by James White
When it was finished, the others left the room and it remained to wrap one of her ankles in a band of thick, soft material, which was obviously padding because around it was tied very tightly the end of another rope. It was thin, tough, and seemed to be woven from plant fiber rather than originating inside a spider. The captor’s grotesque, insectile head bent over her ankle and it spat something at the rope which hardened within a few seconds and covered the knot in a solid, transparent seal. Then it tied the other end, which was long enough to enable her to move anywhere inside the room and a little way beyond it, to a structural support by the doorway and sealed it in similar fashion. It turned to look at her for a moment before pointing with the nearest limb towards a corner of the room at what looked like two low handrails with a flat wooden lid set into the floor between them.
The spider moved across to it, raised and pushed aside the lid, and indicated the square hole beneath it before waving her forward and moving back itself.
The lighting in the room was too subdued to show deep inside the opening, but even before Murchison heard the regular, gurgling wave action of water at the bottom she knew what it was—the body-wastes disposal facility. To show that she understood, but without actually giving a full demonstration, she grasped the rails, one in each hand, and hunkered down for a moment before replacing the lid. Apparently satisfied, the spider was pointing at the contents of a shelf in the opposite corner of the compartment.
It held three wooden beakers, two tall and slim and the other one short and broad, all of them with lids; one small, cuplike receptacle; a small stack of flat, wooden platters; and a large open bowl that had neatly folded squares of soft fabric lying beside it. On hands and knees she moved across to them quickly and lifted down the narrow beakers in turn. She gave them a gentle shake before removing the lids, sniffed, and decided that they contained water. The thicker one was filled with round lumps of material that looked and felt like hairy potatoes.
Murchison straightened onto her knees, turned and waved her hand vigorously at the spider, then pointed down at her equipment pouch. She wasn’t simply trying to attract its attention, because it was already watching her closely, just trying to give it the impression that her next movement would be overt, innocent, and harmless.
Slowly she unfastened the flap and used one finger and thumb to lift out the narrow, white cylinder that was her analyzer, which she put in the corner of her mouth so that she had both hands free to pour an inch of water into the drinking beaker. When she touched the sensor tip of the analyzer into it, the readout showed many trace elements but no toxicity, so she drank it down. From the solid-food container she chose a small piece and broke it. The center was pale green and spongy and gave off a faint odor that reminded her of cinnamon. She pushed the analyzer into it in several places, but none of the readings showed anything to worry her. She replaced the instrument and took a cautious nibble.
It wasn’t completely nauseating, she thought, but it would require a condition of near starvation to make it palatable. Murchison was reminded of her first promotion to the Sector General permanent staff, when her mixed-species former students had thrown a party for her. On a dare she had eaten a piece of Kelgian warlgan cake. This stuff tasted a little better.
She forced herself to swallow it and say, “Thank you.”
The spider chittered briefly in reply and backed to the doorway, where it continued to watch her.
For several minutes Murchison sat on the hammock, which had been left on the floor, thinking about what she should do next and, more importantly, what her captors were expecting her to do next. Their technology was primitive, but in its own way, civilized. Up until now they had shown no deliberate cruelty towards her, and they possessed a high level of intelligence and flexibility of mind, which was shown by their curiosity regarding her and their attempt to make her comfortable. It would be natural in the circumstances for her to demonstrate a similar degree of curiosity.
Using her feet with legs bent almost double and with one supporting hand keeping her from falling onto her back, Murchison began to tour the room. One wall was hung with coils of rope in various thicknesses and another had shelves of wooden implements, some of which looked like the pictures of marlin spikes she had seen in the history books. No metal tools, implements, or even support brackets were visible. Everything, even the deck, walls, and ceiling, seemed to be made of hard, dark green, tightly woven plant fiber except for the regular lines of thin, pale grey that seemed to run through and reinforce all of them.
She was pretty sure where the grey material had come from because she had seen a few strands of it binding the crossbows together, and as a supporting latticework on the wings and fuselage of their gliders. With a tiny shiver of wonder Murchison tried to comprehend a species whose advanced technology, its homes, sailing ships, and aircraft, and who knew what else, was in part woven out of their own bodies.
The third wall was bare, except at the two top corners where there was a large wooden ratchet arrangement that enabled it to be tipped outwards from the vertical and away from the edge of the ceiling. Between them there was a six-inch gap through which fresh air, cold now that the sun had set, was blowing. Plainly this was the room’s ventilation system. She moved to the fourth wall that contained the door—with her spider guard filling it—the lamp, and the fire-prevention arrangements. Intending to examine the workings of the lamp closely with a view to adjusting the setting of its floating wick to give more light, she reached forwards.
Her fingers were more than a foot away from it when she cried out in pain and surprise as a sticklike forward limb cracked down across the back of her hand.
“Why the blazes did you do that?” she cried, pressing the hand between her other arm and side to deaden the pain.
The spider unlimbered its crossbow and sent a bolt thudding into the floor in front of the lamp, then it moved into the room, and with great difficulty loosened and pulled the crossbow bolt from the floor and replaced it in its quiver before returning to the doorway.
She had the answer to her question. Clearly the message was, Hands off the lamp.
Up until then the spider had not deliberately tried to hurt her and might not do so again unless, as now, she tried to break their rules. She wondered how she would have felt if their positions had been reversed. In this society a moment’s carelessness with a naked flame might well cause irreparable property damage in addition to personal injury.
Losing, for example, what was to them a complex, state-of-the-art aircraft would be devastating for the pilot, who had probably woven important parts of its support structure from its own body material. But the destruction of a large-scale, cooperative enterprise like this ship, which must be a continuous, floating fire hazard, would be a community disaster. Henceforth she would obey the rules and avoid having her wrist slapped, or, better still, try to communicate with and understand her captors so that such acts of minor physical chastisement would no longer be necessary.
The time to begin talking was now, but both her brain and her body were too tired to begin the long, complicated and no doubt initially frustrating process of sign language and word sounds that would be needed. She could, however, make a small start.
She moved back to the wall with the ventilator slit in it, pointed to the opening, and blew her breath out noisily for a few seconds, shivered elaborately, and returned to the floor area covered by the hammock. There she lay down lengthwise on her side along one half of it, and pulled the surplus material across her legs and body and tucking it under her chin. It was coarse-textured but warm. With the back of one hand—which was no longer hurting—supporting the side of her face, she looked along the deck at the now-horizontal picture of her guard.
“Good night,” she said quietly.
The spider made a low, chittering sound.
She had no idea of how much if anything of the recent pantomiming it had understood, but Murchison hoped that she had conveyed the message that she had
rendered herself voluntarily immobile and there was no danger of her breaking any more rules for a while. She lay watching it while it watched her, feeling the hard surface of the deck through the hammock material and not expecting to sleep.
* * *
She awakened to find that the lamp was out, the ventilation slit had been opened wide so that sunlight as well as air was coming through it, and that during the night another large rectangle of hammock material had been spread over her sleeping body. She felt stiff and sore, but pleased, because it seemed that the process of communication had already begun. When she raised herself onto one elbow and cleared her throat quietly, her spider guard—she was pretty sure that it was the same one—opened its eyes.
When she had stretched a few times in the limited space available, and rubbed the stiffness out of her muscles, Murchison lifted the lid of the waste-disposal opening, stared at the spider for a moment. It backed out of the doorway and moved sideways out of sight.
It was strange, Murchison thought, that all of the civilized species known to the Federation had this aversion to eliminating body wastes in public, or to witnessing the activity in others. When she had washed and eaten—she was so hungry that the food tasted horrible but on the plus side of inedible—she dissolved a small amount of the food in the remains of the washing-water and with the corner of a cloth daubed two simple sketches on the sunlit wall. Then she put her head around the side of the doorway and beckoned for the spider to come back inside.
It was time to start talking.
But her guard had other ideas. It spat accurately onto the knot holding the other end of her restraining rope, dissolving the seal, then made it into a tight coil which it grasped in one claw. With the other one it indicated its crossbow and quiver before it began tugging on the rope.
Politely she was being told to follow it, or else.
In the event, she had no need to worry because it became clear that her guard was showing her over the ship while giving the hundred or more crew members a chance to look her over. They pointed, waved limbs, and chittered excitedly at her, their body language reflecting intense curiosity. But a quiet, clicking sound from her escort made them keep their distance. She guessed that her spider was a superior officer of some kind and that it was showing off a strange and interesting specimen that it wished to keep as comfortable, if not as happy, as possible. Murchison could live with that, especially as the technology of the ship itself was so strange and interesting.
In a first-contact situation, curiosity that was strong enough to overcome xenophobia in both parties was a very good sign.
The vessel looked even larger inside than out. Its smooth outer shell contained a structure that was like a complicated three-dimensional maze. She estimated it to be about eighty meters from prow to stern, sixty in the beam, and thirty to the highest point of its turtlelike upper works which, so far as she could see, enclosed five or six levels of decking that were stepped back sharply so as to be covered by a segmented outer shell that could be opened in whatever area and number was required, to become sails and furnish highly directional wind propulsion. The overall structural material must have been very light because, in spite of its top-heavy appearance, the vessel rode very high in the water.
She wasn’t surprised to find that the two decks that they were on and just above the water line had no sail openings, ventilation, or natural lighting. The compartments on those levels were large and filled with coils of rope, netting, and masses of eel-like creatures, some of which were still twitching, smelled like fish. She was glad when her escort guided her back towards the fresh air and sunlight of the upper decks.
But there was a steadily diminishing supply of fresh air, she realized, and no sunlight at all. She was pushed gently against a bulkhead and signaled to stay out of the way because it appeared that the entire crew were moving about and working furiously to wind in all of the sail segments and seal their outer shell. Just before the section beside her closed to admit only a narrow band of light, she was able to see the probable cause of all the frantic activity.
The sun had been covered by the dark grey curtain of a rain squall that was running in from the sea.
On the way back to her compartment Murchison had a lot to think about. This and the other two vessels she had seen must be part of a fishing fleet that needed aerial reconnaissance to direct them towards the shoals they trawled. The sails they used for guidance and propulsion had to double as shelters in the event of a storm or even a rain shower because, perhaps like cats and Kelgians and certain other furred species in her experience, it was physiologically dangerous for them to get wet.
These ships were manned, for want of a better word, by very brave sailors indeed.
Back in her room the ventilator had been closed to admit a narrow band of light and none of the heavy rain that was rattling against the hull. The spider pointed to a formerly empty shelf. During their absence someone, probably acting on its instructions, had left them a small stack of wide, pale yellow dried leaves, a thin, short-handled brush, and a small wooden container of what looked like ink.
Considering the spider-hostile weather outside, she thought again, this was a very good time to begin talking.
CHAPTER 25
Using its power-hungry tractor beams in reverse rather than the noisy thrusters, Rhabwar had come in low and quiet to transfer Prilicla and the Trolanni casualties to the station before returning as it had come, to orbit where the captain would be able to watch the spider ships without them seeing him, or if they did, they wouldn’t know that the new star in their sky was watching them.
“There are three vessels,” it reported simultaneously to the med station and the waiting courier vessel, “but all are stationary with their bows resting on the beach. Five gliders are flying around them at low altitude, too low for the med station to spot them. A number of ship’s personnel have been moving about on the beach and under the nearby trees, but too few, I feel sure, for them to be mounting an attack. In any case, the personnel concerned and the gliders went back on board their ships about ten minutes ago and just before a rain cloud blotted out the area.
“Doctor,” it added, “have you any medical or other developments that you want me to relay to Courier Two?”
“None, friend Fletcher,” Prilicla replied.
“None?” the other said. “What about your missing pathologist? What’s the shape-changer doing about finding her? With the increased number of casualties I should think her presence is desirable right now.”
“It is…” he began, when Naydrad, who had been assisting him with Keet’s treatment, answered for him in its usual tactless disregard for the fact that the listening patient was wearing a translator.
“It is not desirable, Captain,” it broke in, “it is necessary. Physiologically the Trolanni are an unusually complex life-form. This one will survive but its mate will almost certainly not, unless Murchison, who is a specialist in other-species pathology, returns to us soon. We are all concerned for her safety and the possible loss of her unrivaled expertise.”
Unlike the Kelgian, who could not help saying exactly what it was thinking at any time, the captain tried to be more circumspect.
“Your medical team is two members short,” it said gently, “and Danalta would be of more use to you there than remaining in the vicinity of the bay. What I’m trying to say is that Pathologist Murchison may not be returning to you. Isn’t that a strong possibility, Doctor?”
Prilicla felt a tremor shaking his limbs and body, the significance of which Naydrad, but not Keet, would understand. He controlled his emotions with difficulty and stilled his body before he was able to speak.
“It is a possibility, friend Fletcher,” he said, “but I hope that it is a remote one. Danalta lost contact with Pathologist Murchison shortly after its capture and while it was still on the ground rescuing the communicator. The shape-changer has since been trying to discover the ship to which friend Murchison was taken and where wit
hin that ship it is being held, so far unsuccessfully.
“I shall not call off this search,” he went on, “because I have known Pathologist Murchison for many years. I know its personality, its warmth, sympathy, humor, its sensitivity, and in particular the intensity of feeling it holds for its life-mate, and many other qualities that cannot be put into words. Of even more importance, I know its emotional-radiation signature almost as well as I know my own.
“The spider ships are at extreme range for my empathic faculty,” he concluded, “and while I cannot honestly say that I sense its presence at any given moment, if friend Murchison was to terminate, I feel sure that I would know of it at once.”
The captain broke contact without speaking.
* * *
Murchison began with the approach long-hallowed by tradition, even in the days before mankind had learned how to leave Earth, by drawing pictures of the people and things she wanted to name. They were small and simple; small for the reason that she didn’t know whether or not the supply of broad leaves was limited, and simple because the ink ran like water and she had botched the first two attempts by overloading the brush. She held the leaf horizontally sketch-upwards for the few seconds it took the ink to dry, then showed it to the spider.
Pointing at herself and the body outline in the sketch, she said, “Human.” She repeated the gestures and the word several times before pointing at the spider and its outline and deliberately said nothing.
The silent questioning seemed to work because one of her captor’s clawlike digits moved down to touch the spider outline. It made a low, clicking and cheeping noise that sounded like, “Kritkuk.”
Ignoring the sketches, Murchison pointed at herself and then the spider, and repeated, “Human. Kritkuk.”
