The scholars of Portia’s kind had been keen not to reprogram the ant colony, as they had done with its various limbs and expeditionary forces, because in doing so its unique abilities would be lost, and the spiders were not blind to the advances that the colony’s development had unlocked. So it was that years of complex campaigning had been entered into—at some considerable cost in lives—until the ant colony was manoeuvred into a position where cooperation with its spider neighbours became the most beneficial course of action, whereupon the ant colony passed, without acrimony or resentment,
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One of the many reasons why in this book the spiders are actually the heroes.
