Adrian Tchaikovsky - Children of Time

‘What can I—?’

Lain hushed Holsten then, trusting her team enough to take a moment away from the consoles. ‘Seriously, you’ve done what you could. You did what had to be done. You did well. But now? This is out of your area, old man. If you want, go help Karst, and hope we can contain Guyen-the-fucking-virus before he does too much—’

There was a shudder through the substance of the ship, and the colour drained from Lain’s face.

‘Shit. Just go, Holsten. Be safe.’

Words from one eggshell-dweller to another.

Fabian has come to the gates of Great Nest with an army.

It is not his army, technically. Seven Trees is not so desperate that it would give over this force to the official command of a male. Viola, one of that city’s most powerful females, is the speaker for her home and therefore nominally in control. Fabian himself is there to put into effect her commands. He had expected this arrangement to rankle more than it has.

It helps that Viola is calm, long-sighted and intelligent. She does not try to tell him how to do his job. She gives him the broad sweep of strategy, bringing to the table an understanding of conflict and of spider nature that is far in excess of his own. He attends to the tactics, playing an army of thousands of ants like a maestro with his fluid, adaptable chemical architecture. The two of them work surprisingly well together.

Another reason that he is glad not to have the final authority is that he is similarly denied the final responsibility. To get this far, Seven Trees and its allies have tallied up a butcher’s bill of the enemy that leaves Fabian shaken every time he considers it. Aside from numberless dead ants, several hundred spiders have perished in the fighting, some by design, others by happenstance. Great Nest has done its best to reverse the tide by killing the Seven Trees leaders, hampered in its belief that those leaders must necessarily be female. Fabian has thus been bypassed by assassins on several occasions, whereas Viola has lost two legs and has personally ended the lives of three attempting to kill her. It is a terrible truth they have discovered about themselves – all the participants in this conflict – that they are of a race that does not kill lightly, and yet give them a cause and they will.

And now they are at Great Nest itself, their army facing a host of ants dredged from that larger city’s colonies, most of which are not even conditioned for military service but will fight against enemy ants if they must.

Ahead of them, the vast conurbation that is the spiders’ greatest city seems fragile, like mere tatters of silk that the wind might blow away. For most of his life this was Fabian’s home. There are hundreds of thousands of spiders currently crouching in their peer houses, beneath their canopies, against the tree trunks and branches, waiting to see what will happen next. There has been almost no evacuation, and Fabian has heard that the Temple has done its best to prevent anyone leaving.

Viola has sent a messenger to the peer houses of Great Nest, with a list of demands. The messenger was a male, therefore Fabian does not envy his chances. When he himself complained, Viola stated darkly that if Fabian truly wished all the freedoms of a female for his gender, then his fellow males must take the same risks.

Fabian can only try to imagine the debate going on in Great Nest even now. Portia and her temple priestesses must be urging resistance. Perhaps they believe that the Messenger will save them, even as She once interceded for Her people in the great war with the ants in ancient times. Certainly the Temple radio frequencies must be crammed with prayers for deliverance. If the Messenger has the power to aid Her faithful, then what is She waiting for?

Radio…? And then Fabian is lost briefly in a dream of science, where every ant soldier could be fitted with a radio receiver, and somehow could write its own chemical architecture according to the urgings of signals sent out over that invisible web. A colony of ants that could be orchestrated swift as thought…? He trembles at the thought. What could we not do?

And it nags at him, and nags at him, that he has come across such a thought before. And with a sudden jolt, he realizes that the great project of the Messenger, which Portia and her fellow zealots have given their all to realize – the indirect cause of this war – could itself be just such a thing. No ants, no chemicals, but that net of copper would carry impulses just as the radio would, just as the individual ants in a colony would. And were there not switches, forks, gates of logic…? It seems to him that such a design would have the virtue of speed, yet surely it could not be as versatile and complex as an ant colony working at full efficiency?

You know Portia. Will she yield? Viola prompts him. They have been waiting for a response for so long that the sun is now going down. Full dark was their deadline, for the ants can fight perfectly well at night.

If she is still in control, she will not. The Seven Trees forces will tear Great Nest open, if they have to, and Fabian is very afraid that within the close, confused confines of a city he may lose control. Scraps of his army may end up cut off from him, unable to be directed, still following their last conditioning. The death toll, amongst those whose only crime is to have made Great Nest their home, will be horrifying. Fabian would almost rather turn back.

Viola has explained things patiently, though. Great Nest’s influence has been cut back to the city’s very boundaries, but it must still concede defeat. There are tens of other temple-dominated cities across the world. They must be taught this lesson.

Fabian has already heard the outcome of other conflicts. Entire cities have been burned – by design or by simple accident, given how voracious fire is and how flammable much of spider construction can be. There have been massacres on both sides. There have been ant armies gone wild, reverting to their old ways, breeding unchecked. The radio brings in daily stories of worsening warfare.

Great Nest stands as the symbol of defiance for the crusaders, though. If Great Nest submits, then perhaps sanity might be salvaged from the chaos.

They will have to kill her themselves , Viola considers.

It is a moment before he understands to whom she is referring: Portia . He himself cannot think of Portia without a stab of guilt. She is the cause of this war, as much as any individual spider is, but Fabian knows bitterly that she has done all she has for what she considers the best of reasons. She has hazarded her entire city because she believes . And he still feels respect for her, and also that curious coiling sense affecting males, that here is a female to dance for and offer his life for. It is a shameful, backwards feeling, but it has been driving the males of his species to engage in the dangerous pursuit of continuing the species for millions of years.

Fabian wishes things could be different, but he can plot no path from where he stands now, to any outcome that would see him reconciled with Portia.

Prepare our vanguard, then. Viola knows that he will already have considered the terrain, the opposing forces and the capabilities of their own troops, and formulated some custom conditioning for the initial assault – to be refined and amended as the war goes on. His revolutionary techniques have won battles against massively superior forces before. Now he will employ them against a defending force that is itself outnumbered and outclassed.

He releases his scents. He has refined the technique. As well as airborne pheromones a host of Paussid beetles are lined up, pressed into service to carry his instructions across the breadth of the army. They are buying their continued survival with their usefulness, their services offered with a spark of awareness of the deal, disturbingly clever insects that they are.