Children of Time (Children of Time, #1)

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

I cannot physically do everything myself. Why is it that other people so often fail to meet my standards, when I rely on them? To Sering alone she sent,

The nanovirus has been busy, doing what it can with unexpected material. She is the result of generations of directed mutation, her presence mute witness for all those failures who never bred. Call her Portia.

She is no mathematician. She does not quite grasp the series of arithmetical progressions, series and transformations that are represented in the waves of motion passing through the ants—no more than the ants themselves do—but she can grasp that there is some pattern there, some significance to what she is seeing.

Her descendants will tell the story of how Portia entered the temple of the ants and stole the eye of their god.

A common misunderstanding. If well coached and born with the pertinent Understandings, then they are quite able to deal with the more routine tasks. I did once employ females, but that results in so much jostling for status and having to defend my pre-eminence; too much measuring of legs against each other—and me—to get the work done. So I settled on this solution.

Ant nests are ecosystems in their own right, and many species live in uneasy communion with them. Some, like the aphids, provide services, and the ants actively cultivate them.

A very few, however, have managed to survive by ingenuity and superior adaptation. Of these, the Paussid beetles—Bianca’s current area of study—are the most successful. The Paussids have dwelt within ant nests for millions of years, utilizing various means to lull their unwitting hosts into accepting them. Now the nanovirus has been working with them and, although they are not as intelligent as Portia, they still have a certain cunning and the ability to work together, and utilize their versatile pheromonal toolkit with considerable insight.

“Long-term planning, if you can believe it. The ability to take a goal and work towards it through however many intervening steps. He’s one of those people who’s always four moves ahead. So if he’s doing this now, it may look just like pique but he’s got a reason.”

Her world is one in which there is no great divide between the thinkers and the thoughtless, only a long continuum.

Who knows what we might have achieved, had we not been so keen to recreate all their follies, he thought now. Could we have saved the Earth? Would we be living there now on our own green planet?

It was the curse of the Old Empire, that division of man against man that was the continual brake on human progress.

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.

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.

that they are of a race that does not kill lightly, and yet give them a cause and they will.

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.

Why could she not see eye to eye with them? Now she sees their eyes. She sees all eight of them.

plan calls for two of them to enter the smaller craft mounted atop the Sky Nest. The Star Nest, they call it, and it will carry them where no spider has ever been—into regions that have been the province of myth and imagination since their records began.

The Sky Nest is robust, able to survive the hectic and turbulent weather conditions extending all the way down to the surface of their world. It is still a great, almost weightless object: a cloud of silk and wood and hydrogen; a small crew of spiders and a handful of engines are the heaviest things aboard.

Your purpose is to survive and grow and prosper and to seek to understand, just as my people should have taken these things as their purpose, had they not fallen into foolishness, and perished.

When they tell her what Fabian did to secure her survival, she refuses to believe it for a long time. In the end, it is the Messenger Herself who brings her to an acceptance of what happened.