Viola (the speaker of Seven Trees)

This page is about the Seven Trees female who leads the war against Great Nest and the airship mission. The name is also used in chapters 4.6 and 4.8 for a scientist of Great Nest, noted at the end.

Viola is a female spider of Seven Trees, one of its most powerful females and its speaker. She leads the city’s answer to the war that Great Nest brings, and later commands the airship Sky Nest.

Among the ruling females

Fabian returns to Seven Trees after destroying a Great Nest column and faces the ruling females, who want his secret and are refused. Viola takes the lead. Fabian suspects she is thinking further ahead than her sisters, having used his services before the war. She prompts him to say what he wants. He names his condition: the right to live, the killing of a male made punishable like the killing of a female, and his own peer house with a voice in the city. The females argue it out and the deal is signed under duress.

The army at Great Nest

The force at Great Nest is not Fabian’s. Seven Trees will not give an army to a male, so Viola is its speaker and nominally in control while he puts her orders into effect. He expected this to rankle and it does not: she is calm, long sighted and intelligent, leaves the tactics to him and gives him the broad strategy, with a grasp of conflict far beyond his own. Great Nest sends assassins after the leaders of Seven Trees, believing them female. Fabian escapes them. Viola has lost two legs and killed three of the spiders sent for her.

She sends a male messenger into Great Nest with a list of demands. When Fabian complains about the risk, she says his fellow males must take the same risks if they want the freedoms of females. While they wait for a response, she asks whether Portia will yield. She has explained already that Great Nest must concede even though its influence stops at its own boundary, because the tens of other cities run by their temples must be taught the lesson. She considers that Portia will have to be killed.

Terms and the peace

Fighting within Great Nest overthrows its priesthood. The new rulers hand Portia’s former allies over to the opposing force as a token of goodwill. Viola negotiates terms, punitive but not impossible, and Fabian watches her play a game she knows well. He sees how much she too had wanted to avoid that last step. Before the leading females afterwards she is dominant, her standing as war heroine confirmed, and she twitches her palps to let him speak.

The Sky Nest

Portia’s crew of twelve assembles at the edge of the city. Viola leads the voyage, and Portia is not even nominally in command. Viola steadies the crew one by one with a touch or a twitch of palps, takes a ceremonial handover from the flight leader, then sets her palps into paired pits in a lectern in the bows while the ship tells her how each of its parts is holding up. She has spoken to the Messenger once, and talking to the Sky Nest feels much like that.

In the thin air she reports that the work goes more slowly than expected but within tolerance. She refuses to let Portia work outside, because Portia is saved for the Star Nest. She orders Portia and Fabian to their station, answers Portia’s offer to fly alone by saying the plan calls for two in case one fails, and runs the radio checks against both onboard colonies. At the moment of separation her words come as electronic pulses with her character stripped out, sounding dreadfully efficient. She starts to say something about the Messenger’s goodwill and stops herself.

Personality

She is calm, long sighted and intelligent, and shares the risks she asks of others.

The other Viola

Chapter 4.6 uses the name for a scientist of Great Nest who supported Portia’s work on the plague. That Viola studied the mechanism of Understandings for years, and ants of her peer group were trained to read the marks of Understandings in a spider’s body. They isolated the nanovirus and the fragment of the immune spiderlings that made the cure. She was in the second stage of the plague when she sent her results, and the cure came too late for her. The chapters never connect the two spiders.

Unanswered questions

• How she lost two legs.
• Her peer group and her standing before the war.
• What she did after the Star Nest flight, and whether the deal outlasted her.