by Neil Clarke
There was a gap in the forest where the Ugly Twin once stood, and lifetimes would pass before another tree would grow to take its place. There were sleepers in cocoons high in the aerie who had never even known the Ugly Twin was dying. Should they ever wake, long after their children’s children settled into their own cocoons and the forest slowly filled with hanging white shapes, after the very last weaver closed herself in and the last spiders spun a soft web to cover her face, they would find the forest less one ancient giant, and the sky pockmarked with tears as dark and unblinking as their painted eyes.
“I remember,” said Rela.
A quiet sigh, and Kef took her hand from Rela’s back. “You’ll be in soon?”
She waited for an answer, but Rela said nothing, and she went inside.
The forest relaxed into a peaceful night. The bridge-keepers extinguished torches far below; distant voices faded; birds fell silent. Only the insects still sang, accompanied by the drip of water from leaves. The fog thickened and Rela’s skin grew damp. She listened to Kef moving inside the pod, washing bowls, sorting her brushes, checking her pots and pouches of paint. A bittersweet odor surrounded her: Kef was crushing flowers and seeds for a bright red hue. She worked for a time, then extinguished the lamp. Ropes creaked as she climbed into their hammock. She would be curling into the woven mat and closing her eyes, and she would expect Rela to join her, to sink into the space beside her, press a kiss to her bare shoulder before falling asleep.
The bright startled morning and long anxious day felt unreal, a lingering dream, but evening passed into night and the knot in Rela’s gut would not ease. She waited until she was certain Kef was asleep, then she rose and called her spiders. They climbed up to her shoulders and gathered around her neck. Their blue eyes flashed with sleepy curiosity, lighting the mist. Rela made soothing noises until they calmed.
She made her way to the aerie, starting with guilty fear at every darting bat and croaking frog. But she saw no one. The forest slept.
When she reached the platform, Rela knelt beside the stranger. Healing spiders moved within the cocoon, slow wandering knots beneath the surface. She drew her knife from its sheath and cut a hole in the silk. Spiders spilled onto the wooden planks, their legs and bodies slicked with blood.
“Open,” she whispered.
Spiders swarmed over the cocoon to peel it away from the stranger’s face. The man was alive, but barely. His breath was labored and hoarse; the scent of blood was strong. Rela heard the funeral spiders wake in their nests. A single funeral spider was too tiny a creature to make a sound, but together, gathering, they were the whisper of a bird’s wind in still morning air, the rustle of a snake moving through leaves.
Rela curled her hand around the back of the stranger’s neck. Slack in unconsciousness, his face was young, round and unlined. He was no older than Marun. She wondered if he had a family somewhere outside the forest, a mother who waited for him to come home. The funeral spiders tasted his blood cautiously. They were small and clumsy, pale on her hands and the stranger’s skin, their eyes devoid of light, aggressive in their hunger. Rela held herself still, scarcely breathing, and let them crawl over her fingers and onto his face. They covered his cheeks and jaw like the mist, gray and silent, creeping into his nose and mouth, burrowing into the damp corners of his closed eyes.
The stranger gasped and opened his eyes. He began to speak, as he had before, the beginning of a single word. Rela clasped her hand over his nose and mouth. He fought, rolled his head from side to side, lips moving against her palm, but he was weak and bound in the cocoon. She held him until he stopped struggling.
Bloated and dark with his blood, the funeral spiders spilled from the dead man’s nose and mouth. Rela lifted her fingers to her lips and caught a few on her tongue. They nipped at the inside of her mouth, each bite a spark of pain.
Shadows gathered, and Rela closed her eyes. The stranger’s memories were jumbled and twisted, every moment of clarity shattered by a burst of pain. She felt the terrifying rush of falling through the canopy, the impact of every branch and snap of every bone, and she felt the panic of losing her grip as a slick strip of sky tore away high above the forest. The fear faded and a gray darkness engulfed her, soft light and sticky pale threads, and for a moment she was herself a spider, lost in a web she had not spun.
Then she was standing outside the sky. The heat was unbearable, even tempered by the suit and mask, and her balance was precarious at the edge of a tear just wide enough for a man to slip through. She stood on translucent fibers, soft and flexible, and beneath her feet the forest was dark shadows and shapes through a film of gray. The sky was brightening as the sun rose, a golden fire in the east, and fierce morning air whipped around her. She turned but the world was the same in every direction: larger than she had ever imagined, an unbounded forest so vast, so far below it looked, at first glance, like moss crowding around countless white nests, each as tall and round as the one on which she stood, smooth surfaces pockmarked by the jutting support of massive trees. Some were no more than barren remains, blackened skeleton forests from which the sky had been ripped away, leaving only wind-torn wisps caught in the highest dead branches.
There was no trail to show where the stranger had come from, no sign of where a curious explorer might go. The endless green and countless mounds rippled the land out to the horizon and the red-tinted sky.
Rela opened her eyes. The roar of the wind ceased, the heat faded, and she was alone. No fellow weavers watched aghast at what she had done; no rootwardens waited on the bridge in silent censure. Kef had not awakened and followed. The stranger was dead. Rela did not know if it was disappointment or relief that pressed like a fist against her throat.
She exhaled, and she said, “Close.”
Her mouth was swollen, and the funeral spiders, sluggish and depleted, picked their way along her lips, down the line of her jaw and neck. Her own spiders hesitated, sparking blue questions in the darkness.
Rela said again, “Close.”
The spiders stitched the cocoon closed across the dead man’s head. Rela brushed the last of the funeral spiders from her skin, blinked to clear the lingering threads of his memories. She pressed her thumbs to his blank face to leave twin smudges of blood in place of eyes.
The Wisdom of Ants
Thoraiya Dyer
The sound of something flailing in the soft sludge distracted me and my bare foot slipped on the thin, bowed branch.
The branch cracked. I fell.
As I plunged shoulder-deep into fetid sink-silt, I had time to think, I’m not fit to take Mother’s place, before the arboreal ant’s nest I’d been reaching for dropped after me, cracking open on my upturned face.
The copper and iron in the dilly bags at my waist dragged me down, deeper than I could have gone down alone. I clenched everything, crying silently, bearing the pain of the bites without opening my eyes or mouth until the silt closed over my head and the ants began drowning.
I could hold my breath longer than they could.
Eventually, with stale air burning in my lungs, I reached overhead, breaking the surface of the tidal flat while my scissoring legs created a water-filled space, reducing the suction. My fingers found the arched stilt-roots of the mangrove tree I’d been climbing and I pulled myself slowly, laboriously out of the muck.
There was a thin layer of briny water on top of the silt. My arm and back muscles burned, but I skimmed some water for washing my face, which was already beginning to swell.
The bites didn’t burn as badly as my pride.
Everybody will see them!
Mother would see, and I didn’t even have the prize to show for it. The ants’ nest, made of mangrove leaves cemented with larval silk, with its core of precious gold metal, was now lost in the mud. Only floating leaves and gold-ant corpses were left behind. At least my bag belt had held; at least I hadn’t lost the whole day’s forage.
Nosey, the yellow hunting dog who had found the nes
t for me, whined softly from his seat on a stilt platform of mangrove roots and flotsam. The sunset behind him gave him a florescent pink aura.
“Sorry, Nosey,” I said quietly. His reward was usually chunks of ant larvae and the salty-sweet jelly that surrounded the metal core. “Did you hear that sound, though?”
Nosey tilted his long face to one side. He had a blind eye and worn-down teeth. His hearing wasn’t that great, but his nose still worked.
The sound had come from downwind.
I hugged a tree trunk and, trying to make up for my earlier impatience, expanded my awareness. Sharks wouldn’t come into the mangroves, risking entrapment and death. Nor would crocodiles, unable to navigate the maze of aerial roots. If the wallowing animal was one of the Island People coming to trade, they had missed the beach camp by about two kilometers, and I hadn’t heard the distinctive whirr of their heli.
If it was wireminds, perhaps my noisy fall had frightened them away.
I shivered.
If it was wireminds, perhaps they killed all the Island People, and there will be no trade, no whirring heli, ever again.
Once again, I berated myself: Mother would never think that way. It was probably an eagle taking a fish! The Island People are due in four days.
The Island People.
We called them Balanda, once. Five hundred years ago they stole our land. Two hundred years ago, they gave it back. Except for Shark Island, which they said was strategic and necessary for them to protect us from the wireminds that lived across the sea.
Ten years ago, though, when the wireminds invaded from the other direction, the Island People were helpless to stop them. All of our initiated men gathered up their explosive-tipped spears and returning EMP boomerangs and went to fight.
None of the men came back. Not my father and not my mother’s brother. I was one of the oldest children and I remember the weeping.
The wireminds temporarily won for themselves what they thought was isolated territory, free of the modified, metal-mining ants that had ravaged the rest of the world. They saw us and thought we were proof. Little did they know we had been living with the ants for decades, that we were skilled in keeping our few precious electronic devices safe from them.
Ants ate the wiremind shelters, their vehicles, exoskeletons and communications devices. They ate their wristwatches. Their boot buckles. When the soldiers lay down to sleep, they were woken by ants trying to bore through their skulls to get at the metal implants inside.
Cut off from their commanders, they were too afraid of us to ask for help. Or perhaps they thought they had killed us all. They starved, died of exposure or poisoned themselves unknowingly with the flesh of native animals.
For our land and seas were polluted with pesticides that had failed to stop the relentless march of the ants. Every animal that survived had adapted by sequestering or becoming resistant to the toxins. We could only eat the animals ourselves because of the vials of gut bacteria constantly supplied to us by the Island People in exchange for metallic gold, silver, copper and iron. The island that they had kept was their only refuge, their southern heartland destroyed, fallen into lawlessness.
Just as I was about to give up and return to the beach camp, I heard the noise again from the direction of open water.
With my hand, I gave Nosey the signal to circle behind prey; he went away silently, paddy paws light on the stilt-roots.
Camouflaged by my coating of mud, I went in a straight line toward the source of the sound.
It was a tall, skinny woman dragging a pair of pressurized gas tanks behind her. A pair of flippers were abandoned far behind her, where it seemed they’d become a liability in the mud, but she persisted with the bulky metal cylinders, though she must have known they would attract ants.
She was pale, not from breeding, I thought, but from being kept in the dark. Her head was shaved. A square electronic device was strapped to her chest over the top of a soggy, sack-like smock. Bra straps stuck out over her shoulders. Her exposed arms were covered in fresh insect bites. Older bites on her legs were turned to weeping, mud-smeared sores.
“This is Clan territory,” I said, and she jolted feverishly as though ants had already started eating her bra wire. “Are you lost?”
I saw Nosey cut off her retreat to the ocean, sniffing interestedly at her flippers.
“I got to find Rivers-of-Milk,” she gasped, naming the one who was birth mother to me and spiritual mother to the Clan.
“I am Quiet-One,” I said.
“You’re her daughter, then.”
“You know me? What else do you know about us?”
She laughed crazily.
“I know you have vials of bacteria. I know that you trade for them. My name is Muhsina. They sterilized my gut as punishment. If you don’t help me, I’ll die.”
Fires flickered on the beach.
Rivers-of-Milk stood with her hunting dog, Bloodmuzzle, beneath the safe tree, where dilly bags of metals were hung like sparkling fruit.
Each time we moved camp, a tree was chosen that harbored nests of fierce, meat-eating green ants. Green ants could not prevail over the metal-mining ants for more than a season; they had monstrous, crushing, acid-oozing mandibles, but their numbers were too small.
Still, it was only a few days until the trade tide, and then our small guardians would no longer be needed. Children caught crickets and cicadas and pinned them to the bark of high branches to keep the green ants moving up and down the trunk, hyper-alert for intruders from any rival nest.
Nosey ran straight over to Bloodmuzzle and started licking his shit-caked anus. Bloodmuzzle did the same to Nosey. Dogs were disgusting. The shaved-headed woman, Muhsina, shadowed me. I’d helped tie her tanks to a mangrove tree and submerge them so that ants wouldn’t get them.
Mother accepted my mud-stinking bags. She didn’t mention my stung face. Her encouraging smile was the same whether I brought great chunks of metal or none at all, but eating me inside was the drive to deliver, just once, more metal than she had gathered herself.
To prove myself.
Skink’s mother, Brushfire, felt no need to be encouraging. The plump little woman leaned over to peer at the bags—her eyesight was failing—and cackled, “Not even enough for a full vial, girl. You want us hungry. You want to be Rivers-of-Milk yourself. Ha ha ha!”
Skink would be my husband when he became an initiated man. He hid behind his mother’s legs now, a twelve-year-old boy with long eyelashes.
Skink and I had no need to drink the vials of bacteria. The Island People said that sometimes, with children, the intestinal environment was suitable for the bacteria to breed by themselves.
Whatever that meant.
The point was, if we didn’t have metals to trade, it would be the adults who starved to death.
I felt conscious of Muhsina close by me. She had not said whether she would require a single vial in order to survive, or repeated doses.
The cooking smells were distracting and had to be making Muhsina’s mouth water. Poison toad, poison croc and poison barracuda; they roasted on long spits over the fires, but Muhsina could not eat, not without first drinking a vial, and only my mother could grant one to her.
“What is your story, Island Woman?” Rivers-of-Milk asked, beckoning to Muhsina.
Muhsina’s exhausted, shambling shape moved around me, to sit at my mother’s feet in supplication.
“My name is Muhsina,” she said. “They said I was crazy, but I’m not crazy. People scare me sometimes, that’s what. Lots of people all in one place, breathing on me like wasp stings. All those women in the same room as me, sleeping, sucking up my oxygen, I had to kill them. It’s better out here.”
“Of course it is,” my mother said without blinking. “Why did you take so long to come?”
“Cause I’ll die, that’s what. After I killed those others, they put in a stomach tube and flushed me out with antibiotics. Left me in hospital to starve to death, but after I’d been
starving for a while, I could fit through the bars. Didn’t think of that, did they? Stole the thing that the net-divers use, the thing that makes the electrical signature of the mother of all sharks. Kept me safe as far as the mainland.”
“You asked for me by name.”
“I heard them talking about you. Said you hid in the bushes and watched while all those metalminds starved, because you had no mercy for them not of your own kind.”
“The metalminds killed our men.”
“And I killed Island People, and you’ve got a treaty with them. Are you gonna let me starve? Because to me, Rivers-of-Milk is the name of a woman who feeds starving people.”
Rivers-of-Milk put her hand on Bloodmuzzle’s head, smoothing one silken ear.
“This dog serves the Clan and I feed him. How will you serve, Muhsina?”
“Information,” Muhsina said with a glint in her eye. “And then I’ll be gone. Over the mountains and west. You’ll never see me again. You’ll never need to worry if I’ll bring harm to your young ones, because I’ll be gone away forever.”
“Give her a vial,” Rivers-of-Milk said to Skink, who scrambled immediately up the tree to fetch one.
And because we had saved her, Muhsina told us everything she knew, in the firelight, as we ate poison toad, poison croc and poison barramundi.
She told us more than we wanted to know about what the Island People had done with all of the metals we had given them.
In the morning, I helped my mother prepare for the ceremony.
Muhsina was already gone and my mind was with spinning with all that she had said.
While Rivers-of-Milk made the sweet sugar-cane water intended to fill the drinker with the wisdom of birds, I ground drowned green ants between two rocks to make the citrus-acid water that filled the drinker with the wisdom of ants. Brushfire beat a malleable golden ant-core into the shape of a metal flame, fixing it in place of a spear-tip on a long, hardwood haft, and Skink prepared strips of dried turtle and shark meat, saying the words over them so they would give the eater the wisdom of reptiles and the wisdom of fish, respectively.