Portia (the first Portia)

This page is about the first Portia, a small ordinary spider. A much larger spider called Portia appears later in the series. See Portia (the envoy). Other spiders in the book also carry the name Portia.

Portia is a female jumping spider of the species Portia labiata, and the first spider the reader meets in Children of Time. She appears in chapter 1.2, “Brave Little Huntress”. The chapter calls her a tiger in her own tiny world.

Appearance

Portia is eight millimetres long. Like every spider she has two body parts. The small abdomen holds her book lungs and most of her gut. The front section is taken up by two huge eyes that face forward and give her binocular vision. Two small tufts above them look like horns.

Her fuzzy hair forms broken patterns of brown and black, so to a predator she looks more like a dead leaf than a meal. Her fangs sit below the eyes, beside a pair of white palps that quiver like a moustache.

Abilities

Her eyes are tiny, but they see as sharply as a primate’s. She uses them to build a 3D map of the twigs and branches around her prey, plots a route in advance and keeps the target in mind even when she can’t see it.

She also lies. Working the edge of another spider’s web, she sends false signals, drops the ones that fail and keeps the ones that get a response. One bite from behind stopped the Scytodes quickly. She moves by creeping, jumping and lowering herself on a silk thread.

All of this runs on about sixty thousand neurons, against a human’s hundred billion. The chapter says she has “no thoughts”, and still she plans.

Story

Hunting the Scytodes

Portia is stalking a Scytodes pallida, a hunchbacked spider with long legs that spits toxic webbing. Scytodes hunts jumping spiders, so attacking from the front would be fatal. Portia hunts spiders that are bigger and stronger than she is.

She first tries to lure it out by tugging its web. It twitches once or twice and stays put. She then studies the surroundings and plans a route that comes at it from above, mostly out of sight.

The male

Before she sets off, a male of her own species arrives and watches the same prey, then turns his eyes on her. Another Portia might have eaten him. She doesn’t. She can’t quite grasp that he is like her, but he becomes something she has no category for until now: an ally.

The two study their mental maps for a long time while the Scytodes hangs between them. He creeps around the edge of the web and waits for her. When his position changes her odds, she starts along her planned route.

Once she is in place above the web, he steps onto it, stiff and slow like a drifting scrap of leaf. A breeze shakes the strands and he moves faster under cover of the noise. Then he bounces and dances to signal that prey is trapped. The Scytodes moves, Portia drops behind it and bites, and her poison stops it quickly.

They feed together. She is often close to driving him off, and something shared holds her back. They hunt together again and take on prey that neither would have tackled alone. In time he stops being “prey, or not prey” and becomes a mate, because her behaviour toward males has only so many options. After mating, her other instincts return and the partnership ends. She lays her clutch, the many eggs of a very successful huntress.

Her children

She and the male both carry the nanovirus, and so will their children. They will grow to twice her size. Each generation after them will be larger and sharper again, selected at a speed the virus makes possible. The chapter ends: “Portia’s children will inherit the world.”

Personality

She has no inner voice, so her character shows in what she does. She is patient, because she waits and watches before moving. She is careful, because she avoids the one attack she knows would kill her. She keeps changing her lure when it fails, and she surveys the ground before committing to a route. She is also a predator to the end: she feeds beside the male while still close to attacking him.

Unanswered questions

• What the nanovirus is, and how Portia and the male came to carry it.
• How many eggs she lays, and whether she lives to see her children grow.
• Whether the male survives.