by J. D. Lakey
Nnursht could hear the babies in their shells as one by one they used their egg-claw to shatter their prison. The warm sand heaved under his toes, his children digging up towards air so that they might scuttle down to the sea under the cover of darkness. He hardly noticed. Perhaps he had grown weary of the cycle of life-giving. He had done this duty more times than he could count. Leaving the young to their own devices, he was content to stand and listen to the strange and alien things imbedded in the ambient of the heavens.
In the morning, with the first rays of the sun, the next wave of spider-kin would clambered from the sea, their legs clashing against their mandibles, offering challenge to any taker. These were the old ones and the young from the last hatching, their bellies empty and waiting for the seed Nnursht now carried in his reformed sex organs. They rose from the sea, come to try their strength against the best of what spider species had made. Some would retreat back to the sea, vanquished and some would die and be eaten by the carrion feeders, all for the honor of mating with the transformed seed givers. This season Nnursht was to plant the seed, having taken his turn as egg carrier. Even now, the reformed egg sac in his belly grew heavy, begging for release.
As the sun rose, the surf churned with scarlet bodies. Nnursht could not find the strength inside himself to meet this new challenge. Instead he retreated before the onslaught, letting it drive him inland, into the grass covered dunes. When the din of battle and mating was no more than a dull roar, he mounted a dune and turned his senses inland. What, he wondered, lay beyond the dunes besides lizards with teeth? It was a fool’s question. Taller dunes blocked his view. If he were sane he would go back to the beach and take the first receptive partner who presented herself. He took one step. Inexplicably, it was in the wrong direction. Then he took another. After that, each step became easier and easier, until he stood upon the highest dune he could find. Yet still, there were other places on the horizon that seemed higher still. He gave in to his thirst and set out to find the tallest place in the world.
A hundred days he walked and as Nnursht drew near to the high white lands, the child named Cheobawn recognized the outline of the Dragons Spine. The place Nnursht sought had a name. White Dragon. This was not some alien planet far across the universe. This was home. Her surprise wrested her out of the misty places in her mind.
“We have no antidote for this venom,” Amabel’s voice said grimly. “I need a dozen of the things that bit her and a month to concoct the serum.”
Cheobawn opened her eyes. Most of the Coven and their Husbands stood around her bed somewhere in the bowels of the infirmary. She wondered vaguely where Connor had gotten to.
“The arm grows black with every passing hour,” Hayrald said through clenched teeth. “You do not have a day, much less a month.”
“What would you have us do, Husband?” Mora voice snapped, her eyes glittering and cold. “Cut off the limb?”
“Yes, if need be,” Hayrald said with equal force.
“No,” Cheobawn said, “Leave me be. I will get it sorted out.”
As one they turned and stared. Her lucidity seemed to surprise them. Hayrald bent to touch her forehead and look into her eyes. Mora brushed him aside.
“You have been bitten by one of your alien spiders,” Mora said. “We have tried everything but the sickness grows.”
“Stop. Stop trying,” Cheobawn said as she closed her eyes again. Nnursht called to her, his journey not yet done. “Stop helping. Give me peace. It is a puzzle I mean to solve.”
“There, confirmation of everything I have been saying,” Amabel said. “Now get out of my sickroom.”
“What are you going to do?” Mora asked.
“Do I need to say it even to you, First Mother?” Amabel asked. “I am going to trust in the magic of the things we have wrought. To do otherwise would be madness.”
Cheobawn closed her eyes, oddly content to have Amabel standing guard over her body while she dreamwalked.
Nnursht climbed the mountains until there was no place left to go but down. There he reabsorbed his child bearing organs and settled down to stay. The stars were ever so much more brilliant here, their songs un-muddied by the ambient of the fecundity of life down in the low places. After a time, when he thought he had the stars firmly planted in his mind, he began to sing their song into the world. Far away, at the edge of the horizon, his kin paused in their daily tasks to listen. Much to Nnursht’s surprise, a few heard his song and wove it into the matrix of their own crystalline brains.
In the world of Spider, one was an unnatural number. Nnursht’s song was painful in its loneliness. Thirty years later, it drew a double leg-count of seed bearers up off the beach on the next hatching night. He heard them coming, their songs full of hope as they battled the toothed lizards and sky hunters on their journey to the high places. He was glad not to be alone. So it became for every egg laying season after that. More and more seed bearers gathered on the tip of the white spire to listen to the stars and sing their songs into the memories of Spider.
Nor was it in Spider’s nature to be idle. Frustrated by the heavy storms of winter, they began to build a spire to reach above the clouds. Such a simple idea turned into a feat of intricate engineering. There was nothing to build with but the stone under their claws. Nnursht spit his venom onto the ice and watched as it melted it down to bedrock. He spit again and sucked up the stone that dissolved in the acid bath and then spit it out again in the shape of a standard building unit that looked very much like the longest segment of a spider’s leg. Using this and the thickest extrusion of silk from his spinnerets to tie them all together, he laid the first course of girders.
The first few towers toppled. It became a matter of trial and error but finally they found success with a lattice of web rigging and elongated crystalline struts.
Above the clouds more stars revealed themselves. New stars were sung into the map of the universe. The matrix of the crystalline minds of the young growing in the egg bearer’s bellies at the bottom of the warm sea grew in their understanding. Nnursht’s longing for empty beaches and salty seas wove itself around and through this new song. More spiders came up the mountain. The tower grew tall, the stabilizing webbing now more extensive and stronger.
There were limits, even for Spider. The cold and thin air, this they could accommodate. It was the lack of pressure on their bodies that nearly stopped them. The hollow parts of their carapaces, meant to withstand the weight of an entire sea, shattered and exploded outward in the emptiness above the spire. Nnursht clung to its tip just on the edge of the cold vacuum and considered the problem. He was old; his joints creaked when he moved and his eyes had grown dim, but he could still hear the stars upon the ambient, the pull of their song as strong as ever. Was this the end? Was the fragility of their bodies going to stop them here? They needed legs that could still move under terrible pressures, hearts that could still pump, and membranes that did not allow the body fluids to boil away into space. Nnursht locked his claws into the spire and put all his efforts into imagining a spider suitable for space. When he thought he had it right, he sang the song of it into Spider.
How long did he cling there? Long enough for his kin to encase his body in webbing and add it to the superstructure of the spire. Long enough for the other spiders to rework the stabilizing webs in preparation. At long last, a birthing cycle brought a wave of spiders carrying burdens on their backs. Up the spire these bundles came, up to the very tip, there to be carefully unwrapped from their web casings. A new kind of spider emerged. Gossamer were their impossibly long legs, thin and sharp as slivers of glass. These spider’s bodies, while useless in gravity, flourished in the darkness above the earth. They set to work at once, adding to the spire, building it higher with incredible speed, though it was not nearly strong enough to support the weight of a land spider. There was no need for that. They built and built until one day, a gossamer spider lifted its feet up towards the heavens and felt the first flutter of the wind between
the stars.
They built a web, these new spiders; a simple sail to catch that breeze and when it was done, the gossamer spiders cut its moorings, took hold of the lines and leapt off into space, letting the wind from the stars take them where it pleased. Nnursht’s mind had long since gone empty, his brain only able to hum in harmony with the rest of Spider, like an empty shell left on the beach as the wind blew over its opening, but Cheobawn thought he would have been pleased with what he had begun. Thirty cycles brought the next wave of space spider. How many cycles passed? A leg-count magnified a hundred thousand times, at the very least. Wave after wave of gossamer spiders took flight on a quest to find what lay beyond the great chasms of space.
The songs of some who went out went dark, extinguished by misfortune or time. The songs of others found nothing but dust and rock. A few, a precious few, found suns with planets and planets with oceans and oceans with beaches empty and waiting for eggs. The cycles of egg laying and seed bearing began again, all synchronized to the turn of a pair of moons and the cycle of a hot yellow sun none of them would ever see again.
Nnursht went with them. Not in body, but in memory. They never lost their need to listen to the stars, nor their wish to sing their songs into the void. Every birthing cycle found a handful of spiders climbing to the tallest places to listen to the song of Spider as it spread across the universe. That song held the memories of all of them, no matter how far from the shores of the First Egg they traveled.
Far did they spread. Glorious was the kingdom of Spider. Infinite was their destiny. Then, with hardly any warning, the Place of the First Egg went dark in the minds of Spider kind.
Cheobawn suddenly found herself standing upon the dark beach, human in form once more, her nightgown fluttering around her body as the uncertain breeze eddied around her. The sun hung low in the western sky. She held up her hand to inspect it in the pale light. A single scarlet scale pulsed with the beat of her heart in the center of her palm. It was all that was left of her spider bite. She smiled as she buried her toes in the hot sand and looked around. A solitary spider stood nearby, its eyes fixed on the sky.
“Why did you leave? This was your home,” Cheobawn asked, puzzled by the memory of being Nnursht.
Look up, Spider said.
The sky was cloudless and palely blue from the haze of sea mist that drifted towards the rapidly cooling land. The first evening star appeared in the southern sky.
“It’s a star,” Cheobawn said, confused, “although it does seem to be out of place.”
Watch, said Spider.
The star grew brighter until it outshone even the sun. Then it extended some sort of wing from its center and flew. It was a ship. The wings gave it purchase on the air, allowing it to glide like her kite wing, only much faster. It approached their position from over the sea, blasting by them, the sound battering against them, making the Spider’s carapace hum under the onslaught. It flew just above the tops of the dunes and then roared away, dragon’s fire shooting out the back. Cheobawn watched in wonder and awe.
This is the first human ship, Spider said sadly. The first of many. We thought that you might be comrades at first. Were you not like us, a curious species who had traveled to the stars? We sang the song of our First Egg as greeting. We sang the song of star longing and the song of leaping off into the void, but your kind did not choose to listen or perhaps they were like our young, come to challenge the egg bearers for the first time, not understanding that holding a spot on the beach it not about conquest but about keeping the stones of the worlds from grinding your children into dust.
The ship came back, to settle delicately upon a rocky outcrop in the near distance. Cheobawn could not help but admire the maneuver. The pilot was deft at the controls. The spider opened its jaws. A soft sigh moaned out of the chambers in its head.
We were patient. That was a mistake, of course, and we died for that mistake. Spider kind can hear each other, across all the distances of space and so it was that we, who had found a place to stand amongst the stars, were forced to listen as the last of our kind died here, in the place of the First Egg.
Spider remembered and fed the memories into Cheobawn’s mind. Images rushed through her. Images of human hunters ranged along the ridge-line, picking off the spiders one by one with their weapons of light, as they emerged from the sea, scattering body parts, egg sacs and dying children upon sand soaked with Spider blood. Air ships flew low along the beach, blasting the egg bearers, fusing the sand under their feet, searing the eggs and encasing them in glassy tombs. The seed bearers, too consumed by their madness to retreat, died, as did the egg bearers rising up out of the sea. The beams of light silenced their roars of defiance and stilled the clashing of legs against mandibles, purple blood running down the sand until the surf frothed thick with their fluids.
Cheobawn found herself curled up in a ball on the sand, weeping uncontrollably. The grief was nearly unbearable and pushed at the edges of her sanity. But those were Nnursht’s thoughts. She shook a semblance of reason back into her mind. She stood, wiped her wet face, and looked around. The beach was clear, the lone ship still perched on the promontory, a ramp now disgorging its occupants.
“But now you are back,” Cheobawn said. “Your eggs rain down upon this place like seeds blown on the wind. Soon you will hold the sea as your kingdom once more. Surely it is a time for rejoicing?”
It is not in our nature to leave a thing to chance when a little industry can turn the tide, Spider said. The last of my kind, knowing they were about to die, crawled out of the sea every night to circle your encampments and sing the songs of our people into your dreams, though we knew you to be deaf to our plight. It was not the songs of star longing that we sang, but the simple songs about eggs growing hot under the sands and the earth turning under our feet as the cycles of birth and death ebbed and flowed. Most of all, we sang of our grief and of the eggs that would never hatch. We listened to the minds inside your sleeping places and we heard a few, a precious few of the egg bearers of your kind grow restless and uneasy, disturbed by the carnage, haunted by the destruction of a planet. We had hope, then, that a species who might feel sympathy for our passing might also help us return.
Cheobawn shook her head to clear it of the craziness behind those thoughts. “But, they did nothing. You died to the last spider. What was the point of that?”
How long did Nnursht wait to see the stars? Spider asked.
“He never did!” Cheobawn shouted. “He died frustrated.”
There is not a spider alive who does not carry the song of his life inside the matrix of their minds, Spider said patiently. We were willing to wait. Now, here you are. You cannot say our efforts fell upon barren ground.
“I am not the solution to your problem,” Cheobawn said, stamping her feet in the sand as her own frustration boiled over inside her. “Get that idea out of your head.”
Nnursht sang the song of the stars until an egg hatched that held a child that could do nothing else but travel to the stars. So too did your Mothers.
“That was not your doing,” Cheobawn said stubbornly. “The Makers of the Living Thread are meddlesome old biddies who cannot leave life to chance. If they could bottle Good Luck and dose us all with it every day, they would.”
The seeds of that idea were planted in the dark, in the dreams of your grandmothers’ grandmothers. It was our solution to a problem that seemed unsolvable. We sang the song of healing into your minds, hoping that you would remember, though you are a species who forgets everything eventually. It was with great surprise, then, when your egg bearers enticed a handful of your seed givers to follow them. We sang the song of the egg laying madness into the ambient and it took hold of their minds, driving them out and away. They went seeking safe haven from those who could conceive of killing a planet so that they might hold it for their own. It was not accident or happenstance that the first dome of the high lands was built under the shadow of Nnursht’s high place and the ruins of his spir
e.”
Cheobawn’s head was reeling. So this was the secret history that Mora kept locked away from the minds of the tribes. Or was this a secret not even Mora knew? Did the First Mother realize that the domes were conceived in the minds of things so monstrously alien they could not claim the remotest kinship with human kind?
“So many minds, so much clever plotting,” she said, looking away from the Spacer ship, its metal hulk perched atop its roost like a sky hunter conceived in tinkerer’s shop. The sea seemed more real, the sound of the rhythmic tumble of the waves against the sand hypnotic and oddly soothing. Over and over, the waves tried to climb the beach, each time a little bit different than the last. She could imagine herself sitting here for hours, mind open to the patterns of all the worlds while the waves explained the purpose of it all to her. The message found in the random pattern of waves could not have been any more nonsensical than what Spider told her.
“What was the endgame in your clever strategy? Did you think to defeat us by making yourself War Master? I will not help you do any such thing.”
Our need is simple, Spider said. We wish to lay our eggs once more upon the beaches of our birth. We can no longer count on the forces of wind and water to take the hatchlings past the jaws of the toothed lizards and the predations of humans. You must help them find their way to the sea.
“How am I supposed to do that?” Cheobawn asked.
You carry the song of Nnursht in your mind, Spider said with utter confidence. You will find a way just as he did.
“You will forgive me if I do not have the confidence in myself that you seem to have.” Cheobawn said in exasperation. “I am one small hatchling. The force of every adult in the dome stands against any kind of action to aid you. On top of that, there are thousands of Spacers roaming the Wastes, hunting out your young as we speak.”