Children of Time

5.1 THE PRISONER

Holsten was pondering his relationship with time.

Not long ago, it seemed that time was becoming something that happened to other people – or, as other people had then been in short supply, to other parts of the universe. Time was a weight that he seemed to have been cut free from. He stepped in and out of the forward path of its arrow, and was somehow never struck down. Lain might call him ‘old man’ but in truth the span of objective time that had passed between his nativity and this present moment was ridiculous, unreal. No human ever bestrode time as he had done, in his journey of thousands of years.

Now, in his cell, time weighed him down and dragged at his heels, chaining him to the grindingly slow pace of the cosmos where before he had leapt ahead across the centuries, skipping between the bright points of human history.

They had hauled him from the suspension chamber and thrown him in this cage. It had been twenty-seven days before anyone gave him even an indication of what was going on.

At first, he’d thought it was a dream of the mutineers kidnapping him. He had been quite sanguine before he realized that the people dragging him through the Gilgamesh were not the long-dead Scoles and company, but total strangers. Then he had entered the living quarters.

The smell had assailed him – an utterly unfamiliar, sick reek that even the Gil’s ventilation had not been able to purge. It was the scent of close-packed human habitation.

He had a blurred recollection of a former operations room now festooned with grey cloth, a veritable shanty town of makeshift drapes and hangings and close partitions – and people, lots of people.

The sight had shocked him. Some part of him had grown comfortably used to being part of a small and select population, but he registered at least a hundred unfamiliar faces in that brief moment. The press of them, the closeness of their living conditions, the smell, the sheer raucous noise, all of it merged into the sense of confronting a hostile creature, something fierce and inimical and all-consuming.

There had been children.

His wits had started to come to him by then, with the thought: The cargo’s got loose!

His captors all wore robes of the same sheer, grey material that the squatters were also using for their amateurish tents – something that the Gilgamesh had presumably been storing for some other purpose entirely, or that had been synthesized in the workshops. Holsten had spotted a few shipsuits during his hurried passage through the living quarters, but most of the strangers had been wearing these shapeless, sagging garments. They were all thin, malnourished, underdeveloped. They wore their hair long, very long, past the shoulders. The whole scene had a weirdly primal feel to it, a resurgence of the primitive days of mankind.

They had seized him, locked him up. This was not just some room in the Gil that they had secured. Within one of the shuttle bays they had welded together a cage, and this had become his home. His captors had fed him and sporadically removed the pail provided for his other functions, but for twenty-seven days that was all he had. They seemed to be waiting for something.

For his part, Holsten had eyed the shuttle airlock and begun to wonder if his future did not include some kind of space-god sacrifice. Certainly the manner of his captors was not simply that of oppressors or kidnappers. There was a curious respect, almost reverence to be observed amongst some of them. They did not like to touch him – those who had manhandled him to the cage had worn gloves – and they refused to meet his eyes. All this reinforced his growing belief that they were a cult and he was some sort of sacred offering, and that the last hope for humanity was even now vanishing away beneath a tide of superstition.

Then they set him to work, and he realized that he must surely be dreaming.

One day he woke up in his cell to find that his captors had brought in a mobile terminal: a poor, lobotomized sort of a thing, but at least a computer of sorts. He leapt on it eagerly, only to find it linked with nothing, entirely self-contained. There was data there, though, files of familiar proportions written in a dead language that he was frankly coming to loathe.

He looked up to find one of his captors peering in – a thin-faced man, at least a decade younger than Holsten but small-framed like most of them and with pockmarked skin suggesting the aftermath of some manner of disease. As with all these bizarre strangers, he had long hair, but it was carefully plaited and then coiled at the back of his neck in an intricate knot.

‘You must explain it.’

It was the first time any of them had spoken to Holsten. He had begun to think that he and they shared no common language.

‘Explain it,’ Holsten repeated neutrally.

‘Explain it so it can be understood. Make it into words. This is your gift.’

‘Oh, for… you want me to translate it?’

‘Even so.’

‘I need access to the Gil’s main systems,’ Holsten stated.

‘No.’

‘There are translation algorithms I wrote. There are my earlier transcriptions I’ll need to refer to.’

‘No, you have all you need in here.’ With great ceremony the robed man pointed at Holsten’s head. ‘Work. It is commanded.’

‘Commanded by whom?’ Holsten demanded.

‘Your master.’ The robed man stared coldly at Holsten for a moment, then suddenly broke off his gaze, as though embarrassed. ‘You will work or you shall not eat. This is commanded,’ he muttered. ‘There is no other way.’

Holsten had sat down at the terminal and looked at what they wanted from him.

That was the beginning of his understanding. Obviously he was dreaming. He was trapped within a dream. Here was a nightmarish environment, both familiar and unfamiliar. Here was a task without logic that was nonetheless the cracked mirror of what he had undertaken when last awake, when the Gilgamesh had been in orbit over the grey planet. He was in the suspension chamber still, and dreaming.

But of course one did not dream in suspension. Even Holsten remembered enough about the science to know that. One did not dream because the cooling process brought brain activity to an absolute minimum, a suspension of even the subconscious movements of the mind. This was necessary because unchecked brain activity during the enforced idleness of a long sleep would drive the sleeper insane. Such a situation arose out of faulty machinery. Holsten remembered clearly that they had lost human cargo already: perhaps this is how it had been for those martyrs.

It was a strangely calming revelation to know that his suspension capsule must be failing at some deep, mechanical level, and that he was lost inside his own mind. He tried to imagine himself fighting with the sleeping-chamber, crawling up the steep incline of ice and medication so as to wake up, beating on the unyielding inside of the coffin, buried alive within a ship-shaped monument to mankind’s absurd refusal to give up.

None of it got the adrenaline going. His mind stubbornly refused to leave that makeshift cell in the shuttle bay, as he worked slowly through the files he had been left with. And of course it was a dream, because they were more of the same: more information about Guyen’s machine, the upload facility the man had wrenched whole from the abandoned terraform station. Holsten was dreaming an administrative purgatory for himself.

Days went by, or at least he ate and slept and they slopped out his pail. He had no sense of anything functional happening outside the cage. He could not see what these people were for, save living day to day and forcing him to translate, and producing more of themselves. They seemed a weirdly orphan population: like lice infesting the ark ship, that the Gil might any moment purge from its interiors. They must have begun life as cargo, but how long ago? How many generations?

They continued to regard him with that curious reverence, as though they had caged a demigod. It was only when they came to shave his head that he fully understood that. They, none of them, seemed to cut their hair, but it was important to them that his scalp was cropped back to fuzz. It was a sign of his status, his difference. He was a man of an earlier time, one of the originals.

As is Vrie Guyen. The unhappy thought finally dispelled his somewhat fond thought that this might all be some hibernation nightmare. Wading his way through tangled philosophical treatises concerning the implications of the upload process, he had a window into Guyen’s tightly clenched, control-hungry mind. He began to assemble the sketchiest possible picture of what might be going on; of what might have gone wrong, therefore.

Then one day they opened his cage, a handful of robed figures, and led him out. He was not finished on his current project, and there was a tension about his keepers that was new. His mind immediately boiled with all manner of potential fates they could be intending for him.

They moved him out of the hangar and into the corridors of the Gilgamesh, still not speaking. They seemed to lack the show of reverence in which they had previously held him, which he reckoned could not bode well.

Then he saw the first bodies: a man and a woman collapsed in their path like string-cut marionettes, the textured flooring sticky with a slick of blood. They had been hacked at with knives, or at least that was Holsten’s impression. He was hurried on past them, his escorts – captors – paying no obvious heed to the dead. He tried to question them, but they just hauled him along quicker.

He considered struggling, shouting, protesting, but he was scared. They were all solidly made people, bigger than most of the grey ship-lice he had observed so far. They had knives in their belts, and one had a long plastic rod with a blade melted into the end: these were the ancient tools of the hunter-gatherers remade from components torn from a spaceship.

It had all been handled so swiftly and confidently that only right at the end did he realize that he had been kidnapped: wrested from one faction by another. At once, everything became worse than he had thought. The Gilgamesh was not just crawling with crazy descendants of awoken cargo, but they had already begun fighting each other. It was the curse of the Old Empire, that division of man against man that was the continual brake on human progress.

He was hustled past sentries and guards, or so he took them to be: men and women, some in shipsuits, some in makeshift robes, others in piecemeal home-made armour, as though at any moment someone would be arriving to judge the world’s least impressive costume competition. It should have been ridiculous. It should have been pathetic. But, looking into their eyes, Holsten was chilled by their steely purpose.

They brought him into one of the ship’s workshop rooms, housing a score of terminals, half of them dead, the rest flickering fitfully. There were people working on them – real technical work befitting real civilized people – and it looked to Holsten as though they were fighting for control, engaged in some colossal virtual battle on an invisible plane.

At the far end of the room was a woman with short-cut hair, a little older than Holsten. She wore a shipsuit that had been fitted out with plastic scales and plates, like somebody’s joke idea of a warrior queen, if only she had not looked so very serious. There was a ragged, healed scar about her chin, and a long pistol was thrust through her belt, the first modern weapon Holsten had seen.

‘Hello, Holsten,’ she said, and his interpretation of what he was seeing suddenly flipped like a card turning over.

‘Lain?’ he demanded.

‘Now you’ve got that look on your face,’ she observed, after giving him enough time to get over his surprise. ‘That one that’s sort of “I have no idea what’s going on”, and frankly I can’t seriously believe that. You’re supposed to be the smart guy, after all. So how about you tell me what you know, Holsten.’ She sounded partly like the woman Holsten remembered, but only if that woman had been living hard and rough for some time.

He gave the request due consideration. A lot of him genuinely wanted to disavow any knowledge, but she was right: that would be self-serving mendacity. I’m just a poor academic doing what I’m told. I’m not responsible. He was beginning to think that he was indeed, in part, responsible. Responsible for whatever was happening now.

‘Guyen’s taken over,’ he hazarded.

‘Guyen’s the commander. He’s already, what, over. Come on, Holsten.’

‘He’s woken up a whole load of cargo.’ Holsten glanced at Lain’s villainous-looking crew. Some of them he thought he recognized as her engineers. Others could well be more of the same cargo that Guyen had apparently now pressed into service. ‘I’d guess he started on that a while ago – looks like they’re maybe two, three generations down the line? Is that even possible?’

‘People are good at making more people,’ Lain confirmed. ‘Fuckwit never thought that one through, or maybe he did. They’re like a cult he’s got. They know fuck all but what he’s told them, yeah? Any of the originals from cargo who might have argued, they’re long gone. These skinny little creeps were basically raised on stories of Guyen. I’ve heard some of them talking, and they’re fucked up, seriously. He’s their saviour. Every time he went back into suspension, they had a legend about his return. It’s all kinds of messianic shit with them.’ She spat disgustedly. ‘So tell me for why, Holsten.’

‘He had me working on the upload facility taken from the station.’ A little of the academic crept back into Holsten’s unsteady tones. ‘There was always a suggestion that the ancients had found out how to store their minds electronically, but the EMP phase of their war must have wiped the caches out, or at least we never found any of them. It’s not clear what they actually used it for, though. There’s very little that’s even peripheral reference. It didn’t seem to be a standard immortality trick—’

‘Spare us!’ Lain broke in. ‘So, yes, Guyen wants to live forever.’

Holsten nodded. ‘I take it you’re not in favour.’

‘Holsten: it’s Guyen. Forever. Guyen forever. Two words that do not sit well together.’

He glanced at her confederates, wondering if things here in Lain’s camp had got to the point where dissent was punishable. ‘Look, I understand it’s not the most pleasant idea, but he’s got us this far. If he wants to load his mind into some piece of ancient computing, then are we definitely sure that’s something worth, you know, killing people over?’ Because Holsten was still thinking a little about those crumpled bodies he had seen, the price of his freedom.

Lain put on an expression to show that she was considering this viewpoint. ‘Sure, fine, right. Except two things. One, I only got one look at his new toy before he and I had our falling out, but I don’t reckon that thing’s a receptacle for minds: it’s just the translator. The only place he can go is the Gilgamesh’s main system, and I seriously do not think that it’s set up to keep doing all of its ship-running with a human mind shoved into it. Right?’

Holsten considered his relatively extensive understanding of the upload facility. ‘Actually, yes. It’s not a storage device, the thing we took from the station. But I’d thought he’d got something else from there…?’

‘And have you seen any of your old files that suggest he has?’

A grimace. ‘No.’

‘Right.’ Lain shook her head. ‘Seriously, old man, did you not think about what it was all meant for, when you were doing his work?’

Holsten spread his hands. ‘That’s unfair. It was all… I had no reason to think that there was anything wrong. Anyway, what’s your second thing?’

‘What?’

‘Two things, you said. Two reasons.’

‘Oh, yes, he’s completely nut-bucket crazy. So that’s what you’re diligently working to preserve. An utter god-complex lunatic.’

Guyen? Yes, a bit of a tyrant, but he had the whole human race in his hands. Yes, not an easy man to work with, someone who kept his plans to himself. ‘Lain, I know that you and he…’

‘Don’t get on?’

‘Well…’

‘Holsten, he’s been busy. He’s been busy for a very long time since we left the grey planet. He’s set up his fucking cult and brainwashed them into believing he’s the great hope of the universe. He’s got this machine mostly up and running. He’s tested it on his own people – and believe me that’s not gone well, which is why it’s still only mostly up and running. But he’s close now. He has to be.’

‘Why has to be?’

‘Because he looks like he’s a fucking hundred, Holsten. He’s been up and about for maybe fifty years, on and off. He told his cultists he was God, and when he woke up next time they told him he was God, and that little loop has gone round and round until he himself believes it. You see him, after they woke you?’

‘Just his people.’

‘Well, believe me, any part of his brain that you might recognize abandoned ship a long time ago.’ Lain looked into Holsten’s face, hunting out any residual sympathy there for the commander. ‘Seriously, Holsten, this is his plan: he wants to put a copy of his brain into the Gil. He wants to become the Gil. And you know what? When he’s done it, he won’t need the cargo. He won’t need most of the ship. He won’t need life-support or anything like that.’

‘He’s always had the best interests of the ship at heart,’ said Holsten defensively. ‘How do you know—?’

‘Because it’s already happening. Do you know what this ship was not designed for? Several hundred people living on it for about a century. Wear and tear, Holsten, like you wouldn’t believe. A tribe of people who don’t know how anything actually works getting into places they’re not supposed to be, buoyed up by their sincere belief that they’re doing God’s work. Things are falling apart. We’re running out of supplies even with what we took from the station. And they just go on eating and fucking, because they believe Guyen will lead them to the promised land.’

‘The green planet?’ Holsten said softly. ‘Maybe he will.’

‘Oh, sure,’ Lain scoffed. ‘And that’s where we’re heading all right. But, unless things get back under control and people go back to the freezer, Guyen’ll be the only one to get there – him and a shipful of corpses.’

‘Even if he does manage to upload himself, he’ll need people to fix him.’ Holsten wasn’t sure precisely why he was defending Guyen, unless it was that he had long made a profession out of disagreeing with just about every proposition put in front of him.

‘Yeah, well.’ Lain rubbed at the back of her neck. ‘There was all that auto-repair system business we took from the station.’

‘I didn’t know about that.’

‘It was priority for my team. Seemed like a good idea at the time. I know, I know – conniving at our own obsolescence. It’s up and running, too, or looks like it. But, from what I saw, it’s not dealing with the cargo or even most of the systems we need. It’s only set up for those parts of the ship Guyen’s interested in. The non-living parts. Or that’s the best impression I got, before I took my leave.’

‘After Guyen woke you.’

‘He wanted me to be part of his grand plan. Only, when he gave me access to the Gilgamesh, I found out too much way too fast. Some seriously cold stuff, Holsten. I’ll show you.’

‘You’re still in the system?’

‘It’s all over the ship, and Guyen’s not good enough to lock me out… Now you’re wondering why I haven’t screwed him over from inside the computer.’

Holsten shrugged. ‘Well, I was, yes, actually.’

‘I told you he’s been testing the upload thing? Well, he’s had some partial successes. There are… things in the system. When I try and cut Guyen out, or fuck with him, they notice me. They come and start fucking right back. Guyen, I could handle, but these are like… retarded little AI programs that think they’re still people. And they’re Guyen’s, most of them.’

‘Most of them?’

Lain looked unhappy – or rather, unhappier. ‘Everything’s going to crap, Holsten. The Gil’s already starting to come apart at the system level. We’re on a spaceship, Holsten. Have you any idea how fucking complex that is? How many different subsystems need to work properly just to keep us alive? At the moment, it’s actually the auto-repair that’s keeping everything ticking over, rerouting around the corrupted parts, patching what it can – but it’s got limits. Guyen’s pushing those limits, diverting resources to his grand immortality project. So we’re going to stop him.’

‘So…’ Holsten looked from Lain to her crew, the old faces and the new. ‘So I know about the upload facility. So you got me out.’

Lain just looked at him for a long moment, fragments of expression burning fitfully across her face. ‘What?’ she said at last. ‘I’m not allowed to just rescue you, because you’re my friend?’ She held his gaze long enough that he had to look away, obscurely ashamed of what was objectively an entirely reasonable paranoia he felt about her, about Guyen, and about near enough everything else.

‘Anyway, get yourself cleaned up. Get yourself fed,’ she instructed him. ‘Then you and I have an appointment.’

Holsten’s eyebrows went up. ‘With who?’

‘Old friends.’ Lain smiled sourly. ‘The whole gang’s together again, old man. How about that?’

5.2 IN GOD’S COUNTRY

Portia stretches and flexes her limbs, feeling the newly hardened sheen of her exoskeleton and the constricting net of the cocoon she has woven about herself. The urge came at an inconvenient time, and she put it off as long as she could, but the cramping tightness at every joint had eventually became unbearable and she was forced to go into retirement: a moon’s-span of days out of the public eye, fretting and fidgeting as she split her way out of her cramped old skin and let her new skeleton dry out and find its shape.

During her lying-in she has been attended by various members of her peer house, which is a dominant force now in Great Nest. There are two or three others who, as a union, could challenge the hold of Portia’s family, but they are seldom friends with one another. Portia’s agents provocateurs ensure that they are kept constantly fighting over second place.

The political realities of Great Nest are finely balanced just now, however. Despite the reports brought to her daily during her lying-in, Portia knows there will be dozens of key pieces of information that she will have to catch up with. Thankfully, there is a ready mechanism for doing that.

Portia is the greatest priestess of the Messenger that Great Nest has, but a month out of circulation will have given many of her sisters ideas. They will have been talking to that fleet, all-important light in the sky, receiving the bizarre, garbled wisdom of the universe, and using it for their own benefit. They will have been taking over the grand, often incomprehensible projects ordered by the voice of God. Portia will have to jostle to recover her old prominence.

She descends to the next chamber, a gaggle of younger females attending her. A flicker of her palps and a male is brought in. He has lived a busy month, and been present at gatherings that his gender are usually banned from. Everywhere that Portia might have gone, he was brought by her adherents. He has had every missive, every discovery and reversal, every proclamation of God patiently explained to him. He has been well fed, pampered; he has wanted for nothing.

Now, one of the females brings forward a bulging bulb of silk. Within is the distilled Understanding that the last month has added to this male. It comprises an intelligence report which, if delivered in any conventional way, would be interminable in its detail. That single draught contains enough secrets of Portia’s peer house to hand Great Nest on a platter to any of her enemies.

She drinks, the fluid thick with learning, the bulb held within her palps as she carefully drains its contents, before passing it to her subordinates to be destroyed. Already she feels a flutter of discord inside her as the nanovirus she has just ingested begins to fit the purloined knowledge into place within her own mind, accessing the structure of her brain and copying in the male’s memories. Within a day and a night she will know all that he knows, and likely she will have lost some unfrequented mental pathways too, some obsolete skill or distant recollection reconfigured into the new and the necessary.

I will send word about him. She indicates the male. Once she is sure that the new Understandings have taken, the male will be disposed of – killed and eaten by one of Portia’s clique. He knows too much, quite literally.

Portia’s society has come some way since the primitive days when the females ate their mates as often as not, but perhaps not so very far. The killing of males under the protection of another peer house is a crime that demands restitution; the needless killing of any male garners sufficient social disapprobation that it is seldom practised, and the culprits usually shunned as wasteful and lacking that golden virtue of self-control. However, to kill a male for a good reason, or after coitus, remains acceptable, despite occasional debates on the subject. This is simply the way things are, and the conservation of tradition is important in Great Nest these days.

Great Nest is a vast forest metropolis. Hundreds of square kilometres of great trees are festooned with the angled silk dwellings of Portia’s kin, constantly being added to and remodelled as each peer house’s fortunes advance or decline. The greatest of the spider clans dwell in the mid-level – shielded from the extremes of weather, but suitably distant from the lowly ground where those females without a peer group must fight for leg-room with a swarm of half-savage feral males. In between the peer houses are the workshops of artisans who produce that dwindling stock of items that ants cannot be bred to manufacture, the studios of artists who weave and craft and construct elegant knot-script, and the laboratories of scientists of a score of disciplines. Beneath the ground, amongst the roots, crawl the interlocking networks of ants, each nest to its own specialized task. Other, larger, nests radiate out from the metropolis’s limits, engaged in lumberjacking, mining, smelting and industrial manufacture. And, on occasion, war. To fight the other is something that every ant colony can remember how to do, if the need arises, although Great Nest, like its rivals, has specialist soldiers as well.

Portia, on her way to temple, feels fragments of current affairs falling into place within her. Yes, there have been further troubles with Great Nest’s neighbours: the lesser nests – Seven Trees, River Chasm, Burning Mountain – they are testing the boundaries of territory once again, jealous of the supremacy of Portia’s home. It is likely that there will be a new war, but Portia is not concerned about the result. Her people can muster far more ants – and far better designed ants – for the fight ahead.

The sheer size of Great Nest necessitates a public transport system in the higher reaches. The central temple where Portia holds sway is some distance from the site of her lying-in. She is aware that the transporting of things is the province of God, and among God’s troubling, hard-to-understand plans are various means of moving from place to place at great speed, but so far no peer house, no city, has succeeded in realizing any of them. The spiders have made their own arrangements in the interim, albeit with a cringing awareness that they are inadequate compared to the Divine Plan.

Portia boards a cylindrical capsule that is strung along a thick, braided strand, and lets it carry her at a rushing speed through the arboreal glory that is her home. The motive power is partly stored energy in silk springs, a macro-engineered development drawn from the structure of spider-silk itself, and partly cultured muscle: a mindless slab of contracting tissue running along the dorsal rib of the capsule, obliviously hauling itself over and over – efficient, self-repairing and easy to feed. Great Nest is a complex interconnecting web of such capsule-runs, a network amongst networks, like the vibrational communications strands that go everywhere, since the temple maintains a rigorous monopoly on the invisible traces of radio waves.

Shortly thereafter she steps into the temple, carefully marking the reactions of those she finds there, sniffing out potential challengers.

What is the position of the Messenger? she asks, and is told that the voice of God is in the skies, invisible against the daylight.

Let me speak to Her.

The lesser priestesses clear out of her way somewhat resentfully, having had the run of this place for a month. The old crystal receiver has been improved steadily since the messages of God became comprehensible – that being the first lesson of God, and one of the most successful. Now there is a whole machine of metal and wood and silk that acts as a terminus for a sightless strand of the great and unseen web of the universe that links all such termini, allowing Portia to speak direct to other temples across half the world, and to speak to and hear the words of God.

After God originally began speaking, it took the combined great minds of several generations to finally learn the divine language, or perhaps to negotiate that language, meeting the comprehension of God halfway. Even now, a certain amount of what God has to say is simply not something that Portia or anyone can understand. It is all set down, though, and sometimes a particularly knotted piece of scripture will yield to the teasing of later theologians.

Slowly, however, a rapport with the godhead was established by Portia’s forebears, and a story was thus told. Late in the development of their culture therefore, Portia’s people inherited a creation myth, and had their destiny dictated to them by a being of a power and an origin that passed all their understandings.

The Messenger was the last survivor of an earlier age of the universe, they were told. In the final throes of that age, it was the Messenger who was chosen to come to this world and engender life out of the barren earth. The Messenger – the Goddess of the green planet – remade the world so that it would give rise to that life, next seeded it with plants and trees, and then with the lesser animals. On the last day of the previous age, at the apex of creation, the Messenger dispatched Portia’s distant ancestors to this world, and settled back to await their voices.

And, after so many generations of silence in which the Messenger’s voice alone touched the strands of that invisible world-spanning web, the temples now sing back, and the balance of God’s plan is parcelled out in piecemeal revelations that almost nobody can yet understand. The Messenger is trying to teach them how to live, and this involves building machines to accomplish purposes that Portia’s people can hardly grasp. It involves dangerous forces – such as the spark that sends signals up the strands of the ether to the Messenger, but of a vastly greater power. It involves bizarre, mind-hurting concepts of nested wheels and eyes, fires and channelled lightning. The Messenger is trying to help them, but its people are unworthy, so preaches the Temple – why else would they fail their God so often? They must improve and become what God has planned for them, but their manner of life and building and invention is wholly at odds with the vision that the Messenger relates to them.

Portia and her sisters are often in contact with the temples of other cities, but they are nevertheless drawing apart. God speaks to each of them, each temple being assigned its own frequency, but the message substantially the same – for Portia has eavesdropped on God’s dictates to others before. Each temple translates the good news differently; interprets the words and co-opts them to fit with existing mental structures. Worse, some temples are losing their faith entirely, beginning to recast the words of the Messenger as something other than divine. This is a heresy, and already there has been conflict. After all, that tiny point of moving light is their only connection to a greater universe which – they are told – they are destined to inherit. To question and alienate that swift star could leave them abandoned and alone in the cosmos.

By the end of the day, between reports and the Understanding the male has just gifted to her, she has caught up with what has transpired in her absence. Friction with the apostate Seven Trees temple is high, and there has been serious infringement at the mine sites. The demands of God mean that raw materials – metals especially – are in high demand. Great Nest has maintained a monopoly of all good veins of iron and copper, gold and silver anywhere near its ever-extending reach, but other cities constantly dispute this, by sending their own ant colonies out in column to raid the workings. It is a war where the weapons, so far, have been more efficiently bred miners rather than fiercer warriors, but Portia is aware that this cannot continue. God herself has stated, in one of those long philosophical diatribes She is partial to, that there is always a single end-point to conflict if neither side will pull back from the brink.

Spider has always killed spider. From the start, the species has had a streak of cannibalism, especially female against male, and they have often struggled for territory, for local dominance. Such killings have never been casual or common, however. The nanovirus that runs through each of them forms another web of connections, reminding each of the sentience of the other. Even males partake: even their little deaths have a meaning and a significance that cannot be denied. Certainly the spiders have never fallen so far as to practise widespread slaughter. They have reserved their wars for defending themselves against extra-species threats, such as that long-ago war against the ant super-colony that in the end proved such a boost for their technology. For a species that thinks naturally in terms of interconnected networks and systems, the idea of a war of conquest and extermination – rather than a campaign of conversion, subversion and co-option – does not come easily.

God has other ideas, however, and the superiority of God’s ideas has become a major point of dogma for the Temple – after all, why would anyone need a temple otherwise?

When she is finally on top of developments both theological and political; when she has been capsuled out of the city limits to visit the divine workshops where her priest-engineers labour to try and make real something – anything – from God’s perplexing designs, only then does she find time for a personal errand. For Portia, personal and priestly are almost always interwoven, but in this she is indulging herself: finding time to meet with one little mind amongst so many, and yet such a jewel of clarity. Several of the key moments of epiphany, in which God’s message was untangled even slightly, have originated with this remarkable brain. And yet she feels a tug of shame in spending her time in travelling to this little-remarked laboratory where her unacknowledged protégé is given the chance to experiment and build without the rigid control that the Temple traditionally exerts.

She enters without fanfare, finding the object of her curiosity studying the latest results, a complex notation of chemical analysis woven automatically by one of the ant colonies of the city. Interrupted by her presence, the scientist turns and waves palps in complex genuflection, a dance of respect, subservience and pleading.

Fabian, she addresses him, and the male shivers and bobs.

Before coming here, Portia has been to the outer laboratories to view the progress on God’s plan, and she is not heartened.

The history of the Messenger’s contact with Her chosen is the enactment of a plan. Once the language barrier was breached – as it is still being breached, missive to missive – God wasted no time in establishing Her place in the cosmos. There was, at the time, some debate amongst the scholars, but against a voice from the stars that promised them a universe grander than anything they had imagined, what could the sceptics suggest? The fact of God was inarguable.

That it served the Temple to argue God’s corner is something Portia is aware of. She is aware that the first reaching out to God was a defying of Temple edicts of the time. Now she finds herself wondering what might happen if the Great Nest temple itself once again defied God.

Unfortunately the most obvious answer is that God would simply gift more of Her message to other temples and not to Great Nest. A unity of religion has led to a rivalry and factionalism between the nests. In all their long histories they have worked together, kindred nodes on a world-spanning continuum. Now divine attention has become a resource that they must squabble for. Of course Great Nest is preeminent amongst the foremost favourites of God, with its own knot of frequencies with which it monopolizes much of the message. Pilgrims of other nests must come begging for word of what it is that God wants.

Only those of the inner temple are uncomfortably aware that the message they distribute to those petitioners is merely a best guess. God is at once specific and obscure.

Portia has viewed the best efforts in those high-risk laboratories outside the city. They are distant because they must be surrounded by a firebreak. God is in love with the same force that burns in the radios. The ants there smelt vast lengths of copper that carry pulses of that tame lightning just as silk can carry simple speech. Except that the lightning is not so easily tamed. A spark is often all it takes to birth a conflagration.

The temple scientists try to build a network of lightning according to God’s designs, but it achieves nothing, save occasionally to destroy its own creators. Somewhere out there, Portia fears, some other community may be closer than Great Nest to achieving God’s intent.

God’s work is not to be entrusted to males, but Fabian is special. Over the last few years, Portia has become curiously reliant on his abilities. He is a chemical architect of surpassing skill.

It is the age-old limiting factor: the ants are slow. The scientific endeavour of each spider nest rests on its ability to train its ant colonies to perform needed tasks: manufacturing, engineering, analysis. Whilst each generation has become more adept, pushing the boundaries of their organic technology, each fresh task requires a new colony, or else for a colony’s existing behaviour to be overwritten. Spiders like Fabian create chemical texts that give an ant colony its purpose, its complex cascade of instinct that allows it to perform the given task. Although in truth there are few like Fabian, who accomplishes more, more elegantly and in less time, than any other.

Fabian possesses everything a male might desire, and yet he is unhappy. Portia finds him a bizarre mix: a male whose value has made him forthright enough that she sometimes feels she is dealing with a competing female.

Before she retired to moult, he was hinting that he was on the brink of a great advance, and yet a month later he has not broached the subject further with any of her subordinates. She wonders if he has saved it all for her. They have a complex relationship, she and Fabian. He danced for her once, and she took the gift of his genetic material to add to her own, so as to gift their combined genius to posterity. He has learned a great deal more, since then, that he has not passed on. In truth she should wait for him to petition her but, now she is here, the subject has come up.

I am not ready, he replies dismissively. There is more to learn.

Your great discovery, she prompts. Fabian is a volatile genius. He must be handled with a care normally unbecoming in dealing with a male.

Later. It is not ready. He is agitated, twitchy in her presence. Her scent receptors suggest that he is quite ready to mate, so it is his mind that is holding him back. Let us get it over with now, she suggests. Or perhaps simply distil your new Understandings? Whilst I do not want anything to happen to you, there are always accidents.

She had not intended a threat, but males are always cautious around females. He becomes quite still for a moment save for a nervous fidgeting of his palps, an unconscious plea for his life that goes back through the generations to before their kind ever developed language.

Osric is dead, he tells her, which she was not expecting. She cannot place the name and so he adds, He was one of my assistants. He was killed after a mating.

Tell me who was involved and I shall reprimand her. Your people are too precious to consume in such a way. And Portia is genuinely displeased. There remains a tight faction of ultra-conservatives in Great Nest that believe males can have no genuine qualities that are not simply a reflection of the females around them, but that hard-line philosophy has been dying out ever since the plague, when a simple lack of numbers saw males assume all manner of roles normally reserved for the stronger sex. Other city states, like Seven Trees, have gone even further, given the far greater ravages of plague there. Great Nest, originator of the cure, has combined cultural dominance with a greater social rigidity than many of its peers.

The improved mining architecture has been completed, Fabian drums out distractedly. You are aware that I myself may be killed any day?

Portia freezes. Who would dare so tempt my disapproval?

I don’t know, but it may happen. If the meanest female is killed, that is a matter for investigation and punishment, just as if someone were to damage the common ground of the city or to speak out against the temple. If I am killed, then the only crime the perpetrator commits is to displease you.

And I would be displeased greatly, and that is why it will not happen. You need not fear, Portia explains patiently, thinking: Males can be so highly strung!

But Fabian seems oddly calm. I know it will not happen, so long as I retain your favour. But I am concerned that it can happen, that such things are permitted. Do you know how many males are killed every month in Great Nest?

They die like animals down in the lower reaches, Portia tells him. They are of no use to anyone save as mates, and not even as mates of any substance most of the time. That is not something you need to concern yourself with.

And yet I do. Fabian has more he wants to communicate, she can tell, but he stills his feet.

You are worried that you may lose my favour? Keep working as you are, and there is nothing in Great Nest you will not have, Portia assures the fragile male. No comfort and no delicacy shall be denied you. You know this.

He starts to phrase a response – she sees the emerging concepts strangled, stillborn, as he overrides the trembling of his palps. For a moment she thinks he will enumerate the things he cannot have, no matter how favoured, or that he will raise the point (again!) that all he can have, he can attain only through her or some other dominant female. She feels frustrated with him: what does he want exactly? Does he not realize how fortunate he is compared to so many of his brothers?

If only he was not so useful… but it is more than that. Fabian is a curiously appealing little creature, even aside from his concrete achievements. That combination of Understandings, impudence and vulnerability makes him a knot that she cannot stop pondering. She must some day tease him out straight or cut him through.

After that unsatisfactory confrontation with Fabian, she returns to her official duties. As a senior priestess, she has been asked to examine a heretic.

From radio communications with other temples, she is aware that other nests display varying tolerances for outspoken heresy, depending on the strength of the local priesthood. There are even those nests – some worryingly close – where the Temple is a shadow of its former strength, so that the city’s governance depends on a collusion of heretics, lapsed priests and maverick scholars. Great Nest itself remains a cornerstone of orthodoxy, and Portia is aware that even now there are plans to exert some measure of forceful persuasion on its recusant neighbours. This is a new thing, but God’s message can be interpreted as supporting it. The Messenger grows frustrated when Her words are ignored.

Within Great Nest itself, the seed of heresy has recently taken root within the very scientists the temple relies on. The mutterings of artisan females who have lost Temple favour, or vagrant males fearful for their worthless lives, are easy to ignore. When Great Nest’s great minds start to question the dictates of Temple, important magnates such as Portia must become involved.

Bianca is one such: a scientist, a member of Portia’s peer group, a former ally. She has probably entertained heretical views for a long time. Implicated by another wayward scholar, an unannounced search of Bianca’s laboratories demonstrated how her personal studies had veered on to astronomy, a science particularly prone to breeding heretics.

Portia’s kind are hard to imprison, but Bianca is currently confined to a chamber within the tunnels of a specialist ant colony bred for this purpose. There is no lock or key but, without adopting a certain scent, changed daily, she would be torn apart by the insects if she tried to leave.

The ant gatekeepers of the colony receive the correct code-pheromone from Portia, and douse her with today’s pass-scent. She has a certain period of time in which to conduct her business, after which she will become as much a prisoner as Bianca.

She feels a stab of guilt over what she is about. Bianca should have been sentenced by now, but Portia is steeped in memories of her sister’s company and assistance. To lose Bianca would be to lose a part of her own world. Portia has abused her authority just to gain this chance to redeem the heretic.

Bianca is a large spider, her palps and forelegs dyed in abstract patterns of blue and ultraviolet. The pigments are rare, slow and expensive to fashion, so to sport them displays the considerable influence – an intangible but unarguable currency – that Bianca until recently could muster.

Hail, sister. Bianca’s stance and precise footwork give the message a barbed emphasis. Here to bid me farewell?

Portia, already ground down by the vicissitudes of the day so far, hunches low, foregoing all the usual physical posturing and bluster. Don’t drive me away. You have few allies in Great Nest now.

Only you?

Only me. Portia studies Bianca’s body language, seeing the larger female change stance slightly, reconsidering.

I have no names to reveal, no others to betray to you, the accused warns the inquisitor. My beliefs are my own. I do not need a brood around me to tell me how right I am.

Leaving aside the fact that many of Bianca’s accomplices have already been seized and sentenced under the Temple’s authority, Portia has already decided to abandon that line of enquiry. There remains only one thing at stake. I am here to save you. Only you, sister.

Bianca’s palps move slightly, an unconscious expression of interest, but she says nothing.

I do not wish a home that I cannot share with you, Portia tells her, her steps and gestures careful, weighty with consideration. If you are gone, there will be a hole torn in my world, so that all else falls out of shape. If you recant, I will go to my fellows at Temple, and they will listen to me. You will fall from favour, but you will remain free.

Recant? Bianca echoes.

If you explain to Temple that you were mistaken or misled, then I can spare you. I shall have you for my own, to work alongside me.

But I am not mistaken. Bianca’s movements were categorical and firm.

You must be.

If you turn lenses on the night sky, lenses of the strength and purity that we can now produce, you will see it too, Bianca explains calmly.

That is a mystery that cannot be comprehended by those outside Temple, Portia reprimands her.

So say those inside Temple. But I have looked; I have seen the face of the Messenger, and measured and studied it as it passes above. I have set out my plates and analysed the light that it seems to shed. Light reflected from the sun only. And the mystery is that there is no mystery. I can tell you the size and speed of the Messenger. I can even guess at what it is constructed from. The Messenger is a rock of metal, no more.

They will exile you, Portia tells her. You know what that means? For females do not kill other females any more, and the harshest sentence of Great Nest is to deny the accused that metropolis’s wonders. Such felons receive a chemical branding that marks them out for death if they approach any of the city’s ant colonies – and many other colonies beyond, as the mark does not discriminate. To be exiled all too often means a return to solitary barbarism in the depths of the wilds, forever retreating before civilization’s steady spread.

I have taken on many Understandings in my life, Bianca clearly might as well not have heard. I have listened to another Messenger’s incomprehensible signals in the night. The thing you call God is not even alone in the sky. It is a thing of metal that demands we make more things of metal – and I have seen it, how small it is.

Portia skitters nervously, if only because, in her lowest hours, she herself has played host to similar thoughts. Bianca, you cannot turn away from Temple. Our people have followed the words of the Messenger since our earliest days – from long before we could understand Her purpose. Even if you have your personal doubts, you cannot deny that the traditions that have built Great Nest have allowed us to survive many threats. They have made us what we are.

Bianca seems sad. And now they prevent us from being all that we could be, she suggests. And that is at the heart of me. If I were to cut myself away from it, there would be nothing left of me. I do not just feel Temple is mistaken, I believe that Temple has become a burden. And you know that I am not alone. You will have spoken with the temples in other cities – even those cities that Great Nest is hostile to. You know that others feel as I do.

And they will be punished, in turn, Portia tells her. As will you.

5.3 OLD FRIENDS

Four of them met in an old service room that seemed to represent neutral ground in the midst of those parts of the ship claimed by the various cliques. Lain and the other two all had retinues who waited outside, eyeing each other nervously like hostile soldiers in a cold war.

Inside, it was a reunion.

Vitas hadn’t changed – Holsten suspected that overall she had not been out of the freezer much longer than he had, or perhaps she just wore the extra time well: a neat, trim woman with her feelings buried sufficiently deep that her face remained a cypher. She wore a shipsuit, still, as though she had stepped straight from Holsten’s memories without being touched by the chaos that the Gilgamesh was apparently falling into. Lain had already explained how Vitas had been enlisted by Guyen to help with the uploader. The woman’s thoughts on this were unknown, but she had come when Lain got a message to her, slipping through the circles of Guyen’s cult like smoke, shadowed by a handful of her assistants.

Karst looked older, closing in on Holsten’s age. His beard had returned – patchy, greying in uneven degrees – and he wore his hair tied back. A rifle was slung over his shoulder, barrel downwards, and he had come in armour, a full suit of the kind that Holsten remembered him favouring before – good against Lain’s gun, perhaps not so much against a knife. His technological advantage was being eroded by the backwards nature of the times.

He was also working with Guyen, but Lain had explained that Karst was something of a law unto himself these days. He controlled the ship’s armoury and only he had ready access to firearms in any quantity; his security detail, and whatever conscripts he had enlisted, were loyal to him first and foremost. And so was he, of course: Karst was Karst’s chief priority, or so Lain believed.

Now the security chief let out a loud bark of what sounded like derision. ‘You even broke the old man out of his grave for us! That sick for nostalgia, Lain? Or maybe for something else?’

‘I broke him from a cage in Guyen’s sector,’ Lain stated. ‘He’s been there for days. I guess you didn’t know.’

Karst glowered at her, then at Holsten himself, who confirmed it with a nod. Even Vitas seemed to be unsurprised, and the security chief threw up his hands.

‘Nobody tells me fucking anything,’ he spat. ‘Well, well, here we all are. How fucking pleasant. So how about you speak your piece.’

‘How’ve you been, Karst?’ Holsten asked quietly, wrong-footing everyone, including Lain.

‘Seriously?’ The security chief’s eyebrows disappeared into his shaggy hairline. ‘You actually want to do the small-talk thing?’

‘I want to know how this can possibly work, this… what Lain’s told me is going on.’ Holsten had decided, on the way over, that he was not merely going to be the engineer’s yes-man. ‘I mean… how long’s this been going on for? It just seems… insane. Guyen’s got a cult? He’s been futtering with this upload thing for, what, decades? Generations? Why? He could just have brought this business before the Key Crew and talked it over.’ He caught an awkward look shared between the three others. ‘Or… right, ok. So maybe that did happen. I suppose I wasn’t Key Crew enough to be invited.’

‘It wasn’t as though anyone needed anything translated,’ Karst said, with a shrug.

‘At the time there was some considerable debate,’ Vitas added crisply. ‘However, on balance it was decided that there was too much unknown about the process, especially its effect on the Gilgamesh’s systems. Personally I was in favour of experimentation and trial.’

‘So, what, Guyen just set himself to wake early, got a replacement tech crew out of cargo, and started work?’ Holsten hazarded.

‘All in place when he woke me. And frankly, I don’t pretend to understand the technical arguments.’ Karst shrugged. ‘So he needed me to track down people who were escaping from his little prison-camp cult thing. I figured the best thing I could do was look after my own people and make sure nobody else got hold of the guns. So, Lain, you want the guns now? Is that it?’

Lain cast a glance at Holsten to see if he was about to go off on another tangent, then nodded shortly. ‘I want the help of your people. I want to stop Guyen. The ship’s falling apart – any more and the main systems are going to be irretrievably compromised.’

‘Says you,’ Karst replied. ‘Guyen says that once he actually does the… does the thing, then everything goes back to normal – that he’ll be in the computer, or some copy of him, and everything’ll run as sweet as you like.’

‘And this is possible,’ Vitas added. ‘Not certain, but possible. So we must compare the potential danger of Guyen completing his project with that of an attempt to interrupt him. It is not an easy judgement to make.’

Lain looked from face to face. ‘And yet here you both are, and I’ll bet Guyen doesn’t know.’

‘Knowledge is never wasted,’ Vitas observed calmly.

‘And what if I told you that Guyen’s withholding knowledge from you?’ Lain pressed. ‘How about transmissions from the moon colony we left behind? Heard any of those lately?’

Karst looked sidelong at Vitas. ‘Yeah? What’ve they got to say?’

‘Fucking little. They’re all dead.’

Lain smiled grimly into the silence that generated. ‘They died while we were still on our way to the grey planet system. They called the ship; Guyen intercepted their messages. Did he tell any of you? He certainly didn’t tell me. I found the signals archived, by chance.’

‘What happened to them?’ Karst said reluctantly.

‘I’ve put the messages up on the system, where you can both access them. I’ll direct you to them. Be quick, though. Unprotected data gets corrupted quickly nowadays, thanks to Guyen’s leftovers.’

‘Yeah, well, he blames you for that. Or Kern sometimes,’ Karst pointed out.

‘Kern?’ Holsten demanded. ‘The satellite thing?’

‘It was in our systems,’ Vitas remarked. ‘It’s possible it left some sort of ghost construct to monitor us. Guyen believes so.’ Her face wrinkled up, just a little. ‘Guyen has become somewhat obsessed. He believes that Kern is trying to stop him.’ She nodded cordially to Lain. ‘Kern and you.’

Lain folded her arms. ‘Cards on the table. I see no fucking benefit to Guyen becoming an immortal presence in our computer system. In fact, I see all manner of possible drawbacks, some of them fatal for us, the ship and the entire human race. Ergo: we stop him. Who’s in? Holsten’s with me.’

‘Well, shit, if you’ve got him, why’d you need the rest of us?’ Karst drawled.

‘He’s Key Crew.’

Karst’s expression was eloquent as to his opinion of that.

And is that it, for me? I’m just here to add my miniscule weight – unasked! – to Lain’s argument? Holsten considered morosely.

‘I confess that I am curious as to the result of the commander’s experiment. The ability to preserve human minds electronically would certainly be advantageous,’ Vitas stated.

‘Planning to become Bride of Guyen?’ Karst asked, startling a glare from her.

‘Karst?’ Lain prompted.

The security chief threw his hands up. ‘Nobody tells me anything, not really. People just want me to do stuff and they’re never straight with me. Me? I’m for my people. Right now, Guyen’s got a whole bunch of weirdos who have been raised from the cradle on him being the fucking messiah. You’ve got a handful of decently tooled and trained lads and lasses here, but you’re not exactly the fighting elite. Take on Guyen and you’ll lose. Now I’m not a fucking scientist or anything, but my maths says why should I help you when I’ll likely just get my people hurt?’

‘Because you’ve got the guns to counter Guyen’s numbers.’

‘Not a good reason,’ Karst stated.

‘Because I’m right, and Guyen’s going to wreck the ship’s systems by trying to force his fucking ego into our computers.’

‘Says you. He says differently,’ Karst replied stubbornly. ‘Look, you reckon you’ve got an actual plan, as in an actual plan that would have a chance of success and not just “let Karst do all the work”? Come to me with that, and maybe I’ll listen. Until then…’ He made a dismissive gesture. ‘You’ve not got enough, Lain. Not chances, nor arguments either.’

‘Then just give me enough guns,’ Lain insisted.

Karst sighed massively. ‘I only really got as far as making one rule: nobody gets the guns. You’re worried about the damage Guyen’ll do with this thing he wants to do? Well, I don’t get any of that. But the damage when everyone starts shooting everyone else – and all sorts of bits of the ship, too? Yeah, that I understand. The mutiny was bad enough. Like I say, come back when you’ve got more.’

‘Give me disruptors, then.’

The security chief shook his head. ‘Look, sorry to say it, but I still don’t think that’ll even the odds enough for you to actually win, and then Guyen’s not exactly going to be scratching his head about where all your dead people got their toys from, eh? Get me a proper idea. Show me you can actually pull it off.’

‘So you’ll help me if I can show I don’t actually need you?’

He shrugged. ‘We’re done here, aren’t we? Let me know when you’ve got a plan, Lain.’ He turned and lumbered off, the plates of his armoured suit scraping together slightly.

Lain was icily furious as Karst and Vitas left, fists clenching and re-clenching.

‘Pair of self-deluding fuckwits!’ she spat. ‘They know I’m right, but it’s Guyen – they’re so used to doing what that mad son of a bitch says.’

She glared at Holsten as if daring him to gainsay her. In fact, the historian had felt a certain sympathy with Karst’s position, but plainly that was not what Lain wanted to hear.

‘So what will you do?’ he asked.

‘Oh, we’ll act,’ Lain swore. ‘Let Karst keep his precious guns locked up. We’ve got one workshop up and running, and I’ve already started weapons production. They won’t be pretty, but they’re better than knives and clubs.’

‘And Guyen?’

‘If he’s got any sense, he’s doing the same, but I’m better at it. I’m Engineering, after all.’

‘Lain, are you sure you want a war?’

She stopped. The regard she turned on Holsten was a look from another time – that of a martyr, a warrior queen of legend.

‘Holsten, this isn’t just about me not liking Guyen. It isn’t because I want his job or I think he’s a bad person. I have taken my own best professional judgement, and I believe that if he goes ahead with uploading his mind, then he will overload the Gilgamesh’s system, causing a fatal clash of both our tech and the Empire stuff we’ve salvaged. And when that happens, everyone dies. And I mean everyone. I don’t care if Vitas wants to make notes for some non-existent posterity, or if Karst won’t get off the fucking fence. It’s up to me – it’s up to me and my crew. You’re lucky. You woke late, and then you got to sit in a box for a bit. Some of us have been pushing every which way for a long time, trying to turn this around. And now I’m basically an outlaw on my own ship, at open war with my commander, whose crazy fanatic followers will kill me on sight. And I’m going to lead my engineers into fucking battle and actually kill people, because if someone doesn’t, then Guyen kills everyone. Now are you with me?’

‘You know I am.’ The words sounded tremulous and hollow to Holsten himself, but Lain seemed to accept them.

They were attacked as they were crossing into what Lain seemed to consider her territory. The interior of the Gilgamesh made for odd tactics: a network of small chambers and passages fitted into the torus of the crew area, bent and twisted like an afterthought around the essential machinery that had been put in first. They had just reached a heavy safety door that Lain – in the lead – obviously expected to open automatically. When it slid a shuddering inch, then stopped, there was no obvious suspicion amongst the engineers. It seemed to Holsten that, under the present regime, little things must be going wrong all the time.

With a tool case already in hand, one of them pried off a service plate, and Holsten heard the words, ‘Chief, this has been tampered with,’ before a hatch above them was kicked open and three ragged figures dropped upon them with ear-splitting howls.

They had long knives – surely nothing from the armoury, so Guyen’s people had been improvising – and they were absolutely berserk. Holsten saw one of Lain’s people reel back, blood spitting from a broad wound across her body, and the rest were down to grappling hand-to-hand almost immediately.

Lain had her gun out but was denied a target, a lack that was rectified when another half-dozen appeared, running full-tilt from the direction they had come. The weapon barked three times, colossally loud in the confined space. One of the robed figures spun away, his battle-cry abruptly turning into a scream.

Holsten just ducked, hands over his head, his view of the fight reduced to a chaos of knees and feet. Historian to the last, his thought was: This is what it must have been like on Earth at the very end, when all else was lost. This is what we left Earth to avoid. It’s been following after us all this time. Then someone kicked him in the chin, probably entirely without malice, and he was sent sprawling, trampled and stamped on, under the thrashing feet of the melee. He saw Lain’s gun smashed from her hand.

Someone fell across his legs heavily, and he felt one knee being wrenched as far as it would go, a shockingly distinct and insistent pain amidst all the confusion. He struggled to get free and found himself furiously kicking at the expiring weight of one of Guyen’s mad monks. His mind, which had temporarily given up any illusion of control, was wondering whether the commander had promised some sort of posthumous reward for his minions, and whether that promise was any consolation with a torn-open stomach.

Suddenly he was clear, and scrabbling at the wall to regain his feet. His twisted knee savagely resisted bearing any of his weight, but he was adrenalined to the eyeballs right then, and overrode it. That got him all of two steps away from the skirmish, whereupon he was grabbed. Without warning, two of Guyen’s bigger goons were on him, and he saw a knife glinting in one hand. He screamed, something to the tune of begging for his life, and then they bounced him off the wall for good measure. He was convinced he was about to die, his imagination leaping ahead, trying to brace him against the coming thrust by picturing the blade already in him in agonizing detail. He lived through the sickening lurch of impact, the cold keening of the knife, the warm upsurge of blood as those parts of him that his skin had kept imprisoned for so very, very long finally took their chance at freedom.

He was living it, in his head. Only belatedly did he realize that they had not stabbed him at all. Instead, the two of them were hurrying him away from the fight, heedless of his staggering, limping gait. With a start of horror – as though this was worse than a stabbing – he realized that this was not just random gang warfare, Guyen vs. Lain.

This was the high priest of the Gilgamesh recovering his property.

5.4 THE RIGHT TO LIFE

Fabian is brought into Portia’s presence after his escorts return him to the peer house. Her reaction on seeing him is a mixture of relief and frustration. He has been missing for most of the day. Now he is brought into a room of angled sides deep within the peer group’s domain, where Portia hangs from the ceiling and frets.

This is not the first time that he has evaded his custodians and gone walkabout, but today he was retrieved from the lower reaches of Great Nest, closest to the ground, a haunt of hungry females who either lack or have left their peer groups; the habitat of the busy multitudes of maintenance colonies whose insect bodies keep the city free from refuse; an abode of the numberless, hopeless, unwanted males.

For someone like Fabian, it is a good place to go to die.

Portia is furious, but there is a genuine streak of fear for his wellbeing that he can read in her jittery body language. You could have been killed!

Fabian himself is very calm. Yes, I could.

Why would you do such a thing? she demands.

Have you ever been there? He is crouching by the room’s entrance, his round eyes staring up at her, still as stones when he is not actually speaking. With her elevated stance that would let her leap on him and pin him in an instant, there is a curious tension between them: hunter and prey; female and male.

The ground down there is a tattered mess of broken silk, he tells her; of hastily built shacks where dozens of males sleep each night. They live like animals, day to day. They prey on the ants and are preyed on in turn. The ground is littered with the drained husks where the females have made meals of them.

Portia’s words thrum towards him through the boundaries of the room. All the more reason to be grateful for what you have, and not risk yourself. Her palps flash white anger.

I could have been killed, he echoes, matching her stance, and therefore her intonation, perfectly. I could have lived my entire life there, and died without memory or achievement. What separates me from them?

You are of value, Portia insists. You are a male of exceptional ability, one to be celebrated, to be protected and encouraged to prosper. What have you ever been denied that you have asked for?

Only one thing. He walks forwards a few careful steps, as though he is feeling out the strands of a web that only he can see. His palps move lazily. His progress is almost a dance, something of the courtship but laced with bitterness. Theirs is a voiceless language of many subtle shades. They are like us, and you know it. You cannot know what they might have achieved if they had been allowed to live and to prosper.

For a moment she does not even know what he means, but she sees his mind is still focused on that detritus of doomed males whose lives will take them no further than the foot of the trees.

They are of no value or worth.

But you cannot know that. There could be a dozen geniuses dying every day, who have never had an opportunity to demonstrate their aptitude. They think, as we do. They plan and hope and fear. Merely see them and that connection would strum between you. They are my brothers. No less so, they are yours.

Portia disagrees vehemently. If they were of any quality or calibre, then they would ascend by their own virtues.

Not if there was no structure that they could possibly climb. Not if all the structure that exists was designed to disenfranchise them. Portia, I could have been killed. You yourself said it. I could have been taken by some starving female, and nothing in that would be seen as wrong, save that it might anger you. He has stepped closer, and she feels the predator in her twitch, as if he were some blind insect blundering too close, inviting the strike.

Portia’s rear legs close up, building muscle tension for the spring that she is fighting against. And still you are not grateful that I think enough of you that your life is preserved.

His palps twitch with frustration. You know how many males busy themselves around Great Nest. You know that we fulfil thousands of small roles, and even some few great ones. If we were to leave the city all at once, or if some plague were to rid you of all your males, the nest would collapse. And yet every one of us has nothing more than we are given, and that can be taken away from us just as swiftly. Each one of us lives in constant fear that our usefulness will come to an end and that we will be replaced by some more elegant dancer, some new favourite, or that we will please too much and mate, and then be too slow to escape the throes of your passion.

That is the way things are. Following her argument with Bianca, Portia is finding this polemic too much to deal with. She feels as though her beloved Great Nest is under assault from all sides, and most from those who ought to be her allies.

Things are the way we make them. Abruptly his pose changes, and he is stepping sideways, away from her, loosening that taut bond of predation that was building between them. You asked about my discovery, before. My grand project.

Playing his game, Portia comes down from her roost, one leg at a time, while still keeping that careful distance. Yes? she signals with her palps.

I have devised a new form of chemical architecture. His manner has changed completely from the intensity of a moment before. Now he seems disinterested, cerebral.

To what end? She creeps closer, and he steps away again, not fleeing her but following that unseen web of his own invention.

To any end. To no end. In and of itself, my new architecture carries no instructions, no commands. It sets the ants no tasks or behaviours.

Then what good is it?

He stops, looking up at her again, having lured her this close. It can do anything. A secondary architecture can be distributed to the colony, to work within the primary. And another, and another. A colony could be given a new task instantly, and its members would change with the speed of the scent, as it passes from ant to ant. Different castes could be made receptive to different instructions, allowing the colony to pursue multiple tasks all at once. A single colony could follow sequences of separate tasks without the need for lengthy reconditioning. Once my base architecture is in place, every colony can be reconfigured for every new task, as often as needed. The efficiency of mechanical tasks would increase tenfold. Our ability to undertake calculations would increase at least a hundredfold, perhaps a thousandfold, depending on the economy of the secondary architecture.

Portia has stopped still, stunned. She understands enough of how her kind’s organic technology works to grasp the magnitude of what he is proposing. If it can be done, then Fabian will have surpassed the chief limiting factor that is frustrating the Temple even now, and that is preventing them from giving true reality to the Messenger’s plan. The brake will come off the advancement of their species. You have this Understanding, now?

I do. The primary architecture is actually surprisingly simple. Building complex things out of simple things is the basis of the idea. It’s like building a web. I also have a system for constructing any secondary architecture, fit for any task required. It is like a language, a concise mathematical language. He stalks forwards a few steps, as if teasing her. You will appreciate it. It is as beautiful as the first Message.

You must pass this Understanding to me immediately. For a moment Portia feels the strong desire to mate with him, to take his genetic material into herself, with its newfound Understanding, to set down immediately the first of the next generation who will rule the world. Perhaps she should instead have him distil his new knowledge so that she can drink it and Understand it herself, rather than leave it to her offspring, but the thought seems intimidating. How will the world look, when he gives her the secret of unlocking the future?

He does not speak. His shuffling feet and trembling palps suggest an odd coyness.

Fabian, you must pass on this Understanding, she repeats. I cannot imagine how you thought risking yourself could be acceptable, if you hold this knowledge.

He has ventured quite close, almost within the span of her forelegs. He is a little more than half her size: weaker, slower, more fragile and yet so valuable!

So unlike the rest of my kind? It is as if he has read her mind. But I am not, or you cannot know if I am or am not. How many Understandings are extinguished every day?

None like yours, she tells him promptly.

You can never know. That is the problem with ignorance. You can never truly know the extent of what you are ignorant about. I will not do it.

She physically recoils. Explain yourself.

It dies with me. I will not distil this Understanding. I will take steps to prevent it being taken by force. For, of course, there were chemical countermeasures for that now as well.

Why would you do such a thing?

Fabian looks direct into her eyes. Unless.

Unless? she prompts.

You are the pre-eminent priestess of Great Nest. I think there is no female more influential than you, Fabian observes, still watching her intently.

You wish to mate…? she begins tentatively, because Portia is finding some difficulty in knowing what he, a pampered male, can really want that he does not already have for the asking.

No. I wish you to go to your peer group, and to Temple, and to the other great matriarchs of Great Nest, and tell them that there will be a new law. Tell them that to kill a male shall be as abhorrent to them as to kill another female. Tell them that my brothers deserve to live.

She freezes because, yes, there have been deranged philosophers in the past who might put up such an idea as an intellectual exercise, and there are those other cities where the males assumed more of the work after the ravages of the plague, and have never quite let go. But that is not Great Nest – and Great Nest’s way is the true way, the preferred path of the Messenger.

Within her, biology and custom are at war. There is a place in her mind where the nanovirus lurks and it tells her that all her species are kin, are like her in a way that other creatures are not, and yet the weight of society crushes its voice. Males have their place; she knows this.

Don’t be foolish. You cannot equate every ignorant, crawling male with one such as yourself. Of course you are protected and valued for your accomplishments. That is only natural, that merit be rewarded. The great host of males beneath us, though, the surplus, what use are they? What good are they? You are an exceptional male. Something female got into you in the egg, to make you thus. But you cannot expect my sisters to blindly extend such consideration to every male in the city just because of you. What would we do with them?

Put them to work. Find their strengths. Train them. Use them. Apparently Fabian has given this matter some thought.

Use them as what? What use can they be?

You can never know, because you do not try.

She rears up in frustration, sending him scuttling back, momentarily terrified. She would not have struck, but for a moment she wonders if that sudden injection of fear might assist her argument. When he settles himself across the chamber from her, though, he seems even more resolved.

What you ask is unnatural, she tells him sternly, controlling herself.

There is nothing about what we do that is natural. If we prized the natural we would still be hunting Spitters in the wilderness, or falling prey to the jaws of ants, instead of mastering our world. We have made a virtue of the unnatural.

She does not trust herself to answer, so she scurries past him, almost knocking him aside. You will reconsider, she tells him, pausing in the doorway to beat out the rhythms of her anger. You will give up this foolish dream.

Fabian watches her go, eyes glinting with rebellion.

He cannot simply walk out of the peer house. From a genuine concern for his safety, Portia has given instructions that Fabian is not to leave. She does not see it as an imprisonment; it is simply not fitting for any male to wander freely. Valued males who have secured the patronage of powerful females are expected to be at their beck and call, or to labour out of sight for their betters. Other males are preferably out of sight as well as out of mind.

Fabian paces the boundaries of his laboratory chamber, knowing that he must manufacture an exit, but fearful of taking that irreversible step. If he leaves now, after that confrontation with Portia, he will be leaving behind everything he has known. Curiosity is built into the spider genome, but in males it is not encouraged. Fabian is fighting centuries of conditioning.

Finally he conquers his timidity and sends out a chemical signal. Shortly afterwards, the scent is picked up by a handful of ants from the city maintenance colonies, passing nearby on their endless round of duties. Their entire colony has been reprogrammed by Fabian, his master-architecture already set in place. Nobody has noticed, because the secondary structures that guide the colony about its task are functionally identical to those that were originally bred into the ants generations before – if a little more elegantly designed. Now, though, the pheromones that Fabian has released instil new behaviours in these individuals, bringing them to the silk side of his chamber, where they cut a neat exit wound for him to depart through. After they are done, he resets them, and they go about their duties with no sign that they were ever subverted. Fabian has been busy these last months in testing his discovery, with the whole of Great Nest as his experimental subject.

He has listened to the news constantly recycled by the peer group. He knows who is causing Portia distress, who has tried to challenge the order of the world – other than himself. He is a male, vulnerable from the moment he slips from the peer house. He knows where he needs to go, but he fears journeying alone. He needs a guardian. He needs a female, in fact, however much he might regret that.

Fabian’s ideal female has three characteristics: she must be intellectually useful, so a commodity in her own right; she must be in a position of weakness that will allow even a male to bargain with her; she must have no interest in mating with him, or otherwise harming him. Regarding the last, he knows he must trust to chance. The first two criteria have already suggested a travelling companion. He knows who has caused Portia to fret most.

Fabian is going to see Bianca.

He pauses halfway down the tree trunk from the peer house, gazing back up at its complex collection of suspended chambers and tents. For a moment he is uncertain – should he not trust the safety of its walls, and give up his ambitions? And what will Portia think, once she finds him gone? She represents all that he intends to overthrow, and yet he likes and respects her, and she has always done her best for him. Everything he has accomplished has been made possible only by what Portia has given him.

But no, it is that kind of gifting that he must break away from. A life lived entirely at the whim of another is no life at all. He has always been surprised at the large number of other males who see matters differently, revelling in their own cosseted captivity.

Previous excursions outside have given him the opportunity to lay groundwork, and where he has not travelled himself, he has sent his proxies instead. His new chemical architecture allows him to use ants as the delivery agent of his instructions, with colonies programming other colonies. Nobody suspects just how far this has all gone.

He suborned the prison colony relatively recently, paving the way for his insurrection. When he arrives, the ants at the tunnel mouth start forwards, antennae waving, mandibles wide in challenge. He releases a distinct, simple scent, a back door into their societal structures, and they are instantly his. With a rapid cycling of olfactory clues he alters their behaviour in specific, precise ways. The tunnel guards turn and enter their colony, unleashing a cascade of his amended architecture throughout their fellows. Fabian follows them in, as though they are his honour guard.

It takes him time to find Bianca’s chamber amongst all the others held in custody. Great Nest holds no prisoners for long, executing the males and exiling females but, as the Temple tightens its dogmatic grip, the number of those crushed within its grasp only increases. With no way of getting the ants to locate an individual, Fabian is aware of time passing – already he will have been missed, but nobody should guess that here would be his destination.

Part of his mind is already considering that he should have arranged for a tissue sample somehow, with which he could program an ant to track its original. Fabian often thinks about more than one thing at once, just to save time.

Then he stumbles into Bianca’s cell, and for a moment she rears up, frightened and angry, and he thinks she might strike him down without even hearing what he has to say.

I am here with an offer, he hammers out hurriedly.

Portia sent you? Bianca is suspicious.

Portia and I have taken different paths.

I know you. You are her creature, one of her males.

Fabian gathers his courage. He must say it, so as to make it real. I am not hers. I am my own.

Bianca watches him carefully, as though he is some prey animal behaving in an unexpected way. Is that so?

I am intending to leave Great Nest tonight, he tells her. I will travel to Seven Trees.

Why? But she is interested, inching closer.

He is very aware of her fangs, in this confined space. He does not know Bianca like he knows Portia; he cannot judge her limits and tolerances so well. Because Seven Trees was rebuilt by males. Because they have been forced to accord males a value there.

The flurry of her palps is a gesture of cynicism. Seven Trees is a poor city. The males there would give all the value they are held in to be looked after by a strong Great Nest peer house, just as you have been. Life is hard there, I have heard.

Yes, you have heard, he echoes. And yet I would make the opposite exchange. I would have my own peer house, however poor. I would give away all of Portia’s in exchange for some small territory of my own.

She makes a disgusted gesture. How happy I am that you came here merely to tell me this. I wish you a swift journey.

Perhaps you will accompany me?

You will have to wait until Portia exiles me then, and hope that whatever they taint me with will not see the ants of Seven Trees becoming as hostile to me as those of our home, Bianca taps out bitterly.

You have been in communication with Seven Trees already. Fabian feels he must come out and say it.

For a moment, Bianca is still. Then a short gesture prompts him to continue.

I went to your chambers after you were exposed as a heretic, after they took you captive. I read some of the knot-books you had made your notes in. They fit with philosophies and ideas that Portia’s agents report are current in Seven Trees. I saw many parts and pieces in your workshop. It occurred to me that one could construct many useful things with them, and not just the telescopes that you were known for. A radio, perhaps?

Bianca regards him stonily. Her words are stepped out stiffly. You are a dangerous little monster.

I am just a male who has been allowed to use his brain. Will you come with me?

You have some trick to come and go, if you are not here at Portia’s orders, Bianca understands.

I have some tricks, yes. I have some tricks that Seven Trees may be glad of, if we reach there.

Seven Trees, Bianca considers. Seven Trees will be the first city to feel the bite of Great Nest. I know what Portia has been planning, even down here. You may not enjoy your new home long.

Then I will go somewhere else. Anywhere else but here. Fabian skips a little dance at the time-wasting, feeling that eventually someone will come to look for him, or simply to look in on Bianca. Perhaps it will even be Portia. What would she make of these two conspirators together?

Come, then, Bianca confirms. Great Nest has lost its appeal for me now it has shrunk to the confines of this chamber. Show me your trick.

He shows her more than that, for rather than exit upwards into Great Nest he reprograms twenty of the guards into miners. Bianca’s own insect custodians dig her escape tunnel, and by morning the two of them are well on the way to Seven Trees.

5.5 THE OLDEST MAN IN THE UNIVERSE

Holsten had assumed it would be the cage for him, but apparently things had moved on somewhat in Crazyville. The weird shanty town of makeshift partitions and tents that he had glimpsed briefly before was now all around him. It baffled him really. There was no weather in the Gilgamesh, and any extremes of temperature were likely to prove fatal. And yet everywhere people here had put up makeshift cover against the non-existent elements, draped lines and blankets and cannibalized wall panels to demarcate personal territories that were barely big enough to lie down in. It was as if, after so many centuries spent in cold coffins, the human race was unwilling to be freed from their confines.

He had previously only got a decent look at those votaries who had overseen his captivity. Now he was being held, under guard, in what he recognized as the Communications suite. How long ago – how short a remembered time ago – he had sat here trying to initiate contact with the Brin Sentry Habitat. Now the consoles were folded away – or ripped out – and the very walls were invisible beneath layers of encrusting humanity. They peered out at him, these long-haired, grimy inheritors of the ark. They talked to one another. They stank. He was ready to loathe them, and be loathed right back, observing these degenerate savages locked in the bowels of a ship that they were slowly destroying. He could not do it, though. It was the children that dissuaded him. He had almost forgotten children.

The adults all seemed to possess some disconcerting quality, people who had been fed a narrow range of lies that had slowly locked their faces into expressions of desperate tranquillity, as though to admit to the despair and deprivation that so clearly weighed on them would risk losing them the favour of God. The children, though – the children were still children. They fought and chased each other and shouted and behaved in all the ways he remembered children doing, even back on toxic Earth where their generation had no future but a slow death.

Sitting there, he watched them peeping out, running at the sight of him, then creeping back. He saw them fabricate their little half-worlds between them, malnourished and frail and human in a way that Holsten felt neither their parents nor he himself still were.

It had been a long road to here from Earth, but not as far as he himself had travelled from their state of innocence. The burden of knowledge in his head burned like an intolerable coal: the certainty of dead Earth, of frozen colonies, a star-spanning empire shrunk to one mad brain in a cold satellite… and the ark overrun by the monkeys.

Holsten felt himself coming adrift, cut loose from any emotional anchor. He had found a point where he could look forward – future-wards – and see nothing that he could possibly want, no hoped-for outcome that was remotely conceivable. He felt as though he had reached the end of all useful time.

When the tears came, when his shoulders unexpectedly began shaking and he could not stop himself, it felt like two thousand years of grief taking hold of him and twisting at him, wringing out his exhausted body over and over until there was nothing left.

When two large men eventually came for him, one of them touched his shoulder almost gently, to get his attention. That same reverence he had noticed when he had been their caged pet was still present, and his outburst seemed only to have deepened it, as though his tears and his misery were worth vastly more than any of theirs.

I should make a speech, he thought wryly. I should stand up and urge them: Throw off your chains! You don’t have to live like this! Except what do I know about it? They shouldn’t be here at all, not three generations of ship-rats living in all the spare space of the ship, breathing all the air, eating all the food. He had no promised land he could lead them to, not even the green planet. Full of spiders and monsters, and would the ship even survive the journey there? Not according to Lain. He wondered whether Guyen had thought past the point of his own ascension. Once some corrupted, half-demented copy of his mind was uploaded into the Gilgamesh’s systems, would he watch the suffering and death of his grey followers with equanimity? Had he promised that he would take them along with him to life everlasting? Would he care when the adults that these children grew into starved, or were cut short by the failure of the Gil’s life-support?

‘Take me to him,’ he said, and they helped him hobble away. The denizens of the tent city watched him as though he was going to intercede for them with a malign deity, perhaps one whose supplicants could only carry the messages of the faithful after their hearts had been torn out.

Shuttle bays were some of the largest accessible spaces on board. His cage had been in one, and now here was another. The shuttle was missing, again, but more than half the space was cluttered with a vast bank of machinery, a bastard chimera comprised of salvage from the Gil and ancient relics from the terraform station. At least half of what Holsten was looking at did not seem to be connected to anything or fulfilling any purpose – just scrap that had been superseded but not disposed of. At the heart of it, actually up on a stepped dais constructed unevenly of metal and plastic, was the upload facility, the centre of a web of cables and ducts that spilled from its coffin space, and the focus of a great deal of the supporting machinery.

But not all of it. Some of it appeared now to be keeping Guyen alive.

He sat on the steps before the uploader, as though he was a steward awaiting a vanished king, or a priest before a throne fit only for the celestial. But he was steward and king both, minister of his own divinity.

His appearance was plain proof that the ragged cult he had surrounded himself with was still capable of working with the Gil’s technology, most especially the medical bay. Guyen sat there quite naturally, as though at any moment he might get up and go off for a stroll. But just as the upload facility was threaded through with connections to the ship, so was Guyen. He wore robes that lay open over a shipsuit that seemed to have been patched together from several older garments, but none of it hid the fact that two thick, ridged tubes had been shunted up under his ribs, and that one of the machines beside him seemed to be doing his breathing for him, its flaccid, rubbery sacs rising and falling calmly. A handful of thinner pipes issued from just past his left collarbone, like the flowering bodies of some fungal infection, before running into the mess of medical devices, and presumably cleansing his blood. It was all familiar to Holsten from back home, and he was aware that the Gil must store equipment like this for the extension of life in extreme cases. He had not expected to witness an extreme case, though. He was the oldest man in existence, after all, and if anyone was going to need this stuff, it would be him.

Guyen was an extreme case. Guyen had beaten him to that title by a comfortable margin. Lain had said he was old, but Holsten had not really processed the concept. He had thought he knew what ‘old’ meant. Guyen was old.

The commander’s skin was a shade of grey Holsten had never seen before, bagged and wrinkled about his face where his cheeks and eye sockets had sunk in. Those almost-hidden eyes did not seem to focus, and Holsten was suddenly sure that somewhere there was a machine that was seeing for Guyen as well, as though the man had just started outsourcing his biology wholesale.

‘Commander.’ Absurdly, Holsten felt a curious reverence creeping in on him as he spoke, as though he was about to be born again into Guyen’s ridiculous cult. The man’s sheer antiquity placed him beyond the realm of human affairs, and instead into that of the classicist.

Guyen’s lips twitched, and a voice came from somewhere amid that nest of botched technology.

‘Who is it? Is it Mason?’ It was not Guyen’s voice, particularly. It was not really anyone’s voice, but something dreamt up by a computer that thought it was being clever.

‘Commander, it’s me, Holsten Mason.’

The mechanical sound that followed was not encouraging, as though Guyen’s reaction was too foul-minded for his mechanical translator to pass on. Holsten was suddenly reminded that the commander had never particularly liked him.

‘I see you’ve got the uploader…’ Holsten petered out. He had no idea what the uploader was doing.

‘No thanks to you,’ Guyen croaked. Abruptly he stood up, some sort of servos or exoskeleton lifting him bonelessly to his feet and perching him there incongruously, almost on his toes. ‘Running off with your slut. I might have known I couldn’t depend on you.’

‘All the travelling I’ve been doing since your clowns woke me up has been entirely the idea of other people,’ Holsten shot back hotly. ‘But, seriously, you don’t expect me to ask questions, given what I’ve seen here? You’ve had people just… what, living out their lives here over the last hundred years? You’ve set yourself up like some kind of crazy god-emperor and conned all those poor bastards into being your slaves.’

‘Crazy, is it?’ For a moment Holsten thought Guyen would rush at him, pulling all those tubes out of himself on the way, but then the old man seemed to deflate a little. ‘Yes, well, I can see how it might look crazy. It was the only way, though. There was so much work. I couldn’t just burn through Science and Engineering, using up their lives like I’ve used up my own.’

‘But…’ Holsten waved a hand towards the cluttered mass of machinery at Guyen’s back. ‘How can this even happen? Okay, the uploader, it’s old tech. It’s going to need fixing up, troubleshooting, testing – that much I understand. But not a century of it, Guyen. How can you have been doing this for so long, and got nowhere?’

‘This?’ Guyen spluttered. ‘You think the uploader took all that time?’

‘Well, no I… yes…’ Holsten frowned, wrong-footed. ‘What did, then?’

‘I’ve gone over the whole damn ship, Holsten. The drive’s been upgraded, the system security, the hull shielding. I’d say you’d not recognize the specs of the Gilgamesh – if I thought you had any idea what they looked like before.’

‘But…’ Holsten waved his hands as if trying to encompass the magnitude of what the other man was saying. ‘Why?’

‘Because we’re going to war, and it’s important that we are ready for it when we arrive.’

‘To war with…’ sudden understanding struck. ‘With Kern? With the satellite?’

‘Yes!’ spat Guyen, his lips quivering, the artificial sound of the single word far grander than anything he could surely make on his own. ‘Because we’ve seen it now: the ice worlds, and that grey abomination we’ve left behind. And then there’s the green planet, the life planet, the planet our ancestors made for us, and we all thought the same when we saw that: we thought: “That’s going to be our home.” And it is! We’ll go back and take out the satellite, and we’ll finally be able to stop journeying. And then what you see here, that so offends you with how unnatural it is, all these people living and breeding, that will be right again. Normal service will resume. The human race can pick up at last, after a hiatus of two thousand years. Isn’t that something to strive for?’

Holsten nodded slowly. ‘Yes, I… I suppose it is.’

‘And when that’s all done – after I’ve worked a generation of specialists from cargo to death, Mason! To death from sheer old age! After I’ve taken their descendants and had them taught, and brought them in on my vision – brought them up on it! – and then prepared ourselves to defend against the satellite’s weapons and its attacks, why would I not go back to the upload facility and try to get it to work? Do you think any of this would have happened without me? Do you understand how important having a single vision is? This isn’t something to delegate to some committee; this is the survival of the human race. And I’m old, Mason. I’ve worked nobody harder than I’ve worked myself, and I’m on the brink of collapse, every scrap of medicine we have is needed just to keep my organs working, and it’s still not done, it’s not finished. I need to see it through. I’m going to upload myself into the machine, Mason. It’s the only way I have of being sure.’

‘You want to be immortal.’ It had been intended as an accusation but it came out as something else, something with a hint of respect.

There was a ghastly choking sound, and for a moment Holsten thought that Guyen was actually dying. But no: he was laughing.

‘You think that’s what this is? Mason, I’m dying. The uploader doesn’t change that. The “me” I live inside will die. And soon – before we see the green planet again. I can’t even go back to the coffins now. There’s no way I’d ever wake up. But now that I’ve got the uploader working, I can preserve a copy of me, to make sure things work out. I’m not some mad dictator, Holsten. I’m not some crazy man with delusions of divinity. I was given this task: to shepherd humanity to its new home. There’s nothing more important than that. Not my life, not yours.’

Holsten realized unhappily that his own moral compass was spinning by now. ‘Lain thinks you’ll wreck the Gil’s systems, if you try that. She says there are copies of your test subjects running riot through the software.’

‘I’m my own test subject,’ Guyen growled. ‘Anything in the system is just cast-offs of me. But none of them worked. None of them were me – not enough of me. But what little work I could squeeze out of you before you went gallivanting has served. Perhaps that’s irony. It’s ready now. I can complete an upload, and then it doesn’t matter if I die. When I die, it won’t matter. And as for Lain, Vitas doesn’t think it’ll destroy the computer. Vitas wants me to do it.’

On Holsten’s list of reassuring things to say, that phrase did not feature. ‘Lain seems pretty sure it’s going to be a bad thing.’

‘Lain doesn’t know. Lain thinks small; she lacks dedication.’ Guyen glowered, his face screwing up like a piece of paper. ‘Only I can plan long enough to save us, Mason. That’s why they chose me.’

Holsten stared up at him. The guards were some distance back, and it came to him that he could leap on decrepit old Guyen and just start pulling things out until nature took its course. And also that he had no intention of doing so.

‘Then why did you grab me back, if you didn’t need me?’

Guyen took a few stalking, mechanical steps, pulled up by the leash of his life-support. ‘You’re our star historian, aren’t you? Well, now you get to do the other part of your job, Mason. You get to write the histories. When they tell each other how we came to live on that green world, that other Earth, I want them to tell it right. So tell it right. Tell them what we did, Mason. Write it down. What we do here creates the future, the only possible future that will see our species survive.’

5.6 RESOURCE WAR

The spider city states operate a variety of mining concerns, but they themselves do not dig. They have insects for that: one of the tasks that comes more naturally to the ant colonies they use in so many different ways. For centuries there has been enough for all, since spider technology is not metal-heavy, and the organic chemicals more important to them are fabricated from the common building blocks of life itself.

This is where it starts.

An ant from a colony run by Seven Trees is now making its way deeper into a set of galleries at some distance from the city itself. Its colony extends all around it – the mine workings are its home, and its siblings’ excavations just a modified form of the same tunnelling they would use to expand their nest. True, much of the colony extends into solid rock, and the ants use modern techniques to conquer that element. Their mandibles are fitted with metal picks, assisted by a selection of acids and other substances to weaken the stone. The colony plans its own mine, including drainage and ventilation to make the place a conducive workplace for the hundreds of blind miners who toil there.

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.

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.’

‘Because you need to fight the Kern satellite, the Brin habitat thing?’ Holsten filled in for him, between mouthfuls.

‘I have to save the species,’ Guyen confirmed, as though that meant the same thing. ‘And we did it. We did it, all of us. All those lives weren’t wasted, after all. We have Empire tech defences, physical and electronic. There’s not a weak point left where Kern can sneak in and switch us all off. But by then I realized that I was old, and I realized how much the ship needed me, and so we got the upload facility and started work on that. I’ve given everything, Mason. I’ve given so many years to the Gilgamesh project. I want… I really want to just close my eyes and let go.’ The artificial voice fell to a static whisper. Holsten recognized this as a sacrosanct pause, and he didn’t try to insert any words.

‘If I thought there was no need of me,’ Guyen murmured. ‘If I thought they – you – could manage without my guidance, then I would go. I don’t want to be here. Who would want to be this dying, intubated thing? But there’s nobody else. The human race stands on my shoulders, Mason. I am the shepherd. Only through me will our people find their true home.’

Mason nodded, and nodded, and thought that Guyen might or might not believe all of that, but knew that he detected a thread of mendacity nonetheless. Guyen had never been a man to take advice or to share command. Why should he now be a man who would hand it over, especially when a kind of immortality was his for the taking if this upload business worked?

If the uploader didn’t wreck the Gilgamesh’s systems.

‘Why not Lain?’ he asked Guyen.

The old man twitched at the name. ‘What about Lain?’

‘She’s chief engineer. You wanted all this work doing, so why not pop her out sooner? I’ve seen her. She’s older, but not…’ not as much as you, ‘not that much older. You can’t have sprung her from the chambers that long ago. Why not start with her?’

Guyen glowered at him for a moment, or perhaps some machine glowered at him on Guyen’s blind behalf. ‘I don’t trust Lain,’ he snapped. ‘She has ideas.’

There was no real answer to that. By now Holsten had already formed distinct ideas about whether Guyen was crazy, and whether Lain was sane. Unfortunately that did not seem to translate into an equal certainty about which of them was right.

He had one arrow left in the quiver. There was a sequence of recordings that Lain had played for him, before that meeting with Karst and Vitas: the last transmissions of the moon colony they had set up back in Kern’s system. It had been Lain’s secret weapon, to persuade him that Something Must Be Done. It had worked, at the time. She had been merciless, and Holsten had been left as depressed and miserable as he ever had been. He had heard the desperate, panicking voices of the people Guyen had left behind: their pleas, their reports. Everything had been failing, the infrastructure of the colony had simply not been self-sustaining. Long decades after the base was established, it began to die.

Guyen had left a community there, some awake, some in suspension. He had abandoned them to live there, and to raise their children to replace them at the helm of that doomed venture. Then the Gil’s commander had listened to their dying cries, their frantic begging, enduring the cold, the foul air… The lucky ones would have just rotted in their cold coffins once the power failed.

The last message had been a distress beacon, automated, repeated over and over: the successor – humanity’s version of Kern’s thousand-year call. Finally even that had ceased. Even that had not stood the test of that little span of time.

‘I heard the recordings from the moon base,’ he told Guyen.

The commander’s leathery visage swung towards him. ‘Did you?’

‘Lain played them to me.’

‘I’m sure she did.’

Holsten waited, but there was nothing more forthcoming. ‘You’re… what? You’re denying it? You’re saying Lain faked it?’

Guyen shook his head, or something else shook it for him. ‘What was I supposed to do?’ he demanded. ‘Go back for them?’

Holsten was about to say that, yes, that was exactly what Guyen should have done. Instead, a little scientific awareness coloured his passion, and he began, ‘The time…’

‘We were decades away,’ Guyen agreed. ‘It would have taken decades to return to them. By the time they found there was a problem, they didn’t have anywhere near that long. You wanted me to go through the colossal exercise and waste of turning this ship around, just to bury them?’

Guyen almost managed it then. Holsten’s perceptions of right and wrong flipped and flopped, and he found he could look into that grey, dying face and see the saviour of mankind – a man who had been trained to make tough decisions, and had made them with regret but without hesitation.

Then a real expression finally clawed its way on to Guyen’s face. ‘And, besides,’ he added, ‘they were traitors.’

Holsten sat quite, quite still, staring at the horrible rearrangement of the commander’s features. A kind of childish, idiot satisfaction had gripped the old man, perhaps entirely without his knowledge.

There had been mutineers, of course, as Holsten had more cause than most to remember. He recalled Scoles, Nessel and all that rhetoric about being sacrificed to an icy grave.

And they were right.

And, of course, most of the actual mutineers had been killed. The cargo decanted out to form the moon base crew had not been traitors; in fact they would have had very little idea of what was going on before learning of their fate.

‘Traitors,’ Guyen repeated, as if savouring the word. ‘In the end, they got what they deserved.’ The transition from earnest, martyred leader to raving psychopath had simply happened without any discernible boundary being crossed.

Then people started entering the chamber, Guyen’s people. They shuffled about in their robes, and swirled and milled into a ragged congregation before the great mechanical majesty of Guyen’s dais. Holsten saw them arrive in their hundreds: men, women, children.

‘What’s happening?’ he demanded.

‘We’re ready,’ Guyen breathed. ‘The time has come.’

‘Your upload?’

‘My ascension, my eternal duty that will enable me to guide my people forever, in this world and the next.’ He began to take the steps stiffly, one at a time.

From somewhere, Vitas and a handful of her team had appeared, hovering about the machines like a priesthood. The science chief glanced once at Holsten, but incuriously. Around the edges of the wider chamber, there stood a score or so of men and women in armoured shipsuits – Karst’s security team. One of them must be the man himself, but they had their visors lowered.

So the old gang’s together again, all but one. Holsten was acutely aware that Lain would expect him to buy her some time, although he had no idea if she was even on her way.

‘Guyen,’ he called after the commander. ‘What about them?’ His gesture took in the massing congregation. ‘What happens to them when you’re… translated? Do they just keep multiplying until they overrun the ship? Until there’s nothing left to eat? What happens?’

‘I will provide for them,’ Guyen promised. ‘I will show them the way.’

‘It’ll be the moon colony all over again,’ Holsten snapped. ‘They’ll die. They’ll eat all the food. They’ll just… live everywhere until things break down. This isn’t a cruise ship. The Gil isn’t supposed to be lived in. They’re cargo. We’re all cargo.’ He took a deep breath. ‘But you’ll have your electronic avatar by then. So long as the power holds, you’ll be fine. Probably most of the ship’ll be fine, the cargo in suspension… but these people, and their children, and – then what? – maybe one generation after that, they’ll die. Your followers will die a drawn-out death of starvation and failing machinery, and cold, and suffocation, and all the other things that can happen because we’re out in fucking space!’ He had shocked himself with the vehemence of his tirade, thinking, Do I actually care about all these lunatics that much? But apparently he did.

‘I will provide!’ Guyen’s voice rose to a boom without effort, channelled through speakers about the room. ‘I am the last shepherd of the human race.’

Holsten had expected his own words to start a riot of fear and uncertainty among the congregation, but they seemed weirdly placid, accepting what Guyen said and barely seeming to register a word said against him. In fact the only reaction he got was that suddenly a couple of the larger sheep in Guyen’s flock were standing at his shoulders, laying hands on him as if about to bundle him away. He needed more ammunition. He would have to fight dirty now.

‘One more thing!’ he shouted, just as Guyen reached the top step. ‘You do know that Karst and Vitas have been working with Lain behind your back?’

The dead silence that followed this pronouncement was spoiled by Karst’s helmet-muffled voice spitting out, ‘Oh, you fucker!’

Guyen had become quite still – and so everyone had become quite still. Holsten stole a look at Vitas, who was observing the situation around her with a calmly inquisitive air, as if she could not feel the sudden change of mood in the crowd. Karst’s people had begun to bunch up. They all had guns, and now these were mostly pointing at the faithful.

Have I just done the most sensible thing that I could, under the circumstances?

‘I don’t believe you,’ Guyen’s voice croaked, although if his disembodied voice was indeed devoid of belief, it was full to the brim with electronic doubt. Guyen’s paranoia clearly had a 360-degree field of vision.

‘When your clowns grabbed me, I was just coming back from a meeting – of me, Lain, her, him,’ pointing out the guilty for the court.

‘Mason, shut up or I will shoot your fucking head off!’ Karst bellowed, neatly erasing any lingering suggestion of innocence.

The congregation was mostly armed, even if it was with knives and makeshift spears and maces. They outnumbered Karst’s squad heavily, and the quarters were close.

‘You will go back into suspension!’ Guyen snapped. ‘You, Vitas, all of your people!’

‘Piss off! And what then?’ Karst snapped. ‘You think I trust you?’

‘I will be the ship!’ Guyen fairly howled. ‘I will be everything. I will have the power of life and death over every member of the human race. Do you think that simply staying out of suspension will save you from my wrath, if you defy me? Obey me now and I will be merciful.’

‘Commander—’ Vitas started. Above the rising mutter of the congregation Holsten did his best to read her lips.

‘You too, traitor!’ Guyen levelled a twig-thin finger at her.

Then either Karst or one of his people – Holsten didn’t see which – tried to level a gun at Guyen, and the fighting started. A few shots went off, striking sparks from the ceiling, some ripping hungrily into the crowd, but matters degenerated into a brawl almost immediately, the untrained but fervent masses ranged against Karst’s few.

That was when Lain chose to make her move.

A knot of robed acolytes burst from the throng, bounding up the steps towards Guyen, and even Holsten thought they were fanatics heading to protect their leader, to form some sort of human shield. Only when their leader dragged some sort of makeshift weapon out, and her cowl slipped back, did he realize his mistake.

Moments later Lain had her weapon – some sort of industrial nail-gun – against the side of Guyen’s head and was yelling for everyone’s attention.

They were about twenty people down to injury or death by that point – a couple of Karst’s band, and the rest luckless followers of the Church of Guyen. Lain never got her requested silence – there was sobbing, cries for help, at least one keening wail that spoke of desolated loss and grief. The bulk of the faithful, however, were frozen in place, seeing their prophet about to be struck down at the very point of his transcendence.

‘Now,’ Lain shouted, as best she could. Her voice wasn’t made for public declamation or for confrontational heresy, but she did her utmost. ‘Nobody’s going anywhere, and that includes into that fucking computer.’

‘Karst…’ It was Guyen’s voice, although his lips hadn’t moved. Holsten looked over to the security team, backed into a tight knot with their leader in its midst. If there was any reply, it was too quiet to be heard, but it was plain that there would be no help for Guyen from that quarter, not any more.

‘Vitas, disconnect this shit,’ Lain instructed. ‘Then we can start to sort out the mess.’

‘Hmm.’ The science chief cocked her head on one side. ‘You have some sort of plan then, chief engineer?’ It seemed an odd thing to say, for someone with no small-talk. Holsten saw the frown on Lain’s face.

And, of course, Vitas had wanted the upload to go ahead. She had wanted to see what would happen.

‘Lain!’ Holsten shouted. ‘It’s happening! He’s uploading now!’ It was a lengthy process, but of course Guyen had been plugged in all this time. He had probably been feeding his brain into the Gil’s memory for ages, a bite-sized piece at a time.

The realization hit Lain at the same time and she pulled the trigger.

Vitas’s face was a picture in that split second: real shock gripping her at last, but at the same time a kind of prurient interest, as if even this twist would yield valuable data for her studies. Guyen’s face, of course, joined the rest of his head in painting the upload facility red.

There was a colossal groaning noise that echoed through the room, twisting and garbling and collapsing into static, but rebuilding itself jaggedly until at last it became a voice.

‘I!’ shouted Guyen even as his body collapsed back into its cradle of tubes and wires. ‘I! I! I!’

The lights died, sprang back, flickered. Screens about the chamber suddenly sprang alive with random vomitings of colour and light, fragments of a human face, and that voice stuttering on, ‘I! I! Mine! Obey! I!’ as though Guyen had been distilled down to the basic drives that had always motivated him.

‘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.

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.