Children of Time (41 page)

This particular ant is exploring for new seams of copper within the rock. The metal ore leaves traces that its sensitive antennae can detect, and it gnaws and works patiently where a trace is strongest, digging inch by inch towards the next deposit.

This time, instead, it suddenly breaks through into another tunnel.

There is a moment of baffled indecision as the digger teeters on the brink, trying to process this new and unexpected information. After that, scent and touch have built up a sufficient picture of its surroundings. The message is clear: other ants have been here recently, ants belonging to an unknown colony. Barring other conditioning, unknown colonies are enemies by default. The ant spreads the alarm immediately, and then goes forth to investigate. Soon enough it encounters the miners of the other colony and, outnumbered, is swiftly killed. No matter: its siblings are right behind it, summoned by its alert. A cramped, vicious fight takes place, with no quarter given by either side. Neither colony has received instructions from its spider masters to cross this particular line in the sand, but nature will take its course.

The second colony, that had literally undermined the Seven Trees workings, has been sent out by Great Nest to seek for new sources of copper. Shortly thereafter, centuries of diplomacy begin to break down.

Since contact with the Messenger was first established, metals consumption has increased exponentially in an attempt to keep up with the complex blueprints that form the Divine Plan. Those cities like Great Nest that are most fervent in pursuing God’s design must push outwards constantly. Supply cannot keep up with demand unless new mines are opened – or appropriated.

Consequently, more mining works are being contested between rival colonies. Elsewhere, caravans of mineral wealth fail to reach their proper destination. In a few cases entire mining colonies are uprooted, driven away or suborned. Those who lose out are all relatively small cities, and none of them strong adherents of the message. A storm of diplomacy follows, amidst considerable uncertainty as to what has actually happened. Open conflict between spider cities is almost unknown, since every city is bound to its neighbours by hundreds of ties. There are struggles for dominance but thus far in their history, the point has always been that there must be something to be dominant over. Perhaps it is due to the nanovirus still working towards unity between those that bear its particular mark of Cain. Perhaps it is simply that the descendants of
Portia labiata
have developed a worldview in which open brute conflict is best avoided.

All this will change.

Eventually, when the truth becomes sufficiently evident to all parties, the transmitters of Great Nest issue an ultimatum to its weaker neighbours. It denounces them as straying from the purity of the message, and claims for itself the right to take whatever steps it must, to put into effect the will of God. Transmissions from the Messenger, though always obscure and open to interpretation, are taken to endorse Great Nest’s proclamation. Slowly at first, and then more and more rapidly, this outright division spreads from local differences into a global fragmentation of ideology. Some faithful cities have thrown in their lot with Great Nest’s vision, whilst others – distant others – have set up rival claims based on different interpretations of the Messenger’s commands. Certain cities that had already begun to turn away from the message have pledged support to those cities that Great Nest has threatened, but those cities themselves are not united in their response. Other cities have declared independence and neutrality, some even severing all contact with the outside world. Sister conflicts have sparked up between states which perhaps have always rubbed along with a little too much friction, always jostling for leg room, for food, for living space.

At the disputed mining sites, many of which have changed hands several times by this point, Great Nest sends in dedicated troops. Another task that ant colonies will perform without special conditioning is to fight unfamiliar ants, and a mining colony is no match for an invading army column equipped with special castes and technologies. In two months of hard warfare, not a spider has died, but their insect servants have been slaughtered in their thousands.

Great Nest can draw upon a vastly larger and more coordinated army than its opponents and one that is better designed and bred for war, but those first months are still inconclusive. When Portia and her fellows gather together to review their progress, they are faced with an unwanted revelation.

We had thought to find matters settled
, Portia considers, listening to her peers weave together their next moves: a sequence of steps that will lead them to . . . where? When the original actions over the disputed mining sites were agreed, their purpose had seemed very plain. They all knew they were in the right. The Messenger’s will must be done, and they needed copper in great quantities – copper that Seven Trees and the other apostate cities would have little use for, save to trade to Great Nest at a ruinous cost. So: seize the mines; that had been a simple aim in itself, and it has been accomplished relatively quickly and efficiently, all things considered.

And yet it seems that building the future is never so simple. Each thread always leads to another, and there is no easy way to stop spinning. Already Portia’s agents in Seven Trees and the other cities know that Great Nest’s enemies are building and training forces to take back the mines, and perhaps to do even more. Meanwhile, the peer group magnates of her enemies are engaging in similar debates over what is to be done. Every council has its extremists who push for more than mere restitution. Abruptly, to call for moderation is to seem weak.

All around Portia, there are those saying that more must be done to secure Great Nest from its new-minted enemies, and thereby to secure the will of their divine creator. They are performing that oldest of tricks: constructing a path by which to reach a destination, only in this case the destination is permanent security. With each step they take towards it, that security recedes. And, with each step they take, the cost of progressing towards such security grows, and the actions required to move forward become more and more extreme.

Where will it end?
Portia wonders, but she cannot bring herself to voice her doubts. An ugly mood has come to the web-walled chamber. Great Nest has its spies in other cities, individuals and whole peer groups who have been bought or who are sympathetic to the dominant city’s ideology. Equally, those other cities will have their agents in Great Nest. Previously, this interconnectedness of cities has always been a virtue, a way of life. Now it is a cause for suspicion, straining the bonds between peer groups, awakening division and distrust.

Nothing is being decided here, so she heads for Temple. It seems plain to her that guidance is needed.

She transmits as good a report of the situation, and her concerns, as she can, knowing that, while her speech to the Messenger will be private, God’s response will be received by anyone listening on Great Nest’s frequency – which will certainly include some residing in Seven Trees.

The record of the Messenger in dispensing practical advice is not good, as Portia is painfully aware. She knows she cannot expect something so much grander than her to spare much consideration for the lowly affairs of Her creations. God is intent on Her machines that will apparently solve many problems, not least that of the maddeningly imperfect communication between the Messenger and those She has set below Her.

Portia is not expecting a clear response therefore, but the Messenger seems to understand her better than she realized. The intended meaning is not precisely clear, for despite a painstakingly negotiated common language, the Messenger and Her congregation are separated by a gulf of common ground and concepts that is only slowly being filled. However, Portia understands enough.

The Messenger is aware that there are differences of opinion amongst Her creation.

She knows that some, like Portia, work hard to fulfil Her directives.

She knows that others, such as the Temple in Seven Trees, do not, and indeed have lost much of their reverence for the Messenger and Her message.

She instructs Portia now that the very future of her people is dependent on Her will being executed precisely and promptly. She states that a time of great danger is coming, and only by obeying Her will may this be averted.

She says, in words clear enough for Portia to understand without a trace of uncertainty, that Portia should take any and all steps to reach Her goal, and that there is no higher goal than this.

Portia retreats from the temple, prey to a whirl of mixed emotions. Spider feelings are not human feelings, but there is something in her of shock, also something of elation. Never before has the Messenger spoken so clearly.

Great Nest’s hand has now been forced. Not only has their duty to God been personally reaffirmed, but spies in Seven Trees and the other enemy cities will also have heard God’s latest words, and they will hardly have to wonder hard about what question could have yielded that dogmatic answer.

Life in Seven Trees has not turned out to be as free and effortless as Fabian hoped.

Bianca, at least, has fitted in well enough. Her contacts amongst the astronomical sorority have seen her installed comfortably into a respected peer group, although a powerful peer house in Seven Trees is still considerably smaller and poorer than even a mediocre house in Great Nest. She did offer to find Fabian a favoured position there, and indeed worked quite hard to import him with her – perhaps to quit a debt of gratitude or perhaps because she has seen how useful that dangerous little mind of his can be. He refused.

Life has been difficult for Fabian during the months since, but he has a plan. He has begun to ascend the thread of life, and this time as nobody’s pet or favourite, acting without patronage and without sacrificing his vaunted freedoms.

Males in Seven Trees may have more freedom and influence than in Great Nest, but they can still be killed out of hand. They still have no more rights than any momentary usefulness grants them.

Seven Trees also has its gutters, though there is less of an underclass than Great Nest – just as there is less of everything else – but there are still surplus males and females down on their luck; each prey for another, just fallen corpses to be cleared away by the maintenance ants.

Fabian was nearly killed several times before he was able to take the first steps in establishing himself as a diminutive power within Seven Trees. Hungry females stalked him, delinquent males chased him from their territories, and he grew shrunken from starvation and exposure. At last, though, he was able to make contact with some females who had lost everything, yet had not quite descended into unthinking cannibalism. He managed to catch them on the very cusp of savagery.

They are three haggard sisters, ageing scions of a peer group that is now nothing but a memory in the higher reaches of the city. When Fabian found them they still kept a little tent of a peer house in good repair, at the very base of one of the trees that regrew here after that great and ancient war when the ants burned down the originals. They listened to him speak, taking turns to vanish from his sight purportedly to instruct the house males concerning his meagre entertainment. He knew there were no males, and what hospitality they could muster was mere crumbs: tiny insects and an old, half-mummified mouse that they had been feeding off for days.

I will reverse your fortunes
, he told them.
But you must do what I say.

He needed them. It was a bitter admission, but any social group must be fronted by females.
For now.

What must we do?
they had asked him. Any flavour of hope was nectar to them, even that offered by a scruffy foreign male.

Just be yourselves
, he had assured them.
I will do the rest.

Having attached himself to them, he had gone out with more confidence to begin recruiting.

There were hundreds of abandoned males scratching a living on the ground level around Seven Trees. They lacked training, education or useful experience, but they all had inherited Understandings of one kind or another. Now Fabian sought them out, interviewed them, adopting those who had abilities he could use.

Acting as merely the servant of one of the old crones he ostensibly worked for, he began to undertake jobs for more powerful peer houses, employing the chemical architecture of the ant colonies. With his unique system, it was not long before word of his prowess began to spread. The peer house of the three old females accumulated favours and barter. Soon they were spinning themselves a new house higher up on the tree, reaching for the same dizzying heights they had once known.

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.