Spiders

Spiders are descendants of Portia labiata, a jumping spider whose lineage carries a nanovirus. The virus accelerates changes in the spiders and lets them pass learned knowledge to offspring as Understandings. Over generations, they become intelligent, social hunters.

Society

Spider society is organized around female peer groups. Members form bonds as spiderlings and often keep those ties as adults. Groups manage shared nests and crèches. Males generally depend on female groups for food and shelter. Some work as assistants, while others court females or exchange useful knowledge. Their status depends on their contribution and relationships, not on a single central authority.

The spiders communicate with visual movements of their palps and vibrations carried through silk or the ground. Their cities consist of silk dwellings and walkways among the trees. Great Nest grows into a metropolis that spans several square miles of forest. Before the plague, it holds close to a hundred thousand adults and many young. The spiders also make tools and weapons from silk and wood, and use glass, metal and radio as their knowledge grows.

They remain predators. Their venom can kill other spiders, and they retain instincts for cannibalism. Their shared inheritance encourages cooperation, but does not erase conflict. When the plague spreads, males take on work that had usually been done by females, including hunting, guarding and fighting.

Knowledge and technology

Understandings pass knowledge and experience from one generation to the next. They can include practical skills and learned behaviour. The spiders also trade Understandings between individuals. After the plague, they develop a treatment that lets adult spiders receive them without waiting for offspring to inherit them.

The spiders study their surroundings and develop new tools. They cultivate aphids for honeydew and train ant colonies to perform tasks, including analysis and chemical production. Their war with a vast ant colony nearly destroys Great Nest. The spiders use Paussid beetle chemicals to disrupt the colony’s coordination, then guide it into cooperation rather than wiping it out.

A plague later kills thousands of spiders. Portia leads researchers studying spiderlings that survive the disease. They find an inherited resistance and isolate the nanovirus. A treatment made from the resistance and the virus saves Great Nest, though many spiders die before it is ready. The work also leads to the transfer of Understandings between adults.

Contact with humans

The spiders encounter humans after a damaged spacecraft crashes on their world. They regard the visitors as giants linked to the Messenger, a moving light in the sky that features in their religious beliefs. They capture a human woman and keep her for many years. Scholars study her body after her death. They try to communicate with her, but conclude incorrectly that she is unintelligent.

When the human ark ship returns, the spiders fight its crew and take control of it. They use their knowledge of human biology to make a nanovirus fragment that changes how humans perceive spiders. The fragment lets humans and spiders recognize one another as kin. The spiders choose this over killing the humans, though the fighting costs lives.

Humans and spiders come to share the green world. They combine their knowledge to develop technology, then set out together aboard the living ship Voyager. Portia commands the expedition.

Unanswered questions

The account does not establish whether every spider community shares Great Nest’s social customs and technologies.