Sixteen spiders of burnished gold; sixteen spiders, live and real. Two hundred fifty-six scurry-legs, thirty-two clicking mandibles.
Eight hundred shining webs, waiting for harvest.
No flies, no carrion; unlive spiders, evolving into trapdoor-makers, learning to burrow into soft earth, waiting; robot spiders, retrieving vibrations, feeding their ever-ongoing rhythm, dancing into artificial sun, raising arms, fed by sun-like rays. Breezes blow through; but no breeze can tear these webs.
Sundown; odd spider circadians; odd music, made not of pitch, but vibration. Live spiders perk; golden spiders anticipate.
Golden spiders, gears working beneath geary thoraxes, bodies sensing the dips of the great altered clepsydra. The clepsydra, looming wide and tall and sideways and grand, its odd works banging into each other in fourfold time and then four over four and then in offbeats, a torrent of ginger wine rushing through its works all the while.
Sixteen auric spinarrettes play out lines of thrillingly nectarous golden thread; thread’s seized, caught by one hundred twenty-eight legs, and pulled in the proper direction.
What lies between mazurka and do-si-do? This; this reeling hoedown of clinking metal and deft-scrabbling chitin, no tunes but the resonance of that ancient and unstately water clock. They pull and turn, pull and twist, pull and double and redouble and pass and re-pass; they make webs.
No two webs alike, no hundred webs anything but subtly not-the-same, and each web holds a silent beating eight-legged thought, each thought a different motion in the long spider tale, as long in the telling as the many planets and suns spider have known, before they were earthbound. Human skulls feel spider thoughts but vaguely, just as spiders feel only the reverberations, not the meaning or tune, of human song. They are old thoughts, they are slow thoughts; yet they are sprightly, thin and cool, then galvanic on the tongue, and lastly thrumming in the stomach, easily satisfying (and this is the part which requires caution) the desire for food, without supplanting the need. Prized are these webs; joy at the harvest.
And then the clepsydra, its profound flaw causing its works once again to jam, is stopped for a time; until, at least, tomorrow. The spiders cannot know when this will happen, perhaps cannot even know that this happens every day; for thousand-year thoughts, spoken through the birthing of children of children of children, days are very hard to parse. Yet the web is somehow complete, as if these spiders knew the dance better than its begetter.
Spider things, insensate things; and still, sun-thing falls, and one hundred twenty-eight eyes glint with oddly unison, curiously hungry satisfaction.
They don’t don’t have anything to catch, so they don’t know why they weave webs; they were simply made to do it, or so they think. They just make beautiful things, and perhaps might not even know it.
You may not know why you’re doing what you’re doing. But if it’s something you like, try deciding you were made to do it. Try deciding, not necessarily that you should stay in a bad place or do things you don’t desire, but that what you do is worthwhile, and if it’s not your future, it’s a worthy past.
Give it a shot.
You’re smarter than a clockwork spider; and you weave the strands of your life, which is more lovely and more meaningful than even the most beautiful web of gold.
My name is Jeff Mach (“Dark Lord” is optional) and I build communities, put on events, and make stories come into being. I also tweet a lot over @darklordjournal.
I write books. You should read them!
My new book, “I Hate Your Time Machine”, is now available! Go pick it up!
