Children of Time

4.1 THE CAVE OF WONDERS

When he was a child, Holsten Mason had been mad about space. The exploration of Earth’s orbit had been ongoing for a century and a half by then, and a generation of astronauts had been raiding the fallen colonies, from the lunar base to the gas giant moons. He had immersed himself in dramatic reconstructions of bold explorers entering dangerous derelict space stations, avoiding the remaining automated systems to pillage tech and data from the burnt-out old computers. He had watched actual recordings of the real-life expeditions – often disturbing, often cut off suddenly. He remembered, at no more than ten years old, seeing a helmet torch play over the vacuum-desiccated corpse of a millennia-old spaceman.

By the time he was grown up, his interest had migrated back through time from those bold scavenger pioneers to the lost civilization that they were rediscovering. Those days of discovery! So much had been hauled back down from orbit but so little of it was understood. Alas, the golden days of the classicist were already on the wane when Holsten had begun his career. He had lived to see his discipline steadily tainted by vicarious disgrace; there was less and less still to be gleaned from the scraps and splinters which the Old Empire had left behind, and it had become evident that those long-dead ancestors were still present, in a malign, intangible way. The Old Empire was reaching out of deep history to inexorably poison its children. Small wonder that the study of that intricate, murderous people gradually lost its appeal.

Now, at an inconceivable distance from his dying home, Holsten Mason had been handed the veritable grail of the classicist.

He sat in the comms room of the Gilgamesh, completely surrounded by the past, transmission after transmission filling the ark ship’s virtual space with the wisdom of the ancients. As far as he was concerned, they had struck gold.

He was one of the few Key Crew able to participate from the comfort of the Gilgamesh itself. Karst and Vitas had taken a shuttle and some drones to check out the barren-looking planet below them. Lain and her engineers were out on the half-finished station itself, slowly proceeding down its compartmentalized length and recording everything they found. When they found working hardware they could access, they sent Holsten the results, and he deciphered and catalogued it wherever he could, or put it aside for further study where he could not.

Nobody had ever had access to an Old Empire terraforming station before, even an incomplete one. Nobody had ever been sure that such a thing actually existed. Here, at the wrong end of his career, and at the wrong end of the history of the human race, Holsten was finally in the undeniable position of being able to call himself the greatest expert ever on the Old Empire.

The thought was intoxicating, but its aftertaste one of bleak depression.

Holsten was now in possession of a greater trove of communications, fiction, technical manuals, announcements and trivia in several Imperial languages – but mostly Kern’s Imperial C – than any scholar before him since the end of the Empire itself. All he could think was that his own people, an emergent culture that had clawed its way back to its feet after the ice, was nothing but a shadow of that former greatness. It was not simply that the Gilgamesh and all their current space effort was cobbled together from bastardized, half-understood pieces of the ancient world’s vastly superior technology. It was everything: from the very beginning his people had known they were inheriting a used world. The ruins and the decayed relics of a former people had been everywhere, underfoot, underground, up mountains, immortalized in stories. Discovering such a wealth of dead metal in orbit had hardly been a surprise, when all recorded history had been a progress over a desert of broken bones. There had been no innovation that the ancients had not already achieved, and done better. How many inventors had been relegated to historical obscurity because some later treasure-hunter had unearthed the older, superior method of achieving the same end? Weapons, engines, political systems, philosophies, sources of energy… Holsten’s people had thought themselves lucky that someone had built such a convenient flight of steps back up from the dark into the sunlight of civilization. They had never quite come to the realization that those steps led only to that one place.

Who knows what we might have achieved, had we not been so keen to recreate all their follies, he thought now. Could we have saved the Earth? Would we be living there now on our own green planet?

All the knowledge in the universe now at his fingertips, yet to that question he had no answer.

The Gilgamesh had translation algorithms now, mostly designed by Holsten himself. Previously the sum total of the ancients’ written word had been so scarce that automatic deciphering had been infinitely hit-and-miss – he would still not have liked to have any conversation with Avrana Kern via a translation by the Gilgamesh, for example. Now, with a library of miscellanea at his fingertips the computers were working with him to turn out at least halfway comprehensible versions of Imperial C. Most of the treasure trove of knowledge remained locked within ancient languages, though. Even with electronic help, there simply wasn’t time to decode it all, and most likely the bulk of it was simply of no interest to anyone but himself. The best he could do was get an idea of what each separate file represented, catalogue it for future reference, and then pass on.

Sometimes Lain or her people would contact him with questions, mostly about tech they had found but which seemed to serve no obvious purpose. They would give him vague search terms and send him digging through his own directories for something that might pertain to it. More often than not, his organization and the wealth of material eventually yielded something of use, and he would set out a working translation of it. The fact that they could have looked for themselves was something he occasionally commented on, but it was plain that the engineers felt actually skimming Holsten’s catalogue was far more difficult than just pestering him about it.

To be honest, he had hoped to get some talk of a more social nature with Lain but, in the forty days he had been awake this time round, he had not so much as met her face to face. The engineers were busy, actually living out there on the great hollow cylinder of the station most of the time. They had thawed out and awoken an auxiliary crew of thirty trained people from cargo to help them, and still there was more work to be done than they could keep up with.

Six people had died: four to what had either been a working security system or a defective maintenance system, one to a suit malfunction, and one to sheer clumsiness, by managing to get their suit cut open whilst trying to hurry equipment through a jagged gap in the station infrastructure.

It was far less than those early exploration recordings would have led him to expect, but then there were no ancient dead here, no suggestion that this installation had fallen victim to the infighting that had brought down the Empire and its entire way of life. The long-ago engineers had simply departed, probably heading back for Earth when everything went wrong. This terraforming project they had begun had been left to the slow, heedless mercy of the stars.

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 been 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.

‘As you’ll have remarked, the surface of this planet seems curiously uniform. Spectrographic analysis, however, shows abundant organic chemistry: all the elements we might need to survive,’ Vitas told them. ‘We dropped a pair of drones as soon as we had established a high orbit. The images that you will be seeing are all taken from drone camera. The colours are the true colours, with no touching-up or artistic licence.’

Holsten wasn’t seeing any colours, unless grey counted, but as sunrise crept across the orb displayed before him he saw contours, shadows: indications of mountains, basins, channels.

‘As you can see, this planet is geologically active, which may have been a prerequisite for the Empire’s terraforming. We don’t know whether this is simply because, of all the Earth-like qualities they wished to find in a new world, that would be the most difficult to fabricate – perhaps outright impossible – or alternatively that they have, indeed, instilled that quality into the planet at an early stage. Hopefully the recovered information from the station will give us an idea of how they went about the process. It is within the bounds of possibility that one day we ourselves may be able to duplicate the feat.’ And there was at least a hint there that Vitas was feeling a little excited by the thought. Holsten was sure her voice lifted a semitone, that one of her eyebrows even twitched.

‘You can see here the drone readings of the basic conditions planetside,’ Vitas continued. ‘So: gravity around eighty per cent of Earth’s, a slow rotation giving around a four-hundred-hour diurnal cycle. Temperature is high, bearable around the poles, survivable in northern latitudes, but probably not within human tolerance towards the equator. You’ll note that oxygen levels are only around five per cent, so no easy home here, I’m afraid. A salutary lesson nonetheless, as you will see.’

The image shifted to a much closer view of the surface, with the drones flying far lower, and a ripple went through the audience; one of bafflement, disquiet. The grey was alive.

The entire surface, as far as the drone camera could register, was covered in a dense interlaced vegetation, grey as ashes. It feathered out into fern-like fronds that arched over each other, spreading hand-like folds to catch the sunlight. It erupted into phallic towers that were warty with buds or fruiting bodies. It covered the mountains to their very tips. It formed a thick, grey fur on every visible surface. The image shifted, and shifted, and Vitas noted different locations, with an inset global map showing where the views were taken from. The details of the view, however, barely changed.

‘What you are looking at is best thought of as a fungus,’ the science chief explained. ‘This solitary species has colonized the entire planet, pole to pole and at every altitude. Scans of the underlying ground – as overlain here – show that the actual topography of the planet is as varied as one might expect of a substitute Earth – there are sea basins but no seas, river valleys but no rivers. Investigation suggests that there is a planet’s worth of water bound up in that organism you see before you. And it may even be a single organism. There’s no obvious division observable. It appears capable of some manner of photosynthesis, despite the colour, but the low oxygen levels suggest this is chemically distinct from anything we’re familiar with. It’s not known whether this pervasive species is somehow an intended part of the terra-forming process, or if it was the result of an error, and its irremovable presence led the engineers to abandon their work, or whether it has arisen after that abandonment – the natural by-product of a part-completed job. In any event, I think it safe to say that the stuff is there to stay. This is now its world.’

‘Can it be cleared?’ someone asked. ‘Can we burn it back, or something?’

Vitas’s outward calm had at last been ruffled. ‘Good luck burning anything with that little oxygen,’ she tutted. ‘Besides, I am recommending no further investigation of this planet. By the time we had established the position down there, and conducted some exploratory research, the drones were beginning to show signs of reduced functionality. We kept them going for as long as we were able, but both of them eventually ceased working altogether. The air down there is virtually a spore soup, new fungal colonies looking to sprout on any fresh surface that becomes exposed. Which reminds me, with all the excitement within this system and the last, we need to construct more drones in the workshops once the resources are available. We have very few of them left.’

‘Granted,’ Guyen replied, from the back. ‘Get onto it. I think we can assume this place isn’t going to be our home any time soon,’ he added. ‘But that’s not going to be a problem. Our priority is to gather everything we can from the station, file it, translate it, and work out what we can put into action. At the same time we’re undertaking a major overhaul of the Gilgamesh’s own systems, repairing and replacing where we can. There’s a lot of useable tech on that station, if we can find a way to splice it to our own. And don’t worry about not being able to go live on Fungus World. I have a plan. There is a plan. With what we’ve found here, we can go and take our birthright.’ The speech veered into the messianic so abruptly that even Guyen himself seemed surprised for a moment, but then he turned and departed, curious conversation welling up in his wake.

4.4 ENQUIRING MINDS

The plague is insidious at first, then tyrannous, and at last truly terrifying. Its symptoms are by now well recorded, reliably predictable – everything, in fact, except preventable. The first sure signs are a feeling of heat in the joints, a rawness at the eyes, mouthparts, spinnerets, anus and book-lungs. Muscle spasms, especially in the legs, follow; at first just a few, a stammering in speech, a nervous dance not quite accounted for, then more and more the victim’s limbs are not her own, leading her in babbling, staggering, whole frantic meaningless journeys. Around this time, from ten to forty days after the first involuntary twitch, the virus reaches the brain. The victim then relinquishes her grasp on who and where she is. She perceives those around her in irrational ways. Paranoia, aggression and fugue states are common during this phase. Death follows in another five to fifteen days, immediately preceded by an irresistible desire to climb as high as possible. Fabian has recounted in some detail the dead city that he has visited once more: the highest reaches of the trees and the decaying webbing were crowded with the rigid carapaces of the dead, glassy eyes fixed upwards on nothing.

Prior to those first definitive symptoms, the virus is present in the victim’s system for an unknown period but often as long as two hundred days, while slowly infiltrating the patient’s system without any obvious harm. The victim feels occasional periods of heat or dizziness, but there are other potential causes for this and the episodes usually go unreported; all the more so because, prior to the disease taking hold in Great Nest – as it now has – any suspected sufferers were exiled on pain of death. Those incubating the disease were part of an inadvertent conspiracy to mask the signs of outbreak for as long as possible.

During this early, innocent-seeming phase, the disease is moderately contagious. Being close to a sufferer for an extended period of time is very likely to lead to oneself contracting the disease, although bites from deranged victims in their last phases are the surest way to become infected.

There have been half a dozen late-stage victims in Great Nest. They are killed on sight, and at range. There are three times as many lingering in the mid-stage, and so far no consensus has been reached regarding them. Portia and others are insistent that a cure is possible. There is a tacit agreement amongst the temple scientists to conceal just how little idea they have of what can be done.

Portia is making the best uses of Fabian’s prizes that she can. The spiderlings came from the plague city, and she can only hope that this means they are immune to the plague, and that this immunity will somehow be amenable to study.

She has tested them, and taken samples of their haemolymph – their arachnid blood – to examine, but all her lenses and analyses have so far discovered nothing. She has ordered that fluids from the spiderlings be fed or injected into mid-stage victims, a manner of transfusion having been pioneered just a few years before. The limited immune system of the spiders means that blood-type rejection is far less of an issue. In this case the attempt has had no effect.

In working with sufferers, in order to preserve herself as long as possible from the inevitable moment when she becomes her own test subject, she has used Fabian, and he has liaised with the males within those peer houses where the plague has taken hold. It is known that males are a little hardier than females where the plague is concerned. Ironically, ancient genetics link the elegance and stamina of their wooing dances with the strength of their immune systems, keeping a constant pressure on natural selection.

Everything that Portia has tried has so far failed, and none of her fellows has obtained any better results. She is beginning to drift into ever more speculative sciences, desperate for that one lateral thought that will save her civilization from a collapse into dispersed barbarism.

She has now been working in her laboratory for the best part of a day. Fabian has departed with a new batch of solutions to pass to his counterparts within the sealed lazar-houses that the dwellings of infected peer groups have become. She has no particular belief that these solutions will work. She feels she has reached the end of her capabilities, frustrated with the great void of ignorance that she has found, while standing out here at the very edge of her people’s comprehension.

She now has a visitor. Under other circumstances she would turn this one away, but she is tired, so very tired, and she desperately needs some new perspective. And new – disturbingly new – perspectives are what this visitor is all about.

Her name is Bianca and she was formerly one of Portia’s peer group. She is a large, overfed spider with pale brindling all over her body, who moves with a fidgety, nervous energy that makes Portia wonder whether, if Bianca caught the disease, anyone would actually notice.

Bianca was formerly of the Temple, too, but she did not fulfil her duties with the proper respect. Her curiosity as a scientist overwhelmed her reverence as a priestess. She had begun experiments with the crystal and, when this was discovered, she came very close to being exiled for her disrespect. Portia and her other peers interceded on her behalf, but she effectively fell from those lofty levels of society, losing both her status and her friends. It was assumed that she would leave Great Nest, or perhaps die.

Instead, somehow Bianca has clung on and even thrived. She has always been a brilliant mind – perhaps that is another reason Portia, at the end of her own mental resources, lets her in – and she has bartered her skills like a male, by serving lesser peer houses, and eventually forming a new peer group of her own, drawn from other disaffected scholars. In better times, the major peer houses were always on the point of censuring or exiling the entire clutch of them, but now nobody cares. Portia’s people have other matters to concern them.

They say you are close to a cure? However, Bianca’s stance and the slight delay in her movements convey scepticism very neatly.

I work. We all work. Portia would normally exaggerate her prospects, but she is feeling too weary. Why are you here?

Bianca shuffles slyly, eyeing Portia. Why, sister, why am I ever anywhere?

This is not the time. So Bianca is after her usual, then. Portia huddles miserably, the other spider stepping close to hear her muted speech.

From what I hear, there may be no other time Bianca says, half-goading. I know what messages come down the lines from the other cities. I know how many other cities have no messages left in them. You and I both know what we are facing.

If I had wanted to think further on that just now, I would have remained in my laboratory, Portia tells her with an angry stamp. I will not give you access to the Messenger’s crystal.

Bianca’s palps quiver. I even had my own crystal, did you know? And the Temple found out, and took it away. I was close…

Portia does not need to know what she was close to. Bianca has one obsession, and that is speaking to the Messenger, sending a message back to that swift-moving star. It is a subject of debate within the Temple every generation – and in every generation there is one like Bianca who will not take no for an answer. They are watched, always.

Portia’s position is wretched because, left to herself, she would probably support Bianca. She is swayed by the majority, however, in the way that most large decisions fall out when the great and the good stand on the same web and debate. The Temple old guard, the priestesses of the former generation, hold the message sacrosanct and perfect. The path of Portia’s people is to better appreciate it, to learn the hidden depths of the message that have yet to be unlocked. It is not for them to try and howl into the darkness to attract the Messenger’s attention. Passing overhead, the Messenger observes all. There is an order to the universe, and the Messenger is proof of that.

Each generation a few more voices are raised in dispute, but so far that enduring meme has won out. After all, did the Messenger not intervene during the great war with the ants, with no need for anyone to ask for help? If it is within the Messenger’s plan to help Portia’s kind, then such help will come without being solicited.

Why come to me? I will not go against Temple, Portia tells her as dismissively as she can manage.

Because I remember you from when we were still truly sisters. You want the same thing as me, only not quite enough.

I will not help you, Portia declares, her weariness adding a finality to the phrase. There is no speaking back to the Messenger anyway. Our people need the Temple as a source of reassurance. Your experiments would likely take that from them, and for what? You cannot achieve what you wish, nor is it a thing to be achieved.

I have something to show you. Suddenly Bianca is signalling and some males are bringing in a heavy device slung between them, stepping in sideways to lower it to the taut floor, which stretches a little more to take the weight.

It has long been known that certain chemicals react with metals in curious ways, Bianca noted. When combined, linked properly, there is a force that passes along the metals and through the liquids. You remember such experiments from when we were learning together.

A curiosity, nothing more, Portia recalled. It is used for coating metals with other metals. I recall there was an ant colony induced to make the task work, and they produced remarkable goods. This memory from her comparatively innocent youth lends her a little strength. Many noxious fumes, though. Work fit for ants only. What of it?

Bianca is attending to her device, which resembles the experiments that Portia recalls in that it has compartments of chemicals within other chemicals, linked by rods of metal, but it has other metal parts too: metal painstakingly teased out until it is as fine as thick silk, coiled densely in a column. Something changes in the air and Portia feels her hair prickle, as though a storm is coming – an event that always inspires a very reasonable fear because of the damage that natural fires can cause to a city.

This toy of mine is at the heart of an invisible web, Bianca tells her. By careful adjustment, I can use it to pluck the strands of that web. Is that not remarkable?

Portia wants to say that it is nonsensical, but she is intrigued, and the idea of some all-encompassing web is attractive, intuitive. How else could they be connected with…?

What you say is that this web is what the Messenger speaks to us through?

Bianca skitters about her novel device. Well, there must be some connection or how could we receive the message? And yet the Temple does not speculate. The message simply ‘is’. Yes, I have found the great web of the universe, the web that the Messenger plucks its message upon. Yes, I can send our reply.

Even for Bianca this is a bold and fearful boast.

I do not believe you, Portia decides. You would have done it already, if it could be done.

Bianca stamps angrily. What point in calling to the Messenger if I cannot hear her words? I need access to the temple.

You wish the Messenger to recognize you, to speak to you. So it is Bianca’s ego that really drives this experiment. She was always thus: always ready to measure legs with the whole of creation. This is not the time. Portia feels exhausted once more.

Sister, we have no more time. You know that, Bianca wheedles. Let me fulfil my plan. I cannot leave this to future generations. Even if I could pass the Understanding on, there will be no future generations worth speaking of. Now is the only time.

There will be future generations. Portia does not step out those words, only thinks them. Fabian has seen them: living like beasts in the ruins of our cities, heads crowded with Understandings that they cannot use, because all the architecture of their mothers’ world has gone. What use is science then? What use the Temple? What use art when there are so few left that all they can do is feed and mate? Our great Understandings will die off, generation to generation, until none of those left alive will remember who we were. But the thought is incomplete, something nagging at her. She finds herself thinking of the selection of Understandings – those lost survivors will presumably have some long-ago Understandings to assist them in their hunting, and those offspring that inherit such primal Understandings would become the new lords of the world. But that will not be all that they inherit…

Portia leaps up, electrified into wakefulness as though she had inadvertently touched the wrong end of Bianca’s machine. A mad thought has come to her. An impossible thought. A thought of science.

She signals one of her attendant males and demands to know if Fabian has returned. He has, and she has him sent for.

I must work in my laboratory, she tells Bianca, and then hesitates. Bianca is half-mad already, a dangerous maverick, a potential revolutionary, but her brilliant intellect was never in doubt. Will you assist me? I need all the help I can get.

Bianca’s surprise is evident. It would be an honour to work with my sisters once more, but… She does not quite articulate the thought, but she tilts her eyes over towards her machine, now inactive and no longer stressing the air with its invisible web.

If we succeed, if we survive, I will do all I can to take your plea to Temple. And a rebellious thought of Portia’s own. If we survive, it will be by our own merits, not because of the Messenger’s aid. We are now on our own.

4.5 DREAMS OF THE ANCIENTS

‘Mason.’

Holsten started, half asleep over his work, and almost fell off his chair. Guyen was standing right behind him.

‘I – ah – was there something?’ For a moment he was racking his brains to remember whether he had already finished the translations that the commander had been asking after. But yes, he’d sent those over for Guyen’s personal inspection yesterday, hadn’t he. Had the man read them already?

Guyen’s face gave no clues. ‘I need you to come with me.’ The tone could quite easily have accommodated the inference that Holsten was about to be shot for some treason committed against Guyen’s one-man regime. Only the lack of an accompanying security detail was reassuring.

‘Well, I…’ Holsten made a vague gesture towards the console before him but, in truth, the work had lost much of its interest for him over the last few days. It was repetitive, it was gruelling, and in a curiously personal way it was depressing. The chance to get a break from it, even in Guyen’s company, was inexpressibly attractive. ‘What do you need, chief?’

Guyen motioned for him to follow and, after a few turns along the Gilgamesh’s corridors, Holsten could guess that they were heading for the shuttle bays. This was not exactly a path that he remembered fondly. Here and there he even saw the odd bullet scar that the maintenance crews had yet to get around to dealing with.

He almost resurrected those long ago/recent days then, almost made the mistake of talking about old times with Guyen. He restrained himself just in time. Odds on, Guyen would just have stared at him blankly, but there was an outside chance that he actually would want to talk about the failed mutiny, and where would that leave Holsten? With that one question that had obsessed his thoughts for those long days after he and Lain were brought back to the Gil. As he sat in solitary decontamination – just like Lain and all of Karst’s crew – he had turned those events over and over, trying to work out which of Guyen’s words and deeds had been bluff, and what had been cold-heartedly meant. He had wanted to talk to Karst about it at the time, but had not been given the chance. How much of the way that desperate rescue mission had gone was Guyen’s plan; how much was Karst’s improvisation? He had always thought the security chief was a thug and yet, in the end, the man had gone to ridiculous lengths to get the hostages back alive.

I owe you, Karst, Holsten acknowledged, but he did not know whether he owed Guyen.

‘Are we…?’ he asked the commander’s back.

‘We are going to the station,’ Guyen confirmed. ‘I need you to look at something.’

‘Some text there, or…?’ He envisaged spending the day translating warning notices and labels for an increasingly opaque Guyen.

‘You’re a classicist. You do more than translations, don’t you?’ Guyen rounded on him. ‘Artefacts, yes?’

‘Well, yes, but surely Engineering…’ Holsten was aware that Guyen had wrong-footed him often enough that he hadn’t really finished voicing a properly articulated thought since the man arrived.

‘Engineering want a second opinion. I want a second opinion.’ They came out into a shuttle bay to find a craft ready and waiting, with open hatch and a pilot kicking her heels beside it, reading something on a pad. Holsten guessed it was one of those approved works that Guyen had released from the Gil’s capacious library, although there was also a brisk trade in covert copies of unauthorized books – writing and footage supposedly locked down in the system. Guyen would get angry over it, but never seemed able to stem it, and Holsten privately suspected that was because the censorship he had ordered Lain to put in place was never going to be able to keep out the chief culprit – to wit, Lain herself.

‘You must be grateful for a chance to actually walk the satellite yourself,’ Guyen suggested, as the two of them took their seats and strapped in. ‘Footsteps of the ancients and all. A classicist’s dream, I’d have thought.’

In Holsten’s experience, a classicist’s dream was far more about letting someone else do the dangerous work, and then sitting back to write erudite analyses of the works of the ancients or, increasingly as his career had progressed, of other academics’ writings. Beyond that, and far beyond anything he might tell Guyen, he had come to a depressing realization: he did not like the ancients any more.

The more he learned of them, the more he saw them not as spacefaring godlike exemplars, as his culture had originally cast them, but as monsters: clumsy, bickering, short-sighted monsters. Yes, they had developed a technology that was still beyond anything Holsten’s people had achieved, but it was just as he had already known: the shining example of the Old Empire had tricked Holsten’s entire civilization into the error of mimicry. In trying to be the ancients, they had sealed their own fate – neither to reach those heights, nor any others, doomed instead to a history of mediocrity and envy.

Their flight to the station was brief, moving from acceleration to deceleration almost immediately, the pilot jockeying with physics as she liaised with the Gil and whatever impromptu docking control had been set up on the station.

The station was a series of rings about a gravity-less central cylinder that still housed the most complete Old Empire fusion reactor that anyone had ever seen. Lain’s team had managed to restore power to the station with remarkably little difficulty, finding the ancient machines still ready to resume functioning after their millennia-long sleep. It was this seamless and elegant technology that had, by imitation and iteration, spawned the systems of the Gilgamesh which had got them this far into space at the cost of only a few per cent of their human cargo.

With some ring sections rotating again, there was something approaching normal gravity within parts of the station, for which Holsten was profoundly grateful. He had not been sure what he would find on stepping out of the shuttle, but this first ring of the station had been thoroughly explored and catalogued, and subsequently colonized by Lain’s greatly expanded team of engineers. He and Guyen came out into a wave of energy, bustle and noise, to see the corridors and rooms crowded with off-duty engineers. There was an impromptu canteen serving food, rec rooms where screens had been rigged up to show footage from the Gil’s archives. Holsten saw games being played, intimate embraces, and even what might have been some sort of dramatic rendition that was cut very short when Guyen was sighted. Under Lain’s custodianship the engineers had become a hard-working but irreverent bunch, and Holsten suspected that their Great Leader was not universally respected.

‘So where’s this thing of yours?’ Holsten asked. He was increasingly curious about Guyen’s motivations, because it seemed that there was surely nothing a classicist could advise upon that could not have been dealt with just as easily over a remote link. So why has Guyen hauled me all the way over here? There were some possible answers, but none he liked. Chief amongst them was the idea that no communications between the station and the Gilgamesh were particularly secure. Anyone with a little savvy could theoretically be listening in. Of course, nobody was likely to have anything to say that was of a sensitive nature, were they?

Perhaps they were.

A shiver ran through Holsten as he dogged Guyen’s heels through that first ring section, until they arrived at a hatch linking to the next.

Has he found something? He imagined the commander piecing through reports with an eye for who-knew-what. Something had caught his eye, though, surely – something that perhaps nobody else had perceived in quite the same way. And now it was evident that Guyen was keen on keeping it this way.

Which makes me his confidant? It was not a comfortable thought.

They progressed further through the station, from ring to ring, airlock to airlock, the bustle of relaxing engineers giving place to a different, more focused flurry of activity. They were now stepping carefully through those areas of the station that were still being thoroughly investigated. The first sections were reckoned safe now, therefore left to the most junior of Lain’s people – often recent awakenees of limited experience – to restore a few final systems or finish the last of the cataloguing. After that, Guyen directed Holsten to get himself into an environment suit, and to keep his helmet on at all times. They would be entering parts of the station where air and gravity were not necessarily guaranteed commodities.

From that point on, everyone they passed was similarly suited up, and Holsten knew that the pace of breaking new ground was limited by the reserves of such equipment that the Gilgamesh carried or could manufacture. He and Guyen passed a dwindling number of engineers working on key systems, trying to restore the station’s basic life-support to the extent where they could declare this ring section safe for unprotected work. The banter and easy nature of the previous sections were gone, the work efficient and focused.

The next section they reached had gravity but no air, and they walked through a nightmare of intermittent lights and flashing warnings that threatened dire consequences in Imperial C. Engineers, faceless in their environment suits, fought to cure the ravages of time and work out where the old systems had failed, and how to work a repair around the ancient and intimidatingly advanced technology.

We’re walking back in time, Holsten thought. Not back to the days of the Old Empire, but back through the engineers’ efforts to restore the station. Once there would have been nothing here, no light, no atmosphere, no power, no gravity at all. Then came Lain, mother goddess in miniature, to bring definition to the void.

‘We’re crossing to the next ring. It has some power, but they’ve not got the section rotating,’ Guyen cautioned, his voice crisp over the helmet radio.

Holsten fumbled for a moment before remembering how to transmit. ‘That’s where we’re going?’

‘Indeed. Lain?’

Holsten started, wondering which of the three suited figures now in sight was the chief engineer. When Lain’s voice came over the com, though, it seemed to sync with none of their movements, and he guessed that she was probably elsewhere on the station.

‘Hola, chief. You’re sure you want to do this?’

‘You’ve already had people go over the section for active dangers,’ Guyen pointed out. That would be the first step, Holsten knew – the step he himself would never witness first-hand. Before anyone could start patching up the key systems, a crew would have to go into that lightless, airless place and check to make sure that nothing the ancients had left behind was going to try and kill them.

At least the station hasn’t been deliberately rigged to be like that. That had been the bane of the old astronaut-explorers of the past, of course. The ancients had gone down fighting – fighting each other. They had not been idle when it came to making their orbital installations difficult to get into, and often the traps were the last things still functioning on an otherwise dead hunk of spinning metal.

‘Chief, you’re going somewhere without basic life-support. It doesn’t need to be actively dangerous,’ Lain replied. ‘No end of things can go wrong. Who’s that with you, anyway? He’s not one of mine, is he?’

Holsten wondered where she was observing him from, but then presumably the internal surveillance had proved easier to restore than breathable air.

‘Mason, the classicist.’

A pause, then: ‘Oh. Hi, Holsten.’

‘Hello, Isa.’

‘Look, chief,’ Lain sounded bothered. ‘I said you needed someone to go with you, but I assumed you’d be taking someone who was trained for it.’

‘I’m trained for it,’ Guyen pointed out.

‘He’s not. I’ve seen him in zero-G. Look, sit tight and I’ll come over—’

‘You will not,’ Guyen snapped angrily. ‘Stick by your post. I know you’ve got half a dozen people in the next section. Any difficulties and we’ll signal them.’ He sounded a little too insistent to Holsten.

‘Chief—’

‘That’s an order.’

‘Right,’ came Lain’s voice, and then, ‘Fuck, I don’t know what the bastard’s up to, but you look after yourself.’ It took Holsten a startled moment to work out that she must be transmitting only to him. ‘Look, I’ll send to the tripwire crew and tell them to keep an eye out. Call out if there’s any trouble, all right? Yes, the place has been gone over, and they’re working to restore full power and all the rest. But just be careful – and whatever you do don’t turn anything on. We’ve sent in a team for a first-stage survey of it, but we don’t know what most of it actually does. That ring looks like it’s set up for some sort of command-and-control, or maybe it’s just terraforming central. Either way, no pressing buttons – and you warn me if Guyen looks like he’s about to. You remember how to get a dedicated channel?’

To his surprise, Holsten found that he did, prodding at tongue controls that worked just like those in the mask the mutineers had put on him. ‘Testing?’

‘Good man. Now, you look after yourself, right?’

‘I’ll try to.’

It did not take long for the classicist’s dreams of becoming a space explorer to be cruelly dashed. The environment suits had magnetic boots, which was an idea that Holsten had just sort of accepted when he was a child watching films of bold space explorers, but which proved frustrating and exhausting to actually use. Simply gliding through the chambers of the station like a diver in the ocean also proved considerably more difficult than he had anticipated. In the end, Guyen – who could apparently clamber about the depthless spaces like a monkey – had to run a lanyard from belt to belt so that he could haul Holsten back when the classicist drifted helplessly away.

The interior of that ring – the furthest limit of their expansion through the station – was not properly lit up yet, but there were countless dormant panels and slumbering banks of readouts that glowed their dormancy softly to themselves, and the suit lights were enough to navigate by. Guyen was setting as swift a pace as he could, plainly knowing just where he was going. Holsten’s own ignorance in that regard was never far from his mind.

‘I have hijacked your suit camera,’ came Lain’s voice inside his helmet, ‘because I want to know what the old man is after.’

At that point Holsten was dangling after Guyen like a balloon, and so he felt he could spare some time for conversation. ‘I thought I was the old man.’

‘Not any more. You’ve seen him. I don’t know what he was doing on the way here, but it looks like he’s been around for years more than us.’ He heard her draw breath to say more, but then Guyen was slowing down, hauling Holsten closer and then touching him down to the wall so that his boots could get purchase; Lain’s voice said, ‘Oh, it’s that thing he likes, is it?’

There was a coffin there – like a suspension chamber with its head end built into the wall. Holsten knew that the station had come with a very limited suspension facility – as far as they had explored it – so it had not been intended for anyone to spend a few lifetimes here. Besides, what would be the point of all this room, all of the complex, sleeping machinery, just to preserve a single human body for posterity?

The pad on Holsten’s suit signalled that it had received new information, so he took it out, fumbling in his gloves, and managed to get the data up, seeing the first-pass survey of this room and its contents. The engineers had not known what it was, therefore had noted its basic features, recorded pictures, and moved on. They had also activated some of the consoles in the room, dumped some data for later analysis by someone like Holsten, then thought no more about it. These had been some of the files Guyen had wanted translated. Holsten called them up now, wondering how good his work on them had been. It had been complex technical stuff, even though it had been just a surface fragment of the knowledge locked in here.

Now he scanned those files again, the dense originals and his own computer-assisted translations, along with everything else the original cursory survey had recorded about this room. Guyen was looking at him expectantly.

‘I… what am I supposed to be doing?’

‘You’re supposed to be telling me what this thing is.’

‘For this, you need me here?’ Holsten’s rare temper sparked a little. ‘Chief, I could just—’

‘Your translation is mostly incomprehensible,’ Guyen began.

‘Well, technical details—’

‘No, that’s all to the good. This way it can be just between you and me. So I want you to go through this again and confirm – tell me just what this is. And we’re here specifically so the device can help you understand it.’

Guyen turned back to the coffin and hunched over it, reaching into the toolbelt that he had slung from his suit harness. Holsten’s anxiety spiked and he very nearly broadcast his worries directly to Guyen, before remembering to switch channel over to Lain.

‘He’s turning something on,’ he got out, and then the whole array around the coffin lit up like a festival: screens and panels flaring and stuttering into life, and the humanoid space at its heart ghosting with a pale blue glow.

‘I see it.’ Lain’s voice blurred with static, then stabilized. ‘Look, I’ve got my people right outside. Any trouble they’ll be all over you. But I want to see.’

So do I, Holsten realized, leaning closer to the displays.

‘These are… error messages?’ Guyen murmured.

‘Missing connections… The engineers think the main computer was gutted by the virus,’ Holsten speculated, ‘so all we’ve got are isolated systems.’ And that all we’ve got was still an overstuffed library of esoteric knowledge. ‘It looks like it’s trying to link up to something that’s not there. It’s basically listing a whole load of… somethings that it can’t find.’

Guyen examined the control panels, his bulky, gloved hands approaching the surfaces occasionally but not committing to a touch. ‘Get it to tell me what it is,’ he said. He had left the channel open, and Holsten was not sure whether those words had been intended for export.

‘Listen carefully,’ Lain said clearly in Holsten’s ear. ‘I want you to try something with the panel. It’s a routine we developed, when we started up here, for cutting through this sort of shit. Seems to work on most of the kit here. You’ll have to blag it to Guyen that it’s your idea, or that you read it somewhere on our reports or something.’

‘Sure.’

Guyen let him take over at the panel, bathed in the pale illumination from the coffin, and he followed each of Lain’s commands carefully, hesitating every time to let her correct him where necessary. The sequence was only fifteen steps, touching the screen carefully to unlock new cascades of options and complaints until he had somehow stripped away all of the device’s plaintive demands for its lost links and pared it down to what was left.

Which was…

‘Emergency upload facility,’ Holsten translated, a little uncertainly. He stared at that human-shaped absence at the heart of the machine. ‘Upload of what?’

He glanced at Guyen then and saw a swiftly hidden expression on the man’s face, clear even within the gloom of his helmet. The commander’s face had been all triumph and hunger. Whatever he was really looking for, he had found it here.

4.6 THE MESSENGER WITHIN

Plague has worked its way thoroughly into the heart of Great Nest until physical contact between peer houses has almost ceased. Only the desperate and the starving roam the streets. There have been attacks – the healthy assaulting those they believe to be sick, the hungry stealing food, the incurably deranged attacking whatever their inner demons prompt them to.

And yet the straining strands of the community have not quite parted, the trickling exodus has not become a flood – due in no small part to Portia and her peers. They are working on a cure. They can save Great Nest and, by extension, civilization itself.

Portia has enlisted not only Bianca but every scientist – Temple and otherwise – that she has faith in. This is no time for reserving the glory to her peer group, after all.

And, in contacting them all, she has made sure that they all know who she is, and that she, as instigator, is their leader. Her dictates twang out across Great Nest on taut wires, received and relayed by diligent male attendants. Normally cooperation between peer houses does not work smoothly at this level: too many egos, too many females vying for dominance. The emergency has focused them wonderfully.

This is my new Understanding, Portia had explained to them. There is a quality that these immune children have that marks them out from their fallen peers. They were born into a plagued city, but they survived. It seems likely, given how long the plague had been rife in their home, that they must have been born from eggs laid by progenitors likewise resistant to the infection. In short, it is a resistance that they inherited. It is an Understanding.

This prompted a storm of objection. The process by which new Understandings were laid down was not fully understood, but those Understandings related only to knowledge – a recollection of how to do things, or how things were. Where was the evidence that a reaction to a disease could also be passed on to offspring?

These spiderlings are the evidence, Portia had informed them. If you doubt that, then I have no use for you. Reply to me only if you will help.

She lost perhaps a third of her correspondents, who have since sought answers elsewhere, and with no success. Portia herself, however, whilst having made advances enough to justify her area of research, is running into the very limits of her people’s technology and also the boundaries of their comprehension.

One of the other scientists who chose to support Portia – call her Viola – has studied the mechanism of Understandings for years, and passed on to Portia all she knew: great tangled nets of notes setting out her procedures and results. The spiders are very reliant on the effortless generational spread of knowledge that their Understandings produce. Their written language, a system of knots and ties, is awkward, long-winded and hard to preserve and store, and this has slowed Portia’s progress greatly. She cannot wait for offspring to inherit her colleague’s grasp of the subject; she needs that acumen now. Viola herself was initially unwilling to even cross the city, for fear of infection.

Today, confirmation arrived that Viola has entered the second stage of the plague, and knowing that is a keen incentive in Portia’s mind: her colleagues are falling one by one to the enemy they seek to defeat. It can only be a matter of time before Portia feels the stirring of it within her own joints.

Bianca is already infected, she believes. In private the maverick scientist has confessed to Portia that she is feeling those elusive first-stage symptoms. Portia has kept her close anyway, knowing that by now there may be no spider in the whole of Great Nest that is not incubating the same disease.

Except for those maddeningly few who are somehow immune.

Thanks to her failing colleague, however, she has a tool formerly denied her. Viola’s peer group operates an ant colony that has been nurtured to the task of analysing the physiological stigmata of Understandings.

This is another great advance that Portia’s society is built on, and yet one that has become a serious limiter of their further advancement. There are hundreds of tamed ant colonies within Great Nest, not counting those in the surrounds that undertake the day-to-day business of producing food, clearing ground or fending off incursions of wild species. Each colony has been carefully trained, by subtle manipulation of punishment, reward and chemical stimulus, to perform a specific service, giving the great minds of the spiders access to a curious kind of analytical engine, using the cascading decision trees of the colony’s own governance as gearing. Each colony is good for a very limited set of related calculations – a vastly skilled yet vastly specialized idiot savant – and retraining a community of ants is a long and painstaking task.

However, Viola has already put in the work, and Portia sent her samples from the three captive spiderlings for comparison to the studies Viola had already undertaken of other members of their species. The results were delivered in a veritable rolled carpet of writing, along with Viola’s admission of her own infirmity.

Since then, Portia and Bianca have been poring over her copious reasoning, stopping frequently to confer over what Viola may or may not have meant. Their system of writing was originally brought into being to express transient, artistic thoughts – elegant, elaborate and pictorial. It is not ideal for setting down empirical scientific ideas.

Fabian is often in evidence, bringing food and drink and offering his own interpretations when asked. He has a keen mind, for a male, and brings a different perspective. Moreover, he seems to have lost nothing of his vigour and dedication, despite showing a few first-stage symptoms himself. Usually, when any spider comes to believe that she or he is infected, the quality of their service steadily erodes. The problem is so great that even the most undesirable male can find patronage if he has the will to work. Great Nest’s society is undergoing curious, painful shifts.

Viola’s studies are in another language still, inexpertly rendered in that knotwork script. In her writings, she calls it the language of the body. She explains that every spider’s body contains this writing, and that it varies from individual to individual, but not randomly. Viola has experimented on spiderlings out of eggs isolated from clutches where the parentage is known, and has discovered that their internal language is closely related to the parents. This was to have been her grand revelation, in the looked-for years to come, when the completed study would allow her to dominate Great Nest’s intellectual life. Portia herself is quite aware of the humbling genius that she is looking at. Viola has uncovered the secret language of Understandings – if it could only be translated.

That is the sticking point. Viola knows enough to state confidently that what her ants can sequence from biopsy samples is the hidden book that resides within each and every spider, but she cannot read it.

However, her ants have a final gift for Portia. There is a passage, in the book of the spiderlings retrieved by Fabian, which is new. Ants of another of Viola’s colonies have been trained to compare these hidden books and highlight differences. The same paragraph, never before seen, turns up in each of the three immune infants. This, Viola hypothesizes, may represent their Understanding of how to ward off the plague.

Portia and her fellows are briefly ecstatic, finding themselves on the very brink of success, the epidemic as good as beaten. Viola has one last comment, though, and her spinning is noticeably harder to read by this point.

She points out that, just as she has no way of reading the inner book, so she has no means by which to write on it. Other than allowing the spiderlings to grow and breed a new generation that will grow into a wild and barbaric immunity, this new knowledge is theoretically fascinating, yet practically useless.

There follow some days while the city decays about them, each hour sending the communication strands dancing with the grim news of yet more victims, of peer houses sealed, of the esteemed names of Great Nest who have gone mad and been put down, or who have taken their own lives by poison because to surrender that hard-earned gift of intelligence is worse still. Portia and Bianca are in shock, as if the plague has come early to cripple their minds. They were so close.

It is Bianca who returns to the work first. Her steps stutter and shudder with uncontrollable utterance. She is closer to death, therefore she has less to lose. She pores over Viola’s notes while Portia regains her mental fortitude, and then one morning Bianca is gone.

She returns late that night, and has a brief, trembling stand-off with the guardians of the peer house before Portia convinces them to let her back in.

How is it out there? Portia herself does not venture forth any more.

Madness, is Bianca’s brief reply. I saw Viola. She will not last much longer, bbbbbut she was able to tell me. I must show you, while I sssssstill can. The disease is jumping from leg to leg, sending her speech into sudden, involuntary repeats. She is never still, prowling about the peer house while she fights to form the words, as though trying to escape the thing that is killing her. She claws her way up the taut silk of the walls, and somewhere within her body lies that keening desire to climb, to climb and then to die.

Tell me, Portia insists, following her meandering trail. She sees Fabian following at a respectful distance, and signals him closer because another perspective on whatever Bianca will say can only be useful.

What comes out is pared down to the minimal, the essential, and Portia thinks Bianca has been pondering it on her return journey through the city, knowing that her ability to describe is constantly being eroded by a pestilential tide.

There is a deeper book, she hammers out, stamping each word on to the yielding floor in a shout of footwork. Viola identifies it. There is a second book in a second code, short and yet full of information, and different, so different. I asked Viola what it was. She says it is the Messenger within us. She says the Messenger is always to be found when new Understandings are laid down. She says it dwells with us in the egg, and grows with us, our invisible guardian, each one of us, she says, she says. Bianca turns on the spot, her wide, round eyes staring at everything around her, palps trembling in a frenzy of broken ideas. Where is Viola’s treatise?

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.

Portia spends a long time, after Bianca has staggered away, in reading and re-reading and doing what her kind have always done best: making a plan.

The next day she sends word to Viola’s peer house: she needs the use of their specialized colonies. At the same time she is begging and borrowing the expertise of another half-dozen scientists still willing and able to assist her. She sends Fabian with instructions to her own colonies as well, those that can perform a range of functions, including doing their level best to duplicate any chemicals that they are given a sample of.

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. Precious days later, their males stagger across to Portia’s peer house with vats of the stuff – or at least some do. Others are killed on the streets, or simply flee. Great Nest’s survival stands on a knife edge.

Portia spends her time in the temple, hearing the voice of the Messenger above, and trying to listen to the Messenger that is within herself. Was it just a conceit of Viola’s to use that term? No, she had her reasons. She grasped that whatever that alien, artificial tangle of language is doing, it has a divine function: drawing them out of the bestial and into the sublime. It is the hand that places Understandings within the mind and tissue of life, so that each generation may become greater than the last. So that we may know you, Portia reflects, as she watches that far away light arc across the sky. It seems self-evident now that Bianca has been right all this time. Of course the Messenger is waiting for their reply. This was heresy such a short time ago, but Portia has since looked within herself. Why should we be made thus, to improve and improve, unless it is to aspire?

To Portia, as always with her species, her conclusions are a matter of extrapolated logic based on her best comprehension of the principles the universe has revealed to her.

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.

By this time, over half of Portia’s peer house are well into the second stage. Bianca and several others have entered the third, and are confined, each to a separate cell, where they will starve. What else is to be done with them?

Portia knows what else.

Fabian offers to go in her place, but she knows that the late-stage infected will kill a little male like him effortlessly. She rounds up a handful of desperate, determined females, and she takes up her artificial fang with which she will inject her serum at the point where the patient’s legs meet the body, close to the brain.

Bianca fights against them. She bites one of Portia’s orderlies and injects two full fangs of venom, paralysing her victim instantly. She kicks and staggers and rears up, challenging them all. They rope her and bind her un-gently, turning her on to her back even as her mouthparts flex furiously at them. All language is gone from her, and Portia acknowledges that she does not know if this stage of the plague can even be reversed.

Still, Bianca will be the proof or disproof of that. Portia drives her syringe in.

4.7 NOT PRINCE HAMLET

The influx of new material from the abandoned station had slowed dramatically, every database and store having been raided and transferred over to the Gilgamesh. Holsten’s cataloguing duties were mostly done, and now he was merely an on-call translator for when the engineers needed help in getting something working.

Most of his time he spent on Vrie Guyen’s private project, and if he didn’t, Guyen would soon be round wanting to know why.

The ark ship was crawling with unaccustomed life, given that several hundred of its cargo had found themselves prodded back into a waking state light years away from their last memories, given hasty, unsatisfactory explanations of where they were and what needed doing, and then set to work. The ship was noisy, and Holsten found himself constantly baffled by the din. Not only was there the shudder and bang of the actual works, but there was the unceasing murmur of people doing things like living and talking and, not to put too fine a point on it, having a good time in a variety of ways. It seemed that everywhere Holsten went he saw impromptu couples – could they be anything but impromptu, given their circumstances? – clinched in some manner of embrace.

They made him feel very old, sometimes. They were all so young, just like all the Gil’s cargo, save for a few tired old specialists like himself.

They were refitting the ark ship – and if I feel like this, how old does the Gilgamesh feel, eh? – with all manner of toys ripped out of the station. Not least was a new fusion reactor, which Vitas reckoned would prove more than twice as efficient as the far more recently built original, and be able to sustain economic acceleration for far longer with the fuel available. Other technology was merely being extrapolated, the Gil’s systems being fine-tuned after the ancient model.

In Holsten’s mind ran that same litany: Coat-tails, coat-tails. They were still clutching at the receding train of the Old Empire, still twisting themselves into knots to stay securely in its shadow. Even as his compatriots celebrated their newfound bounty, all he saw was a people condemning their descendants to evermore be less than they might have been.

Then the message came from Lain: she wanted him over on the satellite. ‘Some sort of dangerous translation or something’, to be precise.

Between Guyen’s constant pressure and the aggressively exclusive youth of the rest of the human race, Holsten was feeling quite sorry for himself by that time. He was not particularly looking forward to being made fun of, which was apparently what Engineering thought he was there for. He seriously considered ignoring Lain if she wasn’t even prepared to ask him properly. In the end it was Guyen that decided him, because a trip to the station would give Holsten some blessed relief from the commander’s vulture-like presence.

He signalled to her that he was coming, and found a shuttle and pilot were ready for him in the bay. On the journey over, he turned the external cameras towards the planet and stared moodily at the fungal grey orb, imagining it reaching upwards, vast building-sized towers of fruiting bodies bloating into the upper atmosphere to seize the tiny intruders that had dared to dispute its complete mastery of the world.

A pair of engineers – from Lain’s original Key Crew, he reckoned – were waiting for him at the station end, assuring him that he wouldn’t need to suit up.

‘All the parts we’re still bothered about are stable,’ they explained. When Holsten asked them what the problem actually was, they just shrugged, blithely unconcerned.

‘Chief’ll tell you herself,’ was all he got from them.

And finally he was almost unceremoniously shoved into a chamber in the second rotating ring segment, where Lain was waiting.

She was sitting at a table, apparently about to start on a meal, and for a moment he hovered in the hatchway, assuming that his timing was off as usual, before noticing that there were utensils for two.

She raised her eyebrows challengingly. ‘Come on in, old man. Got some tens-of-thousands-of-years-old food here. Come and do history to it.’

That actually got him into the room, staring at the unfamiliar food: thick soups or sauces, and greyish chunks that looked uncomfortably as if they might have been hacked from the planet below them. ‘You’re joking.’

‘Nope, food of the ancients, Holsten. Food of the gods.’

‘But that’s… surely it can’t still be edible.’ He sat himself across from her, staring down in fascination.

‘We’ve been living on it for almost a month now, over here,’ she told him. ‘Better than the pap the Gil churns out.’

A loaded pause came and went, and Holsten looked up sharply as she gave a bitter little laugh.

‘My starter gambit worked too well. You’re not supposed to actually be that interested in the food, old man.’

He blinked at her, studying her face, seeing in it the extra hours she had put in, both here on the station, and in sporadic waking days during the journey from Kern’s World, while making sure the ship didn’t consume more of its precious cargo by malfunction and error. We’re a good match now, Holsten realized. Look at the two of us.

‘So this is…’ He made a gesture at the assortment of bowls on the table and ended up getting some sort of orange goo on his finger.

‘What?’ Lain demanded. ‘It’s nice here, isn’t it? All the conveniences: light, heat, air and rotational gravity. This is the lap of luxury, believe me. Hold on, wait a moment.’ She fiddled with something at the table edge, and the wall to Holsten’s left began to fall away. For a heart-stopping moment he had no idea what was happening, save that the dissolution of the entire station appeared to be imminent. But there was a somewhat clouded transparency left behind after the outer shutters groaned open and, beyond it, the vastness of the rest of creation. And one more thing.

Holsten was staring out at the Gilgamesh. He had not seen it from the outside before, not properly. Even when being returned to it after the mutiny, he had passed from shuttle interior to ark ship interior without even thinking about the great outdoors. After all, in space the great outdoors existed mostly to kill you.

‘Look, you can see where we’re putting the new stuff in. All looks a bit tatty, doesn’t it? All those micro-impacts on the way, all that vacuum erosion. The old boy’s certainly not what he was,’ Lain remarked softly.

Holsten said nothing.

‘I thought it would be…’ Lain started. She tried a smile, then began another one. He realized that she was unsure of him, nervous even.

He navigated his way across the table to touch her hand, because frankly neither of them was good with those sort of words, nor were they young enough to have the patience to fumble through them.

‘I can’t believe how fragile he looks.’ The future, or lack of it, decided by the fate of that metal egg – tatty, patched and, from this vantage point, how small the Gilgamesh looked.

They ate thoughtfully, Lain progressing from brief moments where she talked far too fast, trying to force on a conversation for the patent reason that she felt they should be having one, then subsiding into longer stretches of companionable quiet.

At last, Holsten grinned at her, out of one of those periodic silences, feeling the youth of the expression stretch his face. ‘This is good.’

‘I hope it is. We’re shipping tons of the stuff over to the Gil.’

‘I don’t mean the food. Not just that. Thank you.’

After they had eaten, and with the rest of Lain’s crew tactfully out of sight and out of mind, they retired to another room she had carefully prepared. It had been a long time since their previous liaison on the Gilgamesh. It had been centuries, of course – long, cold spacefaring centuries. But it seemed a long time, also. They were part of a species that had become unmoored from time, only their personal clocks left with any meaning for them while the rest of the universe turned to its own rhythms and cared nothing for whether they lived or died.

There had been those back on Earth who claimed the universe cared, and that the survival of humanity was important, destined, meant. They had mostly stayed behind, holding to their corroding faith that some great power would weigh in on their behalf if only things became so very bad. Perhaps it had: those on the ark ship could never know for sure. Holsten had his own beliefs, though, and they did not encompass salvation by any means other than the hand of mankind itself.

‘What’s he after?’ Lain asked him later, as they lay side by side beneath a coverlet that had perhaps been some ancient terraformer’s counterpane thousands of years before.

‘I don’t know.’

‘I don’t know either.’ She frowned. ‘That worries me, Holsten. He’s even got his own engineers doing all the work, you know that? He took his pick from the cargo, woke up a bunch of second-stringers and made them his own personal tech crew. Now they’re installing all that stuff you’re helping him with, fitting the Gil with it. And I don’t know what it does. I don’t like having things on my ship that do things I don’t know about.’

‘Are you asking me to betray the commander’s trust?’ Holsten was joking as he said it, but then he was suddenly stung by the thought, ‘Is that what this is about?’

Lain stared at him. ‘Do you think that?’

‘I don’t know what to think.’

‘What this is about, old man, is me wanting to scratch an itch without messing up the way my crew works and…’ He could hear her trying to harden the edge in her voice, and hear it crack a little, even as she did so. ‘And you know what? I’ve been on my own a lot over the last… what? Two hundred fucking years, is what. I’ve been on my own, walking around the Gil and keeping him together. Or with some of my crew, sometimes, to fix stuff. Or sometimes Guyen was there, like that’s better than being on your own. And there was all that mad stuff… the mutiny, the planet… and I feel like I forget how to talk to people, sometimes, when it’s not – not the job. But you…’

Holsten raised an eyebrow.

‘You’re fucking awful at talking to people too,’ she finished viciously. ‘So maybe when you’re around it doesn’t feel so bad.’

‘Thank you very much.’

‘You’re welcome.’

‘Guyen’s thing, it’s for uploading people’s brains into a computer.’ It felt oddly good for him to no longer be the sole custodian of that information. Otherwise, only Guyen knew, as far as Holsten was aware. Even his tame engineers were just working to rote, each on their own piece.

Lain considered that. ‘I’m not sure if that’s a great thing.’

‘It could be very useful.’ Holsten’s tone of voice did not even convince himself.

Lain merely made a sound – not a word, not anything really – just to show him she’d heard him. It left Holsten turning over in his mind what little he had learned about the device from the technical manuals Guyen had set him to work on. They had all been written for people who already knew what the device did, of course. There was no handy moment when the authors had stopped and gone back to explain the basics for their unthinkably distant monkey descendants.

Holsten was becoming sure that he now knew what the upload facility was, though. More, he thought that he might have seen the result of one, and what happened when someone was mad enough to make themselves its subject.

For out there, in the distant dark around another world, in her silent metal coffin, was Doctor Avrana Kern.

4.8 AGE OF PROGRESS

Ever afterwards, Bianca has suffered from momentary fits, stumblings in speech and gait, sudden epilepsies when she is cut adrift from her surroundings for varying periods of time, her legs drumming and spasming as if trying urgently to impart a message in some idiolectic code.

But she has survived the plague and, when a fit is not upon her, retained her mind. For Viola, whose biochemical genius furnished the means, the cure came too late. Many others, great minds, great warriors, leading females of peer houses, starving males in the gutter, all have been struck down. Great Nest has been saved, but thousands of its inhabitants were not so lucky. Other cities were similarly affected, even with production of the cure taking over the work of every suitable ant colony, and the theoretical basis being sung down the lines that link the spider communities together. The disaster has been averted, but narrowly. It is now a new world, and Portia’s people recognize the fragility of their place in it. A great many things are poised on the point of change.

It is not Portia herself who first grasps the wider import of her cure. It is hard to say which scientist was first to the mark: it is one of those ideas that seems simultaneously to be everywhere, exciting every enquiring mind. Portia’s treatment has allowed living adult spiders to benefit from a foreign Understanding. Yes, what was transferred was an immunity, but surely the process would work with other Understandings, if they can only be separated out and their page noted in Viola’s great book of the body. No longer will the spread of knowledge be held down by the slow march of generations or by laborious teaching.

The need for this technology is great. The depredations of the plague have made Understandings hard to find: where once a given idea might be held within scores of minds, now there are just a handful at best. Knowledge has become more precious than ever.

It is only a few years after the plague that the first idea is transferred between adults. A somewhat garbled Understanding of astronomy is imparted to a male test subject (as are all such, given some failures in earlier experiments). From there on, any spider may learn anything. Every scientist of Portia’s generation and beyond will stand on the shoulders of the giants that she chooses to reside within her. What one knows, any can know, for a price. An economy of modular, tradable knowledge will swiftly develop.

But that is not all.

After she is recovered, Portia presents Bianca to the Temple. She explains about her fellow’s contribution to the cure. Bianca is permitted to address the assembled priestesses.

There has been a shift of orthodoxy in the wake of the plague. Everyone is having to stretch their minds to fill the gaping void left by all those who did not survive. Old ideas are being revisited, old prohibitions reconsidered. There is a great feeling of destiny, but it is a self-made destiny. They have passed the test. They are their own saviours. 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.

Bianca’s battery, in and of itself, does not make a radio transmitter. Whilst the experiments with the transmission of Understandings between spiders progress, so does the investigation into the transmission of vibrations across the invisible web that is strung from their world to the distant satellite and beyond.

Years later, an ageing Bianca and Portia are amongst a crowd of the intimates of the temple, now ready to speak to the unknown, to cast their electromagnetic voice into the ether. The replies to the Messenger’s mathematical problems – that every spider knows and understands – are ready for transmission. 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.

4.9 EX MACHINA

The signal from the green planet resonated through the Brin 2’s Sentry Pod like an earthquake. The ancient systems had been waiting for just this moment – it seemed forever. Protocols laid down in the days of the Old Empire had gathered dust through the ages, through the entire lifespan of the new species that was even now announcing its presence. They had grown corrupted. They had lost their relevance, been overwritten, been infiltrated by the diseased spread of the uploaded Kern persona that the Sentry Pod had been incubating like a culture all these years.

The systems received the signal, checked over the sums and found them within tolerance, recognized that a critical threshold had been passed with respect to the planet below. Its purpose, rusty with aeons-long disuse, was abruptly relevant again.

For a recursive, untimed moment, the systems of the Sentry Pod – the sea of calculation that boiled behind the human mask of Eliza – were unable to make a decision. Too much had been lost, misfiled, edited out of existence within its mind.

It attacked the discontinuities within its own systems. Whilst it was not truly a self-aware artificial intelligence, it nevertheless knew itself. It restored itself, worked around insoluble problems, reached the right conclusion by estimate and circuitous logic.

It did its best to awaken Avrana Kern.

The distinction between living woman, uploaded personality construct and pod systems was not finely drawn. They bled into one another, so that the frozen sleep of the one leaked nightmarish dreams into the cold logic of the others. A lot of time had passed. Not all of Avrana Kern remained viable. Still, the pod did its best.

Doctor Kern awoke, or she dreamt of waking, and in her dream Eliza hovered at her bedside like an angel and provided a miraculous annunciation.

This day is a new star seen in the heavens. This day is born a saviour of life on Earth.

Avrana fought with the trailing weeds of her horrors, struggling to resurface enough to understand what was really being told to her. She had not been truly conscious for some time – had she ever been? She had confused recollections of some dark presence, intruders attacking her charge, the planet below that had become her purpose, the sum total of her legacy. A traveller had come to steal the secret of her project – to rob her of the immortality represented by her new life, by her progeny, by her monkey-children. Had it? Or had she dreamed it? She could not separate the fact from the long cold years of sleep.

‘I was supposed to be dead,’ she told the watchful pod. ‘I was supposed to be locked away, oblivious. I was never supposed to dream.’

‘Doctor, the passage of time appears to have led to a homogenization of information systems within the Sentry Pod. I apologize for this, but we are operating beyond our intended parameters.’

The Sentry Pod was designed to lie dormant for centuries. Avrana remembered that much. How long would it take the virus to spark intellect into generations of monkeys? Did that mean that her experiment was a failure?

No, they had signalled at last. They had reached out and touched the ineffable. And time was suddenly no longer the currency it once had been. She remembered now why she was in the Sentry Pod at all, performing this function that had been meant for someone far more disposable. Time didn’t matter. Only the monkeys mattered, because the future was theirs now.

Yet those troubling half-dreams recurred to her. In her dream there had come a primitive boat of travellers claiming to be her kin, but she had looked at them and seen them for what they truly were. She had scanned through their histories and their understandings. They were the mould that had grown on the corpse of her own people. They were hopelessly corrupted with the same sickness that had killed Kern’s own civilization. Better to start anew with monkeys.

‘What do you want of me?’ she demanded of the entity/entities that surrounded her. She looked into their faces and saw an infinite progression of stages between her and the cold logic of the pod systems, and nowhere could she say where she herself ended and where the machine began.

‘Phase two of the uplift project is now ready,’ Eliza explained. ‘Your authority is required to commence.’

‘What if I’d died?’ Avrana choked out. ‘What if I’d rotted? What if you couldn’t wake me?’

‘Then your uploaded persona would inherit your responsibilities and authority,’ Eliza replied, and then, as if remembering that it was supposed to show a human face, ‘but I am glad that has not occurred.’

‘You don’t know what “glad” means,’ but, even as she said this, Kern was not sure that it was true. There was enough of her smeared up that continuum towards the life electronic that perhaps Eliza knew more of human emotion than Kern herself was now left with.

‘Proceed with the next phase. Of course, proceed with the next phase,’ she snapped into the silence that followed. ‘What else are we here for? What else is there?’ In a very real sense, indeed, what else is there?

She remembered when the false humans, that disease that had outlived her people, had approached the planet. Had they? Had that actually happened? She had spoken to them. The her that had interacted with them must have recognized enough humanity in them to bargain, to spare them, to allow them to rescue their own. Each time she was awoken, it seemed some different assortment of thoughts took the helm of her mind. She had been in a giving vein, then. She had recognized them to be human enough to show mercy to.

She had been sentimental that day. Thinking back on it, she regained those memories of how it had felt. And they had been as good as their word, she assumed, and they had gone. There was no sign of them, or of any transmissions, within the solar system.

She had an uncomfortable feeling that it was not that simple. She had a feeling that they would be back. And now she had so much more to lose. What devastation would those false humans wreak on her nascent monkey civilization?

She would have to harden her heart.

Phase two of the uplift program was a contact exercise. Once the monkeys had developed their own singular culture to the extent that they could send radio transmissions, they were ready for contact with the wider universe. And now I am the wider universe. The Sentry Pod would begin developing a means of communication, starting with the simplest binary notation and using each stage to bootstrap up to a more complex language, just as if a computer was being programmed from scratch. It would take time, depending on the willingness and ability of the monkeys to learn, generation to generation.

‘But first send them a message,’ Avrana decided. For all that the inhabitants of the planet could not possible understand her, right now, she wanted to set the tone. She wanted them to understand what they were in for when she and they could finally communicate.

‘Awaiting your message,’ Eliza prompted.

‘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.