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Portia feels a hint of trepidation as her transport pod slides smoothly to a stop outside her intended destination. She is unsure what precisely has brought her here, on the eve of the end times, but something compels her forward.
Stepping out of the pod, she looks up at the majestic structure before her: the historic Great Nest Museum of Natural History. The massive silken structure has been torn down and re-woven many times over the years, as is typical of all Spider architecture, but its pride of place near the central plaza has remained the same, since the days when the Great Nest was still independent from the vast nation state of Seven Trees.
Attentive staff greet her as she enters, but she passes them by in an almost dream state, her gaze fixed on the colossal specimen that hangs in the main chamber: the skeleton of the ancient giant.
Generations ago, during the war against the Ant supercolony, the giant had fallen from the heavens in what Portia’s kind now know to be a spacecraft belonging to the very same crew of giants whose mothership is currently on approach to their world. In fragments of memories carried down the generations from her ancestress, Portia can still vaguely remember the sight of the broken craft, ablaze and set upon by ants. Back then, in those less enlightened times, the giant had been looked upon as a sort of holy gift from the Messenger; the spiders’ God interceding in their time of greatest need.
In the years following the war, the giant had been studied, both throughout its natural life, and after its eventual death. The vast skeleton at which Portia was now staring had been put on display here only after all manner of scientists and clergy had been allowed to pore over it to their hearts’ content.
Now, it hangs motionless; the bizarre, formerly internal bones held in place by thick copper wires. When it was first put on display, silk had been used, but the skeleton had swung in place like a grotesque wind chime. Even for a creature with which they shared such little commonality, the spiders of the time had felt it disrespectful, perhaps since they believed it to be of their maker, and had thankfully opted for more rigid bindings. The vast silken walls of the chamber curve around it, allowing visitors to crawl on every surface of the room, viewing the skeleton from every angle, while bioluminescence in the walls casts it in a flat, diffuse light.
Portia still isn’t sure why she has come to see it. Logically, there is no intelligence she can hope to glean from it that will be of any assistance against the hundreds of its kind that will be upon her in mere days; anything of scientific or tactical value was ascertained centuries ago, or else was lost when the creature’s soft parts decayed. While no scientist herself, Portia briefly curses the fact that the giant had to land in a time when her kind were still so primitive; what vital information might have been missed that the biologists of the modern age could potentially have grasped with ease?
Still, no sense fretting over that now. No, as much as she herself is no believer, as much as even faith in the Messenger itself has fallen by the wayside in favour of an equal partnership with the being her people now know as Doctor Avrana Kern, Portia is here for matters of the soul rather than those of the mind. She needs to see the face of the monster she is about to fight. Some illogical part of her hopes that doing so will help her to know them somehow. She does not understand how such a thing can be possible; Kern is insistent that these are creatures of pure destruction, who seek only to take and destroy, but ultimately the political minds of the nation decided differently. If the stratagem succeeds, the gods of destruction will know empathy, possibly for the first time in their existence. Will that be enough to avert the end? Portia does not know; she is not a great thinker like some of her forebears. She is a soldier, and she will follow the will of her people. Still though, she wonders at the possibility.
Strangely, in its skeletal state, the giant actually looks less alien than the ancient descriptions make it out to be. The wide, round sockets in its skull resemble Portia’s own gaze far more than the narrow, fleshy eyes that she recalls from the passed-down learnings. Its bony fingers look almost like her own legs; as though the creature has a fully formed spider at the end of each arm.
She wonders if there’s any significance in that. If what Kern says about them is true, then they are in fact distant cousins; children of the same world, separated by millennia of artificially accelerated evolution, but still sharing well over half of their genetic material. Will that be enough to bridge the gap of understanding between them? The coming days will tell.
She has dawdled long enough; she wishes to spend the remaining time she has with her peer group, before she’s summoned to the Great Star Nest. She takes one last look at the towering giant as she leaves, making a silent prayer that the now not-so-divine Messenger is wrong.
--------------------------------------------- One Month Later ----------------------------------------------
The battle is won, and the world is forever changed. Portia, having survived the chaos and bloodshed, returns to the Museum. This time though, she has another in tow. Beside her stands the towering figure of Holsten Mason. It has taken her much of the past month to parse his name; the common language used to communicate with Dr Kern is still in its infancy, and interpreting the purely auditory designations the Humans have for one another remains a challenge.
It was Holsten who asked to come here, once the formalities of post-battle diplomacy were set in motion and could proceed in his absence. The entire frontage of the museum has had to be redesigned to allow him entry; something that is going to have to happen on a very wide scale if the spider cities are going to play host to his kind in the years to come.
He stops in his tracks when he lays eyes on the skeleton, and Portia looks on in awe at the two giants, living and dead, standing face to face. The skeleton actually looks small next to him. He regards it with an expression that Portia has come to understand indicates fondness and sadness in equal measure. How strange, she thinks, that a human is capable of looking upon a lifeless body with a level of empathy that it took an injection of modified nanovirus to get them to show to even the living members of her own kind. Had these alien giants truly been so devoid of morality before her people’s interference?
He turns to her now. “Thank you for letting me see this” he says in the common language; of all the humans, he has shown the greatest aptitude in adopting this new tongue. Portia returns an acknowledgement as best she can.
Holsten speaks again, and while Portia can parse only fragments of it, it is clear he is talking about the women who the skeleton used to belong to. The female was some manner of historian like him, it seems. He says her name, too. Portia only gestures respectfully; names are the hardest thing to translate, and it will likely take weeks of reviewing this conversation before anyone can give the departed woman a designation that translates into something the Spiders can interpret.
It doesn’t matter though; they’re talking now. The understanding will come. And in the years that follow, his descendants and hers will speak to one another as though it is second nature. Sapience has triumphed over the vast separation of time and space; bridged a divide five hundred and sixty million years in the making, and brought Earth’s two wayward children together. Perhaps Holsten’s departed colleague would be pleased about that. Portia hopes so.