Adrian Tchaikovsky - Children of Time

‘Granted,’ Guyen replied, from the back. ‘Get onto it. I think we can assume this place isn’t going to be our home any time soon,’ he added. ‘But that’s not going to be a problem. Our priority is to gather everything we can from the station, file it, translate it, and work out what we can put into action. At the same time we’re undertaking a major overhaul of the Gilgamesh ’s own systems, repairing and replacing where we can. There’s a lot of useable tech on that station, if we can find a way to splice it to our own. And don’t worry about not being able to go live on Fungus World. I have a plan. There is a plan. With what we’ve found here, we can go and take our birthright.’ The speech veered into the messianic so abruptly that even Guyen himself seemed surprised for a moment, but then he turned and departed, curious conversation welling up in his wake.

The plague is insidious at first, then tyrannous, and at last truly terrifying. Its symptoms are by now well recorded, reliably predictable – everything, in fact, except preventable. The first sure signs are a feeling of heat in the joints, a rawness at the eyes, mouthparts, spinnerets, anus and book-lungs. Muscle spasms, especially in the legs, follow; at first just a few, a stammering in speech, a nervous dance not quite accounted for, then more and more the victim’s limbs are not her own, leading her in babbling, staggering, whole frantic meaningless journeys. Around this time, from ten to forty days after the first involuntary twitch, the virus reaches the brain. The victim then relinquishes her grasp on who and where she is. She perceives those around her in irrational ways. Paranoia, aggression and fugue states are common during this phase. Death follows in another five to fifteen days, immediately preceded by an irresistible desire to climb as high as possible. Fabian has recounted in some detail the dead city that he has visited once more: the highest reaches of the trees and the decaying webbing were crowded with the rigid carapaces of the dead, glassy eyes fixed upwards on nothing.

Prior to those first definitive symptoms, the virus is present in the victim’s system for an unknown period but often as long as two hundred days, while slowly infiltrating the patient’s system without any obvious harm. The victim feels occasional periods of heat or dizziness, but there are other potential causes for this and the episodes usually go unreported; all the more so because, prior to the disease taking hold in Great Nest – as it now has – any suspected sufferers were exiled on pain of death. Those incubating the disease were part of an inadvertent conspiracy to mask the signs of outbreak for as long as possible.

During this early, innocent-seeming phase, the disease is moderately contagious. Being close to a sufferer for an extended period of time is very likely to lead to oneself contracting the disease, although bites from deranged victims in their last phases are the surest way to become infected.

There have been half a dozen late-stage victims in Great Nest. They are killed on sight, and at range. There are three times as many lingering in the mid-stage, and so far no consensus has been reached regarding them. Portia and others are insistent that a cure is possible. There is a tacit agreement amongst the temple scientists to conceal just how little idea they have of what can be done.

Portia is making the best uses of Fabian’s prizes that she can. The spiderlings came from the plague city, and she can only hope that this means they are immune to the plague, and that this immunity will somehow be amenable to study.

She has tested them, and taken samples of their haemolymph – their arachnid blood – to examine, but all her lenses and analyses have so far discovered nothing. She has ordered that fluids from the spiderlings be fed or injected into mid-stage victims, a manner of transfusion having been pioneered just a few years before. The limited immune system of the spiders means that blood-type rejection is far less of an issue. In this case the attempt has had no effect.

In working with sufferers, in order to preserve herself as long as possible from the inevitable moment when she becomes her own test subject, she has used Fabian, and he has liaised with the males within those peer houses where the plague has taken hold. It is known that males are a little hardier than females where the plague is concerned. Ironically, ancient genetics link the elegance and stamina of their wooing dances with the strength of their immune systems, keeping a constant pressure on natural selection.

Everything that Portia has tried has so far failed, and none of her fellows has obtained any better results. She is beginning to drift into ever more speculative sciences, desperate for that one lateral thought that will save her civilization from a collapse into dispersed barbarism.

She has now been working in her laboratory for the best part of a day. Fabian has departed with a new batch of solutions to pass to his counterparts within the sealed lazar-houses that the dwellings of infected peer groups have become. She has no particular belief that these solutions will work. She feels she has reached the end of her capabilities, frustrated with the great void of ignorance that she has found, while standing out here at the very edge of her people’s comprehension.

She now has a visitor. Under other circumstances she would turn this one away, but she is tired, so very tired, and she desperately needs some new perspective. And new – disturbingly new – perspectives are what this visitor is all about.

Her name is Bianca and she was formerly one of Portia’s peer group. She is a large, overfed spider with pale brindling all over her body, who moves with a fidgety, nervous energy that makes Portia wonder whether, if Bianca caught the disease, anyone would actually notice.

Bianca was formerly of the Temple, too, but she did not fulfil her duties with the proper respect. Her curiosity as a scientist overwhelmed her reverence as a priestess. She had begun experiments with the crystal and, when this was discovered, she came very close to being exiled for her disrespect. Portia and her other peers interceded on her behalf, but she effectively fell from those lofty levels of society, losing both her status and her friends. It was assumed that she would leave Great Nest, or perhaps die.

Instead, somehow Bianca has clung on and even thrived. She has always been a brilliant mind – perhaps that is another reason Portia, at the end of her own mental resources, lets her in – and she has bartered her skills like a male, by serving lesser peer houses, and eventually forming a new peer group of her own, drawn from other disaffected scholars. In better times, the major peer houses were always on the point of censuring or exiling the entire clutch of them, but now nobody cares. Portia’s people have other matters to concern them.

They say you are close to a cure? However, Bianca’s stance and the slight delay in her movements convey scepticism very neatly.

I work. We all work. Portia would normally exaggerate her prospects, but she is feeling too weary. Why are you here?

Bianca shuffles slyly, eyeing Portia. Why, sister, why am I ever anywhere?

This is not the time. So Bianca is after her usual, then. Portia huddles miserably, the other spider stepping close to hear her muted speech.

From what I hear, there may be no other time Bianca says, half-goading. I know what messages come down the lines from the other cities. I know how many other cities have no messages left in them. You and I both know what we are facing.

If I had wanted to think further on that just now, I would have remained in my laboratory , Portia tells her with an angry stamp. I will not give you access to the Messenger’s crystal.