Bianca (the alchemist)

This page is about the scholar and alchemist Bianca of Portia's generation. Book 1 also names a companion on Portia's journey north and a later scientist Bianca. Later generations call this spider the Bianca of old.

Bianca is a female spider of Great Nest and one of its foremost scholars. She belongs to Portia’s peer group, though the two have not spoken for a long time. Bianca is a recluse who prefers her experiments. Her peers accept this because her discoveries benefit the group, and they would risk losing her to another peer group if she felt unappreciated.

Standing in the nest

When Portia visits, Bianca has already planned their conversation. She has heard that the Messenger’s message may be contaminated and that other Messengers may exist. Bianca keeps her own views private, saying that they do not stop her from working to save Great Nest.

The laboratory

Bianca works in a chamber inside an ant nest. The ants dug it, and scents cordoned it off from their colony. Silk covers its walls. A distillery made of webbing hangs from the ceiling and holds her mixing vessels. She has cultured glowing glands from beetle larvae and set them in the wall silk. Part of the floor is a thin silk sheet above the ant colony.

Bianca treats alchemy as a visual craft. Her senses blend, letting her picture compounds and reactions as a language of molecules. She uses exothermic catalysts to produce heat without an open flame.

Her assistants

Bianca employs male assistants. She says she once employed females, but competition over status took time away from the work. She chooses assistants for their dedication and sometimes accepts their reproductive material to preserve new Understandings. She believes males can pass learned knowledge to their offspring. She chooses mates hatched from her own crèche, expecting them to pass on useful Understandings.

The war with the ants

Bianca studies Paussid beetles, dark red insects no more than twenty centimetres long, with antennae spread into circular fans of fine fronds. They live among ants without being attacked. Bianca finds that the beetles use a scent that makes ants register them as nothing. She prepares beetle shell armour for Portia and her warriors, then makes chemical packages from the beetles’ scent and seals them in webbing.

The warriors infiltrate the ant column and release the packages. Bianca then covers the colony with a modified beetle chemical. The scent disrupts the ants’ structure and leaves them without instruction. Tame ants from Great Nest communicate with them, giving them new purpose and bringing them over as allies. Bianca says she has given them new minds. She did not cause the fireball that fell during the attack.

Afterwards

Bianca’s team encounters the giants from the sky. One of her assistants is killed, and the team removes the giants’ dead before the wreck explodes. The blast kills several more of Bianca’s males.

A later generation remembers her as the Bianca of old, known for her male laboratory assistants. Her argument that female competition obstructed work described a truth about spider society. The practice of choosing mates from one’s own peer group later became common and weakened the immune systems of powerful houses through inbreeding.

Unanswered questions

• What happened to Bianca after her work with the fallen object is not recorded in these chapters.
• The account does not establish whether Bianca’s ideas about passing learned Understandings through males were widely adopted.