Children of Time (42 page)

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.

Within minutes Fabian’s forces have pulled out with minimal losses, and with prisoners, a handful of scouts cut off, immobilized and carried away.

Fabian and his fellows retreat, and keep retreating until the pursuing scouts from Great Nest break off and follow their own scent trails back to the advancing column. Left in peace, Fabian’s team set up their laboratory and use samples from the captured scouts to brew up a fresh set of instructions for their soldiers.

Their ants are given their initial orders. Their little force splits up, each ant to its own, and heads for the enemy.

What are you doing?
Bianca demands.
You have thrown away your army.
Everyone knows that ants are only effective in force. A lone ant counts for nothing.

We must move
, is all Fabian will say.
We must be upwind of them.
It is an annoying limitation of his technique, but one he will solve in time. He is already working out systems in his head, using Paussid beetles as carriers of new information, or somehow triggering chemical releases by distant visual cues . . . but for now he must work with what he has.

The host of individual ants reach the enemy column, and pass through the far-flung screen of scouts without any alarm being raised. They touch antennae with the invaders, a quick fidget of appendages, and are let through, recognized as friends.

From a viewpoint in the branches, Fabian tensely watches his ants accumulating unnoticed within the Great Nest ranks. Now comes the hardest step for Fabian himself. He has never been responsible for the death of another of his species. He knows that there are those who live lives of deprivation where to fight, kill and even consume another spider is simple survival, but he feels strongly that he is working directly against such deprivation, and that to kill one’s own belongs in the past. The nanovirus in him resists the necessity of what he intends, recognizing the sibling strains in his potential victims.

His plan is delicately balanced, however, and he cannot let anything endanger it.

There are a dozen or so observers from Great Nest moving amidst the thousands-strong column. Surely they will notice the foreign ants amongst their ranks? Although the Great Nest army will already have its rigid architecture in place, there will be a series of pre-set protocols that the spider officers will trigger, no doubt including one to order the attack on Seven Trees itself. It is possible that one of these pre-prepared positions will be some manner of emergency response.

Fabian releases his next set of instructions with some foreboding.

His infiltrators systematically seek out and murder the Great Nest spiders accompanying the army. They attack fearlessly, releasing alarm scents that throw the nearby loyalist ants into a frenzy. It is a calculated, merciless act painstakingly planned out in advance. Watching the result, which leaves knots of ants grappling over loose limbs and scraps of carapace, Fabian’s people and Bianca are quiet and subdued. Of course it is not the first time that spider has killed spider, or even that male has killed female, but this is different. It represents a gateway to a new war.

From there on, the Great Nest column is doomed. Fabian’s soldiers eat it from the inside out. The invading army has some defences, pre-set conditioning to defend itself against unexpected attack, plus shifting scent codes that change in a prearranged sequence over time. But Fabian’s new architecture allows him to shift swiftly to adapt. The lumbering composite engine that is the Great Nest army has detected that something is going wrong, but it simply cannot adjust quickly enough to understand the threat. A trail of dead ants stretches for kilometres, by the time Fabian is through. His own losses are less than a dozen. His Thermopylae has been not a physical but a mental constriction that the enemy simply could not pass through while he held it against them.

Great Nest is not defeated yet. The column Fabian has destroyed is merely a fraction of the military machine that the Temple there can set in motion. Seven Trees’ victory will be answered by further aggression, no doubt. Fabian returns home and presents himself to the ruling females.

They demand to know his secret. He will not tell them, and he confirms that he and all of his peer group have taken precautions to ensure that their new Understandings cannot be extracted by force from their dead bodies.

One of the females – call her Viola – takes the lead.
So what will you do?

Fabian suspects that she has thought further ahead than her sisters, having used his services before the war came. She has some idea how he thinks.

I will defeat Great Nest and its allies
, he declares.
If necessary I will take an army from Seven Trees all the way to their city, and show them the error of their ways.

The reactions he sees are a fascinating mix: horror that a male can speak so boldly of such large matters; ambition to see their stronger rival humbled; desperation – because what option do they have?

Viola prompts him to go on: she knows there is more.

I have a condition
, he admits. Before that massed and hostile gaze, he outlines for them what he wants, what he wishes them to commit Seven Trees to, in return for its survival. It is the same deal he put before Portia. They are scarcely more inclined towards it, but then Portia was not in their current precarious position.

I want the right to live
, he tells them, as firmly as he dares.
I want the death of a male to be punishable, just as the death of a female is – even a death after mating. I want the right to build my own peer house, and to speak for it.

A million-year prejudice stares back at him. The ancient cannibal spider, whose old instincts still form the shell within which their culture is nestled, recoils in horror. He sees the conflict within them: tradition against progress, the known past against the unknown future. They have come so far, as a species; they have the intellect to break from the shackles of yesterday. But it will be hard.

He turns slowly on the spot in a series of short, jerky moves, looking from eye to eye to eye. They weigh him up, and they weigh the cost of his demands against the cost of having to acquiesce to Great Nest. They consider what his victory has bought them, and how it has improved their bargaining position. They ponder what Great Nest will exact from them if they surrender – certainly the temple at Seven Trees will be emptied and filled with foreign priestesses, all enforcing their orthodox vision of the Messenger’s will. Control of Seven Trees will be removed from these females here. Their city will become a puppet worked by strings from afar, dancing to the pulse of Great Nest’s radioed instructions.

They confer, they agonize, they threaten each other and scuffle for dominance.

At last they formulate their answer.

5.7
ASCENSION

‘It wasn’t meant to happen like this. It wasn’t meant to take so much
time
.’

Holsten was dining with Guyen. The commander’s cultists, or highly trained engineers or whatever they really were, had brought him some of the rations that he remembered being pillaged wholesale from the terraforming station. It was heated and thawed to a warm slurry, and he spooned this slop unenthusiastically into his mouth as the old man talked. What Guyen ate these days was unclear, but he probably had a tube for that – and another one at the other end to deal with what his desiccated insides couldn’t process.

‘I woke up a crew that looked good, according to the records. They all had tech experience,’ Guyen went on, or at least the machines that spoke for him did. ‘We had all the kit we’d taken from the station. Preparing the ship was supposed to be
quick
. Just another few days. Just another few months. Just another year. Always just another year. And then I’d go to sleep for a bit, and wake up, and they’d still be at work . . .’ His withered face went slack with remembering. ‘And you know what? One day I woke up, and all those young faces . . . I realized that half the people doing the work had been born
outside
suspension. I’d taken up peoples’ whole lives, Mason – they’d been trying to make it work for that long. And the new generation . . . they didn’t know as much. They had learned what they could but . . . and then came another generation, devolving, understanding less than before. Everyone was too busy
doing
the work to pass on the knowledge. They knew nothing but the ship, and me. I had to lead them because they had work to do, no matter how inferior they were, how much longer it would take.’