‘They haven’t left a message,’ I said. I’m not sure what kind of message I expected. They could hardly have left a sign saying ‘Back soon—help yourself.’ The Anacaona had no written language. If they had a direct sound-to-mind link, it was quite probable that their language couldn’t possibly be written down.
‘Is it safe to light a fire?’ I asked Micheal.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Can you?’
I fished out a light. ‘Never travel without one,’ I said.
‘It can’t spread here,’ he said, meaning the cleared area.
‘Your people had no fire. There are no ashes.’
‘They wouldn’t light a fire,’ he said. ‘They don’t have the taste for cooked meat that you people have.’
‘What about you?’
‘We eat meat. Your people have taught mine a great deal.’
The fire wasn’t easy to start. The trees didn’t drop twigs and the fungus wasn’t at all keen to burn. At first we got nothing but a lot of smoke and a foul smell, but persistence eventually paid off and I forced some of the stuff to catch. We gradually built up a convincing blaze in a hollow on a pile of crumbled stone.
I’ve never been an expert at carving meat, but when you live out on the rim it’s one of those things you have to get used to. I set about hacking bits of dead cropper off the carcass, and used my knife to roast it in the flame. It was a slow process, and my hand was painfully close to the flames, but circumstances demanded that the meat be well done, and I kept at it. The alien bacteria were unlikely to attack me, of course—although it was far from impossible, bearing in mind the metabolic overlap between the life systems of Earth and Chao Phrya—but the last thing I wanted was for Micheal and/or Mercede to pick up some secondary infection. Natural resilience and magic music notwithstanding, I knew it would kill them.
Mercede was stretched out on the stone, and Micheal sat beside her, playing softly. I think he was trying to bring her down slowly—play her out of the automatic phase in which the music had sustained her for so long.
We ate in silence. The meat was tough and tasted awful. Owing to my culinary inexpertise it was heavily flavoured with charcoal, but it was such a relief to get something down my throat again that I gladly overlooked its shortcomings.
‘How are you feeling?’ I asked Micheal, when he rose after offering my canteen to his sister.
‘Bad,’ he said. I was mildly surprised—he’d been so offhand before.
‘Mercede?’ I asked.
‘She’s recovering slowly. I think we should leave her to sleep. I don’t think there’s much profit in moving on for a while. We’ll be all right here for a while.’
‘Do you think they might come back?’
‘They might.’ His voice was neutral. There was a real possibility, then.
‘We’ll rest, then,’ I said. ‘We’ll wait here until you think it’s safe to continue.’
‘Thank you,’ he said.
‘It’s your show,’ I told him. ‘You’re the one who knows what’s what. Are you going to try and get some sleep?’
‘I don’t know that I should,’ he said. ‘I’ve relied much more on the music these last days. I’m almost afraid that if I let my body go its own way, my heart might stop.’
I didn’t know whether I ought to sympathise with him or not. It would inevitably sound patronising. I didn’t know whether he knew me well enough to accept my concern. I didn’t have any idea at all what he might think of me. So I lowered my eyes and stayed silent.
‘I think I’ll have to let the sickness take a hold,’ he said. ‘If I contain it any longer it will shake me apart when I release it.’
‘What does that entail?’ I asked him quietly.
‘I have to sit very still. I must fight the sickness on my own.’
‘No music?’
‘No music.’
I didn’t doubt that he knew what he was talking about, but I didn’t want to question him about it. Far better to let him get on with it. Sometimes you have to be content not to understand. What happens is sometimes far more important than what you think is happening.
Micheal began to settle himself, and then froze suddenly, half-kneeling, half-crouching. His eyes had fixed upon something that was behind me. I could see his face very clearly, all the lines in it emphasised by the way everything stopped, and by the fear which I felt because everything stopped. A chill slid slowly down my spine. I began to turn, feeling that I was doing so very slowly, already knowing what it was that was behind me.
‘Don’t move,’ said Micheal. His voice hissed from still lips—although the words were English the tone was the language of the Anacaona. I stopped turning my head. I still couldn’t see it.
‘Stay just where you are,’ added Micheal. ‘Relax, so that you can hold yourself still.’
In grotesque slow motion, he took the panpipes from his lap, and raised them to his lips.
He began to play a languorous, intensive melody which sounded like dance music slowed by a factor of three or four. The notes moaned, and lingered in the air. The tune rose and fell like the swell of a turgid sea.
I didn’t dare turn my head, because he had told me to be still. But only a few minutes passed before the need to turn was quite gone. There was another emerging from the trees behind Micheal. Then another, away to the left. And another alongside that one.
Eventually, I could see four, and there were probably several more that I couldn’t see without looking over my shoulder. Whether it was the blood scent of the dead cropper or the smoke from the fire that had brought them out I didn’t know and I couldn’t ask. It didn’t matter. They were here.
At last.
We had no weapon except for my knife. Micheal’s pipes were holding them under a weird kind of spell and I didn’t know how strong it was or what kind of action might serve to break it. I didn’t know how long he could keep playing in his present state. But I could imagine what might happen if he stopped.
The crypto-arachnids were about the size of black bears, except that their legs were longer and made them look more spread out. They were furred like black bears too. But they had moved like the spiders I knew but had never come to love, with sinuous serial scuttling movements of a multiplicity of legs. Their mouths were hairy, and equipped with a large number of appendages for cutting and pulping food before sucking it in via twin sphincters. I couldn’t see any eyes. They had no eyestalks like Earthly spiders, but they might have had any number of ocelli set within their fur. There was no way of knowing. Perhaps they had real eyes, but small and deep-set like a mole’s. They couldn’t rely too much on sight in the purple jungle, but they were obviously sensitive to movement or Micheal would not have insisted that I be still.
The sheer helplessness of my position was appalling. Micheal simply hadn’t had any time to tell me what I should or shouldn’t do. I didn’t even know whether there was anything I could do. I tried to remember what I’d been told about Danel’s semi-ritual methods of spiderhunting. Micheal hypnotised the spiders, Danel slew them—that was all I knew. Danel had to move to axe the spiders, but how fast—or how slowly—did he have to move? What exactly were the risks and how did he counter them?
Could I simply get up and walk around the cleared area—which had now become a kind of arena—and hack the spiders to death with my knife?
What do I do? I cried, silently.
Take it easy, said the wind. Take it very slowly. Move in time to the music.
That, at least, sounded sensible. Move in time with the music. It was a rational basis for experiment. But the music was far too slow, its rhythm too tortuous. I couldn’t possibly blend my movements with it.
Slow, then. Whatever you do, just make sure it’s very, very slow. I’ll help you.
I daren’t think slowly. My mind was racing. What the hell could I do? Don’t try and hack them to death, I admonished myself. One blow is all you dare try. Danel kills in a single blow. The spell of the music won’t make them
stand still for more than one bang. Hit them with something big. A big rock.
My eyes darted around to the place where we’d built the fire. Out of the corner of my eye I surveyed the heap of rubble. There were several big rocks there. I had to select one that I could lift and carry, but also one which would make no mistake in crushing the life out of a two-ton spider. It seemed like a hopeless task, but I knew that a two-ton exoskeletal would be a great deal more fragile than a big mammal or reptile. A more urgent problem might easily be: Could I extract a suitable rock without making the whole pile slip and causing an unwanted flurry of movement?
Was there anything else I could do?
You can ask, said the wind.
Micheal can’t answer.
Mercede?
She’ll be unconscious for hours, and she might not be able to help anyway.
If in doubt, the wind reminded me, hesitate.
I’m hesitating, I assured him. I’m hesitating. But the heat’s on. I don’t know that I have any time in hand at all.
I knew that I might wreck everything with a false move, but there was no way I could guard against the false moves in advance. I could only make absolutely sure in my own mind that I knew exactly what I was going to do before I did it, and what I was going to do if I found out halfway through that it wasn’t going to work.
I had to do something, or we were all as good as dead anyway.
I looked at Micheal, but he was entranced by his own music. He couldn’t see me. He couldn’t even look frightened. There was an awful intensity in his expression as he blew steadfastly across the mouth of the pipes.
That boy is seriously ill, I reminded myself. He said not ten minutes ago that he had to let the sickness take a hold—that if he tried to hold it in much longer it would shake him apart when he released it. Can he still be holding it? Is this the right music? Can it do both jobs at once, or is he about to give under the strain?
How long, I wondered, could he keep it up? Hours? Minutes? All night?
All right, said the wind, adding his weight to the argument I’d already built up. Move.
I let my head complete the turn which it had begun some minutes earlier. The crypto-arachnid behind me was just fifteen feet away from me. It was perched on top of a shoulder of loose rock, disturbed by a root-ridge. It was poised, held in a bizarre stepping position with one long leg extended to lead it down the slope to where I sat.
There were three more that I hadn’t been able to see.
That made eight in all.
I redirected my attention to the one which was nearest. The perfect slab of rock lay just beneath its feet, broken away from the stone apron by the invading root. But to get it I would have to get close enough to the spider’s jaws to kiss it.
Very tentatively, I raised myself to my feet.
The wind didn’t whisper in my ear—as always he let me get on with the job—but I was conscious of his presence, not only in my mind but in my movements. I mustered all of my concentration to keep tight control over my movements, but I was subject to a persistent niggling temptation to drop the exaggerated slowness in favour of a panic-driven run.
I didn’t stand fully erect, but maintained a half-crouch, and moved crabwise toward the spider. It seemed easier to move one arm and leg out toward it, and then close up my rear arm and leg. The bulk of my movement was thus in a plane directed straight at the spider, and might not be so noticeable from the creature’s point of view.
Though I was terribly careful about the snail-like quality of my motion, it seemed that hardly any time at all had passed when I found myself level with the spider’s extended foreleg. I looked down at it. It was as thick as my leg. It had a huge hairy clubfoot. Beneath the coarse hair the chitinous exoskeleton had a purple sheen.
The foot moved.
I didn’t.
I undoubtedly owe my life to the fact that the utter shock of that moment did not spur me to instant recoil. I remained frozen, and the spider relapsed into stillness.
I was even more careful as I crouched right down and inched forward into the shadow of the monster. I could smell its breath—sweet and heavy, not really unpleasant. I could see the myriad tiny movements of its complicated mouthparts—quite automatic and beyond its control, but nevertheless frightening and apparently threatening. I could almost sense the tension in its limbs as the muscles held it in an unnatural posture.
My hands gripped the slab. I began to pull it backward, praying that I had not misjudged its weight either way. As it slid along; the ground it made a thin grating noise, and the spider drew back its extended leg. Once again, my control held, and as soon as I paused it stopped. But there was no alternative but to keep dragging the rock clear. It was light enough for me to pick up, but it would be a considerable weightlifting feat by my standards, and I would need the space to pluck it from the ground and smack the spider with it all in one smooth motion. There was no question of lifting it free from the ground while I pulled it out from beneath the monster.
As the steady scrape began again, the spider relaxed. But its movements were as tortuous as my own. The interference between the scraping of the slab and the music was so very slight that it barely gave the spider any freedom of will at all. All these movements were almost entirely the work of reflex.
Finally, the slab was clear of the spider’s bulk, resting where the extended foot had been resting only a few moments before. I gripped it securely in my arms, and measured the position of the spider’s head and thorax with my eyes, until I was sure I knew exactly what trajectory the boulder was to be called upon to take.
Then I began to lift. For one horrible instant I was afraid that my fatigued muscles were going to prove inadequate to the task. But my wind-assisted strength merely needed gathering. I lifted the slab, past my waist, past my chest, and finally above my head. Its sheer mass made me sway a little, and there was an inevitable pause between chest and head as I prepared my arms for the extension and shifted my grip. Both these factors modified the smoothness of the action, and by the time I released the missile into its downward course, the spider had moved, with a slithering shuffle of its eight legs, fully three feet toward me. The rock bounced, not onto the junction of head and thorax as I had intended, but onto the abdomen. It landed edge first, the exoskeleton cracked audibly, and the rock pivoted about the point of impact and fell forward. The other edge smashed the head into the ground only an inch from my toes. I had to move backward. The spider died instantly, but its reflexes did not. Its legs vibrated convulsively for ten seconds or more. One of them shook itself clean off the body.
Except for the panpipes, absolute silence followed the thud of the falling boulder, but the death throes of the crypto-arachnid and my backward step and the fall of the rock all added up to a considerable, if localised, flurry of movement.
When I turned around—slowly—to look at the other spiders, they were all several feet closer. They had been caught again in the restored stillness, but they had all made ground.
The nearest one was now only seven or eight yards from Micheal, and the most distant was not more than thirty. It would have taken a mathematical genius to work out how much each of them would gain every time I tried to kill one. At a rough guess, I thought I might just make it if I conceded them no more than the minimum each time. But I didn’t have a monopoly on movement. Every time one of the creatures died, it would make its contribution to our collective downfall.
As I stooped to pick up the slab from the wreckage of the arachnid’s foreparts, it responded to my touch with another burst of purely automatic movement. I saw another spider go through a half-shuffle which brought it eighteen inches forward in its course.
I knew, also, that the rock would get heavier the farther I carried it, that my movements must inevitably lose their smoothness.
And the tune faltered.
This shock was so totally unexpected and so hideously ominous that I failed to drown my reaction. I dropped the slab. If it had f
allen on my toes, it would have been the death of me. But my legs were widely spaced, and it fell between them.
The spiders gained another stride apiece.
It was hopeless.
I froze immediately, but freezing didn’t do much good. Micheal was losing the thread of his music. He was giving way. The disease was getting to him. His concentration was breaking.
He rallied, but I knew that any chance I might have had to kill the spiders was now stone dead.
I had one possible escape. I could walk away, very slowly, through the ring of predators, to the edge of the forest. I could duck between the trees and I could run like hell. Even if they chased me, I had a good chance of dodging them. I could cross the river. They couldn’t.
I’m no hero. I never claimed to be a hero. If I’d started immediately, I could have made it. But I didn’t start. Not because I’m a hero, but rather the reverse. I was scared. I hesitated. And lost my chance.
Micheal faltered again, and the spiders came on. They came very slowly, but they kept coming. They weren’t in any hurry, and perhaps it was still worth a try at the dead run. But I couldn’t help myself. I backed up in front of them, and before I had time to think I was right next to Micheal.
I looked down at him, and I looked over his shoulder at Mercede. He was just about to fall over. She was sleeping like a baby, oblivious to it all.
I took the panpipes from his lips. Gently. He didn’t resist.
As the enemy prepared for the kill, I put them to my own lips.
I think it’s your show, I said to the wind. I’m tone deaf.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
The wind was good. We weren’t up to Micheal’s standard, but we didn’t have his trick fingers. We were good enough for the spiders, though—I guess they had simple minds. We didn’t attempt to play exactly the same piece of music—we settled for something a little simpler and a lot more repetitive. We hadn’t the time or the ability to sort out all the variations on our theme and string them together. Once we knew we had something that worked, we set about milking it to death. We tried to duplicate Micheal’s style, and in that we seemed to be moderately effective.
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