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.
2.
‘My interpretation of inner-system signal traffic and activity supports the hypothesis that they are at war,’ Avrana Kern’s precise, always-slightly-disapproving voice informs them. The Lightfoot’s control system isn’t all of her, of course, only a pared-down version, but Avrana Kern tends to expand to fit the computational space available. Helena wonders if she possessed similar qualities when alive and in her human body.
Portia, beside her, scrapes and shuffles, the words coming through Helena’s gloves as, What are we even looking at here? War with what? Another waking, this, after the long step in-system, and Portia is irritable and restless at the enforced inactivity.
The Lightfoot has come in towards one of the gas giant’s larger moons to find it . . . under deconstruction, is the only way Helena can think about it. The ball of ice and rock had once been about forty per cent of the size of Kern’s World (and, therefore, of Old Earth as well) but has lost at least three per cent of its initial mass. Closer drone viewing shows its outer surface riddled with holes and grooves. Burrows. It is crawling with life; all the more remarkable because it has no atmosphere to speak of, any appropriate gas-forming elements either making up part of its frozen surface or having long ago evaporated into space. Surface temperature is, by Kern’s scale, 250 below zero at the very sunniest. And yet it lives and, apparently, makes war on its inner-system neighbours.
The drone moves closer, dangerously close save that the locals do not react to its presence in any way. They are creatures of varying size up to about half a kilometer in length, with the majority of them somewhere near that larger demographic. They have the form of something grublike, but with dozens of stubby legs ending in hooked claws, with which they make a slow but sure progress about the moon. Their heads – or at least the truncated businesses at the anterior end of their bodies – end in a bizarre, machine-looking assemblage that is plainly more than able to chew up whatever they run into. Helena watches them just grind their way into the ground, barely slowing from their waddle on the surface, their fleshy segments bulging and heaving as they work.