Temple

Temple is the worship of the Messenger and the body of priestesses, buildings and doctrine that carry it among the spiders of the green world.

Description

The temple at Great Nest is the highest point of the city. It is a space without walls, slung between the far ends of the canopy above a floor that slopes inward. At its centre, on the apex of one of the city’s original trees, stands the crystal that an ancestress of Portia took from the ants, a theft that has since become legend.

Worshippers crouch on the sloping floor in a crowd that reaches to the central trunk. When the ant colony is advancing, refugees fill the temple and look for hope there. Most of the greatest nests keep a crystal of their own, which pilgrims from lesser communities travel far to see. The temple at Seven Trees has none, only an expansive tent of silk whose walls are woven with complex geometric patterns.

The central act is a dance. The votive priestess touches the crystal with a metal probe and dances out the arithmetic of the message for the congregation, each step and sweep of her palps a proof. The faithful knot sequences of numbers into thread, a holy text written new each time a spider kneels in contemplation and consumed when she rises.

Doctrine

The Messenger is a moving point of light that broadcasts streams of mathematical sequence. The Temple teaches that it was the last survivor of an earlier age of the universe, that it came to this world and made it able to bear life, seeded it with plants and then with animals, and on the last day of the old age sent Portia’s ancestors here. Priests learned the proofs of the message first by rote and then in true comprehension, as a civic and religious duty.

The old guard of priestesses holds the message sacrosanct and perfect. Their work is to understand it better, not to howl into the darkness in the hope of an answer. Each generation a few voices argue for a reply, and those spiders are watched.

Priest engineers work outside the city, behind firebreaks, on machines of copper and channelled lightning described by the Messenger. The Temple keeps a monopoly on radio. Its receiver has grown from an old crystal device into a machine of metal, wood and silk. A priestess uses it to speak to other cities’ temples and to the Messenger on Great Nest’s frequency.

Priestesses

Portia is the greatest priestess of the Messenger in Great Nest. She is also a warrior and scientist. Lesser priestesses make way for her, though not always willingly. She visits the temple to settle her mind before a fight. Temple scientists study the plague while concealing how little they know about a cure.

Bianca was formerly of the Temple. Her experiments on the crystal brought her close to exile. She was confined and later threatened with exile again. She tells Portia that the Messenger is a rock of metal.

Decline

Under the plague, the congregation thinned and worshippers asked why the fire from heaven had not purged it. After Portia found a cure, Bianca addressed the assembled priestesses. The Temple’s intimates sent the first reply to the Messenger, “We are here”. They panicked when the transmissions stopped.

A second Messenger in the sky shook the theology further, and priestesses and astronomers studied it together. The Temple answered with a harder line. War spread between the cities it dominated, and in Great Nest the priesthood was broken and cast down from within. Some went into hiding, sheltered by those who still believed, some fled, and the rest were handed to the enemy as a token of goodwill. Of Portia there is no word.

In the end the spiders watch the Messenger burn its way across the sky and know something has gone out of their world. Active worship is almost nonexistent by then, and they keep the memory of the heady days of Temple.

Unanswered questions

• Who first learned the language of the message, and how the first crystal reached Great Nest beyond the legend of its theft.
• What became of Portia after the fall of the priesthood.