Children of Time (2015) by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Author:Adrian Tchaikovsky [Tchaikovsky, Adrian]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Science Fiction, Space Opera
ISBN: 9781447273318
Google: P3XCBgAAQBAJ
Amazon: B00UBL1ETE
Publisher: Tor UK
Published: 2015-06-01T12:00:00+00:00

4.8 AGE OF PROGRESS

Ever afterwards, Bianca has suffered from momentary fits, stumblings in speech and gait, sudden epilepsies when she is cut adrift from her surroundings for varying periods of time, her legs drumming and spasming as if trying urgently to impart a message in some idiolectic code.

But she has survived the plague and, when a fit is not upon her, retained her mind. For Viola, whose biochemical genius furnished the means, the cure came too late. Many others, great minds, great warriors, leading females of peer houses, starving males in the gutter, all have been struck down. Great Nest has been saved, but thousands of its inhabitants were not so lucky. Other cities were similarly affected, even with production of the cure taking over the work of every suitable ant colony, and the theoretical basis being sung down the lines that link the spider communities together. The disaster has been averted, but narrowly. It is now a new world, and Portia’s people recognize the fragility of their place in it. A great many things are poised on the point of change.

It is not Portia herself who first grasps the wider import of her cure. It is hard to say which scientist was first to the mark: it is one of those ideas that seems simultaneously to be everywhere, exciting every enquiring mind. Portia’s treatment has allowed living adult spiders to benefit from a foreign Understanding. Yes, what was transferred was an immunity, but surely the process would work with other Understandings, if they can only be separated out and their page noted in Viola’s great book of the body. No longer will the spread of knowledge be held down by the slow march of generations or by laborious teaching.

The need for this technology is great. The depredations of the plague have made Understandings hard to find: where once a given idea might be held within scores of minds, now there are just a handful at best. Knowledge has become more precious than ever.

It is only a few years after the plague that the first idea is transferred between adults. A somewhat garbled Understanding of astronomy is imparted to a male test subject (as are all such, given some failures in earlier experiments). From there on, any spider may learn anything. Every scientist of Portia’s generation and beyond will stand on the shoulders of the giants that she chooses to reside within her. What one knows, any can know, for a price. An economy of modular, tradable knowledge will swiftly develop.

But that is not all.

After she is recovered, Portia presents Bianca to the Temple. She explains about her fellow’s contribution to the cure. Bianca is permitted to address the assembled priestesses.

There has been a shift of orthodoxy in the wake of the plague. Everyone is having to stretch their minds to fill the gaping void left by all those who did not survive. Old ideas are being revisited, old prohibitions reconsidered. There is a great feeling of destiny, but it is a self-made destiny.

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