The crystal

The crystal is a pale stone that picks up the signal of the Messenger, and the spiders who keep one can reach it only through metal. The ants fix one on a spire at the summit of their colony mound. A spider from the Great Nest took it from them, and it became the centre of the temple at Great Nest, where a priestess reads its message out as a dance.

Description

The crystal is pale and translucent, and gleams in the moonlight. The ants mount it on a stumpy spire, the highest point of their mound. Seen up close by the traveller Portia, it does not seem large.

It is used from above. A small ant climbs the spire, turns one antenna down to touch the congregation gathered below and touches the crystal with the other, which wears a fine metal cap tapering to a hair thin wire.

What it does

At the touch of the wire, shivers run through the assembled ants, and each passes the same rhythmic message to its neighbours. The whole host is held by it. The waves carry mathematical series and transformations. The ants cannot read them either, but the colony pours its processing power into the attempt.

The dance begins while the Messenger, the swift star the spiders watch crossing the sky, is overhead, and stops when it drops below the horizon.

A spider can feel the signal for herself. The votive priestess of a temple touches the crystal with a metal probe, feels the pulsing of the message and dances out its arithmetic for the congregation, her stylus hunting for the contact points. In the temple at Great Nest the crystal sits at the centre, on the apex of one of the city’s original trees, in a space without walls strung from the canopy with an inward sloping floor.

Their technology rests on silk and wood, and what little metal they use is taken from the ants.

History

The traveller Portia finds the crystal on her scouting trip into the ants’ land. She watches the dance, then spins a silk net, seizes the crystal from the top of the spire and glides away with it and the head of the ant that raised the alarm. In later tellings her people say she entered the temple of the ants and stole the eye of their god.

Most great nests came to have a crystal, and pilgrims from lesser communities travel a long way to see one. Seven Trees had none, and its people recited the message by spinning and eating their own knots of thread instead.

At Great Nest the crystal became the centre of the temple, said to be the one the ancestress took. A later Portia, come home from the burning of Seven Trees, can reach inside herself for that older Portia’s memories of the theft.

Then the message itself begins to go wrong. A priestess tells Bianca that she felt a new message in the crystal at the wrong moment, a jumble of random vibrations. Others speak of faint whisperings in the crystal, and of other Messengers. During the dance the priestess sometimes halts or stumbles, and the congregation spins harder to cover it.

In the years of the plague, the priestess Portia touches the crystal with her metal stylus and dances to the Messenger as it passes, and takes from it the assurance that what she cannot yet understand can be understood. She also thinks, for the first time, of sending a message back. The Temple acts against such thinking, but scientists have long tried to reproduce the invisible vibrations. Bianca ran experiments with the crystal, came close to exile for it, and had a crystal of her own until the Temple took it away.

By Portia’s later rule the old crystal receiver has been improved into a machine of metal, wood and silk. It is a terminus for a strand of the unseen web that links all such termini, and through it she speaks to other temples across half the world and to God. Each temple is given its own frequency.

Unanswered questions

• What the crystal is made of, how big it is, and whether the ants found it or shaped it.
• How many nests keep a crystal.
• What the stray vibrations in the crystal are. Later attempts to talk back to the Messenger go elsewhere.
• Whether the crystal at Great Nest survives the wars that follow.

Trivia

• The crystal is the trophy in the story the spiders tell about their ancestress, and the deed is remembered as a raid on a temple.
• The priestess works the crystal by touch, not by sight, and reads the message as arithmetic she dances.