Children of Ruin: Children of Time [Book 2]
II из Children of Time
Adrian Tchaikovsky
Pan Books (июл 2019)
Теги: sf
ADRIAN TCHAIKOVSKY
CHILDREN
OF RUIN
Contents
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
PAST 1: JUST ANOTHER GENESIS
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
PRESENT 1: ROAD TO DAMASCUS
1.
2.
3.
PAST 2: LAND OF MILK AND HONEY
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
PRESENT 2: INSIDE THE WHALE
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
PAST 3: FOR WE ARE MANY
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
PRESENT 3: ROLLING BACK THE STONE
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
PAST 4: PILLARS OF SALT
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
PRESENT 4: THE FACE OF THE WATERS
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
17.
18.
19.
20.
FUTURE: WHERE TWO OR THREE SHALL GATHER
EPILOGUE
To Paul
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I have tapped quite a few knowledgeable heads to put this one together, and in particular I want to thank my team of Special Scientific Advisors, to wit: Maeghin Ronin, Peter Coffey, Philip Hodder, Nathan Young, Richard G. Clegg, Brian White, Katherine Inskip, Andrew Blain, Stewart Hotston, Winchell Chung and especially Michael Czajkowski for additional help with planetary mechanics and the splendidly inspirational Nick Bradbeer, spaceship design guru extraordinaire. I’d also like to thank Peter Godfrey-Smith for his book Other Minds which proved to be an invaluable research aid.
Above and beyond this elite team of boffins, my thanks as ever go out to Simon Kavanagh, agent of agents, and to Bella Pagan and everyone else at Pan Macmillan who acted on the development of this book in the same general way the nanovirus sped along the evolution of the various critters I write about. I could also not have produced this book (or just about anything) without the constant support of my long-suffering wife, Doctor Anne-Marie Czajkowski.
‘If you can look into the seeds of time,
And say which grain will grow and which will not . . .’
William Shakespeare, Macbeth
PAST 1
JUST ANOTHER GENESIS
1.
So many stories start with a waking. Disra Senkovi had been asleep for decades. Something like a lifetime passed back home while he slumbered; a fraction of a lifetime passed around his oblivious form, the timespan squeezed down the relativity gradient by his proximity to the speed of light. For him, though, there was no time, nothing but the oblivion of the cold-sleep chamber. They knew how to build them back in those days.
Senkovi chose the manner of his waking. Some of his colleagues – those he thought of as less imaginative – would let themselves be fed crucial mission information, news from home, metrics from the ship, so they could spring from cold sleep with a mind full of data, ready to leap to their stations and steal a march on the day. Ludicrous, given the work they had ahead of them would take decades. Senkovi had always been unimpressed by most of his colleagues.
Instead, paradoxically, he woke himself with a dream.
He hung in the water of a warm, clean Coral Sea that hadn’t existed in that virgin state since long before his birth. The sun filtered down through the waters like an embarrassment of sapphires. Below him, his best-guess reconstruction of the vanished Great Barrier Reef extended in multicoloured profusion, reds, purples and greens as far as the eye could see, like an alien city. Life whirled about the coral metropolis in a riot of motion, swimming, jetting, drifting, crawling. He turned gently, casting a benign and godlike gaze over his creation, half-sleeping, half-knowing, so that he felt the joy of having brought this into being yet not the pain of knowing the original had long predeceased him.
At last, one of his special friends signalled its presence, squirming its malleable body from a crevice within the rocks and undulating cautiously towards him. Eyes like and unlike his own regarded him with the sort of ersatz wisdom nature otherwise gave only to owls. It – determining the gender of an octopus was not a task easily performed at this remove – reached an arm towards him, Adam to his divinity, and he let his hand drift outwards slowly to accept that touch.
It was a good dream. He’d programmed it himself, creating a complex sequence of mental stimulation that drew on his specific memories and jumbled them into something semi-novel. It was still dream like, unreal, but that was what he was aiming for, so, fine. He also had to hack the ship computers with considerable ingenuity to make it happen, given that encounters with marine fauna were not on the à-la-carte menu when choosing a wake-up sequence. The hard part had not been inserting the neurological sequence into the ship’s database but erasing all sign of his meddling. By then he’d been in and out of the mission systems quite a lot without anyone noticing, though. Senkovi had come to the conclusion that the Terraform Initiative back home was very, very lax in its digital security, and then shrugged idly and carried on with his own personal tinkering. What, after all, was the worst that could happen?
Amongst his travels within the virtual architecture of the mission protocols, Disra Senkovi had also come face to face with Disra Senkovi, or at least the crew profile and assessment record of that name. While extreme technical expertise was a given with all crew, he was interested to see the results of his personality assessments. There were two main poles, for a multi-decade mission like this, and they pulled in opposite directions. One related to how well a crewmember could cope working in isolation for long periods of time, and how they might tolerate being severed from the great mass of humanity and the course of human history. He aced that one. The other related to working in close confinement alongside other human beings you simply could not escape from, and he was dismayed to see how close he had come to rejection on that ground alone. Senkovi felt himself an affable, outgoing man. From the age of nine he had been working on constructing pseudointelligences to have conversations with, and hadn’t he – more than anyone else in the crew – surrounded himself with pets back home? What better indication of a warm and loving human nature was there? He’d owned nineteen aquariums, three large enough to dive in. Many of the aquatic denizens were like close personal friends to him. How could anyone think him antisocial, let alone make all those unfair and hurtful comments?
He was being tongue-in-cheek, of course. They meant human friends, and that had never been his strong suit. Still, he had a few, and he worked well in a task-focused environment where everyone was fixed on a common goal. And when it came to R&R, well, if he wasn’t the life and soul of the party, at least he didn’t step on anybody else’s toes. And there was, in his humble opinion, not a human being alive who enjoyed jokes more than he did; it was just that nobody else found his funny.