Understanding

Understanding is the spiders’ term for knowledge the nanovirus writes into the body and passes to offspring. It arrives as instinct, and spiders later distil and trade it.

What it is

The nanovirus transcribes learned behaviour into the genome of sperm and egg. Offspring receive it as instinctive understanding: sometimes a concrete skill or muscle memory, more often knowledge with missing context that the newborn works out over time. Portia’s early moultings bring an innate grasp of language and fragments of her forebears’ lives. Spiderlings can hunt and move without being taught. Portia distinguishes ordinary telling from Understanding, which she offers as one of her species’ secrets.

Inheritance and its limits

No spider can inherit everything. New information rewrites old knowledge, though each generation may store a little more. Small families preserve a handful of tricks; Great Nest draws on many lineages and combines their discoveries. Fabian’s inherited Understanding tells him that forest clearing is faster than in his mother’s time. Portia inherits chronicles of wars with ants.

Teaching offers another route. Portia is born with the mathematical prayers but learns them again at temple; the guided lessons move her in a way the inherited knowledge does not. Spiders also inherit chemical knowledge, especially about scents and pheromones.

Bianca argues that males pass on knowledge they gain during their lives, and that the belief only mothers transmit Understandings has no foundation. She chooses mates from her own crèche for the Understandings they already carry.

Trade

Knowledge is currency. Portia’s male distils his Understanding of aphid husbandry into a silk wrapped packet with his sperm. A local male trades knowledge of his territory and its aggressive neighbours. Their offspring will be kin to both nests. This custom is cultural, not directed by the virus. The local leader recognizes that the trade benefits future generations, not the spider giving up the knowledge, and suspects it is a claim on her hunting grounds.

Distilling and the library

A month’s work can be distilled into a bulging silk bulb of thick fluid. Portia drinks one; within a day and a night the nanovirus has fitted the male’s memories into her mind, displacing some unused pathways. A city library offers the same exchange: an Understanding in, some other knowledge out.

Portia’s cure for the plague lets a living adult take a foreign Understanding, in this case an inherited immunity. A few years later, researchers transfer an idea between adults: a garbled Understanding of astronomy given to a male test subject. Adult transfer then makes any Understanding available for a price. The plague has left knowledge scarce.

Bianca can absorb more Understandings than the average spider. The accumulated store is a vast library of experience, an arachnid Alexandria. It preserves knowledge from a giant captured during the war with the ants, including what scholars learned from its body. The Voyager carries hundreds of thousands of Understandings.

Unanswered questions

• How large a single Understanding is, and what the library charges for one.
• Whether an Understanding is lost for good when the last spider holding it dies.
• How much of a spider’s own life is rewritten by knowledge taken in later.