Spider Legs (27 page)

“Of course I could!” Martha snapped. “But why should I? It would only be helping my enemy to quadruple his population even faster.”

“Because—because it would have—have another property. It would reduce fertility. For man, not for fish or other creatures. The poorest countries, which unfortunately have the highest birth rates, would be your first consumers. If you were to manufacture the food in bulk and sell it cheaply, you'd still make a profit. So the more of it people eat—”

Martha was staring at her. “Good God, girl—this is insidious! The more people eat it, the fewer babies they'd have. Only they wouldn't catch on right away, because it would be like red squill, the rat poison that thins their blood a little at a time, so by the time they notice it they've OD'd and are dying. A slow, cumulative effect, difficult to prove because there would be so many variables, especially if they weren't looking for it. And even if they did catch on, they'd still have to eat it because there wouldn't be much else, and this would be cheaper. Grow different flavors, tasting like steak or hamburger or caviar. Maybe make it slightly habituating, the way cola is, so they don't want to stop. Mix it in with other foods, so they couldn't readily trace the reason for the declining birth rate. You know, this could work! What genius thought of it?”

Elmo, Nathan, and Natalie burst out laughing.

“I—I did,” Lisa said faintly. “They—they thought it was a good idea. And if it wasn't, that maybe you could improve on it.”

Martha shook her head. “Out of the mouths of babes,” she muttered. “So you want me to stop breeding spiders and start breeding algae. And in return you'll keep your knowledge of my activities secret.” She glanced sharply around. “Past, present, and future.”

“Yes,” Lisa said. “As long as you concentrate on positive, peaceful research and development. No more monsters. And we'll try to find a way to—to market the algae, so that some big company can get rich on it. Then it will never stop, any more than tobacco did, because there's money being made. And the human population will be controlled, because only by staying low enough so people don't have to eat the algae will they be able to have babies. The other creatures will have a chance.”

Martha's brow furrowed. “I see you folk came prepared. It's not tight, but I could play with it and come up with a superior variant.”

“For example, just as with the pycnos, you could genetically insert genes in the algae for biochemicals that would reduce a man's sperm count,” Nathan said. “Weren't the Chinese working with an extract from cotton seeds called gossypol that reduced sperm viability?”

“I have a better idea,” Martha said. “How about I insert a gene that produces a chemical that ages people prematurely? Imagine that. By the age of 13, humans would start dying of old age. Wouldn't it be fun to watch them all start dropping like flies with Alzheimer's disease just when they were becoming fertile! Wonder what effect that would have on the social security and Medicare system of the U.S.? Why I could bankrupt the U.S.!”

“Martha, we're trying to steer you on a more humane course,” Lisa said angrily.

“And we'll be watching and checking on you from time to time,” Nathan warned.

“I was just joking,” Martha said. “Your algae idea sounds pretty good.” She squinted at Lisa. “But you, girl—if it were up to you alone, what would you do?”

Lisa couldn't stop herself. “I'd give the police the evidence against you, and see you fry for murder. You killed Kalinda, and almost killed me.”

Martha nodded. “But the others want to go for the big prize, the world. And they made you go along.”

“Yes,” Lisa said tersely. “You bitch.”

Martha seemed satisfied rather than angry. “So you, too, are telling the truth. You will honor the deal.”

“Yes.”

“And I can't even fire you, because we'll be partners of a sort.” Martha shook her head as if bemused. “Well, you've got me in check. I'll make the deal.”

Lisa knew they had won, though for her it was a bitter victory. When she had learned Martha's role in Kalinda's death, she had
wanted to kill the woman. But Natalie had made her face reality: she couldn't bring Kalinda back, but she could help see that no others died that way, and do the world a significant favor. So she had had to choke back her pain and rage and work with them to make it happen. And she knew that despite her anger, it was the right thing. It was a realistic compromise.

Slowly Lisa extended her hand. Martha took it and shook it once. Then Martha shook hands with the other three, concluding with her brother. This was the kind of agreement that could not be written. They all knew that.

Then Martha rose, walked to the edge of the stack, and disappeared over it. She was on her way back to her pet monster, but not to guide it to any more ships.

“It's better this way,” Natalie said. The two men murmured agreement. And Lisa had to agree too.

“Who knows what scientifically valuable information she will discover,” Nathan said, “if we can keep her in check and make sure she uses her apparent skills for the good of humanity.”

“She might even be considered the new savior of humans and the earth,” Natalie said wryly.

Elmo took Lisa's hand. “Next time you propose to me, I may accept,” he said. She knew he was serious. She had proved to him that she had what it took.

They started down the steep slope.

A
UTHOR'S
N
OTE
:

P
IERS
A
NTHONY

M
ARCH
9, 1992, was an unusual day. I was in the middle of the editing of my fantasy novel
Demons Don't Dream,
and learned that Drew, a close acquaintance of my daughter Penny and the closest friend of Alan, my research assistant, had killed himself. Alan had been talking with Drew on the phone, and then there was silence. When other friends checked, they found that Drew had shot himself. I knew Drew, but wasn't close to him; my daughters have many acquaintances, and I try not to mess with their lives. Nevertheless it was a shock. My awareness had abruptly shifted from fun puns to death.

So I would hardly have noticed the letter I received that day from one Clifford A. Pickover of the IBM research center in New York, except that he enclosed one of his books:
Computers and the Imagination.
Now I use a computer, and I have dabbled with fractals, so have a certain layman's interest in such things. But it was evident that this man was into such matters in much the way I am into novels: compulsively. That book had colored fractal pictures resembling such things as an inner tube with heartworms, an ocean wave with pustules, the mountains of the moon overlooking the cataclysmic destruction of Planet Earth, skull-faces in an electrified pool of iridescent oil, and a knot-bodied red worm with eyeballs at either end. Strictly routine
stuff, of course, but it showed that the man had imaginary aspirations. So I sent him a copy of my
Fractal Mode,
told him that I didn't much like IBM as a company, and wished him well.

But Cliff Pickover is not so lightly dismissed. He sent me others of his books, containing all manner of notions and illustrations: giant fractal sea shells, möbius-strip worms, a golden atom with two green electrons, a Mandelbrot set fissioning in the Pacific Ocean, a fractal Mexican hat, stones with indigestion, and kaleidoscopic rug patterns. Promising, but not exactly the magic of Xanth. His text showed a ubiquitous interest in things ranging from the Arabian Nights (me too: that's why I wrote
Hasan)
to computer generated poetry to prehistoric insects. I continued to brush him off politely, as I do with any routine fan. So then he upped the ante: “I've written a sci-fi novel . . .” After I recovered from my heartwormy inner-tube-sized wince at the bad word, I lectured him about the use of obscene terms like “sci-fi” in public, and read his novel. It was promising, but needed work. So . . .

So we collaborated, and this is the result. It gained 40,000 words, a new title, several bit players fractally merged and become major players, and the overall theme changed. Aside from such details, it's the same.

But I had my little adventures along the way. For example, the conversion from Cliff's ASCII mode to my word processor, Sprint, was imperfect; it left a number of midparagraph hard carriage returns in place. Rather than pick them all out individually, I devised a macro—that is, a combination of steps performed as one—to eliminate those annoying breaks in one swell foop. Only I neglected one minor aspect. I did a Find and Exchange, finding each carriage return [^ J] that was followed by something other than a space [^ ]. You know, normally a paragraph ends, and the following paragraph is indented several spaces, so when there's one that has words instead of spaces, that's an error. I simply exchanged each [^ J] for a space: that is, I got rid of it, leaving the paragraph whole, as it was supposed
to be. I should have replaced it with a space question mark [ ?], meaning that whatever followed it remained as it was. A minor omission, of course, but with computers, little things can mean a lot.

What happened was that I did restore all those fragmented paragraphs—but with a few leading letters missing. Yes, I know, my collaborator would never have made such a mistake. But mistakes do make for some intriguing bypaths. Here are some samples:

“I'll shoot it,” heppard said and took a few hots at the creature from her position on deck.

uddenly, Elmo let go of the blond girl or a second. “Help,” he yelled as he ooked at his hand.

Brenda creamed again.

Yes, yes, I know: many readers will say that it's more fun that way. But too much ooking and creaming makes editors nervous. So I tediously replaced the missing letters as I went through it, and as far as I know, none are issing ow.

Another thing I did was change the major characters from a last name to a first name basis. I like things personal. So, for example, I did a global exchange of Natalie for Sheppard. But sometimes the full names were given. Thus every so often I encountered Natalie Natalie. Once it came out “her frisky German Natalie dog.”

I needed a new setting for a romantic scene, and I couldn't wait for my collaborator to work one up, so I drew on a personal resource. This requires a flashback:

Back in 1990 Alan's grandmother Dot McCulla visited us. She has always ranged around the world, collecting stones from many regions. But as she got older, she decided to give some of her collection to interested parties. Now I happen to be a reformed collector. I have collected a wide variety of things in my day, consistently—some would say compulsively. As a child I
collected boxes, from matchboxes to crates, nesting them one inside the other so that they didn't take up too much room. I collected bottletops I found on the ground, noting their seemingly infinite variety, and played a homemade game with them that vaguely resembled the Chinese Go. As an adolescent I collected science-fiction magazines, cherishing each one. When I became a pro writer, and had children (no, the two aren't immutably connected), I could no longer devote a whole room to thousands of old magazines, so gave the collection to serious fans I knew would properly appreciate it. Something that precious can't be sold, after all. Now I collect one copy of each edition of the books I write—hardcover, softcover, American, British, German, etc.—and it keeps expanding beyond my shelving, being somewhere around five hundred now. But I don't think I'll give that away.

So I know the soul of collecting, and understand the importance of saving stones. So she gave several boxes of stones to me, and one day I hope to make a fancy rock garden with them, with sections for the stones from Texas, Cape Cod, Hawaii, Wales, Italy, France, or wherever. When she visited, we had her identify each stone by location, and we marked them. Thus we know that the igneous rock is from Hawaii, and that one stone is a fragment from an old Welsh castle. And some are from Newfoundland, including a little town she passed through called Come By Chance. At that point my ears perked, and I got an atlas and located it on the map. What an intriguing name and location!

So when I found myself amidst a novel set in Newfoundland, in need of a romantic setting, I remembered Come By Chance. I researched amidst the collection and located a stone from there. And that is the one Natalie found. Yes, it really does vaguely resemble that island.

So what other distinction does this novel have? Well, because of the luck of the draw that determines what is finished when, I am now working on three novels and an anthology, and this is
the first of those to be completed, and so
Spider Legs
happens to be #100 in my cumulative total of books written. That doesn't necessarily mean it will be my hundredth published, but at least it's a personal marker of a sort. I hope you enjoy it.

In the interim since this novel was first published, my total number of published novels has increased to more than 150. I now have a web site, www.HiPiers.com, where I have a monthly blog-type column and an ongoing survey of electronic publishers for the benefit of aspiring authors. I can be contacted by email via that site.

A
UTHOR'S
N
OTE
:

C
LIFFORD
A.
PICKOVER

I
am reminded of a French poet who, when asked why he took walks accompanied by a lobster with a blue ribbon around its neck, replied, “Because it does not bark, and because it knows the secret of the sea.”

—
ANONYMOUS

I love to eat lobsters. I'm eating one right now, and I occasionally wipe my messy hands and return to typing on a laptop computer.

Lobsters
were
my favorite food before Piers and I finished
Spider Legs
this week. Now I'm less sure about my craving for lobster meat. In the past, I could get in the mood for writing this book by occasionally eating a lobster. As I would eat I examined the lobster's anatomy, the legs, the claws . . . People at the dinner table or restaurant often thought I was a bit odd.

My interest in lobsters, pycnogonids, and various strange creatures of the sea probably had its origin in an oceanology course I took during the summer of my junior year in high school. My specific fascination with pycnogonids peaked about the time I received my Ph.D. from Yale University, when I read about a 12-legged pycnogonid found near Antarctica of all places. Its proboscis was much longer than the rest of its body. Still, it would have been hard for me to predict that Pickover and Piers would be collaborating on pycnogonids several years later.

After I read about the antarctic sea spiders, a little time went by, and computer graphics and scientific visualization soon became two of my main interests. In the meantime, I published a
number of popular books on the creative use of computers in art and science. (As Piers alluded to in his Author's Note, my books contain a weird collection of computer art, games, philosophies, and mind-expanding puzzles.) My Ph.D. is in molecular biophysics and biochemistry, but now I create computer art and write science fiction. Life is strange that way: it's largely unpredictable. So much of what we do seems to develop from chance meetings with people and what we are exposed to by our families and friends. Randomness plays such a great role.

Although my popular science/art books gave me a nice sense of accomplishment, my real dream was to publish a novel based on my interest in unusual biological creatures. Hence, this novel.
Spider Legs
is based on my explorations, on land and in the sea, into the rare and dangerous creature known as
Colossendeis.
Yes, the deep-sea
Colossendeis
is real! Pycnogonids are real. Various biological descriptions in the novel, such as the packing of the pycnogonid's digestive system into its legs, are based on scientific facts. However, the life cycles of the large, deep-sea forms, especially members of the genus
Colossendeis,
are still largely unknown to scientists. For a general background on the pycnogonid's life and behavior, see Hickman’s
Biology of the Invertebrates
(Mosby, St. Louis, 1973).

How does Piers fit into all this? After completing a rough draft of the novel, I began to search for a collaborator to bring the book together and add material as needed. My first thought was Piers Anthony, science fiction and fantasy's most creative talent—and one of the most prolific. I had been reading his books for many years, but the idea for collaborating with Piers started when a colleague lent me a copy of Piers's fantastic novel
Virtual Mode,
which had just been published. I had spent some time working on
Spider Legs
and decided it would be beneficial to contact a real pro in the fiction business to develop the novel even further. To set the stage, I mailed Piers my book
Computers and the Imagination,
and I thought this would prepare him to receive further material from me. I waited a week
or two. Then I followed up by sending him a draft of
Spider Legs.

After some hesitation on Piers's part, it seemed like I soon hooked him on the idea of a collaboration, and what you see is the result. Collaborating turned out to be quite easy, and, oddly enough, choosing a title was one of our more difficult jobs. I had originally called the book
Phantom,
a title which we abandoned fairly quickly because the title had been used too many times before. Before we finally arrived at
Spider Legs,
we considered other titles:
PycnoPhantom, Legs, Killer Legs, Sea Legs, Pycnophobia, Fractal Phantoms, Spider Eating, Spider Hunter,
and even
20,000 Legs Under the Sea.

Some of you may be interested in how I got the idea for Martha and Elmo's long teeth. It came from various children's stories I had read involving humans with large teeth. In fact these kinds of stories have had a long history. The scary story “The Teeth” in the children's book
In a Dark, Dark Room
by A. Schwartz (Harper-Trophy, 1985) is one good example. “The Teeth” is based on a story from Surinam (Dutch Guiana) collected in the 1920s by Melville and Frances Herskovitz. In the story, a boy continues to meet men on the street with large teeth. Each man he encounters seems to have bigger teeth than the previous. . . .

There is some precedent in the medical literature for a disease known as “vampire disease” which gives the impression of longer teeth because the gums recede. Other effects of this blood disorder disease include pale skin, sensitivity to sunlight, and partial relief by drinking blood. There's also a disease which causes long fingers: Marian's syndrome. President Abe Lincoln is a suspected case, presently awaiting positive identification of the gene from his remains. People with Marfan's are also taller than average.

By now you have probably noticed that I love to collect quotations of all sorts. In
Spider Legs
you'll see a number of quotations by Robert Ingersoll. I found these in an old, tattered book
at a local library book sale. The book was published in 1881 and is falling apart now, but hopefully I have preserved some of its wisdom here. For those of you who collect quotations, here are two favorites:

You are so part of the world that your slightest action contributes to its reality. Your breath changes the atmosphere. Your encounters with others alter the fabrics of their lives and the lives of those who come in contact with them.—Jane Roberts

If we wish to understand the nature of the Universe we have an inner hidden advantage: we are ourselves little portions of the universe and so carry the answer within us.—Jacques Boivin

You probably know all about Piers from his previous novels and Author's Note, but if you're interested in some of my hobbies, they include the practice of Ch'ang-Shih Tai-Chi Ch'uan and Shaolin Kung Fu, raising golden and green severums (large tropical fish found in the central Amazon basin), producing computer art, collecting prehistoric mammal skulls and carved African masks, playing piano, and working with the SETI League, a worldwide group of radioastronomers who scientifically search the heavens to detect evidence of extraterrestrial life.

My professional interest is finding new ways to continually expand creativity by melding art, science, mathematics, and other seemingly disparate areas of human endeavor; and some of my older books include such titles as
The Alien IQ Test, The Loom of God, Keys to Infinity, Black Holes
—
A Traveler's Guide,
and
Chaos in Wonderland.
I also wrote the brain-boggier columns for
Discover
magazine, hold several U.S. patents, and am associate editor for various scientific journals. If you'd like to learn more about pycnogonids, see images of fossil pycnogonids, or learn more about Newfoundland, please feel free to visit my Internet web site, which has received millions of visits: http://www.pickover.com.

Enough about me. I'd like to hear from you readers. If you would like to send me your comments on this Anthony/Pickover collaboration, or obtain a photo of a real pycnogonid, or obtain more information and a complete list of my other popular science books, or send me your own favorite quotations, I can be reached at www.pickover.com.

P.S. Although this Author's Note is finished, by now my lobster is cold. Shall I put it in the microwave to reheat it, or would the claws explode under the pressure of the warming fluid? Let's try the microwave. While we wait: Did you know this decapod (yes, that's its scientific order) has 19 pairs of legs. The eyes consist of a few elongated segments. The number of unfused ganglia (nerve tissue masses) posterior to the esophagael ganglion is five thoracic and six abdominal. I'm rambling. I know. I have a tendency to do that.

The microwave is beeping. The lobster is now warm, but I seem to have lost my appetite after thinking so much about its anatomy. I also keep thinking of the scene in the resturant where Martha Samules probes at the lobster to make it move. Perhaps if Martha were here, we could give her a chunk to devour.