Lucifer Comet (2464 CE)

by Ian Wallace

  A foothold and a handhold crumbled, and the startlement caused her to release hold with the remaining hand and begin to fall backward. Instantly she backtimed a fraction … and found herself crouching again on the higher ledgelet exchanging puzzling mind-signals with the creature below: I friend … You food? . . . Not food. Friend … You not food, you not friend.

  And if by backtiming, returning to the earlier perch at the earlier time, she had lost thirty meters of descent work, nevertheless she had saved her own life, and she had learned an astonishing thing which now needed codification in order to be used. She got it systematized this way. When long ago she had hidden her bank-stolen treasure in her apartment of two days before, she had backtimed the treasure in situ: she had moved it in time without changing its spatial position. And again, when she and Narfar had backtimed to the vitality of his city, they had backtimed in situ. But this new application was different: just now, she had back-spacetimed; that is, if all her moves were plotted on a diagonally linear course on a spacetime chart, then she had moved diagonally backward along that line. She had gone back, not only to when she had been, but to where she had been.

  And there she crouched, thinking it over, trying to introspect how the feelings of backtiming in situ and back-spacetiming were different, so that she could in the future control them to obtain one or the other. While she ruminated, passively she was creating a very small time-paradox, crouching here on the ledgelet far past the moment when actually she had been down below losing her grip on rock-crumbles….

  Ping! The upshot web-line hit her.

  32

  Still Day Thirty

  Narsua had defeated and devoured so many adults of her species, ingesting with each body all its experience including the experiences of all whom the devoured body had ingested, that she was undisputed queen of the spider people in the crater (and that was all the world any of them knew). She attacked only adults, of course. To attack an infant, apart from interfering with species proliferation, was in the first place not sporting, and in the second place was folly because the child could give the adult no experience worth mentioning.

  Her royal status gave her no immunity at hunting times; rather, she was now prize prey, for to defeat and devour Narsua would give the victor all Narsua’s knowledge along with queenhood. On the other hand, few sought Narsua nowadays, she was too likely to win; her only rivals were those who felt sure that they had very good chances to win, and all others avoided her on the hunt—creating food difficulties for Narsua, who frequently had to chase and challenge. But at times other than hunting periods, Narsua ruled without question and was admired, envied, imitated, and fawned over.

  With all this knowledge and status, Narsua nevertheless felt a profound frustration. Still she could not solve the problem of getting out of the crater, still she had no handle on the other-side mystery; and her growing obsession with finding a way out was as potent as Dorita’s obsession with getting in.

  Prowling the foot of the crater wall late one afternoon, peering up the shaded hundred meters of concave un-negotiable bottom-bowl and on up the surmounting roughness to the inaccessible heights, light-luminous (she had never seen the sun), Narsua froze at the sight of up-high motion. It wasn’t much motion; she stared at it; a creature of some sort clinging to cliff-roughness, moving a little and breathing a little and that was all. Narsua’s mind labored to bring into clear singleness the eight eye-images. (Her eyes were not compound.) Unexpectedly she felt a message from the creature: / friend. That was what she always felt when a competitor approached her for combat, but there was something dangerously alien about the quality of this message. She flung back a query: You food? She apperceived counter-puzzlement in the aloft-creature, and presently it responded with an absurd distinction: Not food. Friend. Having mulled that over, Nar-sua formulated and telecast her bafflement as follows: You not food, you not friend.

  It terminated the dialogue, if that was what it was. The aloft-creature began to move cautiously downward. Eagerly Narsua watched its down-climbing technique: this Narsua too could do, upward, if she could only surmount the slippery polished bottom bowl which even the smallest spiders could not conquer.

  Then Narsua went into confusion, because abruptly the creature was back where Narsua had first seen her, and the queer dialogue about friend and food repeated itself; whereafter the creature clung to the rock….

  Shaking herself out of the confusion during which she had seemed forced to hear and respond what she had already heard and responded, Narsua studied what she could see of the creature. It might know something that Narsua needed to know. Maybe it was food, despite its denial; it had called itself friend, which meant food….

  On an impulse (she wouldn’t have tried it had she thought first), Narsua swung her abdomen between her legs upward and fired a web-shot And she hit! the creature was web-stuck to the rock!

  All that way up, even above the smooth to the rough! Narsua felt a bit dizzy: she’d had no idea that she could shoot so high, it hadn’t occurred to her to try, that shot had been easily five times as long as any she’d ever attempted. Also she felt physically depleted, as though she had unwebbed herself totally; had some of her insides followed the web-thread? While introspecting this, she was fastening her end of the cord to a rock at her feet and biting it off; then she moved back to comprehend what she had done.

  She had, for the first time ever, established a straight diagonal webcord-road across and above the smooth to the rough.

  And if the creature had climbed down the rough, surely Narsua could climb up. But there must be special tricks to such climbing—which Narsua would know, of course, as soon as she had devoured the creature.

  Leaping onto her web-line, she ran up it, never doubting her balance. When she came to the entangled creature, she clung to her web-line, inspecting.

  The creature looked out at Narsua, it was obviously terrified, it was little larger than the spider. But then, from the creature, an insistent thought-throw pervaded Narsua: You not eat me. I friend. I not food-friend,1 friend -friend.

  It was the sort of weird nonsense distinction that her own masters might have made. And it came into Narsua that this creature was human like the masters—and female, too! And that made her as food-tabu as any infant spider!

  Narsua challenged: l not kill you, you not kill me?

  Quick response: You not kill me, I not kill you. Although, now that the spider thought about it, how this woman would go about killing Narsua wasn’t at all clear; she seemed as helpless as the masters who ruled Narsua only because of their god-superior authority. Did this woman have equal god-superiority?

  Every queen knows that it never hurts to be tentatively respectful to an alien who may prove a more potent queen—or may not Narsua conveyed her respect: You hang on to rock, l cut you loose; then you hang on my back, I take you to ground.

  Obviously the woman was gaining confidence. She inquired: I get on your back, what I hang on to, not to get poison?

  Hang on anywhere except my head, Narsua instructed, beginning to bite away the entangling strands.

  On the ground, the spider told the woman to stand free; then Narsua turned to examine the web-line. Some rival might find it and use it, and that would never do. The question was, how to get rid of the line, which was anchored aloft: If Narsua should run up to it and cut the upper anchorage free, Narsua would have no way down except rolling to her death.

  Reading her thought, Dorita suggested: You run up and cut it loose. / stop you from falling.

  How?

  For answer, Dorita picked up a small rock and chucked it upward about twenty meters; as it began to roll down the bowl, she mind-braked it; sedately the pebble slid down the smoothery. Twice Dorita stopped it dead on its way down, to make her point; then she allowed it to ease on downward, much slower than normal falling, and come to indolent rest at the bottom. (Ruefully Dorita was reflecting that she might have done the same for herself.) Narsua asked no further questions:
this war a human with god-authority. Running up the webcord, the spider cut it loose; then, clinging to the end, she committed herself to the downslide. Dorita eased her in. Narsua coiled the web-line and hid it at jungle’s edge.

  She turned to the woman: I Narsua, queen of spiders.

  The woman replied: 7 Dorita, queen to Narfar.

  Instant mutual respect, even tentative liking. Narsua knew Narfar only through human lore, as Evil King of the Outside; if this woman was his queen, she must have every courtesy—and be guarded against.

  If you like, Narsua suggested, 7 take you to king of humans. You like?

  I like.

  Follow me then. Not fear other spiders, we not kill humans, you human. Nothing else to fear in jungle.

  33

  Days Thirty to Thirty-One

  As they entered the tropical forest, Narsua broadcast a mind-command which Dorita picked up: Hunting time over now, special thing, I bring human from outside to Medzok, you come and follow. During all the subsequent trek, Dorita was conscious of accompanying spiders in growing numbers: big hairy brown ones like Narsua, smaller varicolored ones like overgrown garden spiders, still smaller rat-sized black ones; and there were myriad other tiny ones. There was no communication, mental or otherwise, only the quiet sound of multitudinous foot-flittering. No feeling of spider-enmity came into Dorita, only an awareness of many-minded curiosity.

  During the trek, light dimmed to a point where Dorita was sure that outside the sun must be setting. Up to then she had been routinely cautious, as she followed Narsua, in terms of her jungle training: above might hang a predatory snake, on the ground might lurk a carnivore; yet Narsua had assured her, Nothing else to fear in jungle; and one had to infer from Narfar that he had immured no evils here except spiders and funny children. Anyhow, in this twilight murk, it was no longer possible for her to see danger; even Narsua ahead was growing dim. Dorita appealed: I not see to follow you. Narsua invited: Come ride on my back again. So Dorita rode the rest of the way, mentally apologizing to Narsua for being a burden, receiving courteous mind-reassurances.

  They came to a place where fires augmented the deep twilight: fire, Narfar’s bane, a third evil probably generated by the funny children here. It was a wide clearing, and the firelit silhouettes affected Dorita profoundly. The least of her surprises was the bordering circle of woven-twig huts thatched with something indiscernible: so far, it was a village which was a small-scale version of Narfar City, circular rather than rectangular in plan. What got to Dorita was the relatively stupendous works in the center. Both her minds went into simultaneous action—one trying to comprehend the figure 8 arrangement of upright rocks, each taller than a man, which occupied the foreground; the other mind studying the rock-heap beyond the 8, a heap whose irregular rocks were obviously in process of being systematically piled in ever-diminishing circles, a heap whose diameter was easily thirty meters at the base and which had already risen to some ten meters in height, with a flat top-area a good twenty meters wide suggesting that the intent was to build a very high conical tower….

  Narsua stood motionless, appreciating Dorita’s impressions, allowing her to watch five Narsua-size spiders wrestling still another rock upward toward tower-top while several human men at the base craned upward watching. Humans get ideas like this, Narsua remarked; spiders like to help, men pleased, they pet us for it, we feel good about it. They got some kind of feelings about these things, like circle bigger than humans, the rock pile bigger than humans; they bow down, we get big feeling from them, Narsua not able to tell. Now you see. You get off my back, Dorita; wait here with other spiders; I go see King Medzok.

  Dorita dismounted: why not? Narsua skittered away and vanished into a quite ordinary hut. Spiders clustered around her, big browns and medium varicolors and semi-small blacks; a few courageous tiny ones mounted Dorita’s legs, a very few extra-heroic ones went on up to her arms and shoulders but stopped short of her neck; almost panicking, Dorita held steady, requiring herself to think of the little ones aboard her as curious children.

  Narsua emerged from the hut, and behind her walked a human male: not naked but wearing a diminutive leaf-skirt; not winged, simply a round-headed brunet human; no excessive hair, no overhanging brow, no bowed legs, but erect as an athlete. As he approached, Dorita felt her shoulders squaring themselves; her belly was always flat, but now her buttocks pulled themselves in, and she tried to straighten her Narfar-bowed legs—though there was nothing she could do about her Narfar-distorted face.

  The man stopped in front of Dorita, inspecting her with deliberation; Narsua slid out of the way. The man was as tall as Methuen. While he studied her surgically Neanderthal face for a few seconds, presently she was aware that he was bypassing the face as such, and focusing on her eyes.

  He said in a pleasant baritone, using a refinement of the language of Narfar (how had he learned it?): “Dorita, you welcome here. I Medzok. You understand me?”

  “I understand you. Medzok, you king of crater?”

  “I king of world,” he said simply. “I stuck here in crater, but I king of world. Some day I go out to claim world. Never mind that, you important visitor; you hungry now, maybe? Thirsty?”

  He led her near the fire centered in the larger circle of rocks. Five meters away from this fire, she found its heat uncomfortable, for the jungle warmth had diminished very little since sundown. She stood it, though, since he was standing it. They continued to talk; but because Medzok used many words of which Narfar had never thought, Dorita was mind-sounding him as he spoke, and she was replying with mind-reinforcement of her limited speech. She was marveling at the relative sophistication of his concepts; and he, in turn, was marveling at the ready receptivity of this primitive-looking outsider-woman who was Narfaris wife, her quick comprehension of his ideas, her countertalk which enriched his ideas….

  “This a holy fire,” he told her; holy she mind-apprehended, his word was strange to her; the feeling of his word was that he knelt in submission to a fearsome yet beloved master. “This fire do no work, it mean the god we worship” (another new word). We not know the god, but we know there is one. Maybe fire is god, maybe not. We put rocks around fire at just right distance so firelight dance on every rock, make more holy.

  “Those other rocks there”—he indicated the smaller circle completing the 8—“they built around village oven; that fire do work. These rocks pick up magic of holy fire; those rocks give magic to oven. Oven bake bread, heat up some fruits which we like hot. We sit here, Dorita, it supper time. Pretty soon men bring us drink, we drink, those guys sit down with us and drink. Then pretty soon women bring us hot bread and hot fruit from oven, we eat, they stand around behind us to keep flies away, they eat later.” (Flies here too? Narfar never put them here, but they do get around… .) “Me, I much ready to drink now. Hey guys, bring drinks!”

  Two dozen men came bearing gourds in each hand. They bent, giving two gourds each to Medzok and to Dorita; then they squatted cross-legged nearby, each sipping the drink in his left hand. Medzok drank off the liquor in his right-hand gourd, then worked on the left while holding out the right; instantly a man arose and ran to him with a refill, and so it went. The liquor, Dorita found, was high ferment; she sipped cautiously, enjoying the belly-warming, having no intention of calling for a refill—two of these drinks would seem to be more than a sufficiency.

  Narsua, privileged to hover behind them, drank no drink, but listened.

  Medzok said, “Hot stuff come soon. Start telling me why you come here.”

  Brought up short, Dorita accepted the challenge. “I very funny woman. What not right, I want to do, if nobody hurt bad from it.”

  So interested was Medzok that he stopped drinking. “You funny woman, we funny people, that why Narfar put us here. What you want to do that not right?”

  She told him candidly half of it. “This crater is tabu, that what Narfar tell me. He say nobody can ever enter it. So I enter it. And I get him to help me.” />
  Medzok spilled some of his drink. “Narfar—help you?”

  “He fly me to top of crater. He open ceiling a little so I can come in. He wait for me up there now.”

  Women danced in, bearing hot bread and hot fruit. Medzok stayed them while he pressed Dorita: “He let you in—he wait for you—then maybe Narfar sorry, want us to come out now?”

  That she flatly negated. “He love me, so when I want to come in, he let me in. He want to come with me, but I not let him. When I ready to go out, he let me out. But he not let you out.”

  King Medzok brooded upon her. He said softly, “Narsua tell me you help her find a way to get out.”

  Firmly Dorita shook her head. “I not help Narsua. Narsua use me to help herself. And Narsua not get out that way. She get up. maybe, but not out. Ceiling stop her.”

  Absently Medzok reached for bread, it was given; he offered some to Dorita, she took, he ate, she ate; he was engrossed in her. He demanded: “Can you get us out?”

  Daringly, she nodded.

  He pressed: “Will you get us out?”

  She demurred: “Why I get you out?”

  He bent a ferocious glare upon her. “You no get us out, I make spiders bite you and eat you, they learn from eating you how to get out.”

  She smiled small, swallowed bread (first in a month, best she’d ever eaten), sipped liquor, and countered: “You no get spiders to kill me. T human, they not kill humans.”

  “I make them kill you!”

  “Maybe I ask Narsua, can you make her kill me?”

  He arrested her with an upraised hand. “No ask Narsua, she say no. Spiders do anything for me, but they not break tabu even for me. I try this another way. You get us out, that be thing you like. Is not right, nobody hurt bad for it, that what you like.”