Asimov's SF, March 2007

by Dell Magazine Authors

  "I can't guarantee, of course, that there are no subtle spies lurking unsuspected in my holds,” Drake said. “You and Muffet have evidently succeeded in optimizing birds as well as spiders, and use them to gather intelligence. The Golden Hind has the usual complement of weevils and flies, any one of which might have descended from the moon. I have no idea how one of your so-called ethereals might be able to conceal itself."

  "It's not improbable that you have insect spies aboard,” Raleigh admitted. “You're probably being monitored as closely as Tom Digges—but we have servants who could clean your ship of that kind of presence. As for ethereal observers, we have little more reliable knowledge of their capabilities than you do. All we know for sure is that the ethereals have internecine struggles of their own to contend with, which distract them from the affairs of solid creatures and make it unlikely that they'll interfere with us. In that respect, at least, the celestial spiders have more in common with fleshcore society than ours; their vast empire is fundamentally harmonious. Prepare yourself, Francis—we're about to..."

  He did not break off his sentence, but the sound of his next few words was drowned by a loud explosion, which Drake initially mistook for cannon-fire. It was followed by a cacophony of other sounds and bizarre manifestations. Flaming missiles of various sorts flew through the air, seemingly converging on their position from several different directions. Some were circular bundles, some were spears—but all of them were wrapped in combustible materials that must have been soaked in some kind of flammable fluid, for they were all burning excitedly.

  The spidersilk making up the structures comprising the vast nest was no more vulnerable to fire than seasoned wood, but nor was it any more fireproof. Where the tunnel walls caught fire they began to burn. Some of the fires sputtered out, but others caught hold, fanned by the steady wind.

  "The fools!” Raleigh gasped, when he had recovered from his initial astonishment. “The stupid, reckless fools!” Then he grabbed Drake by the arm, and began pulling him toward a curtain-like gathering of white fabric that was presumably an entrance into the network of the tunnels. “Run!” he commanded. “Run for your life!"

  * * * *

  9

  Drake had no more than a second to make his decision, and it was instinct rather than reason that guided him. He wrenched his arm free from Raleigh's grip, turned on his heel and ran for his life, heading back the way they had come rather than following the route he had been urged to take by his former crewmate.

  Raleigh howled an objection, but Drake had established a lead of six or seven paces before the dark-skinned man set off in pursuit.

  The air was already filling with acrid smoke, and there were more fires ahead of him than there were behind, but Drake was not intimidated by that. He could not have retraced his steps from memory, but he had only to run between the walls of spidersilk while the way was clear. Alas, the way was not clear for long, and he had to cut across one of the tunnels, through a gap cleared by fire. It would have been easy enough to accomplish had he been unobstructed, but, as he moved between the flaming edges, a spider the size of a mastiff came hurtling out of the tunnel, similarly intent on escaping. It made no attempt to bite him, and probably did what it could to avoid him, but a glancing collision was inevitable.

  The spider's limbs probably suffered more damage than Drake, but the creature was only briefly interrupted in its flight, while Drake stumbled and sprawled on the ground—and when he got up, he had fragments of sticky spidersilk clinging to his arms, shoulders, and face. In order to protect his eyes from the trailing threads he closed them—and then tried to open them by the merest crack so that he could see where he was going.

  He was still running as fast as he could, and was able to see that he had now won clear of the head-high tunnels into a region where most were no higher than his waist. Many seemed to be collapsing even where they had not been ripped or singed, and he was able to hurdle two that sprawled across his path. He tried to do the same with a third, but could not clear it, and, when his booted feet plunged through the fragment, its glue-like strands wrapped themselves around his ankles and calves. He stumbled again, and this time fell upon a white carpet, which caught his arms as his feet had earlier been trapped.

  As he struggled to free himself, Drake saw a huge black spider scuttling toward him, and felt certain that he was about to be bitten—but the monster ran straight over him without pausing. He began to pick himself up and pull himself free, but he turned as he heard a shout and saw Walter Raleigh behind him, amid a billowing cloud of white smoke, standing some ten or twelve yards away, gesticulating urgently.

  "This way, you fool!” Raleigh yelled.

  Drake could not have obeyed the instruction had he wanted to, for his feet were still impeded by the clinging spidersilk. He was about to signal his refusal, though, when a spear hurtled out of the smoke. This one was unencumbered by any burning material, and its sharpened wooden point struck Raleigh in the torso, apparently passing between his ribs,

  Drake ducked low, expecting the weapon to be the first of a shower, and brought up his arms to shield his head. No other spears passed over him, though. Instead, it was a seeming tide of living flesh—bronze flesh, not dark brown or sunburned white—that seethed out of the surrounding bushes, and a dozen grasping hands reached out to seize him and pluck him from the ground, dragging him away from the web that had trapped him.

  It required more than a minute for Drake to realize that he was not in imminent danger of death, and that the men who had seized him were intent on carrying him away alive. Once he was sure of that, he wondered whether his new captors might have mounted their attack in order to rescue him from what they imagined to be deadly peril—but that seemed too optimistic an analysis.

  As soon as the men carrying him set him on his feet again—which they did not do until they were clear of the valley that Raleigh and the celestial spiders had adopted as their home—Drake tried to thank them, but they were not immediately interested in conversation. One said: “Follow! Hurry!” If that was not the limit of his English, he was not presently disposed to say any more.

  Having little alternative, if only because there were as many islanders behind him as before him, Drake followed the man who had spoken, and hurried as rapidly as his captors. He had lost his bearings completely, and did not know which way he was being taken. The sun was too close to its zenith for him to make a accurate judgment of their heading.

  By the time their headlong flight slowed to a walk there were a dozen Tahitians with Drake, forming a virtual phalanx around him as they strode over the ground, so rapidly that he could hardly keep pace. Breathless as he was, he tried again to talk to them, but their only reply was to impress the urgency of the situation upon him with gestures. It was obvious by now that they meant him no immediate harm, but it seemed more likely that they had seized him as a hostage than that they had merely sought to rescue him. Even if that were so, he thought, he was probably better off than he had been in the heart of the arachnid city.

  When his captors brought him out of the forest into the largest native village he had yet seen—the first to be surrounded by a defense of sorts, and to show signs of concerted agricultural endeavor within and without that boundary—he saw that there were men waiting to receive him. They were all natives, but several were wearing linen shirts and trews. He was less pleased to observe that two were in possession of muskets, and several more of machetes.

  He was received with some formality—ceremony, even. The leader of the party that was waiting for him made an elaborate show of welcome even before he said: “You are Captain Drake."

  "I am,” Drake confirmed. and waited politely for the other to reveal his own name.

  "I am Ruhapali,” the islander told him, gravely. “I speak for many tribes."

  "I'm honored to meet you,” Drake assured him. “What do you want with me?"

  "My people saved you,” Ruhapali stated, making an obvious bid for the mora
l high ground.

  "I'm grateful,” Drake said. He did not say that the islanders had also imperiled him by attacking the spiders, because he was not sure exactly what the islanders were claiming to have saved him from. He had no idea what might have happened to him had Raleigh actually been able to introduce him to the celestial spiders, although he suspected that the process of his “optimization” might have been initiated without much delay.

  "You must go away from here,” Ruhapali said, coming to the point. “Your ship, and the others too. You must all go. We will kill the spiders. We do not want to kill your people. We will take you to your ship, but you must give us guns. We will give you food and fresh water, but you must give us guns. Then you must go. All of you."

  The last thing that Drake wanted was to involve himself in a war, especially one in which he did not know how many sides there might be, and who might rally to what banner. “Have your people attacked the settlement?” he asked.

  "No,” Ruhapali told him. “Your people are not our enemies—not all. Many will be glad to go. You have seen the reason."

  Drake knew that most, if not all, of the Golden Hind's crew would probably agree with that judgment, if he told them what he had discovered. He had seen enough to be almost certain in his own mind that he did not want to stay on the island—but he could not be certain that he had seen enough to make a fully-reasoned decision. “Your warriors killed Walter Raleigh,” he observed, playing for time while he tried to clear his mind and formulate a plan. “Do you know Raleigh? The white man who became dark—just as some of your own people have become dark?"

  "The man who brought the master-spiders,” the Tahitian chieftain said. “If he lives, he must go. Better that he dies. The doctor too—but if he goes, that is your business."

  "I understand,” Drake told him. “What about those among your own people who have been transformed? Is that your business?"

  "Yes,” Ruhapali told him. “We will take you to your ship now. Your people will give us guns."

  Drake was not about to start bargaining as to how many guns he might be worth. He nodded his head, to signify that he was content to be taken to his ship. He believed that he understood what was happening here, although he had only met Humphrey Gilbert a little more than twenty-four hours ago. The islanders’ discomfort regarding their various exotic visitors must have been growing apace for some time, as they observed what was happening in the valley where the celestial spiders had taken up residence. They could understand readily enough that there would be more and more dark men as time went by, and they presumably feared—rightly or wrongly—that their entire population might eventually be absorbed into the converts’ ranks.

  Thus far, they had been biding their time, but the arrival of the Golden Hind had spurred them to precipitate action. They must have been afraid that Drake and his crew might have been persuaded to reinforce the spiders’ allies—in which case, the prospects of any future rebellion succeeding would be considerably more remote.

  Drake could imagine with what avidity the native servants had eavesdropped on conversations the night before—not just the tales that Hammond and Ashley had told at Gilbert's table, but the boasts of his crewmen to the crewmen of the Fortune and her fellows. The islanders probably had no notion of the quantity and quality of Drake's firepower, but they obviously knew the value of guns, even in a war against giant spiders.

  Ruhapali had said that many of the settlers would be glad to go, and Drake did not doubt it, no matter how little they knew about the celestial spiders. Muffet and Raleigh, rather than Humphrey Gilbert, were presumably the masters of the little colony, but their authority must have been undermined by their hirelings’ gradual realization of the true purpose of their adventure. Like Drake, Gilbert's men would inevitably have leapt to the conclusion that Muffet and Raleigh might be mere instruments of the celestial spiders, having been bribed with promises of cures for all manner of human diseases, from the rheum to the plague—and the curse of aging too, if Raleigh's bluster about living for centuries could be trusted.

  Even if their instinctive revulsion could be set aside, mariners were a cynical and superstitious breed; Gilbert's seamen would have found it direly difficult to believe in the benevolence of spiders, and they might find it far easier to suspect that a physician like Muffet and a petty aristocrat like Raleigh had sold their souls to the Devil. Raleigh seemed entirely convinced that the kind of “optimization” that he had undergone was a gift worth bringing to the whole of humankind, but its stigmata would inevitably seem diabolical to many people—a number by no means restricted to puritans of John Field's stripe.

  Drake had no way of knowing whether Field's account of the ethership's journey had been taken more seriously than his own, but John Foxe was the Archbishop of Canterbury, whose declarations on spiritual matters carried enormous weight in England. It might, therefore, be extremely hazardous for any Englishman to side with Raleigh and Muffet in this matter, even if reason did turn out to favor their alliance.

  Ruhapali had turned to his fellows after Drake's consenting nod, in order to talk to them in their own language, but the discussion did not last long before he turned back to Drake and said: “You will tell your people they must go. We will give you what you need. You will give us what we need. Then we will kill the spiders."

  Again, Drake nodded his head, although he did not consider the gesture to constitute a binding agreement.

  It occurred to him, though, as they set off on the march again, that if the celestial spiders really did need to be killed, and their schemes aborted, then the sensible strategy might be for the Golden Hind's crew to ally themselves with the Tahitians—just as Drake and another crew had once allied themselves with the Cimaroons, in order to carry through a mission in which either company would have failed had they attempted it without the other.

  * * * *

  10

  Ruhapali and four other chiefs set out to accompany Drake, with an escort of thirty warriors. The first stage of their journey turned out to be longer than he had hoped, but not as long as he had feared. They reached a village on the coast in mid-afternoon, without having been harassed by any dark men or spiders—or, for that matter, followed by any over-attentive birds.

  There were a dozen large canoes drawn up on the beach, but they did not take to the water immediately. Ruhapali had first to enter into negotiations with the village chieftain, who was evidently not party to his council of war.

  Drake was grateful for the pause, for it gave him time to slake his hunger and thirst and to rest his weary feet. The village children clustered round him, laughing and staring. They must have seen other Europeans, but perhaps not at such close range. He entertained them as best he could with smiles and gestures. Arrangements were eventually made for the use of one of the canoes; Drake boarded it, along with eleven other men, including Ruhapali and three other tribal chiefs.

  The fully-laden canoe was not as fast as Drake's pinnace, even when the pinnace carried no sail, because the paddles plied by the islanders were less efficient than English oars. The water was tranquil, though, and the men were experienced.

  Again, the journey was longer than Drake could have hoped, and the sun was touching the horizon when the masts of the Golden Hind and Humphrey Gilbert's four ships finally came in view, although the moon was rising by way of small compensation. Soon thereafter, Drake saw that there were forty more canoes waiting in the vicinity of the harbor mouth, apparently ready to mount an attack if the order were given.

  Were such a meager and disadvantaged force to attack the Hind in daylight, the result would be a massacre, but Drake was well aware that a night attack might be a different matter. In any case, he and his crew could not win a war of attrition fought over weeks or months against the entire population of an island of this size.

  Ruhapali was careful to approach the Golden Hind from the seaward side, and discreetly. The canoe's approach was quickly observed by the ship's watchman, who had plenty
of time to see that Drake was in the canoe and not in any distress before Ruhapali ordered the paddlers to ease down, some thirty yards from the ship's stern.

  "Speak to them,” Ruhapali commanded.

  "Mr. Hammond!” Drake called, seeing the mate come to the stern. “These men have rescued me from danger and brought me home. They mean no harm, and no one is to act against them."

  "I'm exceedingly glad to see you, sir,” Hammond called back. “There was panic ashore when you were nowhere to be found—more among Gilbert's men than your own, since we've grown used to trusting you in such situations. I see that you've been making friends, as is your habit. Will you all come aboard?"

  "No,” Ruhapali said to Drake, in a low voice. “You must give us guns. Then we will go. We will bring food and water. You will give us more guns."

  "No, Ruhapali,” Drake said, in his turn. “You will let me go aboard my ship. It will be best if you come too, although that is your choice. Then we will summon Humphrey Gilbert and Thomas Muffet, and we will talk. I mean you no harm, but I must hear what they have to say before I decide what to do. The best thing of all would be for everyone here to agree what is to be done, but we cannot achieve that if you make threats now. Come aboard my ship, and I will mediate between you and Gilbert. If Gilbert is persuaded to leave, Muffet will have no choice but to go with him. If you supply us with what we need to make the voyage, we will trade guns—but until then, we must keep them for our own defense."

  Ruhapali did not like these terms, but he had to consider them carefully—and he decided in the end that the alternative would be worse, given that it would win him no weapons and might make him some awkward enemies. He agreed to Drake's terms, and boarded the Golden Hind with its captain, while the canoe and his fellow chiefs waited alongside.