CANCRI EPISODE 3: NOW WHAT?
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Ruth comes to half buried in a sand dune. The Spider-Woman retches, blind-choked on wretched grit. Ruth takes as deep a breath as she can under conditions. Her big-ass abdomen swells and the full force of four back legs rock her long segmented body left-right-free.
Skitter-staggering blind, Ruth finishes vomiting and coughing. She’s breathing free from mouth and ass by the time the finest hairs on her tiniest pair of arms have her eyes free of grit and her big leather and clockwork goggles are secured on her face where they belong.
Ruth hops and skitters to the dune crest, rises to the height of a short adult human, and peers back west toward home1 far off, a scar flirting with the horizon. Soot and ash cast high where the wind is calm. The ruin shroud hangs high and blots out the hazy Cancrin sun. Air that burns the eyes and lungs and the ashes of a city-whole on the wind.
Tiny spider toes turn dials slit-fit in the front lenses of her desert-goggles. Ruth zooms to focus on the monster pouring fire into the hole where home was. Ruth looks long, slumped hopeless on the dune, shaking hands focusing lenses on the horrors some kilometers away. Blinding Red light, brighter than the Cancrin’s second sun. Light from the lance of fire glints off the sharp built-edges of the monster. The thing is metal, heavy, not flying. Floating in defiance of weight and gale.
The lesser machines, angry swarming hordes of them dance about the flame, orbit it in mad murmuration. Movement on the dunes, a flock of drones seems to sense it just the moment Ruth does. A shadow crests a dune. A single survivor flees the town. The flailing thing tumbles down the slip-face graceless, rises desperate, sprinting.
Ruth loses sight of the survivor as the horde-swarm dives down into the dune valley. The spider rubs her eyes and her shaking toes slip across dials to throw the goggles out of focus. She throws up. Again. “Anywhere else. Get anywhere else. Baby, Go.” But Ruth can’t run, and something in her is already resolved to linger liminal in the desert Her father’s voice in her ear, Ruth is resolved to find “Shelter. Water. Food.” in that order and the spider is off East and ‘under the wind’ as the Cancrins say.
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The spiders call it “letting in the tempest”–the noise that whispers bad dreams. A superstition a lot like the some-human beliefs that sickness comes on a “bad wind.” The perma-tempest screams loud outside, and the sub-basement base thump of the destroying machine’s digging far away perversely lulls Ruth to the worst sleep.
Last night’s scene, she dreams it repeated (as she will, nightly, for the rest of her life). The single other survivor some kilometers off atop another dune, but it’s her father. The hovering mechanical beast is hot fear all consuming. The drones are swarming death, and the survivor is just a speck. No way to know who the fleeing shadow is at this distance except she knows. Ruth knows in her shell and every nerve burning in her that it’s her father fleeing the machines. In the dream she doesn’t look away. Can’t. Her eye’s mind’s last trick is to make the spider watch the bitter end she imagined night before.
Ruth shakes awake, pulls the ‘curtain’ of her hasty web cocoon, skritch kicks away enough sand to survey the scene. When all seems safe enough she pads carefully up to the dune’s top to peek with her best pair of eyes. West, far west, the metal beast still dig and the swarms still swarm. When the spider observe-determines the machines seem concerned only with the hole they made of her home, she tends to survival.
“You can do whole hell of lot, forgive my language, with four sticks.” Ruth hears her father addressing her scout troop on a ‘camping’ trip close to town. Ruth’s bag had four sticks, a signal flare, and a snack (long consumed), more than enough to rough it a few days and wait for rescue from anything short of the End of Days seen looming behind her.
The funeral shroud up high above the gale grows and spreads. No big delicious bugs in Ruth’s drift web, just siphanophore nymphs and some clumps of glide-algae. Ruth stows half her meager rations and skitters to her wind trap–the funnel made of webbing twisted thick. The spider knocks the grit from the thing and wrings the dawns dew from the knitted web into her canteen.
Simple survival tended to, Ruth resolves to do what she can: learn. Two lensed eyes cresting the dune to learn-observe. Two toe-pads dragging a pencil across a page. Hours-long-hours of notes and observations.
“My daughter the Climate Scientist.” “I’m a glorified weather man, Dad.” She whispers under the wind as she sets to describing machine behavior and hellfire like she used to help forecast the wind’s whims for the web-farmers.
Long hours later the first defective drone shows itself–falls out of formation, jinks and maneuvers drunk. Blind, flying wounded, some of its own come to tend and escort it. Ruth’s lenses show her the machines speaking in dance and flickering light. The sick one, the metal bug with the bent wings and weak strobing red eyes, finally sputters and dies. The wrecked drone found rest atop a dune far from the swarm to tempt Ruth.
“I gotta get it…”
“Get what?”
Ruth rears and reacts. Leaps. She’s on top of the speaker in a fraction of a sliver of a second. Fangs out and arms splayed above the tiny male with the bushy mustache: “Who the fuck are you?”
“Gary! Gary!” little guy lisps around tiny fangs crossed in the symbol of submission. He slaps the name tag dangling from his safety harness. And as she calms, Ruth recognizes the little mustachioed agricultural worker that waved to her on Galileo day.
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EOT
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“Come fight me god!” is a phase archivists go through. Hell, I’ve done it (I’m not proud to admit). It’s a tantrum that turns mental break wrapped in self delusion. The bad ones end with a self inflicted fall into a library bore hole. The good ones? Same as real life: god doesn’t meet you at the bike rack after school.
The Mad Archivist found a result unprecedented in the whole history of the holes that record everything. Unprecedented things are rare treats, and the Stewards have assigned several archivists to document their comrade’s wretched transformation.
The palm that altered the fate of Cancri appears flesh half dissolved into the plate (or perhaps the record writing itself upon it). The man’s mouth and every muscle contort and glitch-flicker strobing in and out of wretched stress positions at random intervals–man as broken speed-deck holo-.gif. His eyes like jumper cables trailing copper nerves contort and twist about the man to tie his ghost to desk and text and follow a path that ends embedded in the record plate that writes Cancri’s being.
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END CANCRI EPISODE 3
BEGIN FOOTNOTES AND CITATIONS:
- “Home” has a name: Scriiik-TIH-tik-tik (repeated 3 times) while one makes a “Looo-OOOOH-weem-PA” sound from one’s wind-pipe. A Cancrin speaker may also communicate place name in dance while speaking (the third Cancrin language) in moments of formal address (messengers, merchants, dignitaries) to add a shimmy or ceremonial flourish to the message such as: “I bring word from the place of…” or “Hark, your sisters send word…” or “Bugs for sale…”. Like the Cephalopods of Keppler 22(b) and other poly-linguistic species, it is common for the Cancrin Arachnids to speak and dance concurrently. This produces further translation/transliteration challenges for a (ghost) human author incapable of making spider speech-sounds (or dancing well). Cancrin Archivists have expressed criticism-concern using terms such as “cultural appropriation.” This author acknowledges that they are correct, but since he is chained to his desk due to a library riot he is unable to request reassignment at this time.