Calculated Risks

by Seanan McGuire

  At least it wasn’t the really big one. That didn’t seem like much of an improvement right now, but I was confident that it was.

  I am not food, I told it firmly. I am not prey. I am not for you to harm. It didn’t move, just continued watching me with its many eyes.

  I tried to feel what it was thinking, and found only confusion, primitive and incoherent, like the world was good because the world was always the same, and now here I was making things un-same. Different was dangerous and bad, therefore I was dangerous and bad, but I was not food, and for some reason it didn’t fear me the way it should have feared a not-food thing. There were only five categories of thing in existence: self, food, mate, enemy, and terrain. I didn’t fit into any of those categories.

  It did at least recognize that sometimes a thing could be one type of thing, only to become another. A mate, for example, could become food or enemy at a moment’s notice, if hunger came to either party. It was a male spider, and it had the vague impression, from the behavior of previous mates that it had failed to eat, that they might have a sixth category, a protect category, because when they went away to lay their eggs, they would drive males from the location they chose with violence that could go as far as killing the intruder. That was unusual. Females who did not wish to mate would generally leap away and leave, or else attempt to corner and consume, not fight directly.

  I should have found a female spider, I thought grimly, and dug deeper into its primitive mind, looking for the switches that could send mother spiders into protective mode. If they were hormonally-activated, they might not be present, and then I’d be stuck standing here and mind-controlling a spider forever. That would suck.

  That was the motivation I needed to dig even deeper, until I found a little complex of instinctive behaviors buried behind one of the few lessons it had absorbed over the course of its lifetime—run away from things bigger than you, or you will be consumed, and what was friend before may not be friend now; the memory was accompanied by the image of another spider so much larger than the self that I assumed it must have been the spider’s mother, on the day her own instincts had stopped treating the babies as things to be protected and started treating them as things to be consumed. The memory had faded. The trauma had survived, and probably survived for every new generation of spiders, all of them unable to recall or learn from what they’d experienced, allowing their instincts to play out the same scenario over and over again.

  Until that day, the mother had been dragging prey—some of which looked dismayingly like the mantis-riders now disappearing with my family—wrapped in silken cocoons back to the lair to feed her brood of growing spiderlings. They had filled their stomachs with flesh, and spent their time learning how to use their natural weapons, playing hunting games with one another, and doing no harm.

  That was the part I focused on. Back then, the spider had been fully equipped to harm its siblings, born with claws and fangs and venom. But until the day its mother turned against it, it had believed it was safe, and had treated the others the same. I gathered up the spider’s own feeling of safety, wadding it into a bundle shot through with the spider’s own perception of me, then fed it back into the system, trying to build a connection between me and the idea that I was something to be kept safe, something to be protected.

  The spider seemed to relax. It was hard to tell, with an arachnid the size of a Clydesdale, whether I was getting the effect I wanted or—ironically enough—trying to judge it by mammalian standards. I stayed inside its mind for a moment more, using the way the spider itself saw safety and things-to-protect to connect myself into instincts it didn’t fully understand having, instincts that would normally only have activated if it had stumbled across an unhatched clutch of eggs with no matriarch to provide protection.

  When I had done all the work I could do, I pulled back, still more than halfway convinced the spider would eat me immediately if I relaxed my grasp on its mind. Still, I had to take the chance eventually. I couldn’t stay embedded in its thoughts forever, and if I tried, one of the really big spiders would come along and eat us both, since my tinkering had the spider effectively frozen until I let go.

  It was time. I pulled back further, detangling myself strand by strand from its rudimentary thoughts, hoping the connection between me and protecting its young would be strong enough to stand, even though this was a spider too recent to adulthood to have raised spiderlings, or triggered those instincts the natural way. I had never done anything like this before, and while the theory was similar to the memory manipulation I’d done in humans, I was risking my life here.

  Wincing, I screwed my eyes shut and let the spider go. It was faster than me. If it wanted to pounce, there was no way I could get clear before it struck. Maybe this was where it ended for me. If so, I just had to hope Mark would be able to attune to the minds of the strangers enough to translate, learn more about how sorcery worked in this dimension, and allow Annie and James to open the gate that would get them all home.

  I’m sorry, I thought, to no one. There was no one close enough to hear.

  Something touched my hair. It was light, nonaggressive, putting out about as much pressure as a mother cat cleaning her kittens. The touch ran from my scalp to my shoulder before it lifted away and began again at scalp level. Cautiously, unwilling to risk any sudden motions, I cracked open my left eye, keeping the rest screwed tightly shut.

  The spider was even closer now, barely a foot away, compound eyes focused on my face and pedipalps moving up and down in a slow staccato motion. It was stroking my hair with a foreleg, combing out the tangles with the hooked claws of its foot. I straightened, opening my other eye, and reached for its mind again, not to reclaim control, but to observe what it was thinking.

  Mine, thought the spider. Protect. Keep. Care for. Mine.

  I laughed out loud before I could catch myself. The spider flinched. I stopped laughing and tensed again, dipping back into its thoughts.

  They were still possessive and paternal. I had managed to convince the spider that I was its natural responsibility, and taking care of me was the most important thing in the world, greater even than the pressing, ever-present need to hunt and feed. It would pass up prey if pursuing it would risk me getting hurt. It would set its own interests aside in favor of my own. It was an apex predator—maybe the apex predator of this strange world of giant insects and super-powered sorcery—and I had broken it, making it my own.

  I couldn’t quite find it in me to be proud of that as I took a step toward the spider, raised my hand, and stroked it—him—gently between the two largest clusters of its eyes. He couldn’t close them, lacking eyelids, but he radiated pleasure and contentment at my touch, remembering a time when he had stroked his own mother in exactly that spot, reminding her of his scent and reinforcing the protective instincts that would see him through his first and most vulnerable molts into a life stage where he could begin fending for himself.

  Great. So now in addition to being an invasive telepathic apex predator, I got to be a giant spider. “I’m sorry,” I told him gravely. “I’m sorry I had to do this to you, and I’m sorry I probably won’t have the opportunity to undo it. But we have to go now.”

  He didn’t understand my words. I sent him an image of the flying mantis-things, soaring toward the horizon with my family along with the ride. Then I asked, in as basic of terms as I could manage, whether he knew where they went.

  He did. Or at least, he knew where the bounds of their territory was, the point past which no spider returned. He didn’t understand why I would want to go there. I wasn’t controlling him so completely that he couldn’t resist me, and I didn’t want to; I was looking for a helper, not a slave. If I had to enslave him to get him to cooperate, I might as well let him eat me right now.

  I told him, again, that I wanted to go, and he resisted, again, unable to understand why I’d want to go to a deeply dangerous place.
Spiders who went there didn’t come back.

  I stroked his head again. “Yeah, I know. Many Bothans died to bring us these plans.” He didn’t want to go, but he wanted me to be safe, and I needed to go there. I pushed a little harder, asking whether he was willing to take me if I promised we would both be safe.

  He didn’t understand how something as small and soft as me could even dream of such an impossible promise, which it knew I would never be able to fulfill. But he wanted me to be safe and cared for, and he knew the mantises would eat me if he let me go on my own. The thought was graphic enough to make me cringe away, and included absolutely no acknowledgment of the fact that he had been intending to eat me not all that long ago. I was his now. He worried about me and wanted me to be safe.

  Grudgingly, the spider agreed to carry me into what he saw as another predator’s territory. I stroked him between the eyes, sending feelings of gratitude and awe that he was such a good and powerful protector. Then I carefully, deliberately walked around him, moving out of what would have been a mammal’s field of view.

  The spider watched me go, my image simply transferring from one set of eyes to the next. All right, that was unnerving, but it wasn’t necessarily a bad thing: I didn’t need to disappear, I had just been hoping to confirm that my quick, cheap adjustment to his natural behaviors would hold once he couldn’t see me anymore. Well, if I couldn’t check my work, I’d just have to trust it.

  Can you crouch? I asked, sending an image of a spider with its belly flat to the ground. The spider obliged, and I climbed onto his back, burying my hands to the wrists in the wiry hair of his shoulders. Were they shoulders? I didn’t really know the terms for spider anatomy.

  It didn’t matter. I made sure I was as anchored as I could be, then informed him, I’m ready.

  The spider leapt.

  There was none of the muscular tension I would have experienced from a mammal of this size, no bunching or sudden feeling of impending motion; one second the spider was holding perfectly still on the rooftop, and the next he was soaring through the air, propelled by a powerful leaping motion so fast that it felt almost like I was attached to an out-of-control roller coaster.

  They have this one coaster at Lowryland, called the Midsummer Night’s Scream, that uses a rocket launch to go from perfect stillness to incredible speed in under a second. This felt like that, but better and worse at the same time, since there was no seatbelt or safety harness keeping me from flying off into the void. The urge to thrust my arms into the air and shout was almost overwhelming. I held out. The urge not to plummet to my death a second time was even stronger than the joy of the moment.

  The spider touched down on a clear stretch of campus lawn, turning to orient himself. Two more spiders came around the corner of the building, both larger than the one I was riding, and his alarm resonated through his entire body, almost overwhelming me. These were big enough to hurt my spider, and more, they were big enough to make an easy meal out of me. And they were advancing toward us.

  My spider could leap away, but bigger bodies meant more jumping power, and these two would likely follow, responding to the intrusion into their shared territory. How the spiders had already divided the campus into individual territories was a mystery to me, but as it seemed to make sense to my spider, I wasn’t going to confuse us both by trying to have a detailed conversation about it. I sat up straighter, gathering the feelings of fear and rejection that I’d been marinating in since waking up tied to a chair and surrounded by people who should have known and loved me, and when I was sure I had created a toxic bludgeon worthy of the swing, I rammed it forward, away from me and my spider, into the two who were even now moving toward us, their appetites radiating outward.

  The mental attack slammed into their primitive minds and sent them reeling, knocking the larger of the two off its feet, while the smaller staggered and collapsed, making an improbable mewling noise that reinforced the idea that the size of the local invertebrates was less about suspension of the square-cube law, and more about their development of lungs.

  With the spiders distracted, my spider took advantage of the opportunity to leap away, springing into the air even more forcefully than he had before. The leap this time had less height but more distance, and when we landed, we were off campus for the first time.

  Everything was gilded in starlight, silvery and unreal, making it difficult to look at the landscape without feeling as if we’d just leapt into Mordor, or someplace equally fictional. Mountains loomed to the left, high and jagged as a crocodile’s teeth. Several were smoking, volcanoes preparing for their next great eruption. To the right was a seemingly endless forest, the treetops wreathed in cottony foam that I could recognize even at this distance and in this low light as cobwebbing. More spiders, then, a different type than this one, more ambush predators than active hunters.

  That didn’t make them any less dangerous. A thing doesn’t have to pounce on its prey to be deadly; it only has to have the capacity to kill. The spider turned slightly, almost as if it were trying to get a look at the full landscape, then leapt again, away from the campus, threading the narrow line between mountains and forests. More spiders passed us, heading toward the campus, which must have been dropped right into the middle of their hunting grounds. It was the only way to explain the number headed in that direction, especially since none of the ones we’d seen had figured out how to get inside the buildings yet.

  When they did, the people who were sheltering there would be easy prey, stars in their own abrupt, unplanned horror movie. I felt bad for them. They hadn’t done anything to ask for this; they were just in the wrong place at the wrong time. But then, couldn’t I say that about all of us?

  I was in the wrong place at the wrong time and wound up adopted by a family of cryptozoologists, rather than going into hiding with an ordinary human family who would have nurtured me to be the perfect little cuckoo. The bomb in my head would have gone off at puberty, the way it was supposed to, and I would have been part of one of those concentric circles forming around the new queen, not the sacrificial lamb standing at the center and waiting to call my own mathematical death down on my own head.

  The spider was in the wrong place at the wrong time, just following his instincts toward an easy meal, and instead of plucking a defenseless alien biped out of the air, he had managed to catch a predator even more dangerous than himself, losing control of his own mind and desires as I overwrote his will with mine. That was an uncharitable way of looking at my actions—I’d been doing what every creature does, and fighting to survive. Staying alive is not a crime. I still felt like I’d done something wrong as the spider landed, adjusted direction, and leapt again.

  Something new appeared on the horizon. I sat up straighter, squinting. It looked like a skyscraper, almost, but organic, or like a mountain that had been pressed until it became impossibly tall and thin. The spider kept leaping, bringing the structure closer and closer, and casting its details into view. It was pale in color, irregular, reinforcing the idea that it was organic, with small openings in the sides.

  We leapt close enough for me to see what looked like one of the giant mantids slip through an opening, tense, and launch itself into the air. I reassessed my idea of its size. It couldn’t be that small if the mantids could fit inside.

  The spider landed one more time, anxiety growing until it threatened to overwhelm my admittedly flimsy compulsion to take me back to the others. No one who approached the territory of the stabbing ones—the closest I could come to it having a name for anything, since he thought of the mantids by picturing the scything motion of their forearms—came back to known territory, ever. He didn’t want to go any closer. He especially didn’t want to take me any closer, not when I was so small and soft and had yet to go through the molts that would make me big and strong enough to fight for a territory of my own, to protect myself against a world full of things that would be happy to
devour a delicate, underdeveloped spiderling like me—

  His anxiety was threatening to become overwhelming. I projected soothing calm, trying to ease his concern. He wasn’t going to get hurt while he was with me, I told him; I was going to keep him safe the same way he was keeping me safe. The mantids were my friends the same way he was my friend, and all my friends could be friends together if they would just trust me to make sure it was okay.

  The spider wasn’t sure, but he didn’t have the logic or sense of coherent resistance to argue, and in short order, I had him calmed again, sufficient to take another leap toward the mound. That was what this structure was: a mound, like the termite mounds I’d seen on National Geographic specials, only massive to fit the insects that must have made it. It was made of heaped-up mud and insect feces, which was gross to think about, but probably not as gross as it could have been. True insect poop doesn’t smell nearly as bad as mammalian or pseudo-mammalian poop, thanks to their simpler digestive systems. A mound of monkey poop that size would not only have been rotting, we would have smelled it all the way back at the campus.

  The closer we got, the stronger the formic acid scent I’d noticed before got. So maybe we had been smelling the mound, it just wasn’t as unpleasant of a smell. It didn’t matter now. One more leap and the spider was clinging to the outside, trembling with the fear I hadn’t been able to entirely smooth away. I leaned forward and stroked his head as soothingly as I could.

  Hold still, I instructed it. I’ll find out where we need to go.

  I lowered my shields, extending my thoughts into the mound. Near the top, I found the edges of familiar minds, close enough that I could identify them, too far away for me to transmit anything other than a vague feeling of proximity. I thought I felt a pang of quickly-smothered excitement from Mark, but at this distance, I couldn’t be sure.

  Can you climb without jumping? I asked the spider. The answer I got was a hesitant, faintly offended affirmative. He knew how to walk. He wasn’t a hatchling. If I didn’t know that, he wasn’t sure I could really be a spider—