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Helena Holsten Lain regards her companion, now crouching in an attitude Helena knows to read as “expectant”. Portiid spider communications, being a combination of eight stamping feet and the waving of two fuzzy palps, are always something of a performance. Helena feels quite mute in comparison, her body language coarse and huge, her lone voice lacking nuance. She was born into a civilization where her people were a tiny minority, a curiosity, surrounded by a vast population of spiders who speak to senses Humans barely even have. She was a mere child when she began working on that barrier between the intelligent species of Kern’s World—to overcome it in a way that the mere sharing of an engineered virus could not. The journey has a few more steps in it, true, but she has just listened to Portia tell an imaginative, biased account of their world’s history, and her gloves and optical and cerebral implants translated most of it in real time, complete with subtext, personality and humour. Possibly a fair chunk of what she received was best guesses and gaps filled with human-equivalents that were square pegs for round holes, but it was leaps and bounds beyond anything she had grown up with.

“Still,” she says, “you’re going to have to find some way to not make us sound so awful.” She subvocalizes into her own implants, her fingers resting ever-so-lightly on the deck, and her gloves patter out what she hopes is a good approximation of her meaning direct to the listening feet of her colleague.

“But you are awful,” comes the translated response, and Helena feels a leap of triumph, because, even if some meaning is lost along the way, she’s talking, even chatting with a Portiid spider in a way no Human has ever been able to save the sainted (and mostly artificial) Avrana Kern herself.

— Children of Ruin by Adrian Tchaikovsky (15%)