Children of Time (45 page)

This is not his intention, however, and Fabian suspects that if he makes them too fearful of him, they will kill him and all his followers outright, whatever the loss to posterity. He must make up ground quickly.
My peer house will help make our city the greatest the world has ever seen. Whilst it is true that my discovery must eventually spread to the wider world, whoever has first use of it will always remain its mother, and thus need never fear the armies of those who lack it.

Much muted messaging vibrates around the edge of the web. Hard, calculating female gazes study Fabian, a mere morsel before them. He can see that most of them want to put him in his place, to take back what was previously given under duress. Probably they would do it with the best intentions, under the long-ingrained assumption that a male simply could not be allowed responsibility for such weighty matters. Probably there are a dozen separate equivocations ongoing in the minds around him, to justify their now withholding what was promised to him. They will offer him Portia’s deal:
Let us feed and value and protect you; what else can you want?

I would prefer that city to be Seven Trees
, Fabian taps out, and hunches against the possible response.

A twitch of Viola’s palps prompts him to continue.

I cannot hold you to our bargain
, he says simply.
I have asked more of you than the Messenger Herself. I have asked you to extend to me and my whole gender the freedoms that you yourselves live and breathe by. It is no small request. It will not be easily made real. Generations from now, there will still be those for whom these reforms rankle, and places where a matter of gender still determines whether one may be killed out of hand.
The concepts themselves are hard to phrase, since gender is integral to so much of their language, so Fabian must tread the long way round to explain his meaning.
All I can say is this: that city which extends to me and mine these basic rights will have my service and that of my peers, and will gain all the profit that ensues. If Seven Trees will not, then some other city, more desperate, shall. If you should kill me here, you will find some of my peers already outside the city, carrying my Understanding with them. We will go where we are made welcome. I would like you to make us welcome here.

He leaves them arguing fiercely over his fate. The decision, he hears later, is close, almost as many against as for. Seven Trees nearly has its own schism there and then. Respected matriarchs resort to measuring legs against one another like juvenile brawlers. In the end, solid mercenary interest outweighs outraged traditional propriety – but only just.

Fabian himself does not live to see the world he has helped create. Two years after Great Nest’s surrender, he is found dead in his laboratory, drained to a husk by parties unknown. Many believe that resentful traditionalists from Seven Trees are responsible. Others claim that Temple fanatics from some defeated city had tracked him down. By that time the war is won, though, and the spiders are not normally given to exacting vengeance for its own sake. Their nature tends towards the pragmatic and constructive, even in defeat.

There are some who say that the perpetrator was Portia herself, whose name has since acquired a curious mystique – often spoken of but never seen, her final whereabouts and fate a mystery.

By then, however, Fabian’s new architecture cannot be put back in its box. His extensive peer house, mostly but not uniformly male, has spread well beyond Seven Trees, the Understanding carefully guarded, but its advantages aggressively exported as stock in trade. A technological revolution is sweeping the globe.

Already it has reached those who speak to the Messenger. The application of Fabian’s genius to matters of the divine is still in its infancy, but his wartime revelation – that his new architecture could in some way approximate to what God wishes them to build – is the dream of a number of other enquiring minds.

And out in cold orbit is the fused thing that is Avrana Kern and the Sentry Pod, its computer system and the Eliza mask that it sporadically dons. She is desperate to communicate with her creation. She has taught her monkeys, as she thinks of them, a common language. Originally a stripped-down Imperial C, it has mushroomed into a dense field of unfamiliar concepts, as the monkeys have run away with it. She is aware that, in opening communications with the inhabitants of the green planet, she has broken new ground in the long history of the human race. Having no other humans (in her view) to share it with, she finds the triumph lacking. She is also increasingly aware that the frame of reference of her new people seems very different. Although they share a language, she and they do not seem to have the commonality of concept that she would have expected.

She is increasingly concerned about them. They seem further away from her than she would have anticipated from fellow primates.

She is aware that direct interference from her, in the sense of shoehorning her desires directly into their nascent culture, is entirely against the dictates of the Brin’s mission, which was to gently encourage them, and always let them come to her. There is no time. She has been away for far too long, aware that the Sentry Pod’s power reserves have dwindled during her long sleep, and have subsequently been drained almost to nothing by her showdowns with the
Gilgamesh
, its drones and its shuttles. The solar cells recharge slowly, but the energy deficit has already taken its toll, starving the auto-repair systems which have slowly accumulated a colossal and continual workload just to keep the pod’s vital systems going.

She is increasingly, miserably aware that she herself is now better classified as a vital system than anything truly living. There is no line where the machine leaves off and she begins, not any more. Nothing of Avrana Kern is so viable as to be able to stand on its own. Eliza and the upload and the withered walnut that is her biological brain are inseparable.

She has been trying to transmit to the monkeys her plans for an automated workshop, which she could then instruct to start building things down on the planet. She could then transfer herself, datum by datum, down into the gravity well. She could finally meet her arboreal people. Most importantly, she could communicate with them properly. She could look into their eyes and explain herself.

The monkeys have made draggingly slow progress, and time is one of many things that Avrana Kern simply does not have enough of. She cannot understand it, but the technology that seems to have arisen on her planet has gone in a wildly different direction to that of Earth. They do not even seem to have invented the wheel, yet they have radios. They are slow to understand much of the task she has set them. She, in turn, cannot follow much of what they say to her. Their technical language is a closed book.

And that is a shame, because she needs to prepare them. She needs to warn them.

Her people are in danger.

The
Gilgamesh
is coming back.

6.1
THE BALLOON GOES UP

Portia is watching art being made.

She is fidgety, nervous – not the fault of the art itself, but she has a great task in front of her, which occupies most of her mind. She never had much patience with sculpture-telling at the best of times. A shame that all this is being done in her honour.

Not just hers, of course. All twelve of her crew are here, being seen and being lauded. Portia is not even nominally in command of the voyage. However, hers is the task of greatest risk. Hers is the name being drummed about the Great Nest district of Seven Trees.

She tries to shrug off her nerves and concentrate solely on the performance. Three nimble male artists are telling the story of the martyr Fabian, the great scientist and enfranchiser. Starting with just a few support lines they have spun themselves a three-dimensional narrative, their threads crossing and knotting and intersecting in a constantly evolving kinetic sculpture of silk that suggests scenes from the famous pioneer’s life, and finally death. Each scene is built on the bones of the last, so that the ephemeral and delicate sculpture they create grows and branches, a constantly evolving visual narrative.

Portia is ashamed to find she is bored. She does not have that poetic turn of mind to properly appreciate this art form – the allusions and memes required to follow the story are not found in her Understandings. She is a pragmatic creature of simple, visceral pleasures. She hunts, she wrestles, she climbs, she mates; traditional pursuits and perhaps a little old-fashioned. She prefers to think of them as timeless.

She could, of course, go to the city library and obtain an Understanding that would immediately allow her to appreciate this art in all its glory, but what would she lose? Some less-regarded ability or knowledge would be shouldered out, for her mind has finite limits on what it can retain. Like many of her kind, she has grown comfortable with what she is, and loathe to change if there is no grand need for it.

She stays still for as long as she can bear, politely eyeing the ever-more-complex structure, while feeling the appreciative stir and tremble of the audience, knowing only that it is something denied to her. At last, she simply cannot stay any longer in that crowd under that grand, tented ceiling, and creeps out as covertly as possible. This is her night, after all. Nobody is going to deny her.

Outside, she finds herself in the centre of the great conurbation that is Seven Trees’ scientific district. Struck by a need for greater height and clear air, she ascends limb over limb, by line and by branch, until she can see the darkness of the sky above, seeking out the pinpoint bright dots that are stars. She knows, by learning and by Understanding, that they are so far away as to make any concept of the real distance meaningless. She recalls nights spent in the wilderness, though – for there is still wilderness despite the growth of the spider communities and their attendant support structures. Once away from the constant glare of the bioluminescent city lights, the stars can seem clear and close enough to touch.

Here, though, she can barely see them at all, with everything around her lit up in a hundred shades of green and blue and ultraviolet. A strange thing that she, whose work places her at the very fang-point of scientific advance, feels that life is outstripping her, actually leaving her behind.

Within her she has Understandings that were first held by some distant hunting ancestress whose life was constant toil: working to feed herself and her kin, fighting off ancient enemies who are now safely domesticated or extinct or driven to the wildest corners of the map. Portia – this Portia – can look back at the simplified, even romanticized, recollections of that time that she has inherited, and yearn for a less complex life.

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.