Children of Time (44 page)

‘Damage report!’ Lain’s team were all up on the dais now, accessing the
Gil
through the machinery there. ‘Karst, get control, you useless fuckwit!’

Karst pointed his rifle at the ceiling and loosed a handful of shots, the roar of the gun scouring the room free of any other human noise, but unable to blot out the tortured glossolalia of the speakers. On the screens, something was trying to form itself into Guyen’s face, a proof of ascension for the true believers; it failed and failed again, incomplete and distorted. Sometimes, Holsten thought, it was Kern’s face instead.

He lurched his way up the steps to join Lain. ‘What’s going on?’

‘He’s in the system, but . . . it’s another incomplete copy like his test runs. Only it’s more . . . there’s more of him. I’m trying to isolate him, but he’s fighting me – they’re all fighting me. It’s like he’s seeded the fucking computer with his people, sent them ahead to clear the way. I—’

‘You shall not prevent me!’ boomed the virtual Guyen, his first complete sentence. ‘I! Me! I am! Eternal! I! I am!’

‘What’s—?’ Holsten started but Lain gestured him away.

‘Just shut up, will you? He’s trying to get control over life-support.’

Karst’s people were clearing out Guyen’s followers, who seemed a lot less exultant about the partial ascension of their leader than they had probably anticipated.

‘Vitas,
help
, will you?’

The science chief had simply been staring at the screens, but now she appeared to come to a decision. ‘I agree, this has gone far enough.’ As though it was simply a matter of an experiment that had outlived its 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.

5.8
CONQUERING HERO

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.

Then there is a bright flash from one of Viola’s spotters, palps signalling a clear message.

A party is on its way out of Great Nest, twenty or more strong. At their head is the male emissary Viola sent in.

Fabian feels a gripping tension leach out of his limbs. Great Nest wants to talk.

He does not recognize the bulk of the enemy delegation. Certainly none of the females now apparently in control are familiar. There are a handful he does recall, Portia’s cronies from her peer house or from the temple. They are hobbled with silk and herded out by their erstwhile political opponents. They are being given over to the enemy.

The story spills out swiftly. There has been a changing of the guard in Great Nest. There has been fighting within the city, spider against spider, at the highest level. The priesthood has been broken and cast down. Some remain in hiding, sheltered by those who still believe in the sanctity of the message. Some are believed to have fled. The balance are here, as a token of goodwill.

Of Portia, there is no word. Fabian imagines her alone and on the run. She is resourceful enough to survive and now, without the infrastructure of the Great Nest Temple, she is not the threat to the world’s peace she once was. No doubt Viola and the others will hunt her down, or her former fellows in Great Nest will, but he hopes that she survives. He hopes that she escapes to find some quiet living somewhere, and does something good.

Terms are then negotiated, punitive but not impossible. The new clique ruling Great Nest treads a delicate line between defiance and acquiescence; Viola knows the game and plays along. It is only in watching the Seven Trees female throw herself into negotiations that Fabian realizes how much she, too, had wanted to avoid taking that final, unthinkable step.

This is not the end of the war of doctrine, but it is the beginning of the end. The fall and conversion of Great Nest is both the catalyst and a model for the future. Fighting continues in various parts of the world but those who still believe that the Messenger’s message is all-important only lose ground.

This does not mean that nobody is talking to God, of course, but they no longer listen with the same single-minded purpose that Portia and her fellows did. Progress on the Messenger’s machine loses its original frantic fervour, although it does not grind to a halt. There will always be scientific minds willing to take up the challenge, who continue to speak in guarded, monitored terms to the Messenger and try and reduce the complex, technical language into something fitting spider technology. The irony is that in now taking a layman’s view of the instructions, some progress is being made that the faithful might never have achieved with their more doctrinal approach.

And, quite soon after Great Nest capitulates, Fabian finds himself crouched before the leading females of Seven Trees: a very similar gathering to the one he faced during the war. Viola is dominant, her war-heroine status confirmed, and they all remember the deal they signed in adversity. He has been expecting this moment, when the great and good try to go back on their word.

Has he allies? Perhaps. Bianca is there, one of the lowliest of the great, but great nonetheless, and as much through her connections with him as due to her own scientific achievements.

The female magnates shuffle and settle, murmurs passing around the web. Viola brings them to order neatly.

Of course, Seven Trees and our allies owe a great debt to your discoveries
, she allows.
Our own chemical architects are already considering all the other aspects of daily life that could be improved by such fine control as you can offer.

I never intended my work to be used as a tool of violence
, Fabian confirms calmly.
And, yes, the possibilities are near endless.

Perhaps you will share your plans with us?

They all become very still, waiting for his first wrong move.

I have my own peer house
, he tells them, reminding them right at the start of one of their major concessions. He feels the dislike and the unease ripple out and then vanish back into their accomplished composure.
I have my peers, who have shared in my Understandings. As you say, there is so much that can be revolutionized. I have already begun.

He remembers Bianca in Great Nest, calling him a dangerous little monster. They all see him that way now. More, they fear him, and perhaps this is the first time females have ever feared a male, in his world. They must wonder whether, if he called, an army would come against them, slaved to his will and his new architecture.