Silk

Silk is the thread the spiders spin, and a material they use throughout their technology. They have spun it for gliding since before the earliest Understandings, and use it for their cities, nets, armour and weapons. In orbit it becomes the great equatorial web, the largest structure their species builds.

The material

A hunting spider lowers herself on a thread, and a male speaks to a female by bouncing on the strands of a web. The spiders have used silk for gliding since before the earliest Understandings, and their growing intelligence refined the art. Their chemical synthesis gives them the hydrogen for lifting bodies, and a technology of silk and light wood takes them into the air.

The same thread carries speech. Vibrations transmit well down silk lines, and the spiders have built nodes of tensioned coils that amplify the signal, so words pass for kilometres between cities in calm weather.

In vacuum a spider’s spinnerets connect to a small silk factory that spins chemical silk into formidably strong strands. Their space suits are built around that supply.

Cities and daily life

Silk is used throughout spider settlements. Hundreds of lines link the trunks of Seven Trees, each one given a job: structure, a road, or speech. Dwellings are silk tents pulled taut by support lines into many shapes, which suits a species that lives in three dimensions and hangs as easily as it sits. Meeting places are broad webs where a speaker’s words run to the crowd along the dancing strands.

At the centre of Seven Trees hangs the reservoir, a watertight net spread wide to catch rain and run off. Great Nest sheathes and strengthens artificial pillars with silk and reaches out over the sea on them. A balloon of silk half sunk in the bay serves as a diving bell for envoys to the stomatopods. Peers spin a cocoon to hold a sister while she moults.

Silk also carries knowledge and art. A worshipper knots thread into a language of numbers, and the knots are eaten when she rises. Male artists build a moving sculpture of silk that tells a life story, then take it down and consume it.

Weapons

Slingers throw globules wrapped in silk, filled with chemicals that strip ants of their scent language. Packages sealed in webbing are woven to come apart at almost the same moment and release their gas. Armour is coats of silk and plates of soft wood, or beetle shell fixed with webbing. A spring trap woven in haste slows giant defenders inside the ark ship.

The great equatorial web

Years of work by a political union of the spider cities produced the orbital structure they call Great Star Nest, a sculpture in three dimensions as much as a machine. Bianca rides out of the Seven Trees conurbation in a capsule on a wire to the nearest anchor point. The ground there is kept clear, and in the middle of the clearing a tent of silken walls a hundred feet high narrows to a single thread that climbs out of the atmosphere and half way to the moon. The equator is studded with these threads.

Beyond them, clusters of habitats trail out from one another, join up, are spun up or taken down, and this became a way of life for the spiders. The web has no centre and no vital point, which is why the ark ship’s lasers scorch it at random when it arrives, frying strands and cutting open nodes.

Its weapons are debris. A rock hauled up by an elevator or caught in the void sits under enormous tension in the net, and the release hurls it at the enemy. Portia’s squads are slung out on lines from a central hub, each group a spinning wheel falling towards the Gilgamesh. Hull teams carry an airtight net of synthetic silk to seal the hole they cut, and they see through a device of glass bound in silk that holds a colony of tiny ants.

After the war the web is grander again, blooming with green solar collectors and dotted with new craft.

Unanswered questions

• How the far end of an elevator thread is held up. The height and the capsules that climb it are given, but not the counterweight.
• How much silk a spider can spin in one working, or how long a line takes to make.
• Whether the web ever reached its planned size, or how the damage from the battle was repaired.