Adrian Tchaikovsky - Children of Time

During her lying-in she has been attended by various members of her peer house, which is a dominant force now in Great Nest. There are two or three others who, as a union, could challenge the hold of Portia’s family, but they are seldom friends with one another. Portia’s agents provocateurs ensure that they are kept constantly fighting over second place.

The political realities of Great Nest are finely balanced just now, however. Despite the reports brought to her daily during her lying-in, Portia knows there will be dozens of key pieces of information that she will have to catch up with. Thankfully, there is a ready mechanism for doing that.

Portia is the greatest priestess of the Messenger that Great Nest has, but a month out of circulation will have given many of her sisters ideas. They will have been talking to that fleet, all-important light in the sky, receiving the bizarre, garbled wisdom of the universe, and using it for their own benefit. They will have been taking over the grand, often incomprehensible projects ordered by the voice of God. Portia will have to jostle to recover her old prominence.

She descends to the next chamber, a gaggle of younger females attending her. A flicker of her palps and a male is brought in. He has lived a busy month, and been present at gatherings that his gender are usually banned from. Everywhere that Portia might have gone, he was brought by her adherents. He has had every missive, every discovery and reversal, every proclamation of God patiently explained to him. He has been well fed, pampered; he has wanted for nothing.

Now, one of the females brings forward a bulging bulb of silk. Within is the distilled Understanding that the last month has added to this male. It comprises an intelligence report which, if delivered in any conventional way, would be interminable in its detail. That single draught contains enough secrets of Portia’s peer house to hand Great Nest on a platter to any of her enemies.

She drinks, the fluid thick with learning, the bulb held within her palps as she carefully drains its contents, before passing it to her subordinates to be destroyed. Already she feels a flutter of discord inside her as the nanovirus she has just ingested begins to fit the purloined knowledge into place within her own mind, accessing the structure of her brain and copying in the male’s memories. Within a day and a night she will know all that he knows, and likely she will have lost some unfrequented mental pathways too, some obsolete skill or distant recollection reconfigured into the new and the necessary.

I will send word about him . She indicates the male. Once she is sure that the new Understandings have taken, the male will be disposed of – killed and eaten by one of Portia’s clique. He knows too much, quite literally.

Portia’s society has come some way since the primitive days when the females ate their mates as often as not, but perhaps not so very far. The killing of males under the protection of another peer house is a crime that demands restitution; the needless killing of any male garners sufficient social disapprobation that it is seldom practised, and the culprits usually shunned as wasteful and lacking that golden virtue of self-control. However, to kill a male for a good reason, or after coitus, remains acceptable, despite occasional debates on the subject. This is simply the way things are, and the conservation of tradition is important in Great Nest these days.

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 remodelled as each peer house’s fortunes advance or decline. The greatest of the spider clans dwell in the mid-level – shielded from the extremes of weather, but suitably distant from the lowly ground where those females without a peer group must fight for leg-room with a swarm of half-savage feral males. In between the peer houses are the workshops of artisans who produce that dwindling stock of items that ants cannot be bred to manufacture, the studios of artists who weave and craft and construct elegant knot-script, and the laboratories of scientists of a score of disciplines. Beneath the ground, amongst the roots, crawl the interlocking networks of ants, each nest to its own specialized task. Other, larger, nests radiate out from the metropolis’s limits, engaged in lumberjacking, mining, smelting and industrial manufacture. And, on occasion, war. To fight the other is something that every ant colony can remember how to do, if the need arises, although Great Nest, like its rivals, has specialist soldiers as well.

Portia, on her way to temple, feels fragments of current affairs falling into place within her. Yes, there have been further troubles with Great Nest’s neighbours: the lesser nests – Seven Trees, River Chasm, Burning Mountain – they are testing the boundaries of territory once again, jealous of the supremacy of Portia’s home. It is likely that there will be a new war, but Portia is not concerned about the result. Her people can muster far more ants – and far better designed ants – for the fight ahead.

The sheer size of Great Nest necessitates a public transport system in the higher reaches. The central temple where Portia holds sway is some distance from the site of her lying-in. She is aware that the transporting of things is the province of God, and among God’s troubling, hard-to-understand plans are various means of moving from place to place at great speed, but so far no peer house, no city, has succeeded in realizing any of them. The spiders have made their own arrangements in the interim, albeit with a cringing awareness that they are inadequate compared to the Divine Plan.

Portia boards a cylindrical capsule that is strung along a thick, braided strand, and lets it carry her at a rushing speed through the arboreal glory that is her home. The motive power is partly stored energy in silk springs, a macro-engineered development drawn from the structure of spider-silk itself, and partly cultured muscle: a mindless slab of contracting tissue running along the dorsal rib of the capsule, obliviously hauling itself over and over – efficient, self-repairing and easy to feed. Great Nest 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 a rigorous monopoly on the invisible traces of radio waves.

Shortly thereafter she steps into the temple, carefully marking the reactions of those she finds there, sniffing out potential challengers.

What is the position of the Messenger? she asks, and is told that the voice of God is in the skies, invisible against the daylight.

Let me speak to Her.

The lesser priestesses clear out of her way somewhat resentfully, having had the run of this place for a month. 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. Now there is a whole machine of metal and wood and silk that acts as a terminus for a sightless strand of the great and unseen web of the universe that links all such termini, allowing Portia to speak direct to other temples across half the world, and to speak to and hear the words of God.

After God originally began speaking, it took the combined great minds of several generations to finally learn the divine language, or perhaps to negotiate that language, meeting the comprehension of God halfway. Even now, a certain amount of what God has to say is simply not something that Portia or anyone can understand. It is all set down, though, and sometimes a particularly knotted piece of scripture will yield to the teasing of later theologians.