Children of Time

Enquiring Minds

By Adrian Tchaikovsky

The plague is insidious at first, then tyrannous, and at last truly terrifying. Its symptoms are by now well recorded, reliably predictable – everything in fact, except preventable. The first sure signs are a feeling of heat in the joints, a rawness at the eyes, mouthparts, spinnerets, book-lungs. Muscle spams, especially in the legs, follow; at first just a few, a stammering in speech, a nervous dance not quite accounted for, then more and more the victim's limbs are not her own, leading her in babbling, staggering, whole frantic meaningless journeys. Around this tie, from ten to forty days after the first involuntary twitch, the virus reaches the brain. The victim then relinquishes her grasp on who and where she is. She perceives those around her in irrational ways. Paranoia, aggression and fugue states are common during this phase. Death follows in another five to fifteen days, immediately preceded by an irresistible desire to climb as high as possible. Fabian has recounted in some detail the dead city that he has visited once more: the highest reaches of the trees, and the decaying webbing were crowed with the rigid carapaces of the dead, glassy eyes fixed upwards on nothing.

Prior to those first definitive symptoms, the virus is present in the victim's system for an unknown period but often as long as two hundred days, while slowly infiltrating the patient's system without any obvious harm. The victim feels occasional periods of heat and dizziness, but there are other potential causes for this and the episodes usually go unreported; all the more so because, prior to the disease taking hold in Great Nest – as it now has – any suspected sufferers were exiled on pain of death. Those incubating the disease were part of an inadvertent conspiracy to mask the signs of outbreak for as long as possible.

During this early, innocent-seeming phase, the disease is moderately contagious. Being close to a sufferer for an extended period of time is very likely to lead to oneself contracting the disease, although bites from deranged victims in the last phases are the surest way to become infected.

There have been half a dozen late-stage victims in Great Nest. They are killed on sight, and at range. There are three times as many lingering in the mid-stage, and so far no consensus has been reached regarding them. Portia and others are insistent that a cure is  possible. There is a tacit agreement amongst the temple scientists to conceal just how little idea they have of what can be done.

Portia is making the best uses of Fabian's prizes that she can. The spiderlings came from the plague city, and she can only hope that this means they are immune to the plague, and  that immunity will somehow be amenable to study.

She has tested them, and taken samples of their haemolymph – their arachnid blood – to examine, but all her lenses and analyses have so far discovered nothing. She has ordered that fluids from the spiderlings be fed or injected into mid-stage victims, a manner of transfusion having been pioneered just a few years before. The limited immune system of the spiders means that blood-type rejection is far less of an issue. In this case the attempt has had no effect.

The Dead City. Photo by Elena.