Children of Time

“Portia’s children will inherit the world.”

The first part of the book introduces Kern and the spiders, and in doing so, Tchaikovsky provides the architecture that will undergird the major themes, the primary conflict, and the resolution of the novel. This passage foreshadows the ultimate success of the spiders and has a double meaning, as Portia’s “children” will ultimately include both spiders and humans—as is hinted in the title of the novel as well.

“She would return to the tomb, and a simulacrum of herself would stand watch over a silent planet, in a silent universe, as the last outpost of the great spacefaring civilization.”

The imagery of Kern’s cold storage as a “tomb” introduces the ongoing comparisons between stasis and death even as Tchaikovsky explains the practical mechanism by which Kern transcends time itself to become a constant figure throughout the spiders’ evolution. The additional metaphor of her AI counterpart “standing watch” over the planet metaphorically places Kern’s satellite in the position of a guardian over the spiders.

“Experience allowed him to recognize where he was and why that was no cause for alarm, but the old monkey instincts still had their moment of glory, shrieking Trapped! Trapped! in the halls of his mind.”

Holsten’s first awakening from cold storage connects the monkey motif to the recurring comparisons between cold storage and death. The diction in this passage connects Holsten to his instinctual roots, highlighting The Link between Physical Attributes and Cultural Evolution. Even with all of his intellectual talents and personal experiences, Holsten must struggle to overcome his instinctual programming, and this moment demonstrates how close the humans are, culturally, to their primate ancestors.

“That same ability that allowed their tiny ancestors to create a mental map of their environs has become the ability to imagine, to ask what is beyond the forest. Portia’s people are born explorers.”

The “mental map” imagery in this scene highlights the importance of planning and hints at the spiders’ emphasis upon crafting architecture of one kind or another to impose a sense of order on their world. The spiders’ mental ability to plan helps them to develop the ability to imagine, and their inherent curiosity leads them to culturally evolve well beyond the progress that other species have made.

“This is no way to run a civilization, he thought. But of course, that’s not what we are, not anymore. We’re a civilization in transport, waiting to happen somewhere else. Maybe here. We’re the last cutting of old Earth.”

Holsten regularly reflects on the nature of his people, who have been set adrift from their planet of origin. Holsten’s perspective as a classicist allows him to view his own culture very differently than his shipmates do, for he alone understands that in order for a true civilization to form, its members must be connected to one another, to time, and to nature itself. As the last group of humans wanders the universe in the Gilgamesh, Holsten contends that they do not yet have what they need to reform civilization; they have only the potential to do so. By calling the humans a “cutting of old Earth,” Holsten invokes a plant-based metaphor to suggest that humanity must find new, viable soil before it can grow and evolve once again.

“The innate, virus-hardwired Understanding of these mathematical transformations that she inherited did not inspire her in the same way as being guided through the sequences by her teachers, slowly coming to the revelation that what these apparently arbitrary strings of figures described was something beyond mere invention—was a self-evident and internally consistent universal truth.”

The relationship illuminated between the mathematical equations that Kern sends to the planet and the spiders’ religious belief highlights The Conflict Between Tradition and Progress. The root of the spiders’ willingness to engage in religious belief is the “self-evident and internally consistent universal truth” of mathematics as a universal language. Because the scientific truth of the message is the foundation of their beliefs, their religion ultimately cannot prevent their forward progress.

“‘Have you actually thought about what we’re doing, Lain? I don’t even mean this business,’ a jerk of the head towards Scoles, ‘but the whole show. We don’t have a culture. We don’t have a hierarchy. We simply have a crew, for life’s sake. Guyen, who someone once considered fit to command a large spaceship, is now titular head of the human race.’”

Holsten’s frustrated tone in this passage indicates the cultural failures of humanity. His ability to perceive the flaws and cracks in Guyen’s leadership comes largely from his focus on the definitions of civilization; he habitually considers the broader philosophical picture rather than focusing solely on moment-to-moment survival.

“They do not conceive of it as some celestial spider-god that will reach down into their green world and save them from the ant tide. However, the message is. The Messenger is. These are facts, and those facts are the doorway to an invisible, intangible world of the unknown. The true meaning of the message is that there is more than spider eyes can see or spider feet can feel. That is where hope lies, for there may yet be salvation hidden within that more. It inspires them to keep looking.”

The connection that the spiders make between scientific fact and mystery lays the groundwork for their later ability to move beyond religious belief in ways that the humans—even Kern—cannot achieve. The spiders can accept that there is “more” to the universe than their direct experience, and this enlightened outlook highlights the importance of Promoting Coexistence through Mutual Understanding.

“Doctor Kern, we are human beings, like you, Holsten sent, wondering how true that latter part could possibly be.”

Holsten’s communication with Kern and his attempt to connect with her through shared experience reflect the importance of Promoting Coexistence through Mutual Understanding. Ironically, however, his insight prompts him to doubt the veracity of the very connections that he is trying to make, given that the remnants of Kern can no longer be strictly categorized as “human.” His ambivalence about the truth of his statement also shows the complexity of his perspective as he tries to find common ground in any way he can.

“Scoles stared about him with the baffled, angry look of a man who has lost control of the last shreds of his own destiny.”

The destiny of the humans and the spiders as two distinct species is a recurring thematic element in the novel. The concepts of independence and ownership of one’s own destiny are placed in opposition to the willingness to place one’s trust in either leaders or gods. Scoles’s experience in this scene is therefore an example of what can happen when a person’s sense of independence is stripped away by external forces.

“Weapons, engines, political systems, philosophies, sources of energy… Holsten’s people had thought themselves lucky that someone had built such a convenient flight of steps back up from the dark into the sunlight of civilization. They had never quite come to the realization that those steps led only to that one place.”

Holsten holds a unique perspective on the progression of human evolution and devolution. Unlike his colleagues, he recognizes that the primary error of his people was in trying to emulate those who had come before them, rather than acknowledging the failures of their ancestors. He realizes that the attempt to recreate the achievements of the past prevents the current generation of humans from seeking new solutions for a better future.

“The Bianca of old, with her male laboratory assistants, had uncovered something of a truth about spider gender politics when she complained that working with females involved far too much competition for dominance, and old instincts lie shallowly under the civilized surface.”

The gender inequality in the spider society is the major stumbling block that hinders their efforts to overcome their instinctual and physical limitations. Inevitably influenced by The Link between Physical Attributes and Cultural Evolution, the female spiders have difficulty in recognizing the males of their own species as “like them” instead of Other.

“If we survive, it will be on our own merits, not because of the Messenger’s aid. We are now on our own.”

Portia’s awakening as an individual who is distinct from both her sister spiders and the Messenger demonstrates a movement away from religion and tradition and towards progress. The cure for the plague doesn’t come from Kern, but from the spiders’ own ingenuity and curiosity. As a result, they can finally begin to resolve The Conflict Between Tradition and Progress.

“The more he learned of them, the more he saw them not as spacefaring godlike exemplars, as his culture had originally cast them, but as monsters: clumsy, bickering, short-sighted monsters… in trying to be the ancients, they had sealed their own fate—neither to reach those heights, nor any others, doomed instead to a history of mediocrity and envy.”

As Holsten develops through the centuries of seeking a new home for humanity, his thoughts on the progression of human society reveal the primary differences between humans and spiders. He recognizes that the act of remaining mired in the past, even if it is a seemingly illustrious past, privileges tradition to the detriment of progress.

“There is a second book in a second code, short and yet full of information, and different, so different. I asked Viola what it was. She says it is the Messenger within us. She says the Messenger is always to be found when new Understandings are laid down.”

The discovery of the nanovirus is connected both to Kern and to the idea of Promoting Coexistence through Mutual Understanding. The thematic connection between the nanovirus and Kern—and therefore between the spiders and Kern—foreshadows the fact that the nanovirus itself, as a “messenger” of understanding, will become the solution to the human/spider conflict.

“She grasped that whatever that alien, artificial tangle of language is doing, it has a divine function: drawing them out of the bestial and into the sublime. It is the hand that places Understandings within the mind and tissue of life, so that each generation may become greater than the last. So that we may know you, Portia reflects, as she watches that far away light arc across the sky.”

Just as mathematics previously revealed a truth of nature to the spiders, the later generations of spiders see the connection between the divine (or the “sublime”) and language. The novel therefore suggests that communication is the path to knowing and accepting the “other,” thereby Promoting Coexistence through Mutual Understanding.

“They were part of a species that had become unmoored from time, only their personal clocks left with any meaning for them while the rest of the universe turned to its own rhythms and cared nothing for whether they lived or died.”

Time is a recurring metaphorical element in the novel. Eons pass from the opening of the novel to its end, and although cold storage is a useful technology that allows for character continuity, Tchaikovsky makes sure to examine the likely effects of immortality upon the human psyche. Those who transcend time suffer negative consequences, becoming “unmoored from time” and from all that makes them who they are. Separated from the natural world, they become increasingly likely to embrace conflict instead of diplomacy.

“It had been a long road to here from Earth, but not as far as he himself had travelled from their state of innocence. The burden of knowledge in his head burned like an intolerable coal: the certainty of dead Earth, of frozen colonies, a star-spanning empire shrunk to one mad brain in a cold satellite… and the ark overrun by the monkeys.”

A primary difference between the spiders and the humans is that the spiders always consider knowledge to be a positive thing, even when that knowledge relates to a looming threat. By contrast, Holsten’s reaction to the children focuses only on the negative effects of knowledge. He cannot see beyond his current level of understanding to perceive the potential benefits that knowledge may provide to his species in the future.

“A million-year prejudice stares back at him. The ancient cannibal spider, whose old instincts still form the shell within which their culture is nestled, recoils in horror. He sees the conflict within them: tradition against progress, the known past against the unknown future. They come so far, as a species: they have the intellect to break from the shackles of yesterday. But it will be hard.”

Fabian’s plea for gender equality offers a summary of the primary theme of the book: The Conflict Between Tradition and Progress. Here, the tradition involves the very instinctual nature of the spider, which resists the cultural progress of spider society as a whole. Fabian’s plea is successful, though the decision is painfully difficult, and this arduous process suggests that tradition hampers progress and that progress is preferable to tradition if the two are ever in conflict.

“She can finally communicate Her warning in a way they can understand. At last the spiders appreciate that, even aside from their orbiting God, they are not alone in the universe, and that is not a good thing.”

The most pivotal moment of Kern’s character development occurs when she willingly acknowledges the nature of the spiders. Her ability to meet them where they are instead of imposing her ideas on them allows her to feel empathy for them and to understand them, and that understanding allows her to communicate more effectively and warn them of the existential threat that now approaches in the form of the Gilgamesh.

“From monkey to mankind, through tool-use, family, community, mastery of the environment around them, competition, war, the ongoing extinction of so many of the species who had shared the planet with them. There had been that fragile pinnacle of the Old Empire then, when they had been like gods, and walked between the stars, and created abominations on planets far far from Earth. And killed each other in ways undreamt of by their monkey ancestors. And then us; the inheritors of a damaged world, reaching for the stars even as the ground died beneath their feet, the human race’s desperate gamble with the ark ships.”

Holsten summarizes all of human evolution in a single paragraph, demonstrating the shortcomings of natural evolution, and the structure of the novel contrasts this idea with the engineered evolution of the spiders. The novel has shown, in detail, the evolution of the spiders who sought to embrace their environment rather than “mastering” it. The track of human development shows the fundamental differences between the species, for although the humans engage in atrocities of genocide and extinction, the spiders lean toward problem-solving and seeking to gain a balanced and peaceful coexistence with the other factors of their environment.

“It was a club. In that sense, it was a quintessentially human thing: a tool to crush, to break, to lever apart in the prototypical way that humanity met the universe head-on. And how do they meet the world? What does the spider have as its basic too? Briefly he entertained the thought, They build. And it was a curiously peaceful image.”

Holsten creates a concrete distinction between human and spider instinct, and his contemplations relate directly to the Architecture motif. Human beings “crush […] break… [and] lever apart,” while spiders “build,” and this difference suggests that even though spiders are hunters and have cannibalistic tendencies, their core nature is to build and work in alignment with the structures that they discover.

“The spiders have equivalents of the Prisoners’ Dilemma, but they think in terms of intricate interconnectivity, of a world not just of sight but of constant vibration and scent. The idea of two prisoners incapable of communication would not be an acceptable status quo for them, but a problem to overcome: the Prisoners’ Dilemma as a Gordian knot, to be cut through rather than to be bound by.”

The importance of perspective is a recurring thematic element, and at the end of the novel, the primary difference between humans and spiders is that spiders refuse to accept a universe with unsolvable problems. The contrast between the Prisoners’ Dilemma and the Gordian Knot, both of which are philosophical scenarios designed to present problems that seem unsolvable, demonstrates the spiders’ refusal to accept that certain things remain impossible. That refusal is largely what saves them from the ants and the plague—they keep searching for answers no matter the odds that are ranged against them.