Children of Time (2015), Winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award, a Sci-Fi Novel by Adrian Tchaikovsky: summary

“True science demands a certain seclusion, if only so that its more unexpected results can be safety contained.” (p. 181)

The highly intriguing science fiction will bring readers to imaginative horizon of space technology. The 600-page book published by Pan Macmillan in London 2015. Adrian Tchaikovsky is a British author, the book is winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award in 2016. The beautiful written made it richly deserve to keep the title.

Earth has been in ruins. Human race survivors had made a long journey to seek the new planet, the Key Crew (Earth’s scientist), asked permitted for living from Kern’s World, the only hope for the sick old ark ship to harbor, but the inventor of the planet, Avrana Kern, has already rejected them and offered a war. Doctor Avrana Kern was a scientist who built green planet, she gave no chance to human race.

Not like her experimental monkeys, her another creation, the spider, has developed to be artificial intelligence unit which could built a technology society and space ship. Portia, the spider’s leader, and her people worshiped Kern as their God, named as the Messenger. Giving the ritual in their temple, and sometimes talked to God (Kern) through the transmission on a crystal.

Great Nest is metropolis for the spiders, but they also had the rivalry. It was ants with their technology. On the space, human had been struggling in their old ship named the Gilgamesh that loaded numerous scientists and five hundred thousand humans in their pod. Guyen was firstly awakened and turn to be mad and made himself as a god to another human, the commander was in ambitious immortality project and set a war to Kern’s world. People wanted to occupy the green planet. The Classicist Hoslten Mason, the oldest man in universe, and the other human scientists, the Key Crew, tried to stop Guyen.

This book is not an easy for novice reader. I found the book to be an exciting fiction that presents some intriguing ideas. I especially enjoyed the AI (Artificial Intelligence) part. The author blends space technology with entomology, human's greediness, and faction’s war to present a fantasy space story that is highly entertaining one.

Children of Time (2015), Winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award, a Sci-Fi Novel by Adrian Tchaikovsky: summary

Earth had been green, in her day, though her colors had faded since. Perhaps never as green as the beautifully crafted world though, where even the oceans glittered emerald with the phytoplankton maintaining the oxygen balance within the atmosphere. All nineteen of them, though the fifteen were in the control room with the chief. Doctor Avrana Kern looked out upon her project, her dream, her planet. The Kern’s World is the future where mankind takes its next great step. His engineering teams under Doctors Fallarn and Medi were well on their way.

A journey took twenty light years home. Whilst thirty years drag by on Earth, only twenty will pass for Fallarn and Medi in their cold coffins. 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. They were lonely and now gods. Earth itself had fallen in fire and dust, there would be a legacy spreading across the stars – expanding variety of Earth-born life diverse enough to survive any reversal of fortune until the death of whole universe.

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. Meanwhile the Brin 2’s hub, the barrel system, where. The Flask was the delivery system for virus that would accelerate monkey along their way- they would stride, in a mere century or two, across physical and mental distances that had taken humanity millions of long and hostiles. The virus was clearly an impressive piece of work. Infected individuals would produce offspring mutated in number of useful ways: greater brain and complexity, greater body size to accommodate it, more flexible behavior path, swifter learning. The virus even would recognize the presence of infection in other individuals of the same species, so as to promote selective breeding, the best of the best giving birth even better. She wanted to make new life, in her image as much humanity’s. She wanted to know what might envolve, what society, what understandings, when her monkeys were left to their own simian devices.

Portia is eight millimetres long but she a tiger within her tiny world, fierce and cunning. Like all spiders, she has a body of two parts. Science named her Portia Labiata, just another unassuming a species of jumping spider. Portia specializes in eating spider-eating spiders, most of whom are larger and stronger than she. Portia had no thoughts. Her sixty thousand neurons barely from a brain, contrasted with a human’s one hundred billion. Portia’s ancestor have making the calculation for millennia, each generation fractionally more accomplished because.

The nanovirus itself is subject to variations in its transcriptions. It was designed that what way in order to creatively accomplish its hardwired him: to bring the host to a detected level of sophistication set by its creators and, once its victory conditions are met, to cease further assistance. The virus was intended for primate host, and so the end state that it has been programmed to seek is something that Portia can never become.  Long ago in Portia’s evolutionary history, her species’s social development was greatly accelerated by a series mutations in the reigning infection.

A larger community like Great Nest has a great many Understanding to draw upon, different lineages passing on their mysteries and trading with others. They were the spider-killers from the first, and their venom will immobilize an enemy of their own species.

The Human

They got the signals danced across those millions of kilometres of void, it’s calling himself the Second Brin Sentry Habitat. The Gilgamesh was the Old Empire technology, The 2 Sentry warned them to leave or they will destroy Gilgamesh. As the Gilgamesh was still fighting to slow down, the drones outstripped rapidly, their own thrust hurrying them towards the planet and the sentinel at an acceleration that a manned craft could not have managed without pulping its occupants.

They got the drones into atmosphere, the drone’s image were grainy and distorted, a high altitude scan of a world so green that one of the scientists asked if the pictured had been recolored. The Earth that they remembered had not looked like that. Any such verdant explosion had been locked away in the years before the ice, and it never returned after the toxic thaw. They came from a planet immeasurably poorer than this one.

Kern’s world ordered the Gilgamesh to a quarantine planet. Gilgamesh is the ark ship that carried five hundred thousand humans in suspension. They were the survival of the human species.

Eliza Kerns, a composite expert system of the Second Brin Sentry Habitat, gave no respond to Gilgamesh’s message, the engineering team began their anxious watch over ship’s system, as the ancient ark ship began to creak and strain at the unnatural imposition of an external source of mass. But finally, the same female tones sounded, Doctor Avrana Kern, chief scientist and administrator of the Second Brin Exaltation Project, was his translation.

Holsten, the classicist of the Gilgamesh asked her permission to establish a colony on Kern’s World.  The vessel is the ark ship Gilgamesh from Earth that was built after their time. A civil war between factions of the Empire. Both sides unleashed weapons the nature of which were effective in devastating higher civilization on Earth and completely destroying the colonies. Earth people had lapsed back into barbarism. When the power had failed, the electromagnetic viruses murdered the artificial minds, they had died. They wouldn’t be returning to Earth, people couldn’t counterbalance the increasing toxicity of the environment. They built the ark ships, in the end they had old star maps to guide them to Kern’s World.

To Kern, people Earth were only monkeys, but they were not even her monkeys. Her monkeys were pure, undergoing uplift in great experiment.

Portia, Great Nest

The creature is slightly smaller than Portia’s standards. He was Fabian. Frequently the entire root system has been unearthed as well, ensuring that nothing will regrow. The forest is under wide-scale attack, its fringes being gnawed away. Fabian can remember when there were more trees, he communicates. The clearing of land continues year to year, and Fabian’s inherited Understanding suggests that it is happening faster now than in his mother’s time.

They are small and squat bulbous, with fleshy leaves and trunks that are warty with protrusions. The exaggerated space between each copse is a firebreak-something the spiders are very familiar with. Their planet’s oxygen levels are higher than Earth’s –lightning-sparked fires are a constant threat. What they are seeing is no work of future. There is a plantation on a grand scale, and the laborers tending it are plainly visible.

There are certain species she shared the planet with, that her people recognize as something more than animals. The Spitters are a low-end example, weak eyes. The western oceans that Portia’s Great Nest looks over are home to a type of stomatopod with which her people have causes, ritualized relations. Their ancestor were fierce, inventive hunters, equipped with unparalleled eyesight and deadly natural weapons and used to living in colonies where negotiations over living space are common.

Portia understands the nature of ants. There are colonies near the Great Nest, and she has both personal and genetically encoded dealings with them to draw upon. It is the Great Nest’s collective experience that ant colonies are complicated neighbors. They must be dealt decisively. They can be destroyed- her inherited Understandings include chronicles of such conflicts- but war with even a small colony is costly and wasteful. Portia knows ants are not like her people, nor like the Spitters or the stomapods of the western shallows. There is no intelligence within colony, but there is such a hierarchy of interacting am co-dependent instinct that seems to Portia that some manner of entity is behind a colony’s actions and reactions.

With ants, the nanovirus has simultaneously failed and succeeded. The colonies are the perfect exponents of game theory: they will cooperate where that course is less costly and more beneficial than other strategies, such as all-out genocidal war. Portia and her people are going to have to continue their journey into the land of the ants. With Fabian taking the lead, the spiders ambush an ant logging party, trapping and killing them quickly and efficiently.

At such time, Portia knows, the Messenger itself would be in the skies overhead, going about her constant journey- whether at night and visible, or hidden by the brightness of the daytime sky. Here in Seven Tree there is no crystal, but internally consistent complexity, to spin and consume and spin again, is a calming ritual that settles Portia’s mind, and allows her to face whatever must soon come, with equanimity.

Her people have solved the mathematical riddles posed by the orbiting satellite- the Messenger, as they think of it- learning the proofs first by rote and then in true comprehensive, as a civic and religious duty. Here is something demonstrably from beyond, and it fascinates them; it tells them that there is more to the world than they can grasp; it guide their thinking in new ways. The beauty of the maths promises in a universe of wonders if they can but stretch out their minds that bot further: a jump they can almost, but not quite, make.

Seven Trees now encompasses more than the original seven, the ticket of trunks interlinked by hundreds of lines, each part of a plan, each assigned a specific purpose, whether structural, as a thoroughfare, or for communication. The vibratory languages of the spider transmits well down silk threads over some distance, and they had developed nodes of tensioned coils that amplify the signal so that amplify the signal so that speech can pass for kilometres between cities in calm weather.

In the high centre, shadowing much of the city, is the reservoir; a watertight net spread wide that catches rain and run off from a grand area around Seven Trees, the water channeling to it through troughs and pipes from a multitude of smaller rain-catchers. Around the Seven Trees the forest has been cut back by the semi-domesticated local ants. Previously this has been a fire-break, Soon it will be a killing ground. Out there is an army of hundreds of thousands advancing towards Seven Trees. There were webs to catch incautious ants.

Portia stamps out a call to arms and her sisters from Great Nest muster around her. The local defenders are less well armed, lacking both experience and innate understanding of ant-war. She and her fellows will lead the charge.  They are far larger than the attackers, both stronger and swifter. Their bite is venomous, but it is a venom best used against spiders, so they now concentrate on using their fangs at the intersections of the insect’s bodies, between head and thorax, between thorax and abdomen. Most of all, they are more intelligence than their enemies, better able to react and manoeuvre and evade.

The new ants are larger-though still smaller than herself. They are many castes, each to its own speciality. Their purpose is to monopolize the defender’s attention and sell their lives as dearly as possible, so as to allow more dangerous castes to close the distance. Most of the enemy are even now entering the tunnels of the local ant’s nest, spreading confounding chemicals that throw the defending insects into confusions, or even enlist them to the cause of the attackers.

For foreign species such as Portia, there is no purpose and no mercy. The defenders are taking loses now. The technology of Portia’s kind is built on silk and wood, potential energy stored in tensioned lines and primitive springs. Only for now, this army is closing on Great Nest, and after that there will only be the ocean. If Portia’s kind cannot defeat the mindless march of the ants, then nobody will be around to write the histories of future generations. 

   

The unnamed gunman and woman, Brenjit Nessel, the scientist of survival human, went to their duties without speaking to one another; she bent over the computer displays, he scowling at the prisoners. The classicist, Holsten Mason, became more and more oppressed by the silence, there was a gun pointing his way. Brenjit Nessel recognized Doctor Holsten Mason, the oldest man on the ark ship. He met his student in jail. While he lived in Earth he taught.

The Great Nest

The greatest metropolis of Portia’s kind, a home. The ants do not know where Great Nest is, of course- their spread across the world is methodical but mindless-but they will reach the coast soon. Great Nest is vast, home to several thousand spiders. The natural forest is still thick there, but great effort and artifice has gone into erecting artificial trees to provide more living room. Great pillars made from felled trunks, sheathed and strengthened with silk, spread out from the living copse at the city’s centre-and even out into the sea itself, allowing the webwork of the city to reach out across the waters. Space is at a premium. And over the last century, Great Nest has grown exponentially in all directions, including up.

Beyond the city proper, there lies a patchwork of farms: aphids for honeydew, mice for meat, and stands of the blister-trunked trees cultivated by the ants, another secret stolen from the enemy. The seas throng with fish ready for the netting, and offshore there is a sister-settlement on the sea bed; relations with the marine stomatopod culture are cordial and mutually profitable, in a sort of way. A generation ago there was friction as the spiders began to expand their city seawards. 

Using communal creches and lacking any maternal instincts, Portia’s people have no strict family units. The youngest spiderlings, still confined to the crèche, are provided with food by the city, but this period of free bounty does not last long. The males must make themselves useful.

The temple at the Great Nest is the city’s highest point, a space without walls, strung between the extremity of the canopy above with an inward-sloping floor below. As its centre, on the apex of one of the city’s original trees, is the crystal that the ancestress’s wrested from the ants. Portia and her people arrives ahead of the Messenger’s appearance, they are come to find hope. Her people regard the Messenger and its message is hard to say. The priests has emerged to dance, her stylus hunting out the connection points on the crystals as, invisibly, the Messenger crosses the blue vault of the sky while broadcasting its constant message. After the service finishes, and feeling more shaken than reassured.

The Human

They were all under a death sentence on Earth, the last time Holsten and Lain were working together, a mad computer-person hybrid thing wanted to kill them for disturbing the experimental monkeys. Lain was the Key Crew and the best engineer on the ship. One of the sat at a console apparently fighting the Gilgamesh’s attempts to override control of the shuttle, whilst Nessel and another woman were giving reports on the system powering up. Isa Lain tried to explain that the Gilgamesh’s array is nothing to the Kern’s satellite. It’s got a defense laser that will carve the Gil into tiny pieces.

Chief Engineer Lain indicated that Doctor Avrana Kern was what’s in the satellite. She was one of the things in the satellite. There are the basic computers, and there are called Eliza. It is an AI (Artificial Intelligence), or a very well-made computer. Avrana Kern also might be an AI.

Great Nest

Portia’s military exploits have won some esteem for her peer group, but Bianca is currently their greatest asset: one of the Nest’s most admired and maverick scholars. She has improved the lives of her species in a dozen separate ways, for she has a mind that can see answers to problems others did not even realize were holding them back. Infiltrating an ant colony is no longer just a case of taking some heads and stolen scent glands. The ants now use the chemical equivalent of shifting cyphers that change over time, and in different detachments of the sprawling colony, and Portia’s kin have unable to keep up. The chemical weapons the spiders use toe disrupt and confuse their enemies are short-lived, and barely an annoyance in the face of the sheer scale of the enemy.

The increase security of the colony has had a catastrophic impact on a number of other species. Ant nest are ecosystems in their own right, and many species live in uneasy communion with them. Some, like the aphids, provide services, and the ants actively cultivate them. Others are parasitic: mites, bugs, beetles, even small spiders, all of them adapted to steal from the ants’ table or to consume their hosts.

Holsten translated the words, the message from Kern. Doctor Kern had warned them not return to her planet. The Kern’s World is her experiment and she wouldn’t have it tainted. The planet is her legacy. She called them as a human, so Holsten assumed Kern was a human once.  

Portia’s people have no fingers, but her ancestors were building structures and using tools millions of years before they attained anything like intelligence. They had two palps and eight legs, each of which can grip and manipulated as required. They work best suspended in space, thinking and creating.

Portia flags her palps in fierce agreement, and then they all do likewise. Staring at the trail of smoke still blotting out the night stars, Portia knows it is a sign from the sky, the Messenger’s sky. All her hours spent in reverent contemplation of mathematical mysteries of Temple, on the brink revelation, seem to her to have let to this.

Something fell from the sky. It was not the Messenger, which clearly retains its regular circuit of the heavens, but in the mind of Portia and her kin it seems linked to that orbiting mote. Some hypothesize that it was a herald of forerunner, a message from the Messenger, and that if its meaning can only be interpreted, then Messenger will have a lesson to teach.

The Gilgamesh

Guyen’s plan is simple. An active crew of fifty had been woken up and briefed on what was expected. The base was ready for them, everything constructed by the automatics during the Gilgamesh’s last long sleep, and tested fit for habitation. 

Great Nest

The fallen giant had died, Portia and her kin found it difficult to conceive of the thing. Speculation as to its original purpose, and connection with the Messenger, continued, with the most commonly held theory being that Messenger was served in the sky by a species of such giants, who performed necessary tasks for it.  

Classicist Doctor Holsten Mason

When he was a child, Holsten Mason had been mad about the space. He had watched actual recordings of the real-life expeditions- often disturbing, often cut suddenly. 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. He had lived to see his discipline steadily tainted by vicarious disgrace. The Old Empire was reaching out of deep history to inexorably poison its children. 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 half-finished station itself, slowly proceeding down its compartmentalized length and recording everything they found. Holsten deciphered and catalogued it wherever he could, or put aside for further study where he could not.

Nobody had ever access to an Old Empire terraforming station before, even an incomplete one. Here, at the wrong end of his career, and at the wrong end of the history of human race, Holsten finally in the undeniable position of being able to call himself the grates expert ever on the Old Empire. He was now in possession of a greater trove of communication, fiction, technical manuals, announcements and trivia in several Imperial language-but mostly Kern’s Imperial C-than scholar before him since the end of the Empire itself. The Gilgamesh had translation algorithms now, mostly designed by Holsten himself.

Six people had died: four to what had either been a working security system or a defective maintenance system, one to a suit maintenance, and one to sheer clumsiness. Their technology had proved stony ground, the virtual attack frustrated by their primitive system.

The Great Nest  

In the last few generations, Great Nest’s population has swelled to somewhere a hundred thousand adult spiders, and countless-uncounted-young. It spreads through several square miles of forest reaching from the earth to the canopy. Plague is coming. 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.  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. Viola herself was initially unwilling to even cross the city, for fear of infection.

Bianca is already infected, she believes. 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 species. Bianca has survived the plague, 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.

The Brin2’s Sentry Pod

The signal from the green planet resonated through the Brin 2’s Sentry Pod like an earthquake. 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. The distinction between living woman, uploaded personality construct and pod system was not finely drawn. Doctor Kern awoke, or she dreamt of waking, and in her dreams into the cold logic of the others.

A traveler had come to steal the secret of her project-to rob her of the immorality represented by her new life, by her progeny, by her monkey-children. 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 the monkeys. She remembered now why she was in the Sentry Pod at all, performing this function that had been meant for someone far more disposable. In her dream there had been come a primitive boat of travelers 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 understanding. They were hopelessly corrupted with the same sickness that had killed Kern’s own civilization. Better to start a new with monkeys. When she woke she found the entity/entities that surround her. She looked into their faces. She remembered when the false human, that disease that had outlived her people, had approached the planet.

     

The Prisoners (the human)

Holsten was pondering his relationship with time. Lain called him ‘old man’ but truth the span of objective time that had passed between his nativity and this present moment was ridiculous, unreal. No human ever bestrode time as he had done, in his journey of thousands years. Now in his cell, time weighed him down, and dragged at his heels, chaining him to the grindingly slow pace of the cosmos where before he had leapt ahead across the centuries, skipping between the bright points of human beings.

His captors all wore robes of the same sheer, grey material that the squatters were also using for their amateurish tents- something that the Gilgamesh had presumably been storing for some other purpose entirely, or that had been synthesized in the workshops. They were all thin, malnourished, underdeveloped. They wore their hair long, very long, passed the shoulders. The whole scene had weirdly primal feel to it, a resurgence of the primitive days of mankind. Certainly the manner of his captors was not simply that of oppressors or kidnappers. They refuse to meet his eyes. Then they set him to work, and he realized that he must surely be dreaming.

One day he woke up in his cell to find that his captors had brought in a mobile terminal: a poor, lobotomized sort of a thing, but at least a computer of sorts.

At far at the end of the room was a woman with short-cut hair, a little older than Holsten. She wore a shipsuit that had been fitted out with plastic scales and plates, like somebody’s joke idea of warrior queen, if only she had not looked very serious. There was a ragged, healed scar about her chin, and a long pistol was thrust through her belt, the first modern weapon Holsten had seen.

He was surprised that it was Lain. He got at her confederates, wondering if things here in Lain’s camp had got to the point where dissent was punishable. She said Vrie Guyen had taken over the ship. The new commander had woken up a whole load of cargo. Some of them he thought he recognized as her engineers. They are like a cult he has got. Guyen was their savior. He wanted to live forever, he had the whole human race in his hands. He has set his cult and brainwashed them into believed he was the great hope of the universe. He had been up for fifty years, he promised the human a promised land, a green land.  

After his awaken, the Gil’s already starting to come apart at the system level. Holsten and the whole gang’s together again to stop Guyen’s grand immortality project.

Great Nest

Great Nest is a vast forest metropolis. Hundreds of square kilometres of great trees are festooned with the angled silk dwellings of Portia’s kin, constantly being added to and remodeled as each peer house’s fortunes advance or decline. It is a complex interconnecting web of such capsule-runs, a network amongst networks, like the vibrational communications strands that go everywhere, since the temple maintains rigorous monopoly on the invisible traces of radio waves. Portia tried to seek the position of the Messenger. The voice of God is in the sky, invisible the day light. The old crystal receiver has been improved steadily since the messages of God became comprehensible- that being the first lesson of God, and one of the most successful. 

The Messenger was the last survivor of an earlier age of the universe, they were told. In the final throes of that age, it was the Messenger who was chosen to come to the world and endanger life out of the barren earth. The Messenger- the Goddess of the green planet-remade the world so that it would give rise to that life, next seeded it with plants and trees, and then with the lesser animals. The Messenger is trying to teach them how to live, and this involves building machines to accomplish purposes that Portia’s people can hardly grasp.

Portia and hers sisters are often in contact with the temples of other cities, but they are nevertheless drawing apart. God speaks to each of them, each temple being assigned its own frequency, but the message substantially the same- for Portia has eavesdropped on God’s dictates to others before.

Spider has always killed spider. From the start, the species has had a streak of cannibalism, especially female against male, and they have often struggled for territory, for local dominance. The superiority of God’s ideas has become a major point of dogma for the Temple-after all. A unity of religion has led rivalry and factionalism between the nests. The temple scientists try to build a network of lightning according to God’s designs, but it achieves nothing, save occasionally to destroy its own creator. Somewhere out there, Portia fears, some others community may be closer that Great Nest to achieving God’s intent.

 

Other city states, like Seven Trees, have gone even further, given the far greater ravages of plague there. Great Nest, originator the cure, has combined cultural dominance with a greater social rigidity than many of its peers.

The Human

He wore robes that lay open over a shipsuit that seemed to have been patched together from several older garments, but none of it hid the fact that two thick, ridged tubes had been shunted up under his ribs, and that one of the machines beside him seemed to be doing his breathing for him, its flaccid, rubbery sacs rising calmly. Guyen was an extreme case. Guyen had beaten him to that title by a comfortable margin. Lain had said he was old, but Hoslten had not really processed the concept. Guyen was old. He instructed Holsten to be his uploader working to start war at the Kern.

The War of Great Nest against Seven Trees

The spider city states operate a variety of mining concerns, but they themselves do not dig. They have insects for that. For centuries there has been enough for all, since spider technology is not metal-heavy, and the organic chemicals more important to them are fabricated from the common building blocks of life itself. Open conflict between spider cities is almost unknown, since every city is bound to its neighbors by hundreds of ties. There are struggles for dominance but thus far in their history, the point was always been that there must be something to be dominant over.

Fabian, a chemical architect, had come to the gates of Great Nest with an army. Technically, it was not his army. Viola, one of that city’s most powerful females, is the speaker for her home and therefore nominally in control. He attends to the tactics, playing an army of thousands of ants like a maestro with his fluid, adaptable chemical architecture.

Sven Trees and its allies have tallied up a butcher’s bill of the enemy that leaves Fabian shaken every time he considers it. Aside from numberless dead ants, several hundred spiders have perished in the fighting, some by design, others by happenstance. Great Nest has done its best to reverse the tide of killing the Seven Trees leaders, hampered in its belief that those leaders must necessarily be female.

This is not the end of the war of doctrine, but it is the beginning of the end. The fall and conversion of Great Nest is both catalyst and a model for the future. Fighting continues in various parts of the world but those who still believe that Messenger’s message is all-important only lose ground.  This doesn’t mean that nobody talking to God, but they no longer listen with the same single minded purpose that Portia and her fellows did.

And out in cloud orbit is the fused thing that is Avrana Kern and the Sentry Pod, its computer system and Eliza mask that is sporadically dons. She is desperate to communicate with her creation. She has taught her monkeys. They have made  draggingly slow progress, and time is one of many things that Avrana Kern simply does not enough. They don’t even seem to have invented the wheel, yet they have radios. They are slow to understand much of the task she has set to them. She, in turn, cannot follow of what they say. Their technical language is a closed book. She need to prepare and warn her people. They are in danger, the Gilgamesh is coming back.

The Sky Nest

Elsewhere in the city in the hub of learning and research that is also the Great Nest temple for the dwindling number of parishioners who still need embrace the unknown in their lives, Bianca is at work making her last minute preparation. She is a born polymath, in this context meaning she is able to absorb far more Understanding than average spiders. She is not one of Portia’s selected crew, but she has had a hand in the mission as a whole.

Spiders have been using silk for gliding since before the earliest Understanding, and their increasing intelligence has led to multiple refinements of this art. Their chemical synthesis meanwhile gives them access to as much hydrogen as they need.

The airship is a triumph of engineering, rugged enough to withstand the turbulent weather of the lower air, and yet- with the gasbag fully extended and filled-capable of ascending to previously inaccessible heights. The aerodynamic profile of the entire vessel is fluid, and determined, moment to moment, by the tensioned cords of its internal structure. The flight crew has settled in, the Sky Nest tells the crew that all its component pieces are holding up. The Sky Nest carries them on up towards the light dusting of clouds. In the fore-cabin space, Viola has sent a signal that all’s well. Down in Great Nest district, Bianca will receive their message and send a communication of her own to their God that says they are coming.

The Sky Nest is making good progress on its historic mission, rising steadily into the atmosphere. The onboard colony reports on its own radio frequency to Bianca, confirming that all is well, and data from three other distant transmitters triangulate the airship’s position.

Kern’s world was some bioengineering planet. Kern used her giant spiders as a biological weapon. The spider was huge, but only huge for spider. They were on the Gilgamesh, they took over the ark ship, crawled through the breach. The shuttle seems to take forever to fall from the clear sky. There is a quite a crowd gathered here, on a cleared field beyond the edge of the Great Nest district of Seven Trees City.

Doctor Avrana Kern watches omnipresent, as her children prepare themselves. Her surviving files on human neurochemistry, together with the spiders’ own investigations of their long-ago captive, have wrought this. The spiders themselves argued along and hard over how to respond to long-waited invaders, discounting her advice more than following. They accepted her assessment of the path the humans would follow, if given free rein over the planet. Genocide- of other species and of their own- was ever a tool in human kit.

The shuttle lands. Up on the Gilgamesh, orbiting a hundred kilometres beyond web and its space elevators, there are many humans, all infected, and thousands still sleeping who will need to have the virus introduced to them. Even within the spiders, the nanovirus has fought a long battle against ingrained habits of cannibalism and spouse-slaying. The real difficulty for that legion of spider scientists, working over generations and each inheriting the undiluted learning of the last, was to engineer the human infection to know its parents: to recognize the presence of itself in its arachnid creators, and call out to the similarity.

Once the shuttle has landed, the spider press closer, a sheeting, hairy greyish tide of legs and fangs and staring, lidless eyes. Kern watches the hatch open, and the first humans appear. Amongst the humans is one of who Portia had thought was injured or ill, but now understands to be simply at the end of her long giant’s life. Another male has carried her from the shuttle and laid her on the ground, with the spiders forming a curious, jostling but respectful circle around them.

Helena Holsten Lain reclines in her webbing, feeling at ease in the zero gravity, whilst around her rest of the crew complete their pre-launch checks. She does not know that this was once, in a long-long age, the name for pioneering human space vehicle. The old technology of Earth, so painstakingly husbanded by Helena’s great-great-grandmother, has been resurrected, rediscovered, built upon and advanced.

The scientist amongst the spiders first learned what the humans could teach, about their technology of metal, electricity, computer and fusion drives. They taught it back to their tutors’ children, broadened and enhanced by a non-human perspective. Human minds have unraveled the threads of the spiders’ own complex biotechnology and offered their insights. Both species have limits they cannot easy cross: mental, physical, sensory. They need each other. After all the years, the wars, the tragedies, and the loss, the spiders and the monkeys are returning to the stars to seek their inheritance.

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May 17, 2017

  

   

             

        

  

Sekapur Sirih

Buku fantasi yang dituliskan dengan frasa dan kalimat-kalimat indah, sangat tepat menerima penghargaan. Sains fiksi pemenang Arthur C. Clarke Award, novel setebal 600 halaman cetakan pertama diterbitkan tahun 2015, dicetak oleh Pan Macmillan tahun 2016. Memang tidak mudah untuk dicerna, sehingga kurang tepat bagi pembaca pemula. Penulis Adrian Tchaikovsky adalah penulis berkebangsaan Inggris.Teknologi angkasa luar yang dikombinasi dengan kehidupan serangga cerdas, konflik kekuasaan bahkan kegilaan menjadi tuhan di depan makhluk lain.  

Ringkasan Terjemahan dalam Bahasa Indonesia: Children of Time (Anak Sang Waktu), karya Adrian Thcaikovsky

Doktor Avrana Kern seorang ilmuwan berhasil menciptkan planet hijau dan menciptakan laba-laba dan makluk satu species lainnya sebagai ciptaan cerdas. Mereka hidup dengan teknologi, bertolak belakang dengan eksperimen monyetnya. Monyet ciptaan berkembang lambat. Wanita penemu ini juga menjadikan dirinya sebagai tuhan untuk disembah pada kuil-kuil yang dibuat oleh makluk ciptaan termasuk koloni semut dan serangga lainnya.

Bumi telah hancur, perang antar fraksi dan kekaisan membuatnya menjadi hunian para barbar dan tanpa sumber makanan. Bumi tidak mungkin ditinggali. Sebanyak lima ratus ribu penyintas manusia yang tengah tidur dalam peti dingin mereka dan sejumlah ilmuan yang mengendalikan pesawat ruang angkasa Gilgamesh. Ilmuwan menciptakan pesawat berupa satelit kuno dengan bahan yang tersisa di bumi, berhasil menembus ruang angkasa dan bertahan hidup di peti-peti dingin mereka. Mereka sangat membutuhkan planet baru, kondisi pesawat dan persediaan semakin mengkuatirkan.

Setelah mereka bangun, tim ilmuwan menerima sinyal dari sebuah planet. Mereka meminta pertolongan dan ijin untuk memasuki planet hijau, tetapi penemu planet Dr. Kern meminta mereka menjauh dari planetnya. Dia telah muak dengan perilaku manusia, kini tengah sibuk dengan ciptaan dan ekperimen barunya. Portia, pemimpin laba-laba cerdas, sangat ambisius menguasai planet ciptaan tuhannya Kern.

Perang haus kekuasaan sesama serangga tidak terhindarkan, yang berakhir pada penaklukan dan perbudakan. Species laba-laba ingin menjadi nomor satu di hadapan sang tuhan dengan memerangi dan mengalahkan serangga lainnya. Sama halnya manusia, yang kini mereka berdiam pada pesawat angkasa Gilgamesh yang sudah menua, tidak terhindarkan dari konflik kekuasaan. Guyen mengambil alih komando dan menjadikan dirinya tuhan bagi manusia lainnya yang ia dogmakan selama bertahun-tahun. Insinyur ahli bahasa dan pengenkripsian sinyal dan sandi terpaksa menuruti keinginan ambisius Guyen untuk menyerang Kern yang menolak memberi ijin pada mereka untuk tinggal dan hidup di planet harapan tersebut.

Perang pun tak terhindarkan, sejumlah insinyur terluka dan tewas, manusia terinfeksi dan ribuan manusia lainnya masih dalam tidur mereka pada peti hibernasi. Pihak serangga memiliki nanovirus yang mematikan dan berhasil menaklukkan manusia, namun pada akhirnya ahli manusia dan laba-laba bekerja sama. Mereka saling membutuhkan satu sama lain. Manusia membutuhkan planet untuk bertahan hidup. Laba-laba membutuhkan teknologi kelistikan, komputer dari manusia.  

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