Adrian Tchaikovsky - Children of Time

She feels tremors from below, and sees someone climbing up towards her. It is Fabian – her Fabian, just one of countless males named after the great liberator. He is one of two males in her twelve-strong crew, and her personal assistant – chosen for his quick mind and agile body.

It is overwhelming, is it not?

He has a knack for saying the right things, and it doesn’t matter whether he means the performance below or the great lit-up tangle that is the city around them. Tomorrow, history will be made.

Fabian dances for her, then, because he senses that she is unhappy, and a little flattery and attention tonight will help her on the morrow. Away from the crowd, he now performs for her the ancient courtship of their kind, and is received in turn. Monogamy – mon andry , rather – is not a concept the spiders have much familiarity with, but some pairs grow used to each other. Fabian dances only for her, and she rebuffs the advances of any other.

As always, at the height of his performance, when he has set down his offering before her, she feels that deep-buried jab to push the matter on to a fatal consummation. But this is all part of the experience, adding zest and immediacy before swiftly being overridden by her more civilized nature. These days such things hardly ever happen.

Below them, the performance also reaches its climax. Later, the artists will take it all down, consume their swathes of webbing and dismantle their masterpiece. Art, like so much else, is transient.

Elsewhere in the city, in the hub of learning and research that is also the Great Nest temple for the dwindling number of parishioners who still need to embrace the unknown in their lives, Bianca is at work making her last minute preparations. She is not one of Portia’s select crew, but she has had a hand in the mission as a whole. Her interest in tomorrow’s departure is almost maternal, for she has been the motivating force behind so much that is about to happen. Her true intentions are not quite what others suspect – nothing nefarious – but she has an unusual mind equipped for thinking broader thoughts and seeing further.

Bianca is a born polymath, in this context meaning she is able to absorb far more Understandings than the average spider. Unlike Portia, she changes her mind regularly. The core of what she considers herself to be is simply her capacity and desire to learn, not any individual facility she might briefly take within her. Currently she is an expert radio operator, chemist, astronomer, artificer, theologian and mathematician, her mind crammed to bursting with a complex interlacing of knowledge.

Now, long past the time when her kin are all resting, she checks and rechecks her calculations, and designs troubleshooting architecture for the ant colony she has instructed to model and double check her figures.

Her newfound theology combines with the basic thoughtfulness of her nature to give her a sense of awe and reverence about the venture in hand. Hubris is not quite a concept she grasps, but she comes very close here, alone in her control centre, as she walks through the complex stages of the plan within her mind.

She has a rare perspective that enables her to look back on so many generations of struggle and growth and be able to give a shape and a texture to history, to appreciate the incremental contributions of all those Portias and Biancas and, yes, Fabians down through the generations. Each has contributed Understandings to the sum total of arachnid knowledge. Each has been a node in the expanding web of progress. Each has planned out the path one step beyond their ancestors. In a very real way, Bianca is their child, the product of their learning, daring, discovery and sacrifice. Her mind throngs with the living learning of dead ancestors.

She understands, in a real and immediate way, how she stands on the backs of giants, and that her own back, too, will be strong enough to bear the weight of many generations to come.

Next morning Portia and her crew assemble at a point beyond where the last buildings of the city taper into nothing, in the midst of a great swathe of farmland, among stands of stubby, warty trees stretching to the horizon, separated by firebreaks and the well-trodden pathways of the farming ants. The weather is fine: cloudy but with only a little breeze, as predicted. This moment has already been put off twice previously owing to inclement conditions.

Portia remains tense and still. The others deal with their nervousness each in their own way. Some crouch, some run about, some tussle or talk nonsense, feet stamping out a fretting staccato. Viola, the leader, goes from each to each, with a touch, a stroke, a twitch of palps, reassuring them.

Fabian is the first to see the Sky Nest.

Even at this distance, it is absurdly huge as it floats majestically over Seven Trees, coasting smoothly over the Great Nest district like an optical illusion. The vast, silvery bulk of its gasbag is currently three hundred metres long, dwarfing the long, slender cabin suspended beneath. Later, they will extend the envelope to twice its current size until the lift-to-weight ratio reaches the extreme proportions that their project will require.

The spiders have been using silk for gliding since before the earliest Understanding, and their increasing intelligence has led to multiple refinements of this art. Their chemical synthesis meanwhile gives them access to as much hydrogen as they need. With a technology of silk and lightweight wood, even their experiments with powered heavier-than-air flight result in something feather-light and buoyant. Constructing dirigibles is something they have taken to readily.

Lines are dropped by the skeleton flight crew, unravelling a hundred metres to reach the ground. Glad to be in motion at last, Portia and the others scramble up, a climb barely worth mentioning. There is a brief, ceremonial handover from the flight leader to Viola, and then the flight crew abseil down their own lines and leave the Sky Nest to its new occupants.

The airship is a triumph of engineering, rugged enough to withstand the turbulent weather of the lower air, and yet – with the gasbag fully extended and filled – capable of ascending to previously inaccessible heights. The aerodynamic profile of the entire vessel is fluid, and determined, moment to moment, by the tensioned cords of its internal structure. Now it is lifting into a stiffening breeze, its structure shifting in automatic response as the new crew settles in.

Their target height is so far above their world that it barely qualifies as height at all. And even then there will be a greater journey for the most adventurous of them: for Portia.

Viola checks that her crew members are in place, and then joins Portia at the forward edge of the cylindrical crew compartment, gazing out through the faintest shimmer at the receding ground below. Already the gasbag is expanding further, bloating out with more hydrogen, its leading edge reshaping itself for streamlining, as the Sky Nest lifts away faster and faster. Here, in the bows, is the radio and also the main terminal for the airship’s brain.

Viola places her palps into paired pits in the lectern before her, and the Sky Nest tells her how it feels, how all its component pieces are holding up. It is almost like speaking on the radio, almost like talking to a living thing. She spoke to the Messenger once, did Viola, and communicating with the Sky Nest feels much like that.

Tiny antennae brush and twitch the sensitive hairs of her palps, feeding her information by touch and by scent. Two of her crew stand ready to give chemical commands to the terminal here, which will swiftly spread across the ship.

The ongoing calculations required to take an object of gossamer and hydrogen to the upper reaches of the atmosphere would challenge even the polymath Bianca, who therefore designed the ship to think for itself: a patient, dedicated intelligence subordinate to the commands of its spider crew. The airship is crawling with ants. This particular species is small – two centimetres at most for the workers – but bred to be receptive to complex conditioning. In fact the colony writes much of its own conditioning, its standing chemical architecture allowing it to receive direct information about the ship’s situation and constantly respond to it without the intervention of the crew.