Adrian Tchaikovsky - Children of Time

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To Portia

1.1 JUST A BARREL OF MONKEYS

There were no windows in the Brin 2 facility rotation meant that outside was always down, underfoot, out of mind. The wall screens told a pleasant fiction, a composite view of the world below that ignored their constant spin, showing the planet as hanging stationary-still off in space: the green marble to match the blue marble of home, twenty light years away. Earth had been green, in her day, though her colours had faded since. Perhaps never as green as this beautifully crafted world though, where even the oceans glittered emerald with the phytoplankton maintaining the oxygen balance within its atmosphere. How delicate and many-sided was the task of building a living monument that would remain stable for geological ages to come.

It had no officially confirmed name beyond its astronomical designation, although there was a strong vote for Simiana amongst some of the less imaginative crewmembers. Doctor Avrana Kern now looked out upon it and thought only of Kerns World. Her project, her dream, her planet. The first of many, she decided.

This is the future. This is where mankind takes its next great step. This is where we become gods.

This is the future, she said aloud. Her voice would sound in every crewmembers auditory centre, all nineteen of them, though fifteen were right here in the control hub with her. Not the true hub, of course the gravity-denuded axle about which they revolved: that was for power and processing, and their payload.

This is where mankind takes its next great step. Her speech had taken more of her time than any technical details over the last two days. She almost went on with the line about them becoming gods, but that was for her only. Far too controversial, given the Non Ultra Natura clowns back home. Enough of a stink had been raised over projects like hers already. Oh, the differences between the current Earth factions went far deeper: social, economic, or simply us and them, but Kern had got the Brin launched all those years ago against mounting opposition. By now the whole idea had become a kind of scapegoat for the divisions of the human race. Bickering primates, the lot of them. Progress is what matters. Fulfilling the potential of humanity, and of all other life. She had always been one of the fiercest opponents of the growing conservative backlash most keenly exemplified by the Non Ultra Natura terrorists. If they had their way, wed all end up back in the caves. Back in the trees. The whole point of civilization is that we exceed the limits of nature, you tedious little primitives.

We stand on others shoulders, of course. The proper line, that of accepted scientific humility, was, on the shoulders of giants, but she had not got where she was by bowing the knee to past generations. Midgets, lots and lots of midgets, she thought, and then she could barely keep back the appalling giggle on the shoulders of monkeys.

At a thought from her, one wallscreen and their Minds Eye HUDs displayed the schematics of Brin 2 for them all. She wanted to direct their attention and lead them along with her towards the proper appreciation of her sorry, their triumph. There: the needle of the central core encircled by the ring of life and science that was their torus-shaped world. At one end of the core was the unlovely bulge of the Sentry Pod, soon to be cast adrift to become the universes loneliest and longest research post. The opposite end of the needle sported the Barrel and the Flask. Contents: monkeys and the future, respectively.

Particularly I have to thank the engineering teams under Doctors Fallarn and Medi for their tireless work in reformatting and she almost now said Kerns World without meaning to our subject planet to provide a safe and nurturing environment for our great project. Fallarn and Medi were well on their way back to Earth, of course, their fifteen-year work completed, their thirty-year return journey begun. It was all stage-setting, though, to make way for Kern and her dream. We are I am what all this work is for.

A journey of twenty light years home. Whilst thirty years drag by on Earth, only twenty will pass for Fallarn and Medi in their cold coffins. For them, their voyage is nearly as fast as light. What wonders we can accomplish!

From her viewpoint, engines to accelerate her to most of the speed of light were no more than pedestrian tools to move her about a universe that Earths biosphere was about to inherit. Because humanity may be fragile in ways we cannot dream, so we cast our net wide and then wider...

Human history was balanced on a knife edge. Millennia of ignorance, prejudice, superstition and desperate striving had brought them at last to this: that humankind would beget new sentient life in its own image. Humanity would no longer be alone. Even in the unthinkably far future, when Earth itself had fallen in fire and dust, there would be a legacy spreading across the stars an infinite and expanding variety of Earth-born life diverse enough to survive any reversal of fortune until the death of the whole universe, and perhaps even beyond that. Even if we die, we will live on in our children.

Let the NUNs preach their dismal all-eggs-in-one-basket creed of human purity and supremacy, she thought. We will out-evolve them. We will leave them behind. This will be the first of a thousand worlds that we will give life to.

For we are gods, and we are lonely, so we shall create...

Back home, things were tough, or so the twenty-year-old images indicated. Avrana had skimmed dispassionately over the riots, the furious debates, the demonstrations and violence, thinking only, How did we ever get so far with so many fools in the gene pool? The Non Ultra Natura lobby were only the most extreme of a whole coalition of human political factions the conservative, the philosophical, even the diehard religious who looked at progress and said that enough was enough. Who fought tooth and nail against further engineering of the human genome, against the removal of limits on AI, and against programs like Avranas own.

And yet theyre losing.

The terraforming would still be going on elsewhere. Kerns World was just one of many planets receiving the attentions of people like Fallarn and Medi, transformed from inhospitable chemical rocks Earth-like only in approximate size and distance from the sun into balanced ecosystems that Kern could have walked on without a suit in only minor discomfort. After the monkeys had been delivered and the Sentry Pod detached to monitor them, those other gems were where her attention would next be drawn.