CANCRI 55(e).
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Spark and sputter, jet-intakes clog, and spool-shafts shudder. Printed circuits sized football-pitch split twist cut-cross circuited. Wounded mining rig shivers and shits-sick. The machine bleed-leaks not-blood jet green and wine red from its wounds. The GeaunToord monster sags beneath itself and the self-same iteration of self-the-same being birth-built on its back. The Monster does what Von Neuman monsters do: single-mindedly strip mine Cancri 55(e) hoping to send ore back to the tomb-world of a dead race whose only contribution to the cosmos is UXO.
Three days the spiders dug deep as ticks on that lava plain. Every rogue dune on the rocks was absolutely rotten with spear-armed spiders lying in wait. Each crevasse cross-hatch covered in webbed camouflage and packed with cannon and mortar, shot and shell and manned by big mean spiders that spit and hissed and sang nasty songs in chitter-cockney about times “thrice grim as these, loves.”
Weather Spiders carry “Morels for morale” and the beautiful blue mushrooms that love cesspits and latrines only suddenly become shit-torch nightlights. Enter doom shroud, the exhaust cloud billowing black choking satin belched from a metal monsters ass. It chokes the lungs and smothers hope. But they sing, the Cancrins. Fangs out percussion-company for the songs about times “thrice as grim.”
Machine monster arrives to find an offering, a great pile of ore most valuable and metals most precious, a feast horde with an eight legged herald standing atop it.
Machine scream from mechanisms unseen: “WARNING. EVACUATE THE WORK HOLE. WHOLE OF AREA IS WORK HOLE. EVACUATE… “
“HOLD YOUR HORSES!”*1 the spider herald hollers in to her megaphone and the machine freezes (searching for ‘horse.explanation’ in some archive). Herald bows low, legs splayed “WE BEG TIME AND OFFER LABOR. OH GREAT MACHINE. MASTICATE WHILE THE BROOD DOES EVACUATE.” She skitters backward, down off the great sacrificial pile of alloys and riches and dinnerware there arrayed as mountain feast.
As answer, the mining rig moves to take what is offered and falls on the food metals. A fevered brain rations reason, and the senile meat in the mining rig cares as little for traps as its mineral sensors and logic circuits. Swarms of lesser machines break off from the orbiting host to circle and tag-and-flag piles of ingots and donated-confiscated riches–a trail of metal bread crumbs laid by spiders (and watched by the million eyes of other spiders (lying in wait (in every crack and crevasse))).
Rumble-hum of a warming plasma torch and the faintest red glow from the belly of the machine-beast. That’s the agreed upon hour: the lighting of the lava lamp that ends the world. One soft popping signal flare get-begets another and another. The choir of wobbling wind chimes in the sky calls in percussion. Fangs clip thick rope ties to let the wind take web-wove camouflage netting and every Cancrin cannon arrayed there speaks as one.
Sodium flares brighter than day and cannon thunder call down spiders flying-in-wait in holding patterns.. Every airfoil and spear-armed guardian dives on the wounded machine hiss-hum hovering over a metal feast.
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1*Translator’s note: the idiom “hold your horses” is correct. Though there are no horses on Cancri 55(e) that idiom travels.
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EoT: (ARCHIVES (ELSEWHERE))
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“Boredom.” The Mad Archivist confesses to a Parson who wasn’t interrogating him.
“Boredom?” The preacher asks as she levitate-rotates to find the madman’s face .gif-glitching at random intervals. “Just boredom?”
“The kind that drives you mad, oh Lord.”
“Nah. Nay. Negative.” Parson has a judge-face, brow-furrowed, teeth sucking. Murmur-making disappointed noises. “I’m not a divine being, though I try to see that spark in everybody right?” Static-shriek, .gif glitches to the next slide’s contortion. Man modem-scream, screen-flickering tears, whimpered word appear as characters crash at his feet (never be transcribed).
“Oof.” and some other sympathetic utterances from the Parson. “Best I can offer is a bit of this…” And holds a lit joint to the tortured man’s mouth. “…and best I can be is Lady Philosophy. See, when I’m bored and I go mad I want to hurt myself. When you go mad, you do things that kill millions of sentient beings and irrevocably alter the trajectories of billions of other sentient beings.”
The shimmering corporeal residue of a man does whimper in pain. Preacher continues: “Show me something. The barest sign you are sane enough to understand the difference between my boredom and yours.” At that the Archivist nods frantically in the affirmative.
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CANCRI 55(e) AFTER-MATH
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“See the other side.” Direct Ruth quote before it was a propaganda-aphorism. She said it to a civilian leader fuddy duddy in the run-up to the battle at Fort Wallace. Mayor Mc-Whatever was fussing about losing his seat on an evacuation airfoil to a crates of agri-cargo (mushrooms). “See the other side” meant the opposite of the doom cloud and the machines.
Ruth wept, through the battle and beyond. She wept for the rest of her long life precisely because she could “see the other side.” Ruth cried quietly and most often without the austere sheen of spider tears. Cancrins don’t cry much (like all dry-world critters (simply cannot spare the moisture)).
While Ruth wept and worked, the other spiders did as she quietly predicted: ran so far east they found home again (or the hole that home became).
Calamity came and transformed Cancrin life, all of it, into a rolling tableaux-biblical. Spiders fleeing-always-fleeing with broods on their backs and belongings in webbed bindles dragged through dust on pallets behind. Sand and sky hobos ballooning east-ever-east toward whatever settlement might have a scrap of bug jerky left in its larder.
There is an army now (armies (plural)) and warlords that learned new tricks and whose troops kept sci-fi guns rip-cut off drone’s noses. If we’ve learned anything in pages and ages past it’s that large bored armies are danger-in-extreme.
Worse, the “Ruthies”, the Weather Spiders, asses their own observation-reports and say it accurate-and-true: won’t be a Feast Fly in the sky for at least 13 years. Nobody knows it yet, but even when food fills the skies again it won’t. Old weather patterns gone, as the predictable constancy of the Cancrin gale gives way to the random-not-random lash of a sick jet stream and the bad-bearing wobble of warming air at the poles. Feast flies follow a recursive wind and circle for whole seasons, drunk in eddies and whorls.
Worse still, warlords with armies to feed follow the flies to prey on the best-fed cities. Strategos Brunhilde’s name and fake title (both backed by real cannon) inspire a fear quite real that gives warlords pause. Most places and peoples are not so fortunate. Brunie battles daily, but she never fights again. The wounded Strategos blusters, threatens, and moves pieces on the literafigurative chess board to buy the space-time for the Great Reverse-Engineer to take place in that long, lean decade-plus. But not even mighty Brunhilde can fight the new foe. Cancri is getting warmer. Whatever strange force bent space and altered mass to speed the precursor machine, whatever woo-woo in its engine guts set the thing to levitating in life, in death does rip and rend the firmament. Without the rotten biological brain to mind the drive the machine reached out regular intervals to tug at the two greatest masses in the in the stellar system: the star humans call Copernicus (and it’s diminutive companion).
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EoT (ELSEWHERE)
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“Is this my punishment?”
“It’s more of a piggyback. Mine hubris flying side by side and under yours until their radar signatures merge.” When the archivist is confused “You altar-ed the text–put a pile of people…”
“Spiders…”
“What fucking difference?… Spider people. You sacrificed several billion of them on the altar of your boredom. Now, you’re going to alter things a little more on your way out oblivion’s door.” The Parson lips a spliff while levitating before the Mad Archivist, pivot-positioning to keep her conjured cue cards in front of his eyes. “Read…”
He does. Read. The Mad Archivist reads his first line of marker scrawl: “Anywhere else. Get anywhere else. Baby, Go.” The words echo off Elsewhere, find a path along geometry sublime and strange to find in Ruth’s ear.
Preacher lady scribbles a whisper script to encourage-console Gary, another for Brunhilde. Mercy, not the technical kind (mercy kill the madman (meddle) and risk the same fate). Parson’s mercy isn’t mild, as death by dissolution is as painful and slow as it was calibira-calculated to be. Her mercy becomes a mighty salve as the madman comes to read her logic the pain of being consumed by his own fuckup becomes bearable (even as it grows) because he believes (as she) that “we’re going prevent a few billion bodies from falling into that mass grave you made…”
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CANCRI 55(e): THE OTHER SIDE
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“I see…” and Brunhilde position-wiggle-re-positions her ‘good’ eye before the telescope maw more than a few times “I see nothing, just a little purple blob…”
“Watch for the dot. Be patient.”
“She’s not good at that.” Gary quip skitters out of reach of the mighty spider’s pinching toes.
“I am great at patience…oh oh. I see it!” Excitement deflated. “The dot? That little dot?” at the black blob pinhole bee-lining across a much bigger purple blob.
“That’s it. That’s where we’re going. That is Grha.” Ruth yells, already climbing up the wall to search through papers stack-tacked to the wall, reems of sheets of schemes and diagrams. She’s looking for the documents and diagrams and maps that show the plotted path from death-diving Cancri to stable-orbit Grha. And camera eye pans from the observatorium to its precariously mounted telescope. Keep flying, higher-ever-higher. As we achieve a terrible speed, we see the fort and foundry town bustle, we rise high on industry smoke (but the eye-cinematic don’t choke). Nasty-nutritious Khal stalks wave goodbye from shrinking terraces full of mushrooms bio-luming blinking blue.
Camera eye flies to the lava plain, the old machine foe’s carcass picked skeletal for all the wizardry, the secrets metallurgic-liturgical in the dead machine’s skin and bones. Cunning and quick wit killed the Geauntoord probe and intellect devoured the precursor soda-can and re-wrote the sacred magic lexicon: tin-nickel, copper-silver, titanium and Germanium. Every astounding metal, alloy, and material-meta and then-some reassembled by a civilian army of industry (guarded by Brunhilde (by threat and boast (and deal ( and reputation))).
Evacuation rockets. Resettlement rockets. A field of hideously bulbous not-aerodynamic things each shaped (roughly) like Gary’s ass. Khal in the cargo hold, wax-leaf wrinkled, nutritious as it is disgusting. Clones cut and wrapped in cloth to be carried as prayer to that other sphere. In some holds are Aphids (chewing on their safety rigging), dumber than sheep and meaner than goats (only worth the hassle for the milk and the curds). Mushrooms. Blue Morels to light ships cabins on the long journey (and the same Blue Morels to man the latrines). All kinds of fungi. Black Trumpets that bring priests sacred visions and Beeches that make a fine laxative tea. The spiders brought books with them and they cut the corners off every precious page of every published text to save weight.
Evacuation Day falls on a special date (by the old calendar): their Galileo’s feast day that celebrates circumnavigation-in-defiance of church authority. And though the spiders are too busy fleeing their planet’s death dive toward Copernicus to properly honor or celebrate, though they have to cut the corners off the story to save weight, they take the story of the science rebel with them. The Cancrin arachnids carry their stories with them, like the broods they carry on their backs.
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END RECORD: CANCRI 55(e)