Adrian Tchaikovsky - Children of Time

He flashes his humble acquiescence briefly and heads out as far along the branch as he dares, settling and resettling his feet over and over as he considers the jump ahead. Portia flashes her exasperation back to Bianca, but her companion is watching something below. An apparition like a walking carpet is creeping along the forest floor, another spider but a species that the nanovirus has managed to gift with a greater size and little else. As bulky as half a dozen Portias, it would kill her in a moment if only it could catch her.

Bianca is hungry. She indicates the ground-crawler and idly suggests they break their journey now.

Portia considers and finds the suggestion has merit. She waits until the male has made his jump across – easily, despite all his trepidation – and leaves him hauling himself back along his own line to begin the bridgework. Then she flashes a message to Bianca and the two of them begin to descend.

The hairy hunter below is intent on its own hunger – the forest is not short of prey species of varying sizes, many of them abortive results of the nanovirus’s work. There are some surviving vertebrate species – mice, birds, dwarf deer, snakes – but the virus has tried and failed with them. Kern’s experiment called for monkeys, and she ensured that the green planet’s chosen would suffer no competition from close cousins. The vertebrates that the monkeys were intended to interact with were designed to reject the virus. They have changed hardly at all.

Nobody considered the invertebrates, the complex ecosystem of tiny creeping things intended to be nothing more than a scaffolding by which the absent monkeys would ascend.

In so many cases – as with the great tarantula-descendant below that Portia is considering – whilst the virus was able to provoke growth, the sought-for neural complexity never arose. Often the environmental pressure to select for such a facility was simply lacking. A sense of self and the ability to contemplate the universe are not necessarily survival traits in and of themselves. Portia is a rare exception – though not the only exception – where increased cognitive capacity granted an immediate and compelling advantage.

The carpet-like hunter stops, the faintest of vibrations reaching it. The forest floor is strewn with its thread, forming a messy but effective sense organ that alerts it to the movements of its prey. Against a creature as simple as this, Portia and her kin prefer hunting methods that have not changed in thousands of years.

Portia has discerned the pattern of threads below, running through the leaf litter, almost hidden save to eyes as keen as hers. She reaches down with a foreleg and plays them carefully, speaking eloquently the language of touch and motion, creating a phantom prey, and giving it the illusion of size, distance and weight entirely conjured by her skill. She places herself in the primitive mind of the ground-hunter, as surely as if she could actually implant her thoughts there.

It advances a handful of steps, testing out this sensation, not wholly convinced. She wonders if it has had some near-escapes with her kind before. The great shaggy abdomen is up, ready to shake out a cloud of barbed hairs that will choke Portia’s book-lungs and irritate her joints.

She reaches down gingerly again, prying and tugging, suggesting that the illusory prey is getting further away, soon to escape entirely. Her body is mottled and irregular as her ancestors’ were, and the ground-hunter’s simple eyes have not made her out.

It takes the bait suddenly, in a hairy rush across the forest floor towards nothing, and Bianca drops on its back, fangs first, driving them in where its legs meet its body, and then springing away a few body-lengths to be out of the way of any riposte. The hunter lunges after her, but stumbles even as it does so, abruptly unsteady. Moments later it is twitching and quivering as the venom takes effect, and the two females wait for it to grow motionless – though still alive – before closing in to feed. Bianca in particular remains taut for another leap to escape if need be, her abdomen heaving slightly in and out as she forces air past her book-lungs.

Up above, the male is looking down plaintively and, when Portia checks on him, he signals for permission to feed. She tells him to finish his work first.

A moment later he has dropped down practically on top of her, sending her leaping instinctively backwards, landing clumsily and flipping onto her back before righting herself angrily. Bianca has come within a whisker of killing the male, but he is stamping and signalling frantically: Danger coming! Danger! Spitters!

And he is right: here come her kind’s ancestral foes.

The spitting spiders, the Scytodes, have marched in step with Portia’s kin all the way from their miniscule beginnings. They are somewhere between her and the ground-hunter in size; but size was not the key to dominance even in the ancient days before the virus. Now she sees them creep warily forwards, a whole troop of them: six – no, eight – individuals, spread out but watching, come down off their web to hunt. They hunt in packs, these uplifted Spitters, and Portia has an understanding that they are not beasts, whilst not having achieved whatever she has become. They are the big, shambling killers constantly on the edge of Portia’s world; brutal lurking primitives whose unseen, implicit presence keeps hatchlings from straying too far from the nest.

If the numbers had been equal, then Portia and Bianca would have contested the kill – for they see that the Spitters have been following the path of the same prey. Eight is too many, though, even with the additional tricks the three travellers can utilize. The Scytodes will throw out their sprays of sticky, venomous webbing. Although their eyesight is weak, and Portia and her kind are smart enough to anticipate and agile enough to dodge, the sheer number of nets will make the odds of their escaping poor.

Conversely, the Spitters are well aware of the danger that Portia’s kind poses. The two species have clashed over untold generations, each time with more understanding of the enemy. Now both recognize that the other is something less than kin but something more than prey.

Portia and Bianca make automatic threats, lifting their forelimbs and displaying their fangs. Portia is considering whether her secret new weapon would even the odds. Her mind plays out likely scenarios, with and without the male’s assistance. The enemy numbers seem too great for her to be sure of victory, and her task comes first. In her mind is a meta-plan, just the sort of A-to-B route-finding that her distant antecedents performed, save that her goal is not just a spatial location but an intangible victory condition. A fight now with the Spitters would likely leave her in no position to achieve what she has set out to do.

She signals to the other two to fall back, making her gestures large and slow enough that the inferior eyes of the Spitters will read them. Can they understand her? She does not know. She could not even say whether they have some way of communicating amongst themselves that approximates to her own visual and vibrational language. Still, they hold off – no spitting and only a minimal threat display from them, as Portia and her cohorts retreat. Bianca’s feet pluck out a muttering refrain of frustration and annoyance. Being larger than Portia, she is quicker to seek physical confrontation. She is here because that has its uses, but for that same reason she knows to follow Portia’s lead.

They ascend once more, aware now that they must hunt again, and hope that the Scytodes clan will be satisfied with what was left here for them. Sometimes the Spitters follow, if they have the numbers, and then it would be a choice of fast flight or turn and ambush.