Asimov's Science Fiction: April/May 2013 (21 page)

"His brother was Hypnos, the god of sleep. Their mother was Nyx, goddess of night. They had no father. Thanatos could often be portrayed as a benign figure, even as a young man with wings. But he had some sisters too, if I remember rightly. The Keres. They're like the Furies, or the Bacchae. Drank the blood of the dead when they arrived in Hades."

"Something else for us to look forward to, then. Girls in on the act, hooding their victims and screaming in their faces. Still trying to think about this deviant Higgs that imparts matter, or some new force, but selectively."

"Yes, it does seem to be acting like a boson with a historical interest."

"Or activated by an agency with a serious interest in history. Now didn't we used to have a name for that? One that the priests used quite a lot?"

"God, you mean?"

And the lovely Renata reckons that should be a verb not a noun, remember. And a female word not a male one. Happy to worship at that shrine, myself.

"Can't get my brain round this stuff any more. I'm done. Finished. Never felt so exhausted since my divorce."

"Bad, was it?"

"The whole marriage was a disaster, I can see that now. But the divorce nearly finished me off. The only time we ever spoke was when she was screaming down the phone. It got so bad I'd go out in the car alone on Sunday mornings, looking for women I could yield to. I'd wait at a crossroads or roundabout until a woman came along in another vehicle, then I'd let her go first. I'd yield with the greatest deliberation, just so I could see a female face smiling at me from the other side of a windshield. That was the extent of my love life at the time—peering at unknown women through two sets of windshields."

Renata started to laugh. But he couldn't stop probing.

"You don't think someone could have come up with some new ultimate product here, do you? I mean this gossamer graphite... Invisible strands of incalculable strength. Could we be missing the obvious here? Could this be the ultimate scientific advertising campaign?"

"It's a pretty expensive one, if it is. And a trifle risky for the advertiser, I'd have thought. Life imprisonment, I mean. That's a big contract, even for a hungry copywriter."

"An arachnid divinity comes on a visit, leaving messages. That's what you seem to be telling me. There's an Autotelic Constellation and you are right slam bang in the center of it. So we really are living in the worldwide web? In which case, there's nothing new under the Sun."

"Or above it. Let's at least be relative about things."

"If it's a divinity then should it really be killing its creatures?"

"The old one in the Bible did. Only got to Chapter Six of Genesis before he wiped the lot out, except Noah and his immediate family. Just got fed up with all that evil-doing."

"So are you saying these little gossamer graphite messages are some sort of modern scripture then, like those embroidered pillows in the old days that said, 'God Is love'? Is that really the idea? Signs of something to come? Those burns on the hands of the Curies you were on about; or Leonardo's drawing of a helicopter. Signatures of a world we can't yet fathom. A demonstration of causes we haven't yet found a space for in our minds. And it's managed to monster up your standard model while it was about it."

"It might be outside the standard model; or it could be a series of new spaces opening up within it."

"Like interstices?"

"Exactly like that. Remember, the spaces between the gossamer are as much a part of the web as the gossamer itself."

"But gossamer comes out of the inside of the spider. So where does gossamer graphite come from? Somewhere else entirely?"

"Maybe, or maybe it's coming out of us. This stuff we're all made of, at this precise moment that we're all being made. And re-made."

"All questions. No answers."

"That's because I'm a scientist. We thrive on disproof."

"Can't quite do that as a copper. You'd lose your job pretty quickly if every prosecution was disproved."

"But what if the evidence required disproof?"

"You'd still lose your job. That's why we've been known—some of us, I mean—to ginger up the evidence from time to time. Someone said something to me about dark matter. That we might just have come face to face with it. What your friend is calling the neutrino gauze."

They were sitting on the sofa together. Banks had put his arm around Renata's shoulder.

"Hard to say. Dark matter, if you came across it, would probably fall through your hands like so much invisible sand. Not interacting with any of the electromagnetic stuff inside us. Obeying gravity but nothing else."

"So let's just try to summarize the situation here, shall we, with what I've got left of my brain? We seem to be dealing with a new element. Or at least one that does not appear in nature as we have observed it so far. Of an almost unfathomable delicacy and toughness. If someone were to find the source of this, they'd become remarkably rich overnight. One thread of this stuff less than a millimeter thick would be strong enough to pull a high-rise building down.

"And we have a spider that seems able to bi-locate, inside and outside a body. That produces out of its insides a tiny thread, strong enough to pull the Moon toward us. So it's some sort of supernatural spider, then."

"Looks like it. A metaphysical one. A divine creepy-crawly that really can get under your skin. And goes in for tattooing from the inside out. Relief rather than intaglio—oldest method of printing. Subcutaneous embossing."

"And can even do it from the inside of a sealed computer. I went to an exhibition once in London. French sculptor. Now, what was the woman called? Louise Bourgeois, that was it. She'd made this enormous bloody thing. Spider as big as a room. If you stood inside it, there was a curious effect. It seemed to shape a world. A whole world with little old you inside it, beginning to feel as though the mommy of them all must be a spider, and you'd somehow got entangled in the spider's web."

"Why do you think the Autotelic Constellation chose Stephen Hawking to deliver one of the most explosive concepts in the history of thought?"

"Tell me."

"Because he's the least likely character to go to war. He is surely no son of Thanatos. And now the co-ordinates have chosen this particular constellation to meet in. Right here. The consciousness that receives them is merely the chronicler of these constellations as they crystallize."

"Crystallize?"

"Maybe the spider is treating us to one of her puns. All the ones who died were planning death. New forms of death. Death for profit from the new sons of Thanatos. The spider goddess used their skin as parchment to write her messages."

"Anyone would think you were pleased about it."

"Maybe I am. I've been looking at this book again. Take a look through the magnifier I've put on top of it. Look at the spider on the leg of Osiris. Notice anything about it?"

He peered through the little lens mounted on its metal square.

"Seems to have been printed differently."

"The rest of the book has been printed into the paper. Intaglio. But like I said, the spider stands out in relief. It has pressed from the inside of the paper upward."

"How?"

"That's another of those questions that would answer all the others if you could get to the bottom of it. Find the answer to that and you've solved your fatalities."

"I notice you didn't say murders."

"No, I didn't. Executions perhaps."

"Still illegal."

"In the Middle Ages they used to try animals. That's if they felt they'd been responsible for a death. Are you planning on spending the night, out of interest?"

Joe Banks was very tired. Also a little drunk.

"You like to keep spinning the changes with your male companions, Doctor Dibdin. Weaving new webs all the time."

"I'm just a girl who needs a little company from time to time. Often not for long. Is that a crime, Inspector?"

"Not one I know of on the statute books, no. I do wonder if I'd better go, all the same. Going to be a very early start."

Never be over-eager with women. The one lesson he'd learnt. Probably the only one.

"Up to you. Anyway, you're welcome to stay if you like." She put her hand on his thigh, and her fingers started tracking. A spider on the thigh of Osiris, making a slow but steady progress.

Joe Banks now made a terrible mistake. Even as the words left his mouth, he knew they had come out all wrong. He meant it as a joke, but the hard copper in him, the old crocodile inside his head, interposed a gauze mesh and fluked his particles, turning them nasty.

"Seems to be a high rate of mortality among your johns."

He felt her stiffen. She started to move away.

"I don't have johns. I'm not a whore." She stood up, a little unsteadily. "And suddenly I don't need your company, either. Clear off out of here, Joe. Now."

A moment later he left. Then a moment after that, the doorbell rang. It was Banks standing there, wearing an awkward smile.

"I'm sorry. Truly. I made a mistake."

"So did I," she said, and slammed the door in his face.

She wasn't sure what time it was. She was on the sofa where she must have fallen asleep. The lights were down low. And then she saw it, descending on its gossamer thread from the ceiling. A rainbow. She held out her hand. And the tiny hologram in the shape of a spider landed on it and flashed. Flashed like a beacon near a harbor. Flashed so that the whole of the darkened room was suddenly and brilliantly illuminated. Then it became vanishingly small. The spider was gone now, and she had taken her light with her. But had left Renata with a sense of utter beatitude. She sat for a few minutes in silence, her life a luminous equation whose two hemispheres had finally found the equal sign at their center, then she phoned Banks.

"Can you record this?"

"Yes. And I'm glad to hear your voice again, Renata. Seriously glad."

"Recording?"

"Yes."

"Your agency. The spider. She's not making the stuff. She is an expression of the gossamer graphite, not its author."

Banks had been sitting at his table finishing off his whisky. He was smiling now simply because she had phoned him. His mistake had not been terminal; they didn't all have to be.

"You're going to have to help me here I think, Renata."

"Our spider goddess is simply a voicing of the string she's arrived along. She's an expression of the string that makes her, just as it makes us." There was a pause. She hadn't expected him to understand this; she wasn't sure she did herself as yet.

"Just the one string, is it?"

"I don't know. I suppose we'll have to try to find out whatever it is she has to say next time she comes on a visit. And what she intends to say it with. We're the ones spelling out the messages on our own bodies. She's only providing us with the pen." Then she hung up.

That night Dr. Dibdin slept cleanly and simply for the first time. Since when? Too far back to remember. For the first time in many years, anyway. She didn't want some man striding into her dream now, offering wine and roses. And she lamented none of these recent dead. Their executions were the form that hope had needed to take, in a world that so desperately needed it. She saw herself entering the black hole, but there was no panic as she went down inside it. In the morning she would emerge once more, wake and dress and work. And this was all. This was her life and she accepted it readily for the first time. A purpose at last. Her Autotelic Constellation.

And that same night Banks finished his whisky, drinking it straight as he played back the phone call from Renata thirty-two times, thirty-three, then fell into bed at last. His sleep was not easy, and he dreamed the most vivid dream he'd ever known. A spider was in the middle of her web, waiting. He had climbed up the pheromone trail of her gossamer strand, twitching in the wind as he went, this way then that, a mountaineer on an Alpine face in winter. And now here he was. Staring into the face of that spider, he recognized her immediately. This face was known to him as lucidly as his own face in the mirror each morning, and as he stepped out gingerly on to the trembling web, he could see that the female spider had been waiting a long time for this encounter, and was undoubtedly hungry for something.

Tom Purdom's latest story plunges us back into the strife on Delta Pavonis II that was featured in "Warfriends" (December 2010) and "Golva's Ascent" (March 2012). The author's April/May 2011 novelette, "A Response from EST17," is currently available in of Gardner Dozois'
Year's Best Science Fiction.
Tom continues to write essays for
Philadelphia's Broad Street Review
and, he tells us, he's hard at work on a sequel to "Warlord."

They came down the river on antigravity sleds and the warning songs of the itiji soared ahead of them. The sleds were moving twelve times faster than an itiji could run, but sound traveled faster and watchers had been posted all along the river.

They came from the great plateau in the mountains, high above the forest. Harold the Human had told the itiji and the tree people about the settlement the humans had established there. The strange young itiji called Golva Arn Letro had climbed the cliffs—higher than any itiji had ever gone—and seen the settlement with his own eyes. And escaped from torture and captivity.

The humans on the sleds peered into the shadows under the trees and searched for glimpses of the dark, four-legged creatures who were surrounding their progress with a chorus. The humans couldn't understand the languages of the itiji but they knew the itiji's big round heads were producing words, not animal howls, and they knew the words relayed information along a chain of voices.

They ride on three of the sleds that glide on the air. There are five humans on each sled. They all carry guns. They do not look afraid.

To most of the itiji, Harold Lizert was the hero of their latest epic—The Song of Harold and Joanne. He and Joanne had come down out of the mountains, the story ran, after they had been cast out of the human settlement, after a quarrel among the humans. Tree people from the city of Imeten captured them. Harold and Joanne saw how the tree people turned the itiji into slaves and their minds revolted. Itiji slaves helped them escape and in return they led the itiji in a war against the Warriors of Imeten. They made weapons for the itiji—weapons that four-footed creatures could never have made for themselves. They assaulted the city of Imeten with towers fitted with ramps so the itiji could climb into the trees of the city and fight the Warriors on their own territory.

And then came the greatest miracle of all. The great assault failed. Warriors and itiji faced each other across battle lines neither side could break. And Harold made a decision that would be praised as long as there were itiji who could raise their voices in song. Harold declared that the Goddess who ruled Imeten had decreed that itiji and tree people were equals and the itiji must be accepted as full citizens of the city. He would deliver her decree, he announced, in the place where the Warriors of Imeten received her commands—in the great grid, at the base of her statue, where a fight to the death would determine her will.

And Harold had gone into the grid. And fought a Warrior who was fighting in a place where tree people could swing from bar to bar and humans had to cling and hope they wouldn't slip. And transformed Imeten into a city in which tree people and itiji fought against a common enemy, the conqueror King Lidris of Drovil.

It was a good story. It was even true, in the sense that all the facts were accurate. If you wanted to believe Harold the Human was a warrior hero out of the
Iliad,
nothing in the facts could contradict your fantasy.

Harold passed the grid every day, as his business took him along the walkways that connected the houses and public buildings the Imetens had constructed in the trees, and he still had to fight the impulse to look away. Had he really gone into that thing? Had he really balanced on one of its crossbars, left hand clinging to an upright, war hammer in his right, and faced a creature who could move through the trees like an acrobat?

The memory of the last moment of the duel could flash through his brain at any moment. He would be eating dinner—he might even be making jokes—and Joanne would rest her hand on his arm when she saw him wince.

Harold had indulged in a few warrior fantasies when he had been a child. The videos stored in the human settlement's databanks had included the achievements of the three musketeers, Conan the Cimmerian, and most of their mythical colleagues. He had even pursued a boyish fascination with the long, hypnotically dramatic saga of human warfare. But his personal dreams of glory had centered on exploration and scientific research. He had dreamed of discovery, not mayhem.

Who had ever heard of a nearsighted warrior?

Harold the Weak Eyed?

Harold Fog Vision?

The humans on the sleds were looking for Imeten and Harold knew they would find it. They merely had to race down the river until they picked up a signal from the locators implanted in the arms of every human on the planet.

"They will find us," Harold advised the High Warrior of Imeten. "We have to prepare a reception."

"And they are your enemies," the High Warrior said. "They killed your father."

The High Warrior of Imeten was not, by human standards, an impressive figure. Stretched out to the best height he could manage, Jemil-Min Mujin would have come up to Harold's shoulder. He looked even less impressive lying on his stomach on the tree people's version of a bench—a padded, three legged log with a chin rest on one end.

A human who judged Jemil-Min by human measures would be making a serious mistake. The tree people might look vulnerable when they stretched out on logs but Jemil-Min's underlings received a message that was significantly less comforting.

I am so powerful I can relax in your presence and regard you as the tense, weaker creature we both know you are.

Jemil-Min could scream nine words in his high tree people voice and condemn an adversary to blindness and a lifetime of labor in the baths.

Harold tensed his vocal cords and shrieked a reply. The Warriors of Imeten did not trouble themselves learning the languages of other communities.

"We should be prepared to fight. We should place eight Double Eights of dartblowers in the trees around the landing dock. We should assemble eight Double Eights of Warriors and eight Double Eights of itiji where they can be thrown into battle on a word of command. We should greet the humans with the same ceremony we would grant a visitor from another city. But we should be prepared to fight."

"How dangerous are the human guns? How many times can they throw their missiles?"

"They can kill six times further than most dartblowers. They can throw four missiles while a dartblower throws one."

"But warriors blowing darts from the trees could get close enough to kill them. We could lose two Eights for every human we killed. But we could kill all of them."

"They can be defeated. Warriors in the trees and itiji on the ground could defeat them."

"I think their sleds are more dangerous. How fast can they move when they leave the river and float through the trees? Can they outrun us then? And attack us where we're weak?"

Harold hesitated. The High Warrior had never seen a gun or an antigravity sled but he had already grasped that high speed mobility could be more threatening than a limited increase in range and rate of fire.

We're inexperienced young people trying to plot the future of a planet,
Joanne had said once.
We must look like clumsy children to people like the High Warrior and the older itiji.

"They can move faster in the forest than most itiji can run," Harold said. "Faster than Warriors can leap through the branches. Warriors and itiji can defeat them. But we would have to move fast."

"And fight well."

"We may not have to fight, High Warrior. They may return to the plateau. I plan to tell them they should return to the plateau. And stay there until we invite them to visit us again. I think most of the humans in the settlement want to be friends. Most of them will believe our visitors should return to the plateau."

"But some won't. Is that what you're saying?"

"Some of them may not agree."

"And one of them may be the man who killed your father."

The Five Master Harmonizers who led the itiji raised the same question. "Can you talk to someone who has done such a thing?" the Third Harmonizer asked. "The man who killed your father is the ruler of the humans now, as we understand it. He rules the humans the way the High Warrior rules Imeten."

The Third Harmonizer was the oldest member of the Five—the second oldest itiji in Imeten, according to the itiji who had developed a preoccupation with statistics. Two of her grandchildren had died in the assault on Imeten. Her first husband had been captured by Imeten slave hunters and ended his life pulling a sledge along the road that connected Imeten with the iron mine that maintained its military and economic power.

"Every itiji in Imeten has been injured by the tree people," Harold said. "If you can put aside your memories and learn to live with the Warriors, I can learn to live with Emile."

"But this is more personal, Harold. You will be facing an individual who killed one of your closest relatives. The stories Golva has told us indicate he may be someone who likes to inflict pain—someone who could make anyone who met him angry."

Harold lowered his head. He had learned to pick his words with care when he spoke to the Five Harmonizers. They could goad you into a frenzy of impatience with their endless talk. Itiji were like that. But you couldn't let the fog of words screen the power of the brains housed inside their big skulls.

"He respects force. He has weapons we don't. But we have numbers. Overwhelming numbers. And we can attack from two directions. From the ground. And from the trees."

"So you are telling us we should be prepared to fight," the First Harmonizer said. "And you believe that will convince him he shouldn't."

"And if it doesn't—we'll fight them and win."

"You're willing to fight your own people, Harold? Your own
species?"

"I think most of the people living on the plateau would feel we'd done them a favor if we killed Emile."

The Fifth Harmonizer had been listening intently, without saying much, as she usually did. She had been one of the leaders in the war and she seemed to be one of the few itiji who preferred to express herself through action, rather than words.

"So why don't they kill him themselves?" the Fifth Harmonizer said. "Is he that frightening?"

Harold frowned. "That's a good question."

"I thought it might be."

The other Harmonizers let out short barks—the itiji equivalent of a chuckle.

"Do they think he's been appointed by the gods?" the Second Harmonizer said. "Do your people have beliefs like that, Harold? You haven't told us much about their religions."

"They're afraid of him," Harold said. "Him and his friends. He probably keeps the weapons on the plateau under his control. But that's only part of it. The other people have his gang outnumbered. But they'd have to organize. Someone has to get things started. Emile could hit them while they were still getting organized. And make them sorry they'd tried."

"That wouldn't happen with us," the Fifth Harmonizer said.

The Third Harmonizer's tail fluttered impatiently. "It isn't the same. We didn't have weapons before Harold and Joanne helped us make them. We can always slip away into the forest if someone starts acting like that."

"But we have a new situation now," the First Harmonizer said. "We have weapons now, thanks to Harold and Joanne. We have allies."

"And we are willing to die for our friends and kin," the Fifth Harmonizer said.

The sleds stopped in the middle of the river, opposite the landing dock for the ferry that connected the city with the opposite shore. A loudspeaker blared across the water.

"Is this the city of Imeten? We are humans. We are looking for the city of Imeten. And the humans who live in it."

Harold squinted at the sleds through the leaves of a blind built into the lower branches of a lush riverside tree. In the trees on both sides of the blind one hundred and twenty-eight dartblowers trained their weapons on the sleds.

"Is Emile there?" Harold said.

The young itiji sitting beside him had dropped into a crouch. His tail thumped against the floor of the blind.

"In the middle sled," Golva said. "On the left. It's hard to tell with those big hats they're wearing. But that one stands like him."

Harold had been living with nearsighted eyes since he was ten years old. The colony could have provided him with glasses, but his father had insisted he had to learn to do without. They were totally isolated from human civilization. An unpredictable catastrophe could wipe out databases and critical assets.

He could see the sleds and the blurry forms of the human passengers. He could have put an arrow into most of the humans. But he couldn't make out their faces.

"Do you see any other weapons?"

"They've got things on their belts. Like holders for pain sticks."

The city behind them had dropped into the closest approximation of quiet it could achieve. Normally, it would have clamored with the shrieks of thousands of tree people voices. Hundreds of Imetens would have bustled in the trees around the loading dock and scurried along the ground in the awkward four-limbed stance the tree people adapted when they descended from their natural habitat.

The loudspeaker blared again.
"Is this the city of Imeten? Can anyone understand what I'm saying? We know there are itiji who understand English."

"That's Emile," Golva said. "That's his voice."

"It didn't take him long to grab the loudspeaker."

Golva's tail thrashed. "I'd have every dartblower in the trees give him a puff if you put me in charge of this welcoming ceremony."

"Will you ask the caller to tell them we're assembling all the leaders of the city, Golva? Tell them we'll call them again when we're ready in... make it an hour."

"An hour, Harold? With the High Warrior already in place?"

"Half an hour."

Golva raised his head. His voice floated through the trees, relaying Harold's message in one of the languages the itiji used for precise communication. The caller on the riverbank raised his voice in turn and Harold heard his message repeated, almost word for word, in clear English.