EOT
*
“Can I bum a light?” a voice out in the ash, falling like asbestos snow from nowhere to nowhere. Weird, as I didn’t smoke in life and had no plans to start in death. But I reached for the pocket of the pants I wasn’t wearing, the ones clinging to the body I no longer had, and there I found the expected source of flame.
I was freshly dead having freshly fled from Archives’ new staff orientation and fumbling at the lighter I didn’t realize I still carried. I had just pressed one nostril to another to launch some snot and brain clot from whatever form I now inhabited and: “Can I bum a light?’ from nowhere and five words filled nowhere with something that was someone: the Parson A(0x20B).
*
CANCRI 9: CANNON AND THUNDER AND SHOT AND SHELL
*
From her airfoil at the head of the formation Ruth can see the gathering, the gaggle-to-be–the swarm of heavily armed spiders attempting to array itself into an army. Every eye in the convoy trailing her sees the pile. All eyes see the great host gathered on the lava plains outside Fort Wallace. Airfoils and sky-skiffs aimed every direction, cargo tumbling off aircraft and wheeled carts to find new form in haphazard piles. The spiders whose sweat wove the planes and made the army manifest aren’t visible, not at first. From height and great distance the individual arachnids are subsumed by the products of their effort. At privileged distance everything (of course) seems to move on its own, as if by magic–the stuff and kit and things arrayed to arm army (an entity not yet in existence). For a long time, Ruth’s flotilla can see only cargo and goods and airfoils and cannon and not the little mighty things that made them and piled them haphazardly here. As they grow closer and individual airfoils and formations break from the flotilla to land, to find parking, the scene can only grow more chaotic (and quickly does).
Organization is the key categorical factor that distinguishes the types of crowds or groups or gaggles. A mob might achieve things, win a fight but is just as likely to eat itself in the attempt (or aftermath). A mass can do mighty things, but that was two taxonomic levels left-and-up from the rabble gathered in the crags and crinkles of the lava field.
A mob. That’s what the Weather Spider and the General and their grand flotilla found gathered on the lava plains round Fort Wallace–a mob of spear-wielding spiders armed with cannon to boot. What’s worse, the mob was several mobs all at once (mobs that would be (and might still) fight one another). Tents of Cancrin warlords hug the low-lazy slop of the ancient long-dead volcano that made the lava plain like lightless beacons, as lifeless lighthouses, like ugly bullseyes or the targets on a ski-ball ramp.
There, Brunhilde fights her next battle, a word-war in the tents where the warlords posture, preen, and dance.
*
“You know you don’t have to go back in there. The hole. The bore. The library. You can just leave. Ghosts don’t need gainful employment. There is no gain for the ghost. Only for..”
Parson gestures to the multiverse glow-growing, gilding the firmament it flows accros. The Parson is kind. Warm in bearing, gesture, and being. And I, the fresh ghost and awkward shade, a metaphysical echo-remnant am confounded and surprised by her kindness.
“I get it. I was confused when I died too. Most are.” My horrified surprise meets the parsons preacher calm, her maddening preacher calm (the kind only ever found radiating from the best shepherds).“No. No. I’m not a mind-reader, not that yours would be difficult to read, you’re just vocalizing your monologue.” She saw my relief. “Yes I did. Dying is a lot. Archival orientation is a lot. You should see how HVAC greets theirs….”
*
Gary lived those three days before the battle like he lived every one of the mountain of minutes since calamity came: in motion and caring, doing the work-of-care. Strategos Brunhilda. Title name wedded thus because a bubble-butted little ‘snack’ of civilian man-candy named Gary helped Brunie carry the load-of-herself.
Performance and the performative: the dance (and the audience watching) is the heart of Cancrin culture. Those that use ‘performative’ as pejorative might want to note that they are doing the dance wrong (and poorly). For all is that is the self is performative The dance is the kayfabe gentlewoman’s agreement not to eat each other that holds as long as the community’s food supply is steady and safe. Wounded Brunhilda woke just in time to turn the emotional tide at Lacuna’s Conclave–to sway the crowd in Ruth’s favor and help the herd heed her warning.
But days later on the long low slopes leading up to the fort, ‘wounded’ wouldn’t work. To enter the biggest tent in the trail of gaudy circus-fabric bullseyes and be heard (let alone heeded) demands a performance of vigor (from a woman sill leaning on her spear).
Gary drills Molly and Cooper, the self appointed honor guard in ill fitting inherited armor: “We guard Brunhilde’s dignity” and they are the first other than Gary to call her “Strategos” (a title she never earned in service because it doesn’t exist, it just sounded cool and smart and badass). But that title sticks to the grizzled warrior spider (quite quickly). She mills through camp on the long way to the warlord’s tent(s), grasping toes with awed warriors and sharing swigs from flask and cantine. On that long walk Gary shouts the made up title. Loudly. Often: “MAKE WAY FOR STRATEGOS BRUNHILDA! NEARLY-SOLE SURVIVOR OF THE SCOURGE OF CLEVELAND.” Gary’s moustache shimmys when he stretches the ‘shtick-tik-et’ sound in “strategos” (kinda like a rolled-r in Earth tongues that have an ‘r’ sound to roll). “MAKE WAY FOR STRATEGOS BRUNHILDA! MACHINE BANE, BRUNHILDA!.”
Molly and Cooper en guarde and posture. The guards click-clack and do the dance-perimeter about their general, and at that the troops gaggle-gathered begin to array and path part and organize. Brunhilde’s six-and-half remaining legs ache (every single one (every single step)). And if two of her primary eyes, the big ones in the front, weren’t blind (they weren’t), those lenses were as cloudy as they were sensitive to light. Over those eyes she wore a black patch. Painted on it (by Gary in scavenged red paint) is the sigil-symbol of the city that was ‘Cleveland’ on the planet you’d know as Cancri 55(e).
The Strategos’ walks slow (as entourage honor guard grants permission to). And when the warrior tarantula woman’s wounds ache or when her body shakes (or when she sees eight legged soldiers with resigned eyes locked on that bleak thing belching smoke and blotting sky) that’s when Brunhilda would stop, swaying on the spear, to listen. To say: “take heart” and “hold fast” or “orders come.”
When Brunhilde enters the clamorous tent of the greatest of Warlords, when Gary attempts to grandly announce her, Brunie trips his back leg and roughly drags him across sand-grit to hiss-whisper (just as roughly): “we watch and observe and look serious.”
*
“So what do we do?” Says me, the over-eager ghost standing in the ash snow.
“No. No. I’m not asking you to be a ‘we’. Nor am I offering membership in something.” The Parson cools my jets (or tries too).
“So what do I do?”
“You wait.” Parson floats there, levitating cross-legged with an infuriating lack of effort.
“That’s it?”
“That’s it.” She adds a smug smirk (equally infuriating). And when I looked like I was ready to walk back into the library-bore. “Wait a span of time that will drive you mad.”
“Wait for what?”
“I’m glad you asked.” And out comes one of those little horrible first-gen handheld holographic projectors. From the horrid floating migraine factory comes the beautiful but hard (painful) to watch sharp-hazed
*
Cancrin Conclaves are about the chaos of call and response, and if that spectacular form of civilian governance obscures a great deal (it absolutely does), it has one virtue: when one addresses the people so performatively and directly and in person, one must ‘bring the thunder’ (surprisingly a shared human and arachnid idiom) or risk being eaten-actually-eaten. The journey, the path to Fort Wallace taught Ruth’s Weather Spiders what the “report” in observe-and-report means. And inside the city some of the Weather Spiders’ ever-growing number do the dance kayfabe and perform for the Conclave to convince the good spiders of the town to organize (verb). And inside the city the rest of the Weather spiders do the work of organizing (a word that belies a lot of kinds of work) side by side with their fellow arachnids. And inside the city, a million brains guide eight times as many arms and eyes in a mighty effort to finish every last cannon, every spear, every shell to-be-shot, every last bandage that could be wove before the monstrous mining rig’s arrival.
Outside the town/fort/foundry, out on that low lava plain that culminates in a caldera as wide as Olympus Mons (if that mighty Martian mound were pressed flatter and lower than a popped pimple). That’s where the host, the gaggle, the mob-that-would-be-army mills about trying to organize itself (and thus-far failing). That’s where the forces of the arachnids sit (not yet arrayed).
In the opulent-austere command tent, the three greatest warlords prance a different sort of performance for a narrower audience. Soldiers are the ‘groundlings’ in this theatre. These women are the poor bloody infantry, the armed-and-armoured wolfies and tarantulas cluttered-clumped under their lord’s banners doing “hup-hup” and “hear hear” cheering arguments in the heated three-spider Conclave–a dance-battle for the right to dictate which strategy will guide the disorganized host out on the lava plain. A dance off to determine whose recipe for an army and strategy they’ll apply to the pile of Arachnids and ingredients outside.
As Brunie watches, the Warlord Aella leaps table to table as she speaks on the relative merits of an air assault on the monstrous mining rig, the derelict machine looming but days away. She’s as Cancrin as the others present, but a lithe example of her species that looks like an Earth jumper. She’s every bit as mean as the bigger warlords, whipcord strong, and keen-of-eye. Aella and her paratroopers fight in-and-from the skies.
Aella ‘Lord of the Skies’ kicks up sand from the to-scale battle map, knocks chess-pieces shaped like war-resources all over the damn place as she dances “Let the enemy come and feed….” and the general climbs tent-rafter high to drama-dive on the diorama-of-battle below. “We’ll fall on the foe!”
Next comes Hippolyta (the warlord with the great infantry horde) then presented the absurd-elaborate reimagining of what was (if we’re being honest (and we always are (honest))) the same exact strategy: wait for the mechanical monster to melt Fort Wallace to assail the thing with siege towers and loppes lobbed via catapult.
Last, Great Boudica whose cannon make her portion of the host the mightiest, offers (you guessed it) precisely the same plan (but even dumber) as her two competitor colleagues: “When the beast looms low over Fort and forge.” The very old, very large warlord begins to nod off, needs to be elbowed in the ribs by her entourage (a few times).
“When that damned devil machine darkens.. darkens the sky” smelling salts, potent ones at that, and the old warlord rages about how rad it will be to fire a thousand cannons at the thing at short range.
*
Parson: “And when the words your asked to scribe or the etchings you’re instructed to provide commentary to, when they are wrong. Profoundly wrong. You’ll call me.”
REDACTED: “Wrong? Like…”
Parson: “Like fusion vs. spears wrong. You’ll call me.”
REDACTED: “How?”
Parson: “Light this beacon.” And while I examined the real and fresh and sticky conical joint in my hand, the Parson vanished.
*
Remember Reader, calamity came to Cancri (55(e)) in a time of (alleged always alleged and in-process) Enlightenment. When their Galileo circumnavigated that globe she sprinkled all kinds of radical ideas, deliciously radical ideas, on the whole world. Galileo shed big thoughts same as she shed quills from her fuzzy ass. As consequence, Gary is a “snack” (fig.) not a snack (lit.) and all the Cancrin women have rights and the men have rights and the Conclave is about every spider deciding things together (not hearing what the Church decided and the goons will impose).
Everywhen and everywhere that power stops pummeling people and puts on a glove there is still a fist inside it. And every place the revolution is velvet (as it was on Cancri 55(e)) there is always-and-inevitably some motherfuckers with sandpaper hearts and austere souls who yearn for whatever flavor of ‘bad old days’ reign/rained hell on their world.
On Cancri, as most places, those spiders who long for the bad old days are the biggest and (by virtue of army) mightiest arachnid warlords.
Brunhilda speaks, that’s wrong. Strategos searches for the proper time to address the warlords and the warriors over which they Lord. The wounded one waits to speak and talks (one-to-one (nodding sagely at Gary’s observation (never showing consternation (for Strategos herself is under observation (from oh so many eyes)))). Brunie does this to earn the right to speak (without the unjust consequence of being eaten). Big wounded warlord half-blind and one-eighth hobbled is in danger of not even earning the dubious honor of facing the threat, the Gee-Tee derelict mining rig rumble-hovering toward them–wireframe copy of itself on it’s back.
Brunhilde must flatter power, not to wield it but to aim it, and so she writes a mighty speech. While Boudica the mighty (Boudica the senile (Boudica the flatulent)) does ramble herself to sleep, Brunhilde writes a speech. While she leans on Gary like a cane and her spear like another cane, Brunhilde imagines (in vivid post-concussion fashion) the sermon-ish speech she is about to give).
Strategos Brunhilde bangs the butt of her spear once, twice, thrice on some rock random-sat in the sand beneath the tent. And the perverse undemocratic almost opposite of a Cancrin Conclave looks to her with all its restrained violence. The sound of thunder, the command-clack calls every eye (the hungry-front eyes (the sharp orbs (the good-uns used for hunting)))) but Boudica. Boudica the senile, flatulent, etc. does sleep, dreaming of the thrum of her own guns.
“All hear Strategos Brunhilde! All Heed her words!” Gary’s voice is crisp, fangs snapping every sentence (for Cancrins pronounce exclamation points). “Warlords hear me. All of you are right. All of you are wrong. Array your forces before the town, and we will bring that machine monster down.” She raises a leg, toes splayed claws out, hand begging silence before the crowd can grumble-yell. “Let me show you how to win, and let the glory be yours.”
*
Nobody I know has flown closer to the literafigurative sun the the Parson (HEX). You play god, even-and-especially in their absence, and the machine smites you. As evidence, I offer the Mad Archivist–the ghost being torment-tortured crammed as door-jam between time and that space outside it. There. That’s the place/unplace preacher lady stepped through to do the thing (whisper in some spider’s ears). That’s supposed to be a thing reserved for being’s biblically accurate. But as we’ve seen in pages past, there’s little-to-no input from the “be not afraid” types in The Book of Ruth.
Parson got the same soul sickness as me: survivor’s guilt. Odd considering she died. See, the preacher lady from Pittsburgh died in detention. Her world went hard theocratic nightmare on its way to the grave. Don’t twist it. She resisted. Mightily. Parson was a Shepard to the end (past the end). She continues to shepherd (verb) a whole host of ghosts called the Church Ethereal. They do scatter. They do wander on all kinds of pil-grem-ahh-ges. Where the Parson or her flock ramble there is a statistically significant uptick in ‘good trouble’ (if not always good outcomes) much to the chagrin of the Mediocre Machine that Does God’s Work in Their Absence.
*
END CANCRI 9
MORE TO COME