Seven Trees

Seven Trees is a spider city on the green planet, a metropolis of interlinked trunks and silk. It encompasses more than seven trees by chapter 3.2. An ant army burns it in that chapter. Generations later, Fabian builds a peer house there and pushes for protections for males.

Description

The city is a thicket of trunks joined by hundreds of lines. Each line has a purpose: structure, a thoroughfare, or speech. Dwellings are silk tents pulled taut by support lines into different shapes. Meeting places are broad webs, so that a speaker’s words reach a crowd along the dancing strands.

At the high centre is the reservoir, a watertight net spread wide to catch rain and run off from a great area around the settlement, fed by troughs and pipes from many smaller rain catchers. Above the city, lookouts stand as high as the silk scaffolding reaches and flag down signals. Nodes of tensioned coils amplify speech, so that words carry for kilometres between cities in calm weather.

Every tree carries sheer web skirts a metre or so above the ground, angled up and out, a surface that ants cannot grip. The forest around Seven Trees was cut back by semi domesticated local ants, first as a firebreak, later as a killing ground. The trees are regrowth, for ants burned the originals in an older war.

Temple

Seven Trees has a temple at the high point of its central tree, an expansive tent of silk whose walls are woven with complex geometric patterns. Unlike Great Nest it has no crystal. A spider crouches inside and spins knots that make a language out of numbers, a text written fresh each time and eaten when the spider rises.

The city burns

An ant army of hundreds of thousands reaches Seven Trees. The local ants meet it while the spiders fight from above. Defenders sling stones, then silk wrapped globules of chemicals that strip the invaders of their scent language. The ants answer with shock troops whose mandibles carry saw edged metal blades, with castes that brew and spray burning fluid, and with artillery that flicks glass grenades from metal masks. Males cut the lines to the ground and carry water up from the reservoir. The fires spread, the reservoir splits and its water falls in steam, and the city burns. Portia escapes on her own silk parachute.

After the fire

Refugees from Seven Trees carry word of the fire to Great Nest. Generations later Seven Trees is one of Great Nest’s lesser neighbour nests, with River Chasm and Burning Mountain, testing Great Nest’s borders. Its temple is called apostate. The plague struck Seven Trees harder than Great Nest, and the city gives its males more room as a result. Fabian says Seven Trees was rebuilt by males, and he leaves Great Nest to live there. Bianca calls the city poor, and says its males would trade all the value they are given for the protection of a strong Great Nest peer house.

Fabian and the war

A colony run by Seven Trees mines copper until a colony sent by Great Nest undermines its galleries. The dispute grows into a war in which Great Nest strips Seven Trees of its mines, demands its farms and laboratories, and calls its people heretics. A council of almost forty powerful females meets on a central web to answer, and its first army of fighting ants is destroyed.

Fabian’s few hundred ants then eat a Great Nest column from the inside. Seven Trees’ forces march to Great Nest with Viola as their speaker, and Great Nest surrenders. Back home the leading females nearly split the city over Fabian’s demand that killing a male become a crime. Two years later he is found dead in his laboratory, and many blame traditionalists from Seven Trees.

Later chapters

By chapter 6.1 Seven Trees is a conurbation with a scientific district and a Great Nest district of its own, lit at night in green, blue and ultraviolet, with artists telling the story of Fabian and a city library. The Sky Nest airship floats over it, and its crew assembles in farmland beyond the last buildings. Bianca later sends the Messenger a picture of Seven Trees from within. In chapter 7.2 the nearest space elevator anchor lies a capsule ride from the vast reach of the conurbation. In chapter 7.10 crowds gather beyond the edge of the Great Nest district of Seven Trees City to watch a human shuttle land.

Unanswered questions

• Why a district of Seven Trees carries the name Great Nest, and whether the two cities merged.
• How many spiders live in Seven Trees.
• What became of the city after the shuttle landed.

Art