HEX: 0x2A LOCATION: CANCRI 55(e)/ARCHIVES
Von Neuyman’s monster (crash) landed on the loneliest moon of the farthest gas giant orbiting an especially metal-rich star. The ‘probe’ that was really a great-hulking ship-derelict lingered long, centuries long, there. The machine with endless appetite was a prime example of the last gasp of the long dead ‘Geauntoord’ doing what such machine monstrosities do: devouring to reproduce. Cold gas, rock, raw matter and ice went into the guts of the machine monster piloted by a rotten, ancient biological brain. Out a cloaca with a conveyor poured drones and machinery and bits of kit and replacement parts for the rust-hulk ‘Probe.’
The Geauntoord were quite possibly the first sentient accident in all god’s garden. Proof oldest don’t mean wisest. Oh, all those parables that tell you to be kind and decent to your elders (even and especially if they did not raise you well) are correct. Even if you gotta wash the brimstone off the story to find the good, it’s there. That’s a proper and practical conclusion for faith to lead one to: that the old timers are worth listening to and the young goblins are worth teaching. Tech is not a proper vessel for faith. “Tech p’our tech” is worse than “art p’our l’art”, the first phrase ends in kitsch with extinction implications.
Geauntoord tech was conceived before the multiverse metastasized, while the physics cake that undergirds reality still cooled and the warp-weft, reality’s stitchwork, was still visible. The Geauntoord, the Gee-Tees, took themselves out. They were huge and hungry. Prolific breeders that ate with no thought of tomorrow, bred with no effort to check themselves, and the only evidence the Geauntoord ever lived (outside of Archives and shattered planets) is the series of poorly conceived and over-engineered Hail Mary shots into space meant to save their race (or at least the population of a planet they’d picked clean). The Old One’s leftovers riddle galaxies like unexploded ordinance. Each artifact as big-obnoxious, dangerous, and terribly powerfully-pathetic as the hubris filled asshats that devised them.
One of them, the Von Neuman ‘probe’, looms toward Cancri 55(e). The thing drank the gas off a giant planet to fuel its reactors and turned gaggle of moons into swarms of drone swarms. The Gee-Tee derelict, it’s not a warship or a weapon, but a self sustaining mining rig designed to strip mine systems whole–make more of itself and ship the riches to a home world tomb world with a burnt out star.
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CANCRI 55(e) JUDGEMENT DAY
Ruth, we’ll call her Ruth because I am too lazy to transliterate a few hundred syllabic-chitters and phonemic-clicks. I am physically and metaphysically incapable of speaking Lep-Tik (the spoken language of the Cancrin Arachnids). I can’t do a dance meant for two legs, let alone the simplest Cancrin two-by-two step (the second speech of the Cancrin Space Spiders). Their third language, the written? I get lost in the web calligraphy and tend to want to info-dump about spiders when I encounter their script and I confess that I cannot yet write it very well.
It’s something like ‘Galileo Day’. Another lazy translation/transliteration. The historical arachnid being remembered wasn’t a learned astronomer, but in the basement beneath Cancri’s clouds that skill set wasn’t necessary just yet. The spiders celebrate the one that proved their world was round, proved it with an audience (that included the global theocracy who insisted the world was flat). It’s a day worth commemorating, parades and speeches and feasts and the reproduction of the feat.
The science rebel Galileo ‘did what the old Greek on Earth did, she pulled the Eratosthenes: measured the length of the faint-hazy shadows cast by the great drift-web masts that stand astride every Cancrin city, town, and burg. This ‘witchcraft’ (then defined as math or ‘doing science’) was most verboten. So Galileo and her science disciples did their work in secret. When the church-police came for Galileo the Heretic, she’d climb to the top of the web-tower. High above the town, she would balloon (verb)–float fly off on the planet’s wicked wind and atmospheric charge to the next town. Galileo circumnavigated the globe, measuring shadows on dunes as she went, agents of the Church/Government who swore globe-is-plate hot on her heels the whole time. G ‘did the math’–calculated the circumference of Cancri based on shadow length–as she sailed hazy-static skies on global gales that always blow on her home.
Fast forward back to narrative now, and the holo-record above my desk. Ruth’s real name is lost to history, but her form hovers clear as day over this archivist’s desk. She stands tall on her four back legs (as one does) and checks her gear while some functionary from the mayor’s office gives a secular sermon to the gathered crowd. This is not a holy day. Nor is it profane. It is a special day, that commemorates the end of Cancrin Theocracy and the beginning of their Enlightenment. Look, see the big ornate silly hats in the crowd? The spiders didn’t eat the believers or anything like that. The church is well represented in this little emerging bland utopia the Cancrins are building in their crater-towns.
This is a typical arachnid city on Cancri in its emergent ‘Golden Age’ (one of them). Chunky thick walls like medieval towns to keep the hostile Cancrin ecology at bay. Low homes and radial roads running out from thick-trunked towers that twist up at odd leaning angles. The architecture webs together in rugged-delicate flying arches that web building tops to walkways (over walkways (over walkways). Tall twisting brick towers do all that work to climb out of the deep carved crater-town just to peek. Tip-top windmills–rugged helictical things–poke their noses up to harness the always-whipping wind for mechanical purpose in the town far below.
Every town looks feels a hive at ground level, spacious promenades and too-intimate alley corridors built over seasons come years come generations. To the farmers and workmen high above the town, the ones who work the great sail-web that feeds the settlement high above, home appears in the dust and haze like a web with a great hole in it. Agricultural work, and care work in general is still gendered male in the here and now, but the spiders are making progress. “Killed by mate” hasn’t been the most common cause of death for Cancrin men in well over a century.
Deep down crater bottom is the hearth, heart, town square and sports stadium and amphitheater and the place where they do the business of town and state and all so on and so forth. It’s the town square, the part of every Cancrin town where the stones warp from the pad of little spider feet and the passage of ages. It’s there the group, town, community gathers for group singing and collective celebration, the officiating of the feasting (and mild bacchanal) to come.
There, an eight legged man at the podium (men can be civil servants now), says commemorative words for too long in too solemn a tone. But the tiny man is trying and the crowd of spiders that spreads up buildings and onto the walkways above like a carpet is a friendly audience. Cancrins have a cuddler conception of personal space, but they keep the ‘stage’ clear respectfully. The speakers movements, like a dance, are prescribed and planned in great detail). At the conclusion of the story of the Science Saint that sets the mood for the day, Ruth will repeat Gallileo’s great deed or a tiny (safer) portion of it: she will climb some one-thousand meters into the sky. All the way up the skinny anchor tower into the constant gale that rakes the world beneath the permanent cloud blanket.
The speech. The ceremony. The repetition of the word web about the lady who challenged and changed everything ends, and the Cancrins cup their toes to clap extra loud, sounds like flip flops on tile. For an especially rousing speech, the ladies in the crowd extend their mandibles to click-clap them like great knives on ceramic. The little men, and the tiny spiderlings clap and jump and cheer as Ruth straps her pack tight to her back above the bulbous abdomen and sets to climbing.
The sound of the crowd is lost the moment Ruth’s ears clear the crater top shield wall that girds every town on Cancri. She is grateful for the howling silence–the sound that drowns as wind tugs goggles and every other bit of kit dangling off the eight legged silhouette careful climbing the tall tower in. East, the wind-shadow side of the great stone mast the whole way, the thousand meter way.
“Don’t look down” Ruth click-ticks to herself. Wind howls back as she looks down, of course she looks down. “Don’t look down.” Ruth turns it into a song. Fear of heights marks one soft in spider society (even in this gentler age). Riding the gale well, reading wind, there’s a million idioms in all three languages born on and of the spiders relationship to the wind. The gale that never quits, the gentle convection oven stirred by two tiny tired stars that warm-not-bake the cozy world with the cruel ecology that the spiders call home.
Food collects in the web, it’s a functional farm and people (the people) gotta eat. Ruth sees the farmers skittering up and down collecting food for the whole town or repairing the great drift web. ‘Cowflies’ are the meat. Siphonophores are the sky-algae eaters–the veggies of the spider diet.
A man carrying a great siphonophore sheet over his shoulder while climbing deftly down the food-web like a sailor dancing through rigging, the workingman stops to wave to Ruth. She braves a wave-back and loses a glove to the wind for her trouble. Climbs on seven shoe limping and cussing. It’s not the old days, a girl can have flaws and fears. They aren’t career or public life enders. “A modern Cancrin can conquer fear and gain honor in the effort” Ruth hears her old fuddy-duddy mother in one set of ears. “Just don’t look down. Sing the practice song, babygirl” her father’s last rush whispered advice in the other set.
The holo-image backs out to a wide angle shot, til ruth is just a speck on spire–a bug on a ships mast dwarfed by scale of sail and the ferocity of the gale that her people learned to live with. I imagine Ruth imagines the feast-to-come to distract herself. When she arrives at the top of the tower, Ruth will take some atmospheric measurements with the gear in her pack (doing science for the hell of it is the reason for the season). Then, she’ll reproduce the feat (absent the eager, armed pursuit Galileo had to cope with): Ruth and every other ceremonial climber will stick their big ass out into the wind and when time is right, they will ‘balloon’ (verb): produce a sail-strand that catches both wind and friendly atmospheric-static to let the spider fly. All the climbers in every settlement along the equatorial belt–every spider town the whole world round–sends a flyer to the nearest town east. An ‘easy’ glide, a ceremonial greeting. Then let the feast that comes complete with a societal ‘hangover day’ off (for all that can be spared) truly begin.
Any second now, Ruth’s ass dangles in the gale. She made it to the skinny tip top. “Any second now…” but it might be a while. Nobody can see her that high in the haze as anything but a dot, but there she is, ass in the wind imagining a town’s worth of eyes on her. She’s blind. Ruth can see from all eight eyes (well enough). She’s charge blind–can’t sense, has never felt, the electro tickle that says “jump” to every spider gifted enough to fly (most Cancrins).
“Any fuckin’ time…” There’s a grunt, dropped pencil. Ass-over-mandibles and tumbling up into the storm, Ruth wrestles her gear to her pack and sets to piloting east (poorly) in a controlled plummet toward the dunes below–as one does on the holiday.
*
Reader, I’ll pause the holo-record here. Zoom in on Ruth’s face to magnify what I assure you is a smile, the kind that only ever comes when no one is watching and the last smile to grace Ruth’s little spider face (that wasn’t faked) for a very long time. As you might’ve gathered, Cancri is/was a tough world. Darwin’s couplet reigns supreme. Everything on Cancri wants to eat you, everything in the ecology in brutal all-against-all war. The only peace is found by those that finish the couplet: the species that cooperate. That doesn’t always keep you getting eaten (ask the siphonophores and other storm-floaters). Spiders, Cancrins, cooperate because they have to. The result are cozy little crater towns populated by extremely social and quite quick witted spiders.
Ruth was mid-flight when the Von Neuman probe and friends made planet fall over her town and moved to consume the rich mineral deposits buried bedrock beneath the spider’s feet. The rotten biomechanical brain, as over-engineered as the rest of the mining rig thought nothing of the settlement below. It thought nothing at all. Id. The itch to eat that fueled Geauntoord greatness–hunger, ceaseless hunger–was all that remained. Ruth watched over her shoulder, helpless against the wind, though she fought her silk sail mightily as if she could circle back to share fate.The city-sized monolith hovering over the town gave no warning. There was no effort to speak, no claxon, just the rumble of the mighty plasma in guts before it poured fire. The energy drill-bit bit the town and melted ground down past bedrock beneath. Dark clouds of drones poured out and around the monolith that melted ground, shook sky, and a thunder clap cast Ruth off course and far North into the dunes and dust and danger of the wastes.
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END CANCRI 2
MORE TO COME