ADRIAN TCHAIKOVSKY
PART 1
THE ANCIENT MARINER
The Ark Age
Long ago
1.1
Not with a whimper, but a bang.
The ship had shot Heorest Holt full of all the right drugs to ensure a peaceful re-entry to life, but he hadn’t been ready for what sounded like the end of the world. It had only been a subjective moment since they’d all been gathered in Command, discussing the target, celebrating their success.
Esi Arbandir, their chatty classicist, had even brewed up something alcoholic and drinkable from the Enkidu’s ancient printers.
Their success: being further away than any of their people had ever gone, older than anyone ever was. A fragment of Earth that was, against all odds, going to live on. The ship was still holding together and, although Olf from Engineering had been dolorously tallying the failures and dead systems, the simple fact that he was alive to speak and they to hear seemed to cheat all probabilities; to cheat even certainties, up to and including death itself.
They’d survived. They’d made it. Almost two and a half thousand years in silent, cold transit across the void. And now they’d even collected data.
Back then, in that previous waking, Holt had been given a wealth of hope.
The star system that they’d set their sights on was there, and if that shouldn’t have been too much of a surprise, well, the planet was there too, immediately detectable. A system of fourteen worlds tugging at their mother the star and one, fifth out from the sun, that the Ancients had chosen as enough like Earth to transform into a paradise.
Or that was what the classicists claimed, and what else did poor, fugitive humanity have to work with? As the drink flowed, the half-dozen of them had speculated about just what might await them there. Olf talked about a pristine world, built for them by their unthinkably distant ancestors and then left, like goods with the wrapping still intact. As though somehow the Ancients had been prescient, knowing of their own upcoming downfall as well as that Holt’s people would come to succeed them, aeons later. That they had rebuilt a planet as a Just Reward For Those Who Were To Come,
and then quietly left. And, with that drink flowing, the thought hadn’t seemed so outrageous. They’d toasted it. Esi the classicist had chattered away about what else the Ancients might have left: the intact machines, the archives of lore, the wonders of their lost age. The Ancients themselves, perhaps, living in some perfectly regulated society which would welcome their penurious relatives. From Earth? they’d say. Why, we thought there was nobody left! Come in, come in and partake of our plenty!
Science chief, bald old Mazarin Toke – well, they were all hairless as eggs, out of suspension, but he’d been bald before they went under – had come out of sleep blind and with one arm and leg withered. He wasn’t taking it well. They’d printed him a mobile chair, and he had his second, Gembel, to act as his hands and eyes, but the drink had made him mean and dour, even as he celebrated with them. The Ancients, he proclaimed, would probably still be there but, having been cut off from wider Earth, they’d have degenerated into savages, living like beasts in a world designed to meet all their needs and present no challenges. We’ll probably have to hunt them for meat, he’d declared with sour joy, and everyone had rolled their eyes, but toasted with him anyway.
Only Halena Garm hadn’t appeared at the impromptu table, cheering on the future. She’d been trying to glean more about the planet, their destination. It wasn’t her job, they called out to her genially. It was, she said. She was Security head, and what greater challenge did Security have than the planet itself? She wasn’t worried about beasts or atavistic Ancients.
She was worried about incumbents on the new world who wouldn’t take kindly to a failing boat full of their distant relatives pitching up out of the black. They’ll have their own problems, she’d said. Of which we’ll just be one more.
And so she’d sat there trying to bootstrap the ship’s instruments to full functionality while the rest of them celebrated. Once, just once, she claimed there was a signal. A transmission coming from that distant orb. But the ship hadn’t recorded anything but static and she couldn’t repeat it and at last she’d given up in disgust.
They’d gone back into suspension, eventually. Olf had forcibly sobered himself up and run through all the proper checks – Engineering’s final report had been sobering for the rest of them. The ship was in the red on almost every metric. We almost didn’t make it, was what they’d told each
other. But they were so close now. Just a short step across the icy abyss to their new home. Maybe it had a name, that unseen world, with inhabitants who knew what it was called, and its long and storied history. Perhaps the greatest crisis the cap-in-hand refugees from Earth would fa [Continued in the Full Archive Manuscript...]
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