Fabian

Several males in Children of Time are named Fabian. This page is about the one the later chapters call the great liberator.

Fabian is a male spider of Great Nest. He invents a chemical architecture that lets an ant colony be given any task in moments, turns it into an army, and makes his help for Seven Trees conditional on the killing of a male becoming a crime. He is murdered two years after Great Nest surrenders, and later generations name their sons after him.

Background

A male of Great Nest holds nothing in his own right. He lives on a powerful female’s patronage or, with the surplus males, on the ground, where females may kill and eat males without punishment. Fabian is an assistant in Portia’s peer house. When the plague reaches the city she sends males north, and he is the only one who returns, missing a leg and half starved.

Story

The plague

He brings back three spiderlings from the plague city and tells Portia they are immune. Males are hardier against the plague, so he deals with the infected peer houses. When Portia needs someone to inject the new serum, he offers to go in her place, and she refuses because the late stage sick would kill him.

The new architecture

His new chemical architecture lets ants take on new tasks quickly. Fabian claims it makes mechanical work ten times faster and calculation at least a hundred times faster. Portia sees that it could remove a limit on her people’s science.

The demand

He will not hand the Understanding over, and he has taken steps so that it cannot be taken from his body. His price is a new law: the killing of a male to be as abhorrent as the killing of a female, and the surplus males trained and put to work. Portia calls it unnatural. He answers that nothing her people do is natural. Then he leaves, using colonies he has quietly conditioned to open a way out, and frees Bianca.

Seven Trees and the war

Seven Trees is poorer and gives its males more room. Fabian nearly starves there. He joins three ageing sisters whose peer group is gone, recruits abandoned males off the ground, and wins work from the stronger houses until the sisters try to take the house from him. Then he stops working, his males stop with him, and he wins the direction of the house.

Bianca brings him before the city’s leading females when a Great Nest army is on the way. He asks for a few hundred ants and promises to beat the army with them. His ants go in singly and are let through the enemy scouts as friends, then kill the Great Nest spiders marching with the column from the inside. The column dies with fewer than a dozen losses on his side. With Viola leading the females, he names his price: the right to live, and the right to build and speak for his own peer house.

Several hundred spiders die in the war, and Fabian struggles with the killing. When the army reaches Great Nest, its people overthrow the priesthood and hand over the priestesses. Portia is missing. After the surrender, Fabian asks Seven Trees to give males the same freedoms as females, offering to take his peers elsewhere if the city refuses.

Death

Two years later he is found dead in his laboratory, drained to a husk. Some blame traditionalists in Seven Trees, some Temple fanatics from a beaten city, and some say Portia did it.

Personality

He is forthright enough that Portia feels she is dealing with a rival female. He argues that denying males opportunity wastes what they could contribute. Bianca calls him a dangerous little monster, and he feels guilty about Portia.

Other males named Fabian

• A local male lent to Portia’s party as a guide in chapter 2.6, who leads the ambush of an ant logging party.
• A crew male of the Star Nest and Portia’s assistant, who hauls her back into the cabin after her fall and gives himself up to her so that she can live.
• A later male who tends the ant colony holding the mind of Kern, her hands, her confidant and her faithful acolyte.

Unanswered questions

• Who killed him. Three explanations are offered and none is confirmed.