Adrian Tchaikovsky - Children of Time

When they tried to take it all away from him, as Fabian had known they would, he had simply stopped working. By then the other males had grown to understand his ambition and they downed tools as well. A new arrangement was reached. The females were free to enjoy the status that Fabian’s work brought them, but his would be the mind that directed the house, and – most importantly – his people were to be sacrosanct. The males of his house must not be touched.

Still, it has been a long, slow road to get anywhere. As a result, Fabian’s unorthodox methods have just begun to bear fruit within the social network of Seven Trees at around the time that the mining skirmishes erupt.

Once the rumours reach him, he is quick to re-establish contact with Bianca. Her position has shifted from independent scientist to political advisor, as the major peer houses of Seven Trees and its neighbours try to come up with a suitable response. Great Nest has almost contemptuously stripped them of all their mines, but nobody is keen to be the first to suggest a straight-out violent response.

When diplomats contact Great Nest to try and negotiate, however, they come up against the new world that Portia has constructed after talking to God. Instead of simply beginning to exploit its own strength in return for concessions, as is traditional, Great Nest’s position is uncompromising. Demands are made for other resources belonging to Seven Trees and the allied cities: farms, colonies, laboratories. When Seven Trees protests, the speakers for Great Nest label them heretics. The Messenger has spoken. She has chosen Her champions. This is not war: it is a crusade.

Then, and only then, does Seven Trees send out a large force of fighting ants to retake the mines. They are met by a similar force from Great Nest, and a battle ensues that is only a faint echo of the tumult promised for the future. The ants fight with mandibles, with blades, with acids and fire. They fight with chemicals that confuse the enemy, drive them berserk, attack their respiratory surfaces, suborn them and change their allegiance. The force sent from Great Nest readily obliterates the attackers.

A simple radio message is received in Seven Trees – and in all of its allies’ cities – the next day.

Now we will come for you. Surrender yourselves to our Understandings or we will do what we must. The Messenger wills it.

There is chaos then, with the loose-knit, non-hierarchical spider society threatening to tear itself apart, as it has before under intense pressure. Ruling councils rise and fall. Some advocate surrender and appeasement, others outright resistance, others simply suggest flight. None of these carries the majority, instead each fragments and factionalizes in turn. The stakes are higher every day.

Then, one day, with an army from Great Nest already dispatched and on its way, Bianca asks to be allowed to address the great and the good of the city.

She finds herself positioned in the centre of a web with almost forty powerful females crouching at its edges, legs forward attentively to catch her words as the individual strands relay them. They listen intently. Everyone knows that they need a masterstroke now, to save themselves, but nobody can agree on what it might be.

But Bianca herself has nothing to say. Instead, she tells them, I will bring one to you now who has found a way to combat this threat. You must listen until the end. You must hear what he has to say.

The reaction is instant derision, shock and anger. The powers-that-be of Seven Trees do not have time for such foolishness. There is nothing a male could have to say that they themselves have not already considered a dozen times over.

Bianca presses on. This male is from Great Nest , she explains. It is only through his assistance that I was able to escape from there. He possesses a curious facility with ants. Even in Great Nest his work was highly respected, but I believe he has discovered something secret, something new. Something Great Nest does not yet have.

At last, by such means, she is able to gather their attention, soothe them, persuade them to hear Fabian out.

The male creeps out, to be pinned by their collective gaze. Fabian has given this moment some thought, based on his earlier failure with Portia. He will not ask for too much. He will show, rather than tell. He will woo them, but as a female does, with success, rather than as a male, with flattery.

Give me a force of ants and I shall defeat their army , he declares.

Their response is not as negative as he had expected. They know he is a turncoat from Great Nest, after all. They question him carefully, whilst he gives evasive, cautious answers, in a fencing match of subtle vibration and noncommittal gesture. He hints at having some secret knowledge of the Great Nest ant colonies, but he gives them nothing more. He watches them confer, plucking discreetly the radial strands of the web to send messages around their circle without their conference reaching the centre where he crouches.

How many ants? one asks him at last.

Just a few hundred. He only hopes that this will be sufficient. He is risking everything on this one venture, but the smaller the force he takes with him, the more valuable will seem his victory.

It is a ridiculously small force compared to the army that is encroaching on Seven Trees’ territory, and in the end the females feel that there is little to lose. The only other serious alternative is to surrender and give up all they own to the peer groups of Great Nest.

Fabian heads with all speed back to his own peer house and chooses a score of his most able assistants, all males. They know much of his secret: the new architecture. He and they set at once to the most laborious task, reconditioning the ants he has been gifted with to obey his primary architecture, so that they can be given instructions while on the run.

The next day they leave Seven Trees for, Fabian hopes, the annals of history. He travels with his cadre of apprentices, with his meagre force of insect soldiers – and with Bianca. The leaders of Seven Trees could not countenance a force devoid of any female guidance, and so she is its figurehead, the respectable face of Fabianism.

For her part, Bianca has not been let in on Fabian’s secret, but she remembers their miraculous escape from Great Nest and knows his reputation as a chemical architect. She has yoked her future to his, and now must hope that he is as good as he thinks he is.

The old weapons that allowed their species to fully dominate the ants – and thereby vastly enrich and complicate their society – are no longer viable weapons of war. The deconditioning effect of the Paussid beetle master-scent is something that most ants are now conditioned to resist, both because of inter-spider rivalries, and simply because the Paussid beetles themselves are constantly hacking colony architecture for their own purposes, remaining a persistent ghost in the organic machine. The spiders can only strive to minimize their effects.

Fabian’s plan is more complex, therefore more risky. The first phase is a frontal assault.

The path that the Great Nest column is likely to take has already been densely strewn with a complex maze of deadfalls, spring-traps, webs and fire-traps. No spider would be fooled by them, but ant senses are easier to deceive, especially as they have little ability to sense anything at a distance. The Great Nest force is screened by a large, dispersed cloud of scouts to find and trigger these traps, and it is on to these that Fabian sets his own troops.

The response is immediate, alarm scents drawing more and more of the invaders. Positioned upwind of the skirmish, Fabian releases scent after scent into the air. Each one contains a fresh set of instructions, chemically encoded, allowing his small force to react swiftly, to change tactics and outmanoeuvre the enemy, whilst the Great Nest ants are simply following a basic battle architecture little changed from the insects’ ancient fighting instincts.