CANCRI 6: “FOR WANT OF A NAIL”
* EOT (ARCHIVES:\(BORE-HEX:0x2A:\(RECORD: “ALONG CAME A PARSON”)))*
The Parson A(0x20B) floats by on a mission to feed her sermon notes, searching this Borges-borehole’s stacks half-randomly in search of inspiration. As she so often does, preacher-lady accepts a diversion created by the mad archivist’s hubris. Parson watches the watchers a bit: the archivist‘s and Stewards, the ghosts and glowing orbs taking copious notes and write-filing prayers to no-where.
Preacher speaks to all and none of them watching the Mad Archivist being .gif-glitch dragged into a silver tablet: “What are we watching?” and when a Steward hiss-snaps and threatens lightning. “Don’t come at me, Sassafras. I get it. Observe and report. But retort: what if I do this?”
Before the Steward(s) can answer, before a single Archivist has time to look up from their notes on tablets or pads or silver tablets or post-it scrolls. Before anyone can react the Preacher lady, the human ghost head of the Church Ethereal, skitters Cancrin-quick up to the Mad Archivist to collect a sample.
Glitch-writhing madman sweat. A single bead. A tear, and all the sweet suffering contain-captured there-in. The Parson is determined to get some.
Preacher lady read-re-read Dumas last trip to the library, and she borrows from the Count. Looking like the man from Monte Cristo learning to sword fight dodging water drops down in the dungeon-oubliette, the stoner preacher lady circles and swipes. She dodges lighting lobbed by the angry Steward and tosses cat-quick hands at the .gif glitching Archivist. Again and again-again the swift preacher swipes at nothing and the .gif glitching man being devoured by consequence. The copper barbed wire that replaced the Mad Man’s optic nerves wraps and digs and drags the man and bites the preachers hands.
Finally, Madman sweat meets the Parsons blood and mingles over cat scratch stigmata caught on optic nerve barbs and a vision finds the Parson. She falls in. Preacher’s form falls flat and whispers things she shouldn’t know. When the lights in the library hole flick strange and spit sparks, even the angry Steward stands hushed. Profanely Illuminated, the Parson A(0x20B) does a thing physically impossible reports back across the eventful horizon–from wherever in the history of Cancri 55(e) hubris and gravity/gravitas pluck-and-pulled and cast the Mad Archivist’s eyeballs.
*
CANCRI 55(e). EOD +5 (END OF DAYS +5)
*
The “Battle” of Cleveland wasn’t one. And Ruth wasn’t that kind of hero. All the Archivists read ahead and also we know (mostly from previous rodeos) how myths tend to grow. In a few centuries, Ruth will be remembered as an eight-legged Odysseus. Reader, it’s crucial that you understand this point: everybody in god’s garden is some-body, and this becomes more true once the universe metastasizes multi-. But Ruth was born closer to ‘nobody’ than being the “no-bah-dee” of human myth and legend (or even the ‘somebody’ of her own).
The “Battle of Cleveland wasn’t one, and Ruth seems nothing like Brunhilda–the tarantula among wolf spiders she confronted at Cleveland’s gate. Ruth sees big Guardian again, catches the glint of the last hazy-daylight the doomed city will ever see on the big spider’s armor. Ruth’s tiniest arms flick expert-anxious at her goggles. Damn near maximum magnification on her fore-lenses. The Weather Spider lays flat on her abdomen next to the docks. See Ruth there taking notes two-tiny forearms making micro adjustments to her lenses. Two legs each side of her body hold notebooks and pen/pencil before auxiliary eyes. The spiders back eyes (weakest of the eight anyway) see nothing because the busy brain is busy being busy running in three directions.
They’re hunters, my spiders, even Ruth (“my climate scientist” “I’m a weather man dad.”). Ruth, and every spider beside-around her gathering data the same (chittering to each other and shimmy-ing dance-speak shop-talk to each others side eyes). It’s beautiful because it’s ugly: what a mind made keen back in the bad old days of ‘all against all’ can do when the whole house-world is on fire. It’s the crap-shoot shibboleth a ghostly mad man set in motion.
The “battle of Cleveland” wasn’t one, and this isn’t a war book. It’s a Ruth book and the Weather Spiders watching with her bore witness to horrors. They wretched and wept and shit while Cleveland burned and more than a few put their notebooks down, took off their goggles, exchanged what gear they had for heavy rocks with which to walk into the water and promptly did so.
*
It went like this: the great half-orb monolith hovered over Cleveland a span of time transliterated to one half an hour on Earth, screaming from a million mouths: EVACUATE. THIS IS WORK HOLE. EVACUATE. In a voice that blurred vision. Every spider that would stay and tough it out with the mayor found themselves packing the promenades.
Honey-combed construction riddles the oldest Cancrin settlements (like Cleveland) and in the spaces between the buildings that lean where the walkways become tunnels (de facto if not de jure). Every promenade clogs and Cancrins kick each other off the spiraled walkways that gird the biggest buildings like ramped staircases. Every tumbling Cancrin lands safe on the writhing blanket of life that’s panicked but still soft. EVACUATE. THIS IS WORK HOLE. As the whole process of shit-chutes and ladders or whatever the game the spiders wouldn’t know starts again with twice the anger and thrice the desperation.
The Cancrin’s are cuddlers, and this is an Enlightened age, but tunnels clog and choke, and balconies collapse and crush families and someone trying to climb out a choked tunnel with their babies on their back (whole mess of them) sinks fangs deep into someone else in the dark while someone else is gouging a neighbor’s eye and so on and so forth.
Cancrin’s are cuddlers but a stampede is a stampede. Though the drones swarm-patrolling like metal murder hornets did not fall on the spider people during EVACUATE. THIS IS WORK HOLE. EVACUATE. Many Cancrins that thought themselves cunning for catching the wind, ballooning off Cleveland’s tallest towers at the last moment flew directly into that horde-swarm (never to be seen or heard from again).
In the mad-mocking silence after the machine’s silence, after not enough time (not enough time at all) there is terrified silence and white noise. The twin hiss of mag-lev generators above and the writhing carpet of spider-life rend-wrenching itself to death in desperation below.
The mining rig, Von Neuman’s monster. Great hulking grey half-orb, skin mottled like a metal orange. The Precursor relic with a rotten living brain reduced to ‘id’-repetition would gleam, if the smoke it chimney-belched high didn’t blot both suns out of the hazy sky. The sound of fire in its belly began below-sound, the infra-sound basement that blurs vision in all eight eyes and shakes carapace and rattles jellied-hollow Cancrin spider-bones of all those trying to flee (too late (much too late)).
Then the fire fell down and molten rock and metal and pathways worn by little spider feet over a span that defies memory are gone with some great portion of the people in the time it takes for a fusion torch to melt stone.
*
On the far shore, Weather Spiders and Guardians of Some-Suburb are half-kitted in panic. It’s the tableux-biblical: the spider people gathering and girding to flee into the desert. All ready for evacuation if they aren’t pulling desperate half-drowned late-comers out the alkalai lake. Spider lings too-light to break surface tension race ahead and wave/shout/dance at shore urging mom-dad-grams on. The whole scene takes place in nightmare nightlight, the devil-red glow of the fusion torch melting away life and memory and burning brighter than the hope its shock-awe extinguishes.
A few reform-kilometers from the hole, the wind blows hot on Ruth’s face. Behind the lenses that reflect the red-devil light of the Monster’s all-consuming fire, Ruth watches Brunhilda. For hours, Ruth watches the tarantula-among-wolves-and-jumpers (forgive my try-fail at the Cancrin idiom piss-poorly translate-a-literated).
Reader, I told you, that the ‘battle’ of Cleveland wasn’t one and this isn’t war book. But Brunhilda and her Guardians did brave deeds that day for far longer than any critter ought to be able to (against odds-impossible). The biggest baddest spider and her comrades flew finger-four tight formation like jet interceptors into death, and sad-boldly.
The Guardians clipped their balloon-sails, like paratroopers cutting free from rigs. The fighters fell into the horde-swarm fangs out and mighty arms splayed as if leaping on prey. For hours, and long past the limits of Cancrin endurance, watchers on the far shore caught sight of sparking drones and explosions on the surface of the great mottled metal monster when the Guardians turned weapons ripped from the clockwork hornets against the all consuming thing.
Finally. Nothing. Just a mining torch and murmuring hordes of swarms of murder drones.
Ruth was the last to leave, when the watchers were done weep-retching, when all eyes-arms turned toward the rolling-evacuation that might save all and the Duty-to-Warn the rest of the planet (every ‘Cleveland’ to the East).
Gary, finds her there. Little man sighs and fidgets at his moustache with those two tiny-est arms while searching for words. Finding none, he approaches Ruth careful-creeping sideways (the way one does in heavy moments) to shimmy down into the dirt.
“What are you doing?” Ruth aims for angry.
“I’m watching.”
“You don’t…” The weather spider is irritated.
“We’re watching. Together.” Gary shimmies deeper into the dirt. His kind of bravery, the kind that’s called for here. And unwelcomely welcome the small man sits in silence with Ruth a long time. Saying nothing, but leaving a canteen and some dried flies (Cancrin jerky) within her reach.
And two spiders sit under fresh night lit by the end of days while Ruth watches with fool’s hope for any sign of defiance above or escape below in the hole that used to be Cleveland. Hours after any spider has found their shore alive, Ruth and Gary watch-wait. The two spiders watch in the warm wind while Ruth considers which heavy rock she’ll carry to the bottom of the lake. The two bear witness while Ruth waits for her fathers voice to talk her out of it (a voice that doesn’t come this time). She will not say it and does not, but the Weather Spider is grateful for the company.
Ruth and Gary are still waiting the next morning that is permanent night under machine-belched shroud when Brunhilda, five-legged, four eyed washes ashore. The tarantula-among-jumpers is half drowned and bad-burnt and barely alive, when the two begin desperate-tending her wounds.
*
END CANCRI 6
MORE TO COME