Humans

Humans are the species that built the Old Empire and then destroyed it. By the time their ark ship reaches the green planet, the people aboard believe they are all that is left. The spiders of that world, raised on the stories Kern sent them, call the arrivals the Star Gods.

Description

The Empire’s people had learned to stretch a life across several natural lifespans. Kern has carried the argument for her uplift project across several natural human lifetimes in one body. Her successors on the ark ship keep the records of that age and understand only part of what it built.

Portia meets those successors as giants. Their chambers are scaled to a size she finds frightening, and in her ancestors’ memories a creature so huge and ponderous hardly seems able to think at all. Their eyes move strangely in their faces, and a drug carried into their blood reaches the brain swiftly, hurried along by their racing metabolisms.

The descendants of the cargo are thin, small and underfed, with hair hanging past their shoulders. They wear shapeless robes of grey cloth. The waking crew wear shipsuits, some with plates and scales sewn on over the fabric.

History

The Old Empire turned inhospitable worlds into living ones. Kern’s project on the green planet is one of a chain of terraformed worlds, each built to hold a stable biosphere for geological ages.

Then came the civil war. Holsten cannot describe the weapons, only their result: higher civilization wrecked on Earth and the colonies destroyed outright. One of the last transmissions from Earth was an electronic virus meant to infest and kill any system that received it. When Kern wakes, the signal from home has already been silent for twenty years, and the last thing she can read in it are pleas for help.

The choked atmosphere that followed blocked the sun and brought the ice. Holsten repeats the guess that the whole remaining population of Earth may have been ten thousand people, living in caves and holes near the equator. When the ice retreated, the survivors expanded and reindustrialised, tripping over the remains of a people who had done everything before them, and better. Poison stored in the ice then made Earth unliveable. The ark ships left with no destination but old star maps.

On the ark ship

The Gilgamesh carries five hundred thousand humans in suspension. Guyen wakes part of that cargo and lets it breed, and two or three generations later their descendants fill the ship, raised on his legend and certain he is something close to a god. They fight each other for control while the vessel wears out, and Holsten calls them grey ship lice. Lain’s judgement is blunter: a tribe who do not know how anything works, eating and multiplying while the ship falls apart.

As the Star Gods

The spiders remember giants. Crew from the Gilgamesh walked their world in the days of the ant war, and one of them was kept in captivity for years by scholars who did not believe it could think. Its body taught them how human biochemistry works. Kern later told them the rest, and her account of her own species is a chain of destruction: the animals of Earth first, then rival groups of humans, then humans against themselves.

So the spiders call the returning humans the Star Gods, the ancient astronauts who seeded all life on their world, and they build a defence with survival as its only aim.

After the landing

The spiders work out a use for the humans instead of a slaughter. They cut the nanovirus down to one of its base functions, the part that lets the infected know their own kind, and rebuild it to work on a mammal brain. Humans who breathe it look at the spiders without revulsion and treat them as kin. After the fighting, Portia and her peers take the ark ship. The humans aboard are infected, and thousands still sleep who will need the virus introduced to them.

By the time of the Voyager, humans and spiders build machines together and share a common language, and Helena Holsten Lain, a descendant of Lain and Holsten, serves on the crew under Portia.

Unanswered questions

• Whether anyone is left alive on Earth is never settled.
• No transmission from any other ark ship arrives, so their fate stays open.
• How long it takes to wake and infect the sleepers on the Gilgamesh is not stated.