Kern's World

Kern’s World is the terraformed planet twenty light years from Earth where Doctor Avrana Kern ran the Second Brin Exaltation Project. A satellite kept it sealed off for ages, and its forest became the home of an intelligent civilization of spiders.

Description

From orbit the planet is a green marble beside the blue marble of Earth. Its oceans glitter emerald with the phytoplankton that hold the oxygen balance of its atmosphere. It is one of a string of worlds the Old Empire turned from inhospitable chemical rock into balanced ecosystems, close to Earth only in approximate size and distance from their sun, and Kern’s World was the first of them finished. Its builders guided the plate tectonics, set the weather systems running, hurried the erosion along and seeded the soil with life. A moon crosses its face.

Most of the land is forest. A drone sent down through a gap in the canopy found a vaulted space with trunks for pillars and the interlocking boughs above for a green sky, ground and canopy equally far away. The air is breathable: at the crash site of the shuttle the temperature read six degrees above ship standard and the oxygen five per cent above it, with nothing poisonous in the mix. The crew of the Gilgamesh came from a poisoned Earth and had forgotten what a living world looked like, so that when a drone sent back a high scan of this one, a scientist asked whether the picture had been recoloured.

Name

The world had no officially confirmed name beyond its astronomical designation, and there was a strong vote for “Simiana” among some of the Brin 2 crew. Kern called it Kern’s World and counted it as hers. The Sentry Habitat used the same name in its warnings, together with a description of the planet as a quarantine world, and the crew of the ark ship took the name from the satellite.

The exaltation project

Kern sent ten thousand monkeys down in a lander called the Barrel, with a canister called the Flask carrying the virus meant to uplift them. The whole ecosystem had been built to give the monkeys a home and no competition from close cousins, so the spiders that answered instead were never part of the plan. The sabotage that destroyed the Brin 2 station left the Barrel burning up in the atmosphere with its cargo, and the Flask falling at a gentler angle to deliver the virus to a world with no monkeys in it.

The life that answered

The vertebrates meant to live alongside the monkeys had been designed to reject the virus, so mice, birds, dwarf deer and snakes changed hardly at all. The virus took the invertebrates instead. Portia’s descendants reached half a metre from fangs to spinnerets and kept growing. One relative that the virus enlarged and gave little else grew as bulky as half a dozen of them. Ants grew as large as a hand and learned to spray fire. The spitting spiders hunted in packs.

The spiders built cities, among them Great Nest by the Western Ocean and Seven Trees, and most of the tropical and temperate land stayed forest. By the time the ark ship came back they had a web around the planet, a city called Great Star Nest in orbit, and space elevators on the equator, each a thread reaching halfway to the moon. Other creatures on the world stood close to the brink of a mind.

Later history

Kern’s satellite held the planet closed while she waited for her monkeys to answer, and it turned the Gilgamesh away. The humans came back and fought for the planet anyway. The spiders boarded their ship and took it. They then gave the humans a cut down form of the nanovirus that taught both species to see the other as people, and the two peoples shared the world. From it the living ship Voyager later left for another system, carrying a crew of seventy and the stored material of tens of thousands more.

Unanswered questions

• Whether the planet had a name of its own before the humans arrived.
• What became of the giant ants and the spitting spiders once the spider cities grew.
• How much of the forest the human war and Vitas’s plan to poison the surface damaged.

Trivia

• The first humans to land on the surface reached it in a shuttle that broke in half in the atmosphere.
• Kern’s speech called the world the first of a thousand that humanity would give life to.