image, never to have to face the ants again.

Portia feels the thrumming of destiny beneath her feet. She has a sense that everything that is past and everything that is to come are balanced at this point in time, the fulcrum resting within herself. This moment is one of divinely mandated significance. Here, in its monstrous living form, is some part of the Messenger’s message.

Portia guides her to the great unrolled skein that is Viola’s life’s work, and Bianca, after several false starts, finds this “deeper book.” It is barely an appendix, a complex tangle of material that Viola has been unable to unravel, because it is written within the body in a wholly alien manner, far more compact, efficient and densely organized than the rest. The spiders cannot know, but there are good reasons for the contrast. This is not the product of natural evolution, or even evolution assisted: this is that which assists. Viola and her ant farm have isolated the nanovirus.

Viola’s peer house—though their erudite mistress is past helping now—isolate the fragment of the body’s book unique to the immune spiderlings, but they do more than this. They isolate the nanovirus as well: the Messenger Within.

Why should we be made thus, to improve and improve, unless it is to aspire?

Days later, the ants have produced the first batch of her serum, a complex mixture of the immune spiderlings’ genetic fragment and the nanovirus: Messenger and Message circling and circling within that solution.

They wish to communicate something to that one point of intellect outside their sphere: the most basic, essential signal. They wish to tell the Messenger, We are here.

They wait for the Messenger to appear in the night sky above, and then they send that unequivocal first transmission. We are here. Within a second of the last solution being sent, the Messenger ceases its own transmissions, throwing the whole of Portia’s civilization into a panic that their hubris has angered the universe. Several fraught days later, the Messenger speaks again.

“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.

But of course one did not dream in suspension. Even Holsten remembered enough about the science to know that. One did not dream because the cooling process brought brain activity to an absolute minimum, a suspension of even the subconscious movements of the mind. This was necessary because unchecked brain activity during the enforced idleness of a long sleep would drive the sleeper insane. Such a situation arose out of faulty machinery.

She understands, in a real and immediate way, how she stands on the backs of giants, and that her own back, too, will be strong enough to bear the weight of many generations to come.

In the fore-cabin space, Viola gestures to her radio operator, and they signal that all’s well. Down in Great Nest district, Bianca will receive their message and then send a communication of her own, not to the Sky Nest but further still. Bianca is hailing God with a simple announcement: We are coming.

Lain gave him an exasperated look. “Time, old man. This ship’s close to two and a half thousand years old. Things fall apart. Time is what we’re running out of.”

What Bianca asks is this: What does it mean that you are there and we are here? Is there meaning or is it random chance? Because what else does one ask even a broken cybernetic deity but, Why are we here?

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.

At last the spiders appreciate that, even aside from their orbiting God, they are not alone in the universe, and that this is not a good thing.

“You’ve had any other classicists working on this, out of cargo? There must be a few students or …” Alpash looked solemn. “I’m afraid not. We have searched the manifest. There were only a very few at the start. You are the last.”

Holsten stared at him for a long while, thinking through the implications of that: thinking about Earth’s long history before the fall, before the ice came. His society had possessed such a fragmented, imperfect understanding of the predecessors that they were constantly trying to ape, and did even that poor record now boil down to just himself, the contents of one old man’s head?

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.

He thought about those hateful whispers telling the Gilgamesh, impossibly, to turn around and go away. Abandon hope, all ye who enter …

One advantage of God ceasing to move in mysterious ways is that the entire planet has found a hitherto unknown unity. Little focuses the collective mind more decisively than the threat of utter extinction.

We lasted too long, in the end. Holsten the classicist felt that he was a man uniquely qualified to look down the road that time had set them all on.

Helena Holsten Lain reclines in her webbing, feeling at ease in the zero gravity, whilst around her the rest of the crew complete their pre-launch checks.

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.