The plague

This page is about the epidemic in the spider cities. The war against the ant super colony is a different event.

The plague is an epidemic virus that swept the cities of Portia’s people on the green planet. It killed hundreds of thousands before it reached Great Nest, and Great Nest came through it only after a serum made from immune spiderlings and the nanovirus.

The illness

The first certain signs are heat in the joints and a rawness at the eyes, mouthparts, spinnerets, anus and book lungs. Muscle spasms follow, mostly in the legs, with a stammering in speech and a nervous dance that has no cause. Later her limbs stop obeying her, and she staggers through long pointless journeys she did not choose.

Ten to forty days after the first involuntary twitch the virus reaches the brain. The victim loses hold of who and where she is and reads the spiders around her irrationally, with paranoia, aggression and fugue states. Death follows in five to fifteen days, and just before it comes an urge to climb as high as possible. Fabian describes trees and webbing crowded with rigid carapaces and glassy eyes fixed upwards.

An infected spider can carry the illness for up to two hundred days before the first sign, feeling only occasional heat or dizziness, and it is moderately contagious in that time. Long closeness to a sufferer very likely passes it on, and a bite from a victim in the last phase is the surest route.

Why it was so deadly

The epidemic was already spreading from community to community before Great Nest saw its first victims. Cities in the north were in ruins and hundreds of thousands were dead.

Their cities made it worse. They held huge numbers of bodies close together, with the squalor that follows, and their governments were casual and almost anarchic, badly fitted for harsh measures.

The third cause was inbreeding. For a century leading females chose mates from their own peer group to keep Understandings in the family, and the practice left the great houses with weak immune systems, so the females who might have acted were often the first to fall. Portia knows the pattern but not its cause.

A spider’s immune system does not adapt as a mammal’s does, which is why the vaccination theory brought in from other cities led nowhere.

Great Nest during the plague

Once the first cases appeared, hundreds of females left the city and many males fled. Contact between peer houses almost stopped, and the desperate and the starving roamed the streets, the healthy attacking those they believed to be sick.

Six victims reached the last stage and were killed on sight. Three times as many lingered in the middle stage while the city argued over them. Infected peer houses were sealed as lazar houses, and some spiders chose poison over losing their minds.

Portia led the search for a cure and gathered every scientist she trusted, Bianca among them. Colleagues fell one by one: Viola was in the second stage when her results arrived, and Bianca was already infected.

The cure

Fabian brought back three spiderlings from a plague city. They were healthy, and Portia hoped that meant they were immune. Transfusing their blood into infected spiders did nothing.

Viola’s ant colonies read the marks a spider’s body carries and found a passage shared by all three, which she took to be their resistance. She had no way to read that book herself, or to write in it. Then came the second find: the body holds another code, shorter and far denser, which Viola called the Messenger within. It was the nanovirus.

The ants made a serum from the immune fragment and the nanovirus, and Portia drove it into Bianca in the last stage with an artificial fang, at the joint where the legs meet the body.

Aftermath

Bianca lived and kept her mind, though she was left with fits and stumbles in speech and gait. Viola died before the cure reached her. Great Nest was saved with thousands of its people dead, and other cities were hit as well. The cure took the work of every suitable ant colony, and the method travelled along the lines between cities.

A living adult could now take a foreign Understanding, so knowledge no longer waited on inheritance or teaching, and an economy of tradable knowledge grew. The plague left Understandings scarce. Some cities where males took on female work during the crisis never let it go, and Seven Trees went furthest.

Unanswered questions

• Where the plague came from, and how it first reached the spider cities.
• Whether the nanovirus caused the disease, or only made the cure possible.
• How many died in total.