CANCRI 55(e) EOD +1 (End of Days +1)
EPISODE 4: DON’T EAT THE MESSENGER
*
“You wanna go back?” Gary’s thorax-tummy touches the ground, legs splayed, he shimmies down into the sand (as if to hide). His tiny fangs half out, cautious crossed. He points, scared over his head with a back leg (with the foot farthest from her and danger). “Back there?”
“Yes!” arms splayed aggravated at the tiny man spider and his obliviousness to the obvious. “Look. I don’t want to die, but we need to know what did that”–two spider legs waving wild at the doom shroud cloud and the civilization bonfire light dancing off it.
“We, we could warn next town1 we have to tell them what happened so they…”
“So they can what?” Crossed arms, cocked head. “I’m waiting Gary. What wisdom could we carry to our neighbors? Think, motherfucker. We know next-to-nothing of the threat.” But when the little fella turns. When Ruth sees Gary shudder, hide his face so he can tug his goggles and wipe the tears down into his snotty moustache, she calms.
The spider woman hears the voice of her father, the literafigurative gentleman (“he was a gentle-decent-man”): you catch fatter flies when you sugar the web, my dear. Ruth tries to comfort Gary, puts two legs on his ‘shoulder’ but he shrugs her off and skitters away, shimmies into the sand (trying) to hide fact he’s still crying (if only a little bit):
“I’m fine. I’ll be fine” Gary lies.
“I know you will be, Dude. Gary.” Ruth circles to face the tiny spider man and finds his eyes, the two big ones. “Look, one of those monsters, the little ones, fell out of the sky. Died. I’m gonna get it. I’ll face the danger. But I need you to be brave and watch my back, ok?”
“I can do that.” Little man perks up.
“I know you can. You’re a survivor.” Gary rises, shakes off the sand. Flexes a little. Ruth continues. “If we show up at Cleveland-town2 like prophets of doom?”
“Eat the messenger. But what if it stays here?” Gary shrugs and shimmies and cowers deeper into the dirt.
“Smart man, kinda. Gary look, truly look at that. I think that thing is feeding.” she says (figuratively correct). Ruth grabs the little man by the shoulders (gently). She turns him and points to the soot cloud funeral shroud–the cloud composition wove from burnt remnants of their town being shit by the monster so high and with such force they only halt high to loom and lurk and spread above the Cancrin gale. Ruth continues: “They have to see that doom cloud over in Cleveland Town, right?” He nods. “We show up with evidence in hand?”
“Don’t eat the messenger”
“No. Well, yeah that too, but look.” Ruth breaks it down. “No thing feeds forever. When its done with our home? It’s coming for theirs. Gary, do you have my back?
“Yes, Ma’am.”
“Ruth. It’s Ruth.”
“Yes Ruth. I got your back. What the fuck?” He skitters back to examine the flare gun the big woman pressed into his paw. “What am I supposed to do with this?”
“Mamma’s got a plan. I’ll get the dead monster. You are far away, like two dunes behind me. Watching. If the monsters see me and I need a distraction? All you gotta do is fire the flare and leave. Flee. Boogie. Run we meet back here.” She points to the hastily constructed burrow she slept in last night. “That’s all.”
“That’s all?
“That’s all.” Ruth presses her forehead to her comrade’s. “You ready to be brave?”
“Fuck yeah. Four dunes behind you.”
“My guy. Three dunes behind me.” And two Cancrin arachnids. A big lady scientist trying to be brave as the hero she portrayed a few days ago and a tiny male farm worker, both of whom survived their home’s own end of days set off–back toward cataclysm–in the name of knowing to warn others.
*
Forgive my Amateur Anthropology, but if Melville can dare to ask you for 60 pages of your life to tell you how much he likes trains, sorry whales, I’ll venture a few paragraphs (or dare I say a page).
Reader, one of the most significant inventions in the whole history of the Cancrin Arachnids is the ‘fang condom.’ Long before the cataclysm(s) space spider civilization transforms from some kind of ‘war of all-against-all’ to something kinder and gentler in the interest of all having longer life spans. That’s when some great thinker and expert tinker-er came up with ‘fang condoms.’
Cancrin women (when mating with men) either leave having achieved climax or extremely angry. It’s a (mercifully) brief nervous-system fueled all-consuming killing rage. And ‘fang condoms’ keep one’s partner alive in procreative-hetero (or other kinds of spicy, adventurous mating situations) if said sexual partner does not ‘hit’ the spot.
Said ‘condoms’ are prophylactics not contraceptives, and a common complaint is that they are ‘bulky’ or ‘uncomfortable’ and are a hindrance to dirty or sexy talk. Fang condoms tend to make the wearer speak with a lisp (this being more true the thicker and more padded the prophylactic and the bigger meaner-sexier the Cancrin woman).
No judgement on Cancrin mating or biology or culture or anything. This Archivist is the ghost of a primate, a human. And having consulted and consorted with Cancrin colleagues here in the Borges bore-hole libraries I sometimes think are purgatory, I know that our visage (unmediated by tech) does disturb them–fingers in particular. “Why the fuck do you have them?” Or “Oh god, they’re so gross.” are common reactions.
Ruth and Gary don’t know it, but their partnership surviving the End of Days on Cancri is a microcosm of the (many) shibboleth(s) that came, admittedly unjustly, to Cancri 55(e).
Cancrin women tend to be bigger and meaner and stronger, and in the ‘bad old days’ their men were spoils of war and hypersexualized literafigurative snacks. Narrative now? In Ruth’s enlightened moment? Cancrin males are equals under the law, and all the little eight legged critters (much to the chagrin of the stodgiest church-folk) can love who they love in the cozy comfort of mutual consent.
Oh they still hypersexualize the shit out of the men, and there’s this macho streak and warrior bravado problem with lady spider cowboys–and that’s just the problem. When the literafigurative doom cloud crawls over the horizon some portion of ‘us’ get really mean and stingy and vicious (and that’s true for any kind of ‘us’, no matter how many legs or eyes or brains or hearts).
Before the End, a lot of spiders–a lot of Cancrins–did a lot of work to make their world gentler and kinder and more compassionate. And if the meanest most badass lady warrior spiders might scoff at that, the wise among them know the rigid tight web wont last the night. The web that bends feeds the town that grows.
Sometimes I get to see the universe in a grain of sand, its not that I am so observant. No, I’ve simply got the time to wait and watch for it. Ruth’s friendship with that little fella Gary, not by luck or providence but because of the society Cancrins built, is the basis for Arachnid resistance to the “all-consuming but unconquering” machines. How? I’ll show you.
*
Two black orbs in desert specs peek periscope over a dune top, cautious. Another pair of eyes joins and all four scan the skies and note the patterned flight paths of the drones that ply the skies ahead of them. Above scorch-melted hole that used to be home, the metal monster looms–a sphere with its bottom open-retracted flat save for odd-angled protuberances and the “Fire Drill” (Ruth’s name).
When she best-guesses it’s safe, Ruth goes over the top–dives quick and slides. The spider glides wrong-way against the wind and down the back of a dune that would look as much at home in the Gobi or the Sahara. A great relentless marching mountain of sand, but one member of a great marching band (all composed of silica the same).
Ruth kick-flips herself–purposeful trip-flick that sets the big bug tumbling like debris that looks like tumbling weed, one of the rocks the dunes barf up from a distance. Dust cloud and sand grit kicked, Ruth halts equal parts super-hero posed and or ice-less skater. When she signals from the belly of the dune valley below, when Ruth waves from the shadowed shelter between the slow-mo marching sand mountains (and when he’s built his nerve) Gary lurches over the top to slide, drop, join.
Again and again-again, the two spiders do the peek-and-skitter dive down dunes and when they are sure they weren’t seen. Over the top and down again, slowly creeping toward the prize: the drone that broke from the pack and died (and whatever secrets its body hides).
Every time the two Arachnids crest a ridge, Gary gets nervous. Starts examining the flare gun (drops it a few times). “You got this, guy. You are my guy and you got this.”
“I got this. I’m a guy, but can we repeat. Oh shit.” Little man skitters to pick up the Flare gun that danced out of his grip (again).
“One more time? The plan?”
Ruth dives the last three dunes alone, and when she climbs the last rise to dive on the prize, the dead drone, far-off-little-Gary looks like a stone. Debris lying motionless, waiting to provide a distraction. Ruth creeps low over the last dune, armed only with a rock and her father’s words in her head, chiding her after her first molting (the hardest, always the hardest): “But did you die?”
“I might today, Dad.” Ruth whispers to the gale and advances. Here, close to the hole the wind is hot, and the high rock walls the girded town against the sand sea are half glass glowing read in the heat of the pulsing fire. Ruth’s eyes confirm what her quick wits guessed-correct: the metal monster is eating .
The great maw, the metal aperture gun-jutting from the flat bottom of the spheroid monster pours fire. Same time, rocks and great globs of molten rock and metal lava-lamp glide equal-opposite up. The floating ‘food”–the half-melted bedrock and molten precious metal globs–they lurch-circulatory lunging up, pushed by the beating of the hungry beast’s mechanical heart.
Backlit by hellfire, dancing in it. The little ones, the drones that glide while their motors grind to death on dust and sand. Up close their collective hiss makes a din that competes with Cancri’s wind. They’re dropping like plague flies, one after another. “Good.” Drones death diving into the bore-hole below complete with grinding mechanical cries and sparks and lesser fires (that seem to add evidence to Ruth’s clockwork menace hypothesis).
The prize, the (almost) dead metal bug Ruth always kept two side-eyes on (even-especially when observing the Doom Machine feeding on her homes bones), it click-chitters–as if to speak in infernal clockwork mockery of speech. The little monsters wings are bent and broken, chewed holy by sand and wind-grit. The drone’s body is segmented like an insect more-geometric or a virus. Like a bacteriophage writ unholy large and horrifying with claw and spark, and no visible mouth but a few wicked red eyes on the ‘head’ that glow in pale imitation of the big fire.
Ruth raises the rock and brings it down, hard, on the bot’s head and the heavens do not notice. The mighty horde of drones circling continues its ceaseless murmuration without notice or care as the spider takes her prize in two tiniest paws and skitters off, carrying the body of one of theirs on its back.
About to crest the first dune on the careful skitter-back and feeling proud of herself: “My daughter the climate scientist.”
“I’m a glorified weather man dad” to the wind, and when Ruth crests the dune she risks a wave to Gary.
The wave back. The clumsy pop, launcher dropped from a flop-sweaty spiders paw and a single signal flare, screaming loud with its wind-chime design and glowing bright in the doomsday-night sky. The single flare Gary was saving and honestly did not mean to fire flies, accidentally but irrecoverably, into the Cancrin sky to begin its by-design cork-screw boomerang wobble in the wind.
“WHY GARY?!” Ruth screams and doesn’t wait for an answer.
“I slipped!” Gary takes the time to shout through four cupped arms like a megaphone while leaping backward off the dune and fleeing faster than he thought possible.
The dive down dune, body shaped for speed. She let’s momentum carry her into the skitter up the next mighty dune, every muscle already screaming. She refuses to look back at the cloud looming at the edge of her hazy rear-most eyes. Some great portion of the vast horde breaks off from the drone swarm, spiraling high in the unwanted night that should’ve never come to Cancri.
Clockwork beasts shriek, their red eyes glow bright and hungry. The swirling phalanx rises high, climbs to dive-spiral. on the spider desperately skittering up and dive sliding down sand mountains.
“Don’t look back, baby girl.” And Ruth doesn’t, even when the drones spit fire that. Snapping shots, the crack of sand glass blasted behind-beside her. Ruth dives over the last dune, but can’t find safety. Miscounted hills? Her shelter hole is gone. Fire burns the hairs off an arm, Ruth runs-anywhere. Trips in panic flight.
Two-toes-times two grip the woman’s flailing ankle, then another. With every free leg he has braced against webbed walls of Ruth’s burrow, Gary pulls and tugs with all the might the little man has. The tiny male drags Ruth and the drone to safety (relative safety).
“Thank you, Gary.” Ruth hisses and bares her fangs (but not sexy like) while the drones swarm a long while. The monsters rage and shoot up the sand. Pock marks and shattered glass.
There’s nothing for the drones to hear, for Gary’s repeated sincere prayers (and Ruth’s shooshing him just as urgently) are drowned by the wind. There’s nothing for the drone’s to see, as perhaps luck or providence answered Gary’s prayers (in that lame and limited socks as holiday gift way). For whatever cunning sensors the swarming drones had in their over-engineered heads, the things were utterly befuddled by the natural properties of Cancrin spider’s webs.
*
It was a long and restless night for two spiders and a drone corpse crammed in a burrow dug and webbed (quite hastily) for one. But when Gary is snoring softly and the muffled shots are silent and all that is left is the wind, when Ruth finally unclenches, that’s when memory comes to drag her to sleep.
Before the Spider we’re calling Galileo circumnavigated their world, there was a Cancrin story book about one of the many boastful women who claimed to have done the deed and circled the Cancrin sphere. One such tall-tale both the hero and Ruth heard regularly in their youth. Ruth hears her father reading to her as she falls asleep:
“All the things in heaven and hell are glorious and strange. Every force seems magic when first perceived and the Stranger always strange (at first). But to know a thing, truly know a thing (note I didn’t say: beat, own, or tame) is to make it mundane and all the more miraculous at time-the-same.”
Last thing she sees in the dream, is the new common theme: dad closes the story book and bursts into flame.
Awake. Gary snoring behind-beside-around her. Ruth shudders and shakes off the dream. Peeks. Steps. Skitters outside into the slowly growing night. Head cocked. Feet splayed to listen-feel the deep-thrumming of the beast feeding over the horizon. The rhythm seems slow, ever so slightly slower than the night before.
Ruth looks back West at the beast looming-doom over home. The spider adjusts her goggles for maximum magnification. Higher still, above the great metal monster, there appears an outline or a sketch–gossamer metal web at range. There in the air, still against the gale, the beginnings of a web or skeleton or half a balloon. Hordes of angry drones break off from the guardian swarm to carry metal bones and bits of kit shit from the top of the big monster up high to the sketch similar in shape and girth above. Reader, Ruth sees what is obvious to you and we: Von Neuman’s monster giving hellish birth to a copy of itself.
“No.” Not angry. Not loud, and certainly not defeated (though she’s shell-weary). “No.” And Ruth reaches into her pack for the only tools she’s got left to set a drift web for food and a wind trap for water. “You can do a whole hell of a lot, pardon my fucking language, with four sticks.”
END CANCRI 4. MORE TO COME.
*
BEGIN FOOTNOTES AND CITATIONS
- “Reeeth-PI-tik” (said thrice and fast) while one whistles “Cleeeeeeeeve-eh-LOOOND” (with a nasal twang) in Leptik (spoken Cancrin Language).
- This Author is lazy, and the next-town-over from Ruth’s obliterated home is basically the Cleveland, Ohio of Cancri 55(e) in that era. It’s nice (but not too nice) and the people are friendly (but you’re never sure if they’re passive aggressive or sincere). Oh and there’s a lake. And some of the spider architecture there evokes Art Deco (which is lovely).
- Reader, it came to me in a dream. All of it. If I’m being honest (as always), this is the basis of collegial criticism of this Archivists contributions to the endless records in the library bore-holes beyond the end of time.