Spider Legs

by Piers Anthony

  “Counterproductive,” Martha finished. “I'm trying to save the world, not harm it myself.” She glanced at Elmo. “But since when does my brother care about the environment? He's always been a human-first idiot.”

  Lisa stifled a laugh. She had come to know how extensive Elmo's knowledge of the sea and its creatures was. He was just as smart as Martha was, only maybe in a different way. It was one reason she loved him, as she had come to know him. He had saved her life, but he was a considerable man regardless. “He cares about humankind. And the other creatures of the world.

  He wants to help them. He just thinks you're going about it wrong.”

  Martha looked at Elmo again, assessing him anew. “If she turned you around on that, she's a hell of a lot more girl than I took her for.”

  Elmo remained silent, refusing to be provoked into a retort, because they had agreed to let Lisa speak alone, unprompted. They believed that would be more persuasive. So Lisa had to speak for him. “It wasn't me. He had time to think, while he was recovering. He realized that humankind is like a monster, maybe, and maybe has to be stopped. But peacefully, without bloodshed. And he talked with Nathan and Natalie, and they worked out a way, maybe.” She wasn't saying it well; Martha's remark about her competence, or lack of it, had put her off her rehearsed words. Exactly as Martha had intended.

  “What way?” Martha demanded.

  “You—you have a knowledge about marine life that they— they say is genius,” Lisa said, cursing herself for her halting delivery. But this was the crux, and if Martha didn't buy it, there would be trouble. “You can make monsters no one else could. So maybe you could make—something else. Like a way to feed humankind, instead of—”

  “Feed humankind!” Martha screeched, startling several gannets into flight. “I don't want to make the situation even worse! Humankind should be starved, not fed—especially not at the expense of the marine environment.”

  “A special food,” Lisa continued with determination. “Algae, maybe, a new variety that grows the way the sea spiders do, that feeds on wastes and oil spills and stuff, to fill whole bays with high quality green food that man can harvest instead of hunting fish. Like—like manna from heaven. So people could farm it, and there'll always be more than enough. The fish could eat it too. You could develop this, and—”

  “Of course I could!” Martha snapped. “But why should I? It would only be helping my enemy to quadruple his population even faster.”

  “Because—because it would have—have another property. It would reduce fertility. For man, not for fish or other creatures. The poorest countries, which unfortunately have the highest birth rates, would be your first consumers. If you were to manufacture the food in bulk and sell it cheaply, you'd still make a profit. So the more of it people eat—”

  Martha was staring at her. “Good God, girl—this is insidious! The more people eat it, the fewer babies they'd have. Only they wouldn't catch on right away, because it would be like red squill, the rat poison that thins their blood a little at a time, so by the time they notice it they've OD'd and are dying. A slow, cumulative effect, difficult to prove because there would be so many variables, especially if they weren't looking for it. And even if they did catch on, they'd still have to eat it because there wouldn't be much else, and this would be cheaper. Grow different flavors, tasting like steak or hamburger or caviar. Maybe make it slightly habituating, the way cola is, so they don't want to stop. Mix it in with other foods, so they couldn't readily trace the reason for the declining birth rate. You know, this could work! What genius thought of it?”

  Elmo, Nathan, and Natalie burst out laughing.

  “I—I did,” Lisa said faintly. “They—they thought it was a good idea. And if it wasn't, that maybe you could improve on it.”

  Martha shook her head. “Out of the mouths of babes,” she muttered. “So you want me to stop breeding spiders and start breeding algae. And in return you'll keep your knowledge of my activities secret.” She glanced sharply around. “Past, present, and future.”

  “Yes,” Lisa said. “As long as you concentrate on positive, peaceful research and development. No more monsters. And we'll try to find a way to—to market the algae, so that some big company can get rich on it. Then it will never stop, any more than tobacco did, because there's money being made. And the human population will be controlled, because only by staying low enough so people don't have to eat the algae will they be able to have babies. The other creatures will have a chance.”

  Martha's brow furrowed. “I see you folk came prepared. It's not tight, but I could play with it and come up with a superior variant.”

  “For example, just as with the pycnos, you could genetically insert genes in the algae for biochemicals that would reduce a man's sperm count,” Nathan said. “Weren't the Chinese working with an extract from cotton seeds called gossypol that reduced sperm viability?”

  “I have a better idea,” Martha said. “How about I insert a gene that produces a chemical that ages people prematurely? Imagine that. By the age of 13, humans would start dying of old age. Wouldn't it be fun to watch them all start dropping like flies with Alzheimer's disease just when they were becoming fertile! Wonder what effect that would have on the social security and Medicare system of the U.S.? Why I could bankrupt the U.S.!”

  “Martha, we're trying to steer you on a more humane course,” Lisa said angrily.

  “And we'll be watching and checking on you from time to time,” Nathan warned.

  “I was just joking,” Martha said. “Your algae idea sounds pretty good.” She squinted at Lisa. “But you, girl—if it were up to you alone, what would you do?”

  Lisa couldn't stop herself. “I'd give the police the evidence against you, and see you fry for murder. You killed Kalinda, and almost killed me.”

  Martha nodded. “But the others want to go for the big prize, the world. And they made you go along.”

  “Yes,” Lisa said tersely. “You bitch.”

  Martha seemed satisfied rather than angry. “So you, too, are telling the truth. You will honor the deal.”

  “Yes.”

  “And I can't even fire you, because we'll be partners of a sort.” Martha shook her head as if bemused. “Well, you've got me in check. I'll make the deal.”

  Lisa knew they had won, though for her it was a bitter victory. When she had learned Martha's role in Kalinda's death, she had wanted to kill the woman. But Natalie had made her face reality: she couldn't bring Kalinda back, but she could help see that no others died that way, and do the world a significant favor. So she had had to choke back her pain and rage and work with them to make it happen. And she knew that despite her anger, it was the right thing. It was a realistic compromise.

  Slowly Lisa extended her hand. Martha took it and shook it once. Then Martha shook hands with the other three, concluding with her brother. This was the kind of agreement that could not be written. They all knew that.

  Then Martha rose, walked to the edge of the stack, and disappeared over it. She was on her way back to her pet monster, but not to guide it to any more ships.

  “It's better this way,” Natalie said. The two men murmured agreement. And Lisa had to agree too.

  “Who knows what scientifically valuable information she will discover,” Nathan said, “if we can keep her in check and make sure she uses her apparent skills for the good of humanity.”

  “She might even be considered the new savior of humans and the earth,” Natalie said wryly.

  Elmo took Lisa's hand. “Next time you propose to me, I may accept,” he said. She knew he was serious. She had proved to him that she had what it took.

  They started down the steep slope.

  AUTHOR'S NOTE:

  PIERS ANTHONY

  MARCH 9, 1992, was an unusual day. I was in the middle of the editing of my fantasy novel Demons Don't Dream, and learned that Drew, a close acquaintance of my daughter Penny and the closest friend of Alan, my research assistant, had kille
d himself. Alan had been talking with Drew on the phone, and then there was silence. When other friends checked, they found that Drew had shot himself. I knew Drew, but wasn't close to him; my daughters have many acquaintances, and I try not to mess with their lives. Nevertheless it was a shock. My awareness had abruptly shifted from fun puns to death.

  So I would hardly have noticed the letter I received that day from one Clifford A. Pickover of the IBM research center in New York, except that he enclosed one of his books: Computers and the Imagination. Now I use a computer, and I have dabbled with fractals, so have a certain layman's interest in such things. But it was evident that this man was into such matters in much the way I am into novels: compulsively. That book had colored fractal pictures resembling such things as an inner tube with heartworms, an ocean wave with pustules, the mountains of the moon overlooking the cataclysmic destruction of Planet Earth, skull-faces in an electrified pool of iridescent oil, and a knot-bodied red worm with eyeballs at either end. Strictly routine stuff, of course, but it showed that the man had imaginary aspirations. So I sent him a copy of my Fractal Mode, told him that I didn't much like IBM as a company, and wished him well.

  But Cliff Pickover is not so lightly dismissed. He sent me others of his books, containing all manner of notions and illustrations: giant fractal sea shells, möbius-strip worms, a golden atom with two green electrons, a Mandelbrot set fissioning in the Pacific Ocean, a fractal Mexican hat, stones with indigestion, and kaleidoscopic rug patterns. Promising, but not exactly the magic of Xanth. His text showed a ubiquitous interest in things ranging from the Arabian Nights (me too: that's why I wrote Hasan) to computer generated poetry to prehistoric insects. I continued to brush him off politely, as I do with any routine fan. So then he upped the ante: “I've written a sci-fi novel . . .” After I recovered from my heartwormy inner-tube-sized wince at the bad word, I lectured him about the use of obscene terms like “sci-fi” in public, and read his novel. It was promising, but needed work. So . . .

  So we collaborated, and this is the result. It gained 40,000 words, a new title, several bit players fractally merged and become major players, and the overall theme changed. Aside from such details, it's the same.

  But I had my little adventures along the way. For example, the conversion from Cliff's ASCII mode to my word processor, Sprint, was imperfect; it left a number of midparagraph hard carriage returns in place. Rather than pick them all out individually, I devised a macro—that is, a combination of steps performed as one—to eliminate those annoying breaks in one swell foop. Only I neglected one minor aspect. I did a Find and Exchange, finding each carriage return [^ J] that was followed by something other than a space [^ ]. You know, normally a paragraph ends, and the following paragraph is indented several spaces, so when there's one that has words instead of spaces, that's an error. I simply exchanged each [^ J] for a space: that is, I got rid of it, leaving the paragraph whole, as it was supposed to be. I should have replaced it with a space question mark [ ?], meaning that whatever followed it remained as it was. A minor omission, of course, but with computers, little things can mean a lot.

  What happened was that I did restore all those fragmented paragraphs—but with a few leading letters missing. Yes, I know, my collaborator would never have made such a mistake. But mistakes do make for some intriguing bypaths. Here are some samples:

  “I'll shoot it,” heppard said and took a few hots at the creature from her position on deck.

  uddenly, Elmo let go of the blond girl or a second. “Help,” he yelled as he ooked at his hand.

  Brenda creamed again.

  Yes, yes, I know: many readers will say that it's more fun that way. But too much ooking and creaming makes editors nervous. So I tediously replaced the missing letters as I went through it, and as far as I know, none are issing ow.

  Another thing I did was change the major characters from a last name to a first name basis. I like things personal. So, for example, I did a global exchange of Natalie for Sheppard. But sometimes the full names were given. Thus every so often I encountered Natalie Natalie. Once it came out “her frisky German Natalie dog.”

  I needed a new setting for a romantic scene, and I couldn't wait for my collaborator to work one up, so I drew on a personal resource. This requires a flashback:

  Back in 1990 Alan's grandmother Dot McCulla visited us. She has always ranged around the world, collecting stones from many regions. But as she got older, she decided to give some of her collection to interested parties. Now I happen to be a reformed collector. I have collected a wide variety of things in my day, consistently—some would say compulsively. As a child I collected boxes, from matchboxes to crates, nesting them one inside the other so that they didn't take up too much room. I collected bottletops I found on the ground, noting their seemingly infinite variety, and played a homemade game with them that vaguely resembled the Chinese Go. As an adolescent I collected science-fiction magazines, cherishing each one. When I became a pro writer, and had children (no, the two aren't immutably connected), I could no longer devote a whole room to thousands of old magazines, so gave the collection to serious fans I knew would properly appreciate it. Something that precious can't be sold, after all. Now I collect one copy of each edition of the books I write—hardcover, softcover, American, British, German, etc.—and it keeps expanding beyond my shelving, being somewhere around five hundred now. But I don't think I'll give that away.

  So I know the soul of collecting, and understand the importance of saving stones. So she gave several boxes of stones to me, and one day I hope to make a fancy rock garden with them, with sections for the stones from Texas, Cape Cod, Hawaii, Wales, Italy, France, or wherever. When she visited, we had her identify each stone by location, and we marked them. Thus we know that the igneous rock is from Hawaii, and that one stone is a fragment from an old Welsh castle. And some are from Newfoundland, including a little town she passed through called Come By Chance. At that point my ears perked, and I got an atlas and located it on the map. What an intriguing name and location!

  So when I found myself amidst a novel set in Newfoundland, in need of a romantic setting, I remembered Come By Chance. I researched amidst the collection and located a stone from there. And that is the one Natalie found. Yes, it really does vaguely resemble that island.

  So what other distinction does this novel have? Well, because of the luck of the draw that determines what is finished when, I am now working on three novels and an anthology, and this is the first of those to be completed, and so Spider Legs happens to be #100 in my cumulative total of books written. That doesn't necessarily mean it will be my hundredth published, but at least it's a personal marker of a sort. I hope you enjoy it.

  In the interim since this novel was first published, my total number of published novels has increased to more than 150. I now have a web site, www.HiPiers.com, where I have a monthly blog-type column and an ongoing survey of electronic publishers for the benefit of aspiring authors. I can be contacted by email via that site.

  AUTHOR'S NOTE:

  CLIFFORD A. PICKOVER

  I am reminded of a French poet who, when asked why he took walks accompanied by a lobster with a blue ribbon around its neck, replied, “Because it does not bark, and because it knows the secret of the sea.”

  —ANONYMOUS

  I love to eat lobsters. I'm eating one right now, and I occasionally wipe my messy hands and return to typing on a laptop computer.

  Lobsters were my favorite food before Piers and I finished Spider Legs this week. Now I'm less sure about my craving for lobster meat. In the past, I could get in the mood for writing this book by occasionally eating a lobster. As I would eat I examined the lobster's anatomy, the legs, the claws . . . People at the dinner table or restaurant often thought I was a bit odd.

  My interest in lobsters, pycnogonids, and various strange creatures of the sea probably had its origin in an oceanology course I took during the summer of my junior year in high school. My specific fa
scination with pycnogonids peaked about the time I received my Ph.D. from Yale University, when I read about a 12-legged pycnogonid found near Antarctica of all places. Its proboscis was much longer than the rest of its body. Still, it would have been hard for me to predict that Pickover and Piers would be collaborating on pycnogonids several years later.

  After I read about the antarctic sea spiders, a little time went by, and computer graphics and scientific visualization soon became two of my main interests. In the meantime, I published a number of popular books on the creative use of computers in art and science. (As Piers alluded to in his Author's Note, my books contain a weird collection of computer art, games, philosophies, and mind-expanding puzzles.) My Ph.D. is in molecular biophysics and biochemistry, but now I create computer art and write science fiction. Life is strange that way: it's largely unpredictable. So much of what we do seems to develop from chance meetings with people and what we are exposed to by our families and friends. Randomness plays such a great role.

  Although my popular science/art books gave me a nice sense of accomplishment, my real dream was to publish a novel based on my interest in unusual biological creatures. Hence, this novel. Spider Legs is based on my explorations, on land and in the sea, into the rare and dangerous creature known as Colossendeis. Yes, the deep-sea Colossendeis is real! Pycnogonids are real. Various biological descriptions in the novel, such as the packing of the pycnogonid's digestive system into its legs, are based on scientific facts. However, the life cycles of the large, deep-sea forms, especially members of the genus Colossendeis, are still largely unknown to scientists. For a general background on the pycnogonid's life and behavior, see Hickman’s Biology of the Invertebrates (Mosby, St. Louis, 1973).

  How does Piers fit into all this? After completing a rough draft of the novel, I began to search for a collaborator to bring the book together and add material as needed. My first thought was Piers Anthony, science fiction and fantasy's most creative talent—and one of the most prolific. I had been reading his books for many years, but the idea for collaborating with Piers started when a colleague lent me a copy of Piers's fantastic novel Virtual Mode, which had just been published. I had spent some time working on Spider Legs and decided it would be beneficial to contact a real pro in the fiction business to develop the novel even further. To set the stage, I mailed Piers my book Computers and the Imagination, and I thought this would prepare him to receive further material from me. I waited a week or two. Then I followed up by sending him a draft of Spider Legs.