Children of Time Fan Wiki

A fan-made guide to the characters, species, places and technology of Adrian Tchaikovsky's Children of Time series.

Characters

• Avrana Kern: Avrana Kern leads the Second Brin Exaltation Project and survives the destruction of its station as an uploaded personality in the Sentry Habitat. She guards the planet where her experiment continues and later advises the society formed by humans and spiders.
• Bianca (the alchemist): A scholar of Great Nest who works in a silk laboratory inside an ant nest. Her plan turns a marching ant colony into allies.
• Brenjit Nessel: A colonist aboard the Gilgamesh who joins Scoles's mutiny rather than go to the moon base. She reaches the green planet in a stolen shuttle and runs into the forest when Karst's security team starts shooting the survivors.
• Fabian: A small male spider of Great Nest who invents a chemical architecture for ant colonies, uses it to destroy an army, and makes his help conditional on the killing of a male becoming a crime.
• Holsten Mason: Holsten Mason is a classicist and member of the Gilgamesh's Key Crew. He translates Old Empire signals and recognizes the spiders' transmissions as language.
• Isa Lain: Isa Lain is the chief engineer of the ark ship Gilgamesh. She works to keep the ship and its human cargo alive across a journey of millennia.
• Karst: Karst leads the security detail aboard the Gilgamesh. His first name is not given.
• Portia (the envoy): A large spider from the Great Nest who travels north to investigate the ants and their colony. She steals a crystal from the colony, then escapes by gliding away.
• Portia (the first Portia): A jumping spider eight millimetres long who hunts with a patience that looks almost like thought, and whose children are said to inherit the world.
• Renas Vitas: Renas Vitas is the science chief aboard the ark ship Gilgamesh. She argues that the crew must attack rather than risk trusting an offer of peace from Kern's World.
• Scoles: Scoles leads the mutineers aboard the Gilgamesh and takes Holsten Mason and Isa Lain hostage. He gets a shuttle to the green planet, where Karst's security team shoots him.
• Sering: Sering is the volunteer chosen to ride the Brin 2 Sentry Pod in cold sleep and mentor uplifted primates. He sabotages the station, but Kern escapes in the pod.
• Viola (the speaker of Seven Trees): A powerful female of Seven Trees who is nominally in control of its force at Great Nest and later leads the Sky Nest mission toward the edge of the sky.
• Vrie Guyen: Vrie Guyen commands the ark ship Gilgamesh and steers it to Kern's World. He plans to return and take the planet, then tries to copy his mind into the ship's computer.

Species

• Ants: Ant colonies on the green planet expand, adapt, and develop new castes without individual thought. Spiders first encounter them as a threat, then use colonies for work and technology.
• Humans: Humans built the Old Empire, lost it in a war and left Earth for good. On the green planet the spiders know them as the Star Gods and expect them to return as destroyers.
• Monkeys: Ten thousand primates were carried in the Brin 2's Barrel as stock for Kern's uplift experiment, and burned with it in the atmosphere of the green world. The word then becomes Kern's name for the people she thinks she is uplifting, and her insult for humans.
• Paussid beetles: Small dark red beetles that live inside ant nests and read as nothing at all to their hosts. Bianca turns their scent of absence into armour and into the gas that stops the ant column marching on Great Nest.
• Scytodes pallida: A spider with long legs and a hunched body that spits sticky, venomous webbing to catch jumping spiders. Portia's kind call them the Spitters, raise them as one of the planet's thinking neighbours, and never wipe them out.
• Spiders: Descendants of Portia labiata develop intelligence and a complex society under the influence of a nanovirus. They preserve knowledge through inherited Understandings and later share their world with humans.
• Stomatopods: A crustacean people of the western ocean, in cautious and mostly minimal contact with the spiders of Great Nest. Mathematics is the one subject the two species discuss with any ease.

Places

• Brin 2: Brin 2 is the station that carries the uplift project to Kern's World, a ring of life and science around a central needle. A saboteur destroys it on the day the project begins, and Doctor Avrana Kern escapes in its Sentry Pod.
• Earth: Earth is the home world of the human race, twenty light years from Kern's World. By the time the ark ship Gilgamesh reaches the green planet, Earth is poisoned, frozen and silent.
• Fungus World: A planet with grey fungal growth from pole to pole, where an Old Empire terraforming project was abandoned before completion.
• Kern's World: Kern's World is the terraformed planet twenty light years from Earth where Avrana Kern's uplift experiment ran after her monkeys burned up in its atmosphere. Its forest became the home of an intelligent spider civilization.
• Second Brin Sentry Habitat: The sentry pod orbited Kern's World and broadcast questions to the planet below as part of the Exaltation Program. It held the uploaded mind of Doctor Avrana Kern and the expert system called Eliza until the Gilgamesh's drones destroyed it.
• Seven Trees: Seven Trees is a spider city built through a thicket of interlinked trunks and silk lines. An ant army burns it, and generations later it is the city where Fabian wins legal standing for males.
• The Gilgamesh: The Gilgamesh is an ark ship that carries five hundred thousand humans in suspension from a dying Earth. After its systems fail during its return to Kern’s World, its surviving passengers settle there with the planet’s spider civilization.
• The Great Nest by the Western Ocean: Great Nest is the largest spider settlement on the green planet, built through a forest and out over the western ocean. Its silk structures, farms, temples and ant colonies support a complex city society.

Technology

• Chitin armour: Body armour cut from the shells of Paussid beetles and fitted to Portia and her warriors. The shell carries the beetles' scent of absence, so the ants read its wearer as nothing at all.
• Environment suit: Sealed suits for work where there is no air. Humans aboard the Gilgamesh wear heavy armoured versions, and the spiders of Kern's World build their own to reach the top of the atmosphere and orbit.
• Mind upload: Mind upload copies a human mind into a computer. Avrana Kern's upload keeps her satellite working for millennia, and Vrie Guyen's attempt leaves broken copies of him loose in the Gilgamesh.
• Nanovirus: An engineered virus delivered to Kern’s World to accelerate development in its hosts. It alters inherited traits, encourages social bonds among affected species and can pass learned knowledge to offspring.
• Radio: Radio is the spiders' long range signalling technology, and the only channel between their world and the Messenger in orbit. Their sets are grown rather than built, so a damaged part simply regrows.
• Silk: Silk is the thread the spiders spin, and the material of their lines, dwellings, tools and weapons. In orbit it becomes the great equatorial web, the largest structure their species builds.
• Sky Nest: A hydrogen airship built by the spiders of Seven Trees, and the vessel that lifts Portia and her crew towards the top of their atmosphere. It serves as the mothership for the smaller Star Nest.
• Suspension chamber: Suspension chambers are the sealed cold sleep tanks that keep humans alive across the Gilgamesh's voyage of millennia. The crew call them coffins, and their slow failure shapes the lives of everyone aboard.
• The crystal: A pale crystal that the ants mount on a spire above their colony mound, where it carries the Messenger's signal to whatever metal touches it. A spider stole one from the ants, and it became the centre of the temple at Great Nest, where priestesses dance out its message.

Factions

• Guyen's cult: The people raised aboard the ark ship Gilgamesh as followers of Vrie Guyen, who treat him as a saviour and his upload as an ascension. They live outside suspension in a shanty town of cloth tents and work the ship for him.
• Key Crew: Key Crew is the senior crew of the ark ship Gilgamesh, the small group whose suspension chambers stand in the ship's own crew room instead of among the cargo. They hold the command, engineering, science and security posts, and they are the people the ship wakes when a job needs judgement.
• Non Ultra Natura: A human political faction on old Earth that opposed uplifts, engineered genomes and machines allowed past human limits. Its name means "no greater than nature", and one of its people destroys the Brin 2 station.
• The Old Empire: The Old Empire was a human civilization whose star maps and technology guided the Gilgamesh to Kern's World. A civil war destroyed its colonies and devastated Earth, whose later human societies rebuilt among its remains.
• The Tribe: The Tribe are the ship born engineers of the ark ship Gilgamesh and their descendants. They maintain the ageing vessel and call Isa Lain their Grandmother.

Concepts

• Palp semaphore language: The spiders' language of gesture and vibration, made with the palps and backed by stamping feet, and the main way Portia's people talk.
• Peer group: A peer group is the base social unit of the spider cities. Spiderlings that hatch in the same crèche band together as juveniles and keep the bond as adults. The larger groups hold a peer house, a complex of silk walled chambers.
• Temple: The worship of the Messenger among the spiders of the green world, with its temples, priestesses and doctrine. Its priests treat the mathematical signal from the sky as the word of God, and the old guard forbids any attempt to answer it.
• The mutiny: Colonists aboard the ark ship Gilgamesh refuse to be left on a moon without an atmosphere, seize the armoury and take Holsten Mason and Isa Lain hostage. They steal a shuttle for the green planet, where the satellite destroys it and most of them die.
• The plague: An epidemic virus that swept the spider cities of the green planet and killed hundreds of thousands before it reached Great Nest. The city survived on a serum made from immune spiderlings and the nanovirus.
• Understanding: Knowledge that the nanovirus writes into a spider's body and passes to its offspring, at first inherited at birth and later traded, distilled and drunk.
• Uplift: Uplift is Doctor Avrana Kern's project to raise another species to intelligence on Kern's World with an engineered virus, in two phases. The monkeys it was built for burned before it began, and the virus raised the arthropods instead.