Adrian Tchaikovsky - Children of Time

Lain had stalked over to the hatch, her stick clacking on the floor. ‘It’s warm,’ she said softly. ‘They’re outside. They’re cutting.’

‘Masks.’ Holsten had located some, and held one out to her. ‘Remember?’

‘I don’t think we’ll need a private channel any more.’

He had to help her with the straps, and eventually she just sat down, hands trembling before her, looking small and frail and old.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said at last. ‘I led us all to this.’

Her hand was in his, cold and almost fleshless; like soft, worn leather over bone.

‘You couldn’t have known. You did what you could. Nobody could have done any better.’ Just comforting platitudes, really. ‘Any weapons in here?’

‘It’s amazing what you don’t plan for, isn’t it?’ something of Lain’s dry humour returning. ‘Use my stick. Squash a spider for me.’

For a moment Holsten thought she was joking, but she proffered him the metal rod, and at last he accepted it, hefting its surprising weight. Was this the sceptre that had kept the nascent society of the Tribe in line, from generation to generation? How many challengers for leadership had Lain beaten down with it, through the ages? It was practically a holy relic.

It was a club. In that sense, it was a quintessentially human thing: a tool to crush, to break, to lever apart in the prototypical way that humanity met the universe head-on.

And how do they meet the world? What does the spider have as its basic tool?

Briefly he entertained the thought, They build . And it was a curiously peaceful image, but then his console sounded, and he almost fell over the stick in lunging for it. A transmission? Someone was alive out there.

For a moment he found himself trying to drag his hand back, thinking that it would be some message from them , some garbled mess of almost-Imperial C within which that inhuman intelligence, malign and undeniable, would be hiding.

‘Lain…?’ came a soft and wavering voice. ‘Lain…? Are you…? Lain…?’

Holsten stared. There was something dreadful about the words, something shuddering, damaged, unformed.

‘Karst,’ Lain identified it. Her eyes were wide.

‘Lain, I’m coming back,’ Karst continued, sounding calmer than he had ever been. ‘I’m coming back in now.’

‘Karst…’

‘It’s all right,’ came the voice of the security chief. ‘It’s all right. It’s all going to be all right.’

‘Karst, what happened to you?’ Holsten demanded.

‘It’s fine. I understand now.’

‘But the spiders—’

‘They’re…’ and a long pause, as though Karst was fumbling through the contents of his own brain for the right words. ‘Like us… They’re us. They’re… like us.’

‘Karst—!’

‘We’re coming back in now. All of us.’ And Holsten had the terrifying, irrational thought of a sucked-dry, withered husk within an armoured suit, but still impossibly animate.

‘Holsten,’ Lain clutched at his arm. There was a kind of haze in the air now, a faint chemical fog – not the killer weapon of the spiders, but whatever was eating away the hatch.

Then there was a hole near its lower edge, and something was coming through.

For a moment they regarded one another: two scions of ancient tree-dwelling ancestors with large eyes and inquisitive minds.

Holsten hefted Lain’s stick. The spider was huge, but only huge for a spider. He could smash it. He could sunder that hairy shell and scatter pieces of its crooked legs. He could be human in that last moment. He could exalt in his ability to destroy.

But there were more of them crawling through the breach, and he was old, and Lain was older now, and he sought that other human quality, so scarce of late, and put his arms around her, holding the woman as tightly to him as he dared, the stick clattering to the floor.

‘Lain…’ came Karst’s ghostly voice. ‘Mason…’ and then, ‘Come on, pick up the pace,’ to his own people. ‘Cut yourself free if you’re stuck.’ And the spark of impatience there was Karst’s, through and through, despite his newfound tranquillity.

The spiders spread out a little, those huge saucer eyes fixed on the two of them from behind the clear masks the creatures were wearing. Meeting that alien gaze was a shock of contact Holsten had only known before in confronting his own kind.

He saw one of the creatures’ rear legs bunch and tense.

The spiders leapt, and then it was over.

The shuttle seems to take forever to fall from the clear blue sky.

There is quite a crowd gathered here, on a cleared field beyond the edge of the Great Nest district of Seven Trees City. On the ground and in the surrounding trees and silk structures, thousands of spiders are clustered close and waiting. Some are frightened, some are exhilarated, some are less than well informed regarding what precisely is about to happen.

There are several dozen seeing-eye colonies, too, and these capture and send images to chromatopore screens across the green world – to be viewed by millions of spiders, to be pored over by stomatopods beneath the waves, to be gazed at with varying degrees of incomprehension by a number of other species who stand close to the brink of sentience. Even the Spitters – the neo-Scytodes on their wilderness reservations – may see images of this moment.

History is being made. Moreover, history is beginning: a new era.

Doctor Avrana Kern watches, omnipresent, as her children prepare themselves. She is still not convinced, but so many millennia of cynicism will take time to wash away.

We should have destroyed them , is her persistent thought, but then, and despite the dispersed form she currently inhabits, she is only human.

Her surviving files on human neurochemistry, together with the spiders’ own investigations of their long-ago captive, have wrought this. She has not been its prime mover, though. The spiders themselves argued long and hard over how to respond to the long-awaited invaders, discounting her advice more than following it. They were aware of the stakes. 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 the human kit.

The spiders have been responsible for a few extinctions along the way, too, but their early history with the ants has led them down a different road. They have seen the way of destruction, but they have seen the way the ants made use of the world, too. Everything can be a tool. Everything is useful. They never did wipe out the Spitters, just as they never exterminated the ants themselves, a decision that later would become the basis of their burgeoning technology.

Faced with the arrival of humanity, the creator-species, the giants of legend, the spiders’ thought was not How can we destroy them? but How can we trap them? How can we use them?

What is the barrier between us that makes them want to destroy us?

The spiders have equivalents of the Prisoners’ Dilemma, but they think in terms of intricate interconnectivity, of a world not just of sight but of constant vibration and scent. The idea of two prisoners incapable of communication would not be an acceptable status quo for them, but a problem to overcome: the Prisoners’ Dilemma as a Gordian knot, to be cut through rather than be bound by.

They have long known that, within their own bodies and in other species across their planet, there is a message. In ancient times, when they fought the plague, they recognized this as something distinct from their own genetic code, and took it to be the work of the Messenger. In a manner of speaking they were correct. Long ago, they isolated the nanovirus in their systems.