Adrian Tchaikovsky - Children of Time

The temple scientists try to build a network of lightning according to God’s designs, but it achieves nothing, save occasionally to destroy its own creators. Somewhere out there, Portia fears, some other community may be closer than Great Nest to achieving God’s intent.

God’s work is not to be entrusted to males, but Fabian is special. Over the last few years, Portia has become curiously reliant on his abilities. He is a chemical architect of surpassing skill.

It is the age-old limiting factor: the ants are slow. The scientific endeavour of each spider nest rests on its ability to train its ant colonies to perform needed tasks: manufacturing, engineering, analysis. Whilst each generation has become more adept, pushing the boundaries of their organic technology, each fresh task requires a new colony, or else for a colony’s existing behaviour to be overwritten. Spiders like Fabian create chemical texts that give an ant colony its purpose, its complex cascade of instinct that allows it to perform the given task. Although in truth there are few like Fabian, who accomplishes more, more elegantly and in less time, than any other.

Fabian possesses everything a male might desire, and yet he is unhappy. Portia finds him a bizarre mix: a male whose value has made him forthright enough that she sometimes feels she is dealing with a competing female.

Before she retired to moult, he was hinting that he was on the brink of a great advance, and yet a month later he has not broached the subject further with any of her subordinates. She wonders if he has saved it all for her. They have a complex relationship, she and Fabian. He danced for her once, and she took the gift of his genetic material to add to her own, so as to gift their combined genius to posterity. He has learned a great deal more, since then, that he has not passed on. In truth she should wait for him to petition her but, now she is here, the subject has come up.

I am not ready , he replies dismissively. There is more to learn.

Your great discovery , she prompts. Fabian is a volatile genius. He must be handled with a care normally unbecoming in dealing with a male.

Later. It is not ready. He is agitated, twitchy in her presence. Her scent receptors suggest that he is quite ready to mate, so it is his mind that is holding him back. Let us get it over with now , she suggests. Or perhaps simply distil your new Understandings? Whilst I do not want anything to happen to you, there are always accidents.

She had not intended a threat, but males are always cautious around females. He becomes quite still for a moment save for a nervous fidgeting of his palps, an unconscious plea for his life that goes back through the generations to before their kind ever developed language.

Osric is dead , he tells her, which she was not expecting. She cannot place the name and so he adds, He was one of my assistants. He was killed after a mating.

Tell me who was involved and I shall reprimand her. Your people are too precious to consume in such a way. And Portia is genuinely displeased. There remains a tight faction of ultra-conservatives in Great Nest that believe males can have no genuine qualities that are not simply a reflection of the females around them, but that hard-line philosophy has been dying out ever since the plague, when a simple lack of numbers saw males assume all manner of roles normally reserved for the stronger sex. Other city states, like Seven Trees, have gone even further, given the far greater ravages of plague there. Great Nest, originator of the cure, has combined cultural dominance with a greater social rigidity than many of its peers.

The improved mining architecture has been completed , Fabian drums out distractedly. You are aware that I myself may be killed any day?

Portia freezes. Who would dare so tempt my disapproval?

I don’t know, but it may happen. If the meanest female is killed, that is a matter for investigation and punishment, just as if someone were to damage the common ground of the city or to speak out against the temple. If I am killed, then the only crime the perpetrator commits is to displease you.

And I would be displeased greatly, and that is why it will not happen. You need not fear , Portia explains patiently, thinking: Males can be so highly strung!

But Fabian seems oddly calm. I know it will not happen, so long as I retain your favour. But I am concerned that it can happen, that such things are permitted. Do you know how many males are killed every month in Great Nest?

They die like animals down in the lower reaches , Portia tells him. They are of no use to anyone save as mates, and not even as mates of any substance most of the time. That is not something you need to concern yourself with.

And yet I do. Fabian has more he wants to communicate, she can tell, but he stills his feet.

You are worried that you may lose my favour? Keep working as you are, and there is nothing in Great Nest you will not have, Portia assures the fragile male. No comfort and no delicacy shall be denied you. You know this.

He starts to phrase a response – she sees the emerging concepts strangled, stillborn, as he overrides the trembling of his palps. For a moment she thinks he will enumerate the things he cannot have, no matter how favoured, or that he will raise the point (again!) that all he can have, he can attain only through her or some other dominant female. She feels frustrated with him: what does he want exactly? Does he not realize how fortunate he is compared to so many of his brothers?

If only he was not so useful … but it is more than that. Fabian is a curiously appealing little creature, even aside from his concrete achievements. That combination of Understandings, impudence and vulnerability makes him a knot that she cannot stop pondering. She must some day tease him out straight or cut him through.

After that unsatisfactory confrontation with Fabian, she returns to her official duties. As a senior priestess, she has been asked to examine a heretic.

From radio communications with other temples, she is aware that other nests display varying tolerances for outspoken heresy, depending on the strength of the local priesthood. There are even those nests – some worryingly close – where the Temple is a shadow of its former strength, so that the city’s governance depends on a collusion of heretics, lapsed priests and maverick scholars. Great Nest itself remains a cornerstone of orthodoxy, and Portia is aware that even now there are plans to exert some measure of forceful persuasion on its recusant neighbours. This is a new thing, but God’s message can be interpreted as supporting it. The Messenger grows frustrated when Her words are ignored.

Within Great Nest itself, the seed of heresy has recently taken root within the very scientists the temple relies on. The mutterings of artisan females who have lost Temple favour, or vagrant males fearful for their worthless lives, are easy to ignore. When Great Nest’s great minds start to question the dictates of Temple, important magnates such as Portia must become involved.

Bianca is one such: a scientist, a member of Portia’s peer group, a former ally. She has probably entertained heretical views for a long time. Implicated by another wayward scholar, an unannounced search of Bianca’s laboratories demonstrated how her personal studies had veered on to astronomy, a science particularly prone to breeding heretics.

Portia’s kind are hard to imprison, but Bianca is currently confined to a chamber within the tunnels of a specialist ant colony bred for this purpose. There is no lock or key but, without adopting a certain scent, changed daily, she would be torn apart by the insects if she tried to leave.