Peer group

Peer group is the base social unit of the spider cities on the green planet. It starts in a crèche, where spiderlings that hatch around the same time grow up together, and it lasts into adulthood. The larger groups keep a peer house, a complex of chambers with walls of silk.

Formation

Spiders raise their young in communal crèches and have no maternal instincts, so they form no strict family units. The city feeds the smallest spiderlings, but not for long. The fast maturing young must be independent within their first year, and a spider on her own is at the mercy of larger kin that bully her. So the young band together, and the bonds they make as juveniles carry into adult life, after the members scatter into their own trades. A union of peers is the base social unit in most spider settlements, and peers often found a crèche between them, raising one another’s eggs and so continuing the line down the female side.

The peer house

Any larger peer group maintains a peer house. In Great Nest the word means a complex of chambers with walls of silk. Portia’s house sits at the lowest point of a series of bubble chambers where her fellows live and meet, and it has gained a room or two since she last came home. A few generations later it is a sprawling house of many chambers slung between three trees. Houses are added to, remodelled and abandoned as a group’s fortunes change. The strongest clans live in the mid level of the city, away from the ground, where females with no peer group fight for room with half savage feral males.

A house is also where a female sheds her skin. When the old shell grows too tight at every joint, she retires into the house, her sisters spin a cocoon around her, and they keep her company and stroke messages into the silk while she peels herself out and waits for the new skin to harden.

Standing

Great Nest has no strict hierarchy. Standing comes from contribution. A peer group gains it through warriors who win battles, scholars who make discoveries, elegant dancers and storytellers, or skilled crafters, and the reward shows as gifts, favours, petitioners and a larger crowd of males in attendance. A capable female can climb a long way. Portia’s peer group becomes a dominant force in the city after the plague, and only two or three others together could challenge it.

Peer groups also act as political bodies. Cooperation between houses usually goes badly, with too many egos and females measuring legs for dominance, and it takes an emergency to make them work as one. A spy in another city can be a whole peer group that has been bought. Killing a male under the protection of another peer house is a crime that demands restitution. In the war between the cities, the alternative to fighting was to surrender everything to the peer groups of Great Nest.

Standing does not carry between cities. Bianca’s contacts among the astronomical sorority, a separate network of astronomers, got her installed in a respected peer group in Seven Trees, and even a powerful house there is smaller and poorer than a mediocre house in Great Nest.

Males

Males form no peer groups of their own. Juvenile males try to attach themselves to the edge of a female group, flirting, running errands and paying in usefulness and amusement for scraps of food. An adult male with a powerful patroness may spend his life dancing attendance on her, or be trained as an assistant. Fabian is the exception after the war. He wins the right to build his own peer house and speak for it, and that house is mostly but not uniformly male.

The plague and after

The custom of taking mates born inside the same peer group, common in the century before the plague, held Understandings together but weakened the immune systems of the great houses through inbreeding. When the plague came, the females with the power to act were often the first to fall sick. Contact between peer houses almost stopped, and infected houses were sealed. Later, when Portia’s warrior peer group boarded the ark ship, six separate peer groups were inside it at once, each troop on its own.

Unanswered questions

• How many spiders a typical peer group holds. The text never gives a number.
• Which group the “connection peer group” was, which Fabian says was having some success just before the Messenger was destroyed.
• What became of the peer groups of Great Nest after the temple fell and the city surrendered.