Children of Ruin (Children of Time #2)

Once upon a time there was a civilization on a distant planet. The people of this civilization knew many things, including how to travel to other stars and remake the planets they found there, within tolerance, into places where they could walk and breathe the air.

But they were fractious, and just as they had reached up to seize the stars, they fell upon one another and all their work was destroyed. Almost all.

One of their scientists, the greatest mind of her age—

Or so she says.

She does, and I am not in the mood to measure legs with her over it. You have decades enough, but Portiid life is too short.

She was named Avrana Kern, and she had a plan to exalt the beasts of her world so that they would know and adore their creator. She made a world for them, and released a virus that would expedite their evolution towards such a state of adulation, and she had a consignment of monkeys, and of all of these things, that last failed in its delivery, for the wicked who made war on their fellows on her home also brought the war to her. So Kern was left in her tiny capsule, awaiting the call from the world below, which was devoid of monkeys but rich in many other forms of life. For many thousands of years she orbited, so that what was left was not, deny it as she might, much of Avrana Kern at all, as opposed to the computer systems she had bargained with for eternal life.

And when the call came, it came from that world’s new mistresses, the most intelligent, the most emotionally sophisticated, the most elegant of all its many beings.

Now you’re just bragging.

We must assume that any life we meet will value sophistication, intelligence and elegance, or what is life for? Anyway, I continue.

Unknown to the Portiids, for as such they would come to be known, visitors were coming to their world. The civilization that had given rise to them had fallen and risen again, and at last, on the brink of extinction from their own vices—

I’m going to put my foot down.

And if you do, it will only prove my point. It will sound like a hundred thousand ants in confusion. And I continue—

Will you at least preserve some dignity for the human species?

(A small fiddling of the palps to express resignation, like a sigh.)

Those who could, set out in a desperate vessel chasing their knowledge of the places their ancestors had walked so very long ago, and so they came to the world under the stewardship of Avrana Kern, or what was left of her. At first, they came in need, and at last they came in war, for they could not understand the Portiids and saw them as monsters, and neither side could communicate with each other, and the remnant of Avrana Kern was mistrustful and remembered only how her great project had been betrayed.

That is a very diplomatic way of putting it.

I count diplomacy amongst my many Understandings.

The Portiids took the virus that had aided their evolution, which had allowed them to know one another and come together rather than living out their lives as single hunters, and introduced it to their creators, who were also the virus’s creators, gifting them with the understanding that here, too, were minds who looked out and sought to know the universe. And so it was that peace was made between the humans and the Portiids, and a new golden age dawned, and the humans would forever after be not just humans but Humans, which is a far better thing.

And so it was, later, that the combined knowledge of these peoples would lead to a vessel setting out from Avrana Kern’s world to voyage to other distant places where once humans had set foot and remade worlds, for faint signals had been detected from such places, and they were eager to know new intelligences and meet with them in peace.

Helena Holsten Lain regards her companion, now crouching in an attitude Helena knows to read as “expectant”. Portiid spider communications, being a combination of eight stamping feet and the waving of two fuzzy palps, are always something of a performance. Helena feels quite mute in comparison, her body language coarse and huge, her lone voice lacking nuance. She was born into a civilization where her people were a tiny minority, a curiosity, surrounded by a vast population of spiders who speak to senses Humans barely even have. She was a mere child when she began working on that barrier between the intelligent species of Kern’s World—to overcome it in a way that the mere sharing of an engineered virus could not. The journey has a few more steps in it, true, but she has just listened to Portia tell an imaginative, biased account of their world’s history, and her gloves and optical and cerebral implants translated most of it in real time, complete with subtext, personality and humour. Possibly a fair chunk of what she received was best guesses and gaps filled with human-equivalents that were square pegs for round holes, but it was leaps and bounds beyond anything she had grown up with.

“Still,” she says, “you’re going to have to find some way to not make us sound so awful.” She subvocalizes into her own implants, her fingers resting ever-so-lightly on the deck, and her gloves patter out what she hopes is a good approximation of her meaning direct to the listening feet of her colleague.

“But you are awful,” comes the translated response, and Helena feels a leap of triumph, because, even if some meaning is lost along the way, she’s talking, even chatting with a Portiid spider in a way no Human has ever been able to save the sainted (and mostly artificial) Avrana Kern herself.

****

There is an itch at the back of his head. Not the itch of the surgical scars, which an interesting cocktail of medication is keeping at a respectable distance, but something inside his skull. Meshner concentrates on it, trying to draw it out, his own eyes sightless and dark because seeing actual real things is too much of a distraction and his eyelid discipline suffers when he’s distracted.

“Not coming,” he announces. “Give me a clue.” He hears the tinny little sound of his lab assistant relaying his words to his partner in experimentation, and then that unique exhalation which is Fabian, said partner, going into a spectacular arachnid convulsion for the specific purpose of telling his Human confederate, Meshner, just how frustrated he is right now. Portiid spiders are a long way from their ancestral state, both in size and biology. The original diminutive jumping spider did not engage in active respiration, whereas the current model funds its life by expanding its abdomen to drag air in over the elegant filigree of its book-lungs. What they don’t do, as a rule, is sigh. By dint of great effort, however, Fabian has learned how to breathe in precisely such a way as to convey a Human emotion. Fabian and Meshner have been partners in crime, scientifically speaking, for a very long time. Despite the barriers to communication, they have developed an idiolect of their own, mostly devoted to complaining.

Then comes the rustle-shuffle of Fabian’s response to the translating lab assistant, and the assistant’s uncanny-valley voice saying, “Picture the ocean.” The assistant was designed and embodied as part of Avrana Kern’s experiments in relating more closely to her chosen people, the Portiids. Coded to act as a spider male, it also speaks to Meshner in a male version of Kern’s usual tones, which he continues to find disconcerting.

The ocean… The idea passes deeper into Meshner’s mind in search of that spectral itch, and for a moment he has it: sunlight—dawn?—gleaming on water. He gets the impression of structure, wood and webbing, perhaps a pier? Shadows loom at the brink of his vision, hard-edged.

A faint rustle comes to him, Fabian making notes on Meshner’s brain activity and the data transfer from the ugly blocky implants that now make up a band around the back of Meshner’s head.

The brief moment of vision is gone, and Meshner knows his own excitement, and then frustration, conspired to drive it away. There is information waiting to feed into his brain, but his mind is an unruly mess and so it cannot find a way to its proper neurological targets.

Ocean, ocean… Images are there, but he knows them for his own memories and clears his mind again, using mindfulness techniques developed from scratch. What if I suppressed my own memory-accessing ability? he wonders. Could that work? There will be drugs that could render him an amnesiac for the duration, surely. Perhaps in that void, the alien impressions will come more naturally.

“Couldn’t you give me something more… individual?” he murmurs. “I don’t know if I’m getting anything through of yours.”

Again Fabian skitters in terse communication, and their assistant’s off-male voice reports, “I wanted you to have something that would fit naturally with Human experience, to make it easy.”

“It’s not working…” But even as he says it, his mind whirling with annoyance and resentment and the thought of another session wasted, he has a clear sight: a sea of a million blues—no, not even blues, a whole spectrum of colours that simply do not plug into the visual range he is familiar with. A sky that shimmers with the sun’s radiation. A ground beneath his feet that breathes softly with the traffic of a whole city at his back. Except his feet, his feet were in all directions, his back, his eyes, his eyes—

Meshner feels a sudden wave of nausea. The image, the sensory feedback, is gone in an instant, and yet his regular body has not come back to him. His proprioception goes haywire, all sense of where his body is, what shape it is, utterly deserting him. He opens his mouth to speak and his limbs spasm with palsy, sending him toppling backwards—had he been sitting, standing?—thrashing on the ground. His teeth snap and a sharp jolt of pain shoots through him as he bites his tongue.

Then a sudden rush of flattening artificial calm bullies its way into his mind like a thug, beating down the rush of panic and cooling his blood. Meshner opens his eyes, knowing that he’ll have a killer headache when the drugs wear off, and also that he might just have irreparably damaged his brain.

His colleagues regard him anxiously, or at least the fidget of Fabian’s palps conveys anxiety in a manner even a Human can understand. Fabian is a brindled black and grey spider with a body about the size of Meshner’s head, currently hunched over a spindle-shaped console with four legs making jerky adjustments to the program as he tries to mitigate whatever damage has just been done to Meshner’s mind. Beside him is the lab assistant he has taken to calling Artifabian. It has the general shape of a small Portiid spider, much like Fabian himself, but constructed entirely out of plastic, alternatively russet, transparent and iridescent. It is a robot of sorts with a dumbed-down copy of Avrana Kern’s personality inside it, splintered off from the ship’s. If it is genuinely concerned, there is no way of knowing.

Meshner stares at them, waiting for his eyes to focus properly. The headaches are starting now, the ones the medication never seems to touch. He suspects it’s all psychosomatic, his mind deciding that he damn well should be in pain given the stunt he just pulled. That doesn’t make it better, it only means he can’t actually use anything to get the pain to stop.

“How’s my head?” he asks, and Artifabian translates for him. They could just use the ship, but having this one servitor dedicated to their partnership means it learns their figures of speech and mannerisms, its approximations closer and closer to conveying the complexities of each other’s language. Meshner is fascinated by the way the device mimics Portiid attitudes. With Fabian it is plainly one rung down on the ladder, its stance polite without being quite deferential. When a female Portiid turns up, it is instantly obsequious, more so than Fabian, who is something of a boundary-pusher as far as his gender is concerned. Meshner has read simplified children’s histories of the spider civilization, vocal in explaining that, these days, everything is fine and male spiders are allowed to play a full role in society. In practice, even Human eyes can see it isn’t quite as advertised. He has no doubt today’s Fabian has far better prospects than the Fabian of a century ago, but the playing field still needs some rolling before it is level.

“I’m seeing inflammation along the neural pathways, some small swelling around the occipital lobe,” come the relayed conclusions of Fabian. “Not good, Meshner.” His name becomes a cavalier little flick of the spider’s left palp, as though the creature is tossing a hat at a peg without looking at it. Portiid communications are short on those distinct meaning-to-movement correspondences but names are an exception.

“Explains why I still can’t see straight,” Meshner complains. “There was something there, though. I had a sniff of it.” He eyes the spider. “Hmm?”

He recognizes the gesture Fabian makes, because it is the spider imitating him biting his knuckles, a piece of Human body language the Portiid had picked up on. It means that he, Meshner, is obfuscating and Fabian knows it.

“We’ll go again next dawn,” he decides stubbornly. “Dawn” is a shipwide fiction, of course, but Portiids like their day/night cycles even more than Humans do. “I saw the sea,” he adds, although he can’t say, in his heart of hearts, whether the sea had been truly from Fabian’s memories. “Can’t you give me something… more Portiid? Something I’ll know is definitely yours?”

Fabian taps his palps together with an audible tok, a gesture Meshner has seen no other spiders make. It means he’s thinking. The ship’s archives have a whole library of what the best translation renders as Understandings, a cornerstone of the Portiid civilization. They are genetic memories, Meshner knows, rendered into something that can be inherited, copied and implanted by a fluke of the pervasive nanovirus that guided the spiders’ evolution. If Fabian needs knowledge or a skill, he can simply have it introduced to his brain and, very shortly, be an expert. Meshner covets the facility, both for the way it could make any individual into a polymath, and for the bridge it could build between humanity and their new best friends. He knows that Helena and the linguistics crowd are going about the same task by very different and non-invasive means, but his way is better. If he can only get it to work. If he doesn’t scramble his brains trying. He is lucky to have a lab partner like Fabian who isn’t averse to risk-taking. But then Fabian covets whatever academic success looks like to a spider and, as he’s a male, that means he has to go twice as far on half the support. Fabian is doubtless delighted he found such an obliging test subject.

Then Artifabian’s meek pose changes to something bold and dominant, so that Fabian himself instinctively gives ground. The spirit of Avrana Kern—or at least the dominant facet that inhabits the ship’s complex computer system—has seized control of this errant splinter in order to interact with its crew.

“The Ship’s Mistress has sent out a general alarm,” comes that female voice from Artifabian’s speakers, even as the machine’s feet tap out an analogous message to Fabian. “All crew to the bridge, apparently. We have made a discovery.”

****

Waking the crew had begun in measured stages after the Voyager passed by the barren outer planets of the new system, homing in on the busy buzz of the signals coming from closer to the star. It had begun with Kern—or the semi-biological computer system that identified as Kern—bootstrapping herself up from basic functions into her full and ascerbic personality, then progressed through the crew roster based on the ship’s requirements: maintenance, medical, command, then everyone else. Both Helena Holsten Lain and Meshner Osten Oslam should have been in this last category, but both had employed special pleading to be woken early to work on their personal projects while the Voyager decelerated.

The Voyager has changed since they left their mutual home in search of a voice among the stars. Unlike the ancestral ships humans had travelled in, it has a fluid structure, forged from materials that can stretch and grow at Kern’s whim. On departure it had still mimicked what Kern remembered spaceships looking like, long and dynamic with a ring section for the crew’s waking moments. Now it is something more like a manta ray, its delicate wings extended and fitted out as organic solar panels for when they near the star. The crew assembles in a set of bolas-like structures Kern grew for them, that whirl in an orbit just ahead of the wingspan as though they are specimens in a centrifuge. Despite the best Human-Portiid medical tech, everyone is finding the resumed gravity onerous.

Helena and Portia arrive just in time for the ship’s commander to address them. The Voyager’s leader is old now—Portiids don’t live more than about three decades and Helena knows the commander kept herself awake longer than was her due, in order to watch over her crew. She is an angular spider with great tufted plumes over her main eyes that give her an owlish look. She is also a Portia, or at least her name is so similar to Helena’s friend that a mere Human has difficulty in distinguishing between them.

A lot of the other Humans there are looking more than a little groggy, woken more recently or slower to recover. Helena remembers her grandfather complaining about coming out of cold sleep on the old Gilgamesh, that had brought humans to Kern’s World. To hear him tell it, it had all been waking up and then mad chaos and then going back to sleep again. Duly cautioned, Helena put more time into modifying her biochemistry and training her body, and practically bounced out of cold storage the moment they woke her. Portia herself confessed that waking for the spiders was a profoundly uncomfortable process. She was only able to work with Helena because Kern had given them a head start and only come to the Humans later. The Understandings that the Portiids rely on so heavily became disconnected during long periods of sleep, to return haphazardly days after waking. It was, Portia tried to explain, like constantly forgetting who you were, forever reaching for knowledge that was not there.

Helena shuffles to her place, sure-footed in the padded socks all the Human crew use because shod footsteps on the springy floors sound like shouting to the Portiids’ vibrational hearing. She wears the standard crew uniform that Kern fabricated: a shirt and trousers of pale green, the cloth filmy and thin because the ship is warm and humid just like the planet they left behind.

Portia is already signalling and chatting with a pair of spiders on the Receiving team who have been up longer than anyone, cataloguing the rich signals from within the system and trying to make sense of them whilst keeping a few eyes on the active and passive sensors to ensure that the locals don’t sneak up on anybody. The literal translation of their department is “alarmed feet”, which still makes Helena giggle. It is also a salutary lesson that there are different layers of translation, and literal is not always the most useful.

She crouches and puts her hands to the floor, letting her gloves intercept the vibrational chatter between the Portiids, and her implants turn that into something resembling speech. Portia asks the two operators what’s up; they are bursting with the knowledge that they have detected an approaching object, almost certainly artificial. They are about to get their first look at the handiwork of the locals.

By then Old Portia, the ship’s mistress, is speaking. “I’m sure you’ve all been waiting for a gathering such as this. Anyone with any curiosity will understand that this is a heavily active, populated system. The volume and complexity of signals demonstrates that there is an advanced civilization based here, and the character of them shows a great many hallmarks of pre-collapse Earth technology and protocols. We may have here the secondmost direct line of descent from our founding culture.” That is the spoken translation of the captain’s message, as relayed by the artificial ghost of Avrana Kern. With her fingers touching the floor, however, and her eyes on the flicking palps of the captain, Helena simultaneously receives the original. Her cybernetics and her organic brain provide her with, What this is, we have contact as you will have all expected. Signal traffic from in-system is dense and diverse enough to suggest a space-faring civilization that is still using Old Empire structure for the basis of its communications. Kern is both wordier and considerably free in how she passes on the concepts, and that sort of thing is exactly why Helena is working on her pet project. She feels a stab of annoyance at the coda the computer decided to add for its Human audience, to remind them just who was the first line of descent, in Kern’s own view, whilst feeling some bleak amusement that the utterly inaccurate phrase “Old Empire” that her ancestors used to describe their own lost ancestors survives as a spider term of reference even after Kern hunted it to extinction amongst Humans.

“We are about to have our first look at an artifact of this inner-world’s culture,” Old Portia continues crisply. “Our instruments have detected a fellow-traveller in these reaches, an artificial body moving outwards at a considerable rate.” Around them, tightly-furled plastic roses open up into screens showing enhanced views of the interplanetary traveller they are closing on. There is notation in the neat letters of Imperial C, which is the written lingua franca amongst the colonists, and in the slipshod and chaotic-looking spider notation, but the floor also buzzes with technical data for those members of the crew with the feet to receive it, and for Helena. Perhaps because they had their Understandings to lean on, Portiid writing systems are considerably less efficient than human. For new information, they prefer directly informative interfaces where possible.

Helena assumes at first she has mistranslated what she is receiving, and double-checks against the screens.

How big? Portia scratches out, soft enough that it is for Helena’s hands only. An error, do you think?

The Voyager has made quite a sharp diversion to get closer to the oncoming object’s trajectory, ever since initial readings showed something other than a mere errant asteroid. Kern has husbanded their energy and fuel all the way through the cold dark between solar systems, but the ship’s scoops have replenished their stores from the rich cloud of ice, gas and dust that formed the edge of their destination system’s orbiting disc, allowing all manner of costly manoeuvres. She constructed remote probes in her internal factories and sent them ahead on one-way journeys, each with a tiny splinter of herself copied into their cores. Now the data comes back, and nobody can quite understand what they are looking at.

The approaching artifact is mostly spherical, with one very obvious exception. The outer surface is studded with a regular net of nodes that might have been sensors or engines or even weapons once, but are now little more than scarred, ice-frosted stumps and pits. One side of it has ruptured, and the innards have come out in a vast, jagged spray that flowers into fantastical spines and curling tentacles as though some unthinkable oceanic horror has been killed halfway through hatching out of an egg twenty-seven kilometres across.

Ice, the probes confirm. Its eruption from the interior of the object might be the result of a fissure in the unknown surface material, or else the freezing of a liquid centre might have burst the membrane open with its expansion. Either way the colossal, frozen eruption threw the entire object’s centre of gravity so that the sphere and its miles-long plume now spin about one another with ponderous grace.

The ice is opaque white over most of its surface, but the keen eyes of the probes find shadows within. Under magnification, some seem to be recognizably fish, others are of a more uncertain shape, although that might also be the work of the expansion.

An artificial moon. A moon of water, Portia suggests. Ornamental perhaps? And is that damage we see from after it was flung into space or the cause of it?

Helena lets her palms touch the deck and subvocalizes, “Don’t let speculation run away with you,” letting the mechanisms in her gloves make their best translation in precisely calibrated touch-speak, while the white dots on her thumbs add palp-emphasis. It is halting at best, and Portia says she sounds as though she is “giddy with sweet sap,” but progress is progress.

The probes get the best look they can at the whirling planetoid, but they lack the ability to reverse their course and follow it, and soon it is on its endless way, heading along the plane of the solar system on a course that will one day see it vanish forever in the great beyond.

Curious, says one of the Alarmed Feet operators.

Uninformative, the other complains, with a twitch of her palps that conveyed the subtext, and I had better things to be doing with my time.

The captain calls up the relevant figures, wavering over whether to pursue the ruined object or let it vanish away: relative momentum, energy consumption… probably these quoditian elements don’t sway her as much as the clear radio evidence that there is a great deal more of interest further into the system. Her very silence and stillness is her decision, as physics whisks the object beyond their reach. They are going onwards. And yet…

If we push on, we will pluck so many strings we can expect a response by the locals, she addresses them. Analysis of energy signatures leaves open the possibility that they may be more technologically advanced, and also that they may either be fighting a war amongst themselves or be naturally exuberant and wasteful in the way they burn energy. Helena is having difficulty keeping up with the rapid speech of the captain and words from Kern’s version keep creeping in. She fights to concentrate.

Caution dictates we not risk the entire mission by proceeding further as a whole or broadcasting our position. I’m having us move into the shadow of the closest outer planet. The screens begin to display the relevant telemetry. However, we cannot come all this way and not make contact. I’ve ordered a segment of the ship be prepared as an independent scout fitted for a small crew. I’d prefer a crew made up entirely of Portiids. The captain is using the Portiid’s own name for themselves, of course, meaning something like We who know best, and Kern’s translation omits this digression entirely. However, there is a small chance that the civilization is both human and unaugmented by the Unity infection, in which case Human ambassadors will be essential.

Small chance? Helena throws in, through her palms.

One of the sensor operators cocks a cephalothorax to eye her sidelong. There are no human representations within the decoded visual data that forms a large part of the signals we have intercepted, she explains. Mostly it is just rapidly changing colours and irregular 3D shapes. Very fascinating!

The captain continues, The scout will have a facet of the Avrana Kern construct but this will have necessarily fewer resources to draw upon. I am selecting crew and Human companions who have demonstrated their ability to interact with each other independently. This will be high-risk. No guarantee that we will be able to assist if things go wrong. Participation is therefore voluntary. This is said with a brief rearing motion, the captain’s first two pairs of legs held high for just a second. It suggests that anyone backing out will lose status with the captain—hence with the mission as a whole. Portiids place great value on boldness, an archetypal female trait for them with a whole dictionary of social expectations spilling out from it. The captain probably didn’t mean to qualify her words like that, but some mannerisms are too deeply ingrained to shake.

Helena’s name tops the list of Humans, but then this is exactly the sort of opportunity she has worked so hard to open up. The others are Zaine Alpash Vannix and Meshner Osten Oslam, also working on Human-Portiid relations. Portia is the next chosen—not just Helena’s closest liaison but exactly the sort of over-bold all-rounder that a female Portiid is supposed to be. Also on the crew are two other females, Bianca and Viola, who have been working with Zaine for years, plus Fabian, a male, with Bianca having overall authority. Helena listens to the susurrus of those around her, happy or unhappy to be out of the running. Unsurprisingly, nobody turns the honour down.

****

Meshner had very much wanted to turn the honour down. Being part of a scouting mission will not keep him from his research, but it is hardly conducive. The captain’s announcement fills him with a peevish annoyance he is entirely too prone to. He had assumed that Fabian was all for the posting, and only when they are installed in the outgrowth of the Voyager that will become the scout ship do the two of them have a chance to discuss it.

Fabian, too, is not keen, the spider explains through the medium of Artifabian. For his part, it is the potential danger of the business that he objects to.

“Let them leap into the fire,” Artifabian translates, them meaning female Portiids in general. “This is not a good use of my talents. Or your talents.” That last tacked on awkwardly afterwards, because Fabian, being a creature of easily bruised ego, recognizes Meshner as a kindred spirit.

“Well, we work closely together,” Meshner points out weakly. The walls of the chamber around them deform as Kern—the chief Kern of the Voyager—manipulates the tensions in the ship’s hull fabric to create the appropriate structure for the scout. “So if they were looking for that…”

“Pchah!” the drone articulates, its reading of a little stamping tantrum Fabian has just indulged in. “This is a punishment detail.”

“Punishment?”

“Our research is not approved of,” Fabian declares. He crouches with his abdomen on the ground, tapping with his front legs only as he faces Meshner, so that his words will not spread to the others filing in.

“Nobody told us to stop,” Meshner points out.

Fabian’s palps strike each other, tok! “Well, no. But you’ve been spoken to. And so have I.”

In actual fact there were quite a few words from Humans and Portiids, both about the accelerated pace of their work and just what it might be doing to Meshner’s brain, but nobody took their toys away. He explains this and Fabian scuttles closer, rapping out a hard little rhythm.

“But that’s how it is. Isn’t it the same for Humans? That’s how it is for social species. The disapproval.” The drone gives the word a peculiar emphasis, like a maiden aunt being vulgar. Meshner knows that Portiid society is far less formally structured than humans’ had been, but then pre-Human humans had been the crew of a ship in emergency conditions. And humans were always more sensitive to their children getting killed doing stupid things, whilst the spider society seems to thrive on a kind of harsh Darwinism, because they have a lot of young and no real parenting instincts. He hadn’t considered it before, but the spiders don’t really force each other to do or not do things, they just express, as Fabian says, disapproval.

“We can still continue the work,” he says, now feeling very rebellious. “I mean, we’ll have at least a year in transit to the inner solar system. We don’t have to spend it all on ice. We can refine the experiment.”

“We will.” Fabian rears up, legs high in a threat pose as though daring the universe to stop him. A moment later a couple of female Portiids come in with the lean woman Zaine, and Fabian is instantly all humility and submissive body language just in case they feel punchy.

Males have the chance to excel in Portiid society, Meshner knows, but they have to work damned hard at it. Scientific advancement is one proven route, a path cut through the social thickets by Fabians past. Oh, female Portiids still comprise the majority of their great thinkers, but the precedent is at least there. And we’ll make it happen, he knows. His eyes flick over to where Helena Lain is coming in with her research confederate, Portia. The pair are also working on the final closure of the gap between spider and monkey, at a very procedural, unimaginative level. They use technology to simply understand and translate signals and impulses, little more than having an Artifabian in your skull. Meshner and Fabian’s approach is bolder by a factor of ten: bring the Portiid Understandings to Humans, find a way to translate them so that the anthropoid brain can grasp what it is like to be a spider, learn the skills, absorb all that stored knowledge.

Outside the chamber the superstructure of the scout ship is being moved into position and connected up, cables and flexible struts writhing their way across the taut hull like strange writing. A seething movement signifies the controlling computer’s biological element being decanted: a ball of ants rapidly spreading out to explore and master their new environment. They carry with them, between them and as the sum of their parts, another copy of Avrana Kern, who has made herself a third species in this strange partnership.

The scout vessel is duly christened Lightfoot, to represent the first tentative contact between the peoples of Kern’s World and whoever calls this new system home. Their first stop will be the next planet in, the biggest gas giant, because long-range investigation has detected activity around its moons.