Michael Bishop - Blooded on the Arachne(1).pdf - Michael Bishop - margozap

BLOODED ON

ARACHNE

Michael Bishop

Ethan Dedicos stood at the turnstile in the sapphirine depot with the

other disembarked passengers of the Dawn Rite. Outside, the wind blew

and the world fell away. Among the dronings of people sounds, it was his

turn.

"I've come to be blooded," he told the man at the stile. Because of the

noise, he had to repeat himself, shouting.

"Go the H'Sej," the stile-tender said out of a skinned-looking face.

Ethan glanced around: bodies, polarized glass, a series of plastic domes,

red sandstone beyond, a pinprick sun. "I don't—"

"There, by the footslide. That one, boy. The hag-sage with the spider

crown. Move on, Ethan Dedicos, you make us lag."

He went through. Bodies pressed behind him, angry of elbow,

flashing-loud of teeth. Hands shoved at him, hands pushed him this way

and that. By the footslide the H'Sej was staring at him, a man maybe old,

with skin the color of burgundy wine and brown satchel clothes that

swallowed him. The spider crown was made of blue metal, and the tips of

its eight legs seemed to grow into the hag-sage's narrow skull.

"I'm Ethan Dedicos," the boy said. "I've come to be blooded."

"Who sends you, Ethan?"

"The Martial Arm. I'm to be a star-bearer, an officer of the Arm. Isn't

that why you're here, H'Sej? Didn't you come to meet me?"

"I know you, Ethan Dedicos. But I have to know if you know what you

want. Now you can come with me."

The hag-sage turned, ignoring the crowd in Scarlet Sky Depot, and

maneuvered agilely onto the footslide. How old, the boy wondered, how old

the H'Sej assigned me? He followed the burgundy man.

"Can you tell me your name?" he shouted.

"Integrity Swain, Child of Learned Artifice," the maybe-old man said,

grabbing Ethan's arm and pulling him alongside. The name was a

genealogy, not solely a descriptive designation. Learned Artifice had been

this hag-sage's father, and their people lived in the salt gardens on the

margin of Arachne's desolate sea bottoms. That was where you went when

you were blooded, and that was all you knew until the H'Sej made you

aware of more. "Sej, only Sej, is what the outli people call me, boy."

Then they were out of Scarlet Sky Depot, on the precipice-stair that fell

into the basin where Port Eggerton lay: white larvae nestled plastically

against the red sandstone. Other people went quickly into air tunnels that

led down to the administrative complex.

The wind blew. The pinprick sun hurled glitterings across the sky, and

even here the noise of a world continuously eroding and reshaping itself

made real talk impossible. Dizzied, Ethan put an arm over his eyes to

block the blowing sand, the scathing light, the fear of falling.

"Sej!" he shouted. "The tubes! Can't we take the tubes down?"

"We aren't going into Port Eggerton, lamb's eyes."

"I must report to the Martial Arm!"

"You report afterward!"

And the maybe-old blooder of boys led him away from the drop-tube

terminals, away from the precipice-stair, across an expanse of plateau.

They fought the wind to a chimney of rocks beyond Scarlet Sky Depot, now

a shimmering bubble-within-a-bubble-within-a-bubble at their backs,

and plunged down the wide abrasive chimney into silence.

On a ledge they halted, and Ethan Dedicos could see nothing but the

dark-red rocks surrounding them. Above, maybe the sky. Below, faceted

cliffs without bottom. In the wide stone chimney he trembled with a

calmness as eerie as drugsleep.

"What do we—?"

"We wait, Ethan Dedicos."

"Why do we wait here, Sej?"

"For transport and because you aren't to see a friend-face until the

blooding's done. You aren't to think of Earth or probeship voyagings. We

provide now, my people of the salt gardens."

"And the blooding—what must I do?"

"Survive, of course." The hag-sage chuckled. "We play old games on

Arachne."

And the maybe-old blooder of boys squatted on the ledge so that his

brown vestments billowed around him and his burgundy hands hung over

his knees like the bodies of skinned rabbits. He stopped talking, and

darkness began climbing up the faceted cliffs below. Ethan leaned on the

cold rocks, studied Sej's spider crown, and waited.

And stiffened with his aloneness.

On the other side of the plateau, down in the red basin, there were

people just like him. Not just wind-burned hag-sages; not just the promise

of cranky spidherds, arrogant in their gardens of salt and sandstone.

Impatience burned in Ethan Dedicos like a secret fuse.

Then from deep in the chimney of rock a golden spheroid rose toward

them, a ring of luminous orange coursing about its circumference. The

coursing ring emitted a hum more musical than a siren's song. The entire

canyon glowed with the spheroid's ascent.

"Sej!"

"The nucleoscaphe from Garden Home. Our transportation."

"Such a vehicle! I didn't think—"

"The spidherds of Garden Home aren't barbarians, unblooded one."

Humming, the nucleoscaphe hovered beside them. The brilliant-orange

ring swept upward and became a halo over the spheroid rather than a belt

at its middle. A door appeared, and a ramp reached out to them like a

silver tongue. The H'Sej, ignoring the chasm that fell away beneath the

ramp, entered the nucleoscaphe. Reluctantly Ethan Dedicos followed, his

eyes fixed on the darkness inside the humming spheroid.

Then he was inside, and the howling ruggedness of Arachne seemed

light-years away. Beside the maybe-old blooder of boys he found himself in

a deep leather chair the color of Mediterranean grapes. The chair

swiveled, but the curved walls of the nucleoscaphe bore nothing upon

them but silken draperies. Directly overhead, there was a stylized insignia

depicting a spider as drawn from the top.

When the nucleoscaphe's ramp retracted and its door sealed shut, man

and boy could not see out. Alone, in a gargantuan atom.

Soon they began to move. Unearthly music droned in their ears.

"Sej, this is a wonderful thing, this vehicle. Couldn't you have had it

come to Scarlet Sky Depot? Did you have to make me climb down a

hundred rocks to hitch a ride to Garden Home?"

"The nucleoscaphe belongs to the spidherds, boy, not to your outli folk

in Port Eggerton. A long-ago gift of Glaktik Komm and the Martial Arm.

You don't like climbing, heh?"

Ethan said, "Will it take us to Garden Home?"

"Close, close. We'll have to walk a few last kilometers, down from the

perimeter cliffs." The H'Sej laughed. "But only because I like to climb, to

walk, to hike. And your feet, lamb's eyes, how will they fare?"

Ethan was silent.

In only a few minutes, it seemed, the nucleoscaphe had stopped. It

hovered, hummed insanely, and ran out its ramp for the maybe-old man

and the boy to disembark upon. They went out into the night and the chill,

onto a brutal ledge. The nucleoscaphe closed up behind them and dropped

goldenly into the abyss, disappearing like a coin sinking through water.

Overhead, the stars mocked.

"Come with me, Ethan Dedicos."

Along the ledges, down the uneven sandstone steps, the H'Sej and the

boy struggled. At last they came upon a salt plain and left the escarpments

behind. In the starlight, monstrously alone again, they walked across an

empty whiteness. They walked all night. When dawn began reddening the

yardangs that had at last begun to appear in the desert (grotesque,

plastically shaped rocks suggesting the work of a demented sculptor), they

finally sighted Garden Home.

"There," Sej said. "Punish your feet some more, darling Ethan."

In the morning's attenuated light Ethan Dedicos saw the salt towers

surrounding the central butte of Garden Home: Garden Home, an

assemblage of yellow syntheskin tents huddled in a cove beneath the

encircling pillars of white. Forty or fifty such tents, all of them large. The

encircling pillars, larger yet, pitted with arabesque holes by Arachne's

winds. It was a dream city, but as cruel and as real as eroded rock.

"How can you live out here?" Ethan asked.

"Nowhere else is so dear. For three hundred years there have been

spidherds in Garden Home, supported at first by Glaktik Komm but living

here now like even our own arachnids. And each year the Martial Arm

sends us its stringclinging neostarbs to be blooded. Such as you, lamb's

eyes."

"Why was Glaktik Komm a patron, Sej? In the beginning?"

"Someone must care for the spiders, they said. Must keep them away

from the new depot. In their saliva is a terrible virus that can affect almost

any kind of living cell, a virus to which the arachnids themselves are

evolutionarily immune. We must study the Stalking Widows, they said, we

must have people who will watch them and destroy their poisons. The first

scientists who watched them invented the symbodies you carry in your

veins, Ethan Dedicos, to keep your blood lucid starwhen and starwhere.

The spidherds of Garden Home are the children of the makers of the

symbody, the children of the outli folk who killed disease, for always."

They were close enough to see people among the yellow tents.

"Why must you stay here now?" Ethan asked. "Why must anyone

remain in this angry desert of salt?"

"To call the spiderlings home, boy, to sing them back to Garden Home

when they have gone ballooning."

Ethan remembered something vague. "Isn't that but once a year?"

"Aye. But we love our leggy beasts. They are as thought-bright as you or

any stringclinging manbud in the Martial Arm. We stay because we

belong to them, because we talk the spidherd-Stalking-Widow talk."

"You talk to them? And understand their talk?"

"Talk to them, croon to them, pipe to our spiderlings the homing call of

Garden Home. The Stalking Widows are a people, too, unblooded

Dedicos."

Ethan said nothing. They strode into a crowd of burgundy people who

moved among the plastic buildings. A few of these people hailed the H'Sej

wordlessly by dancing their fingers like spider legs. The sun was now full

up. Its strange light glittered on people, tents, and stones alike. Ethan felt

lost, alone in the long shadows that rippled from the fanciful salt pillars:

lovely, sensuous, weird.

They were in front of a tent. A piece of plastic facing unzipped, and a

woman darker than the red wines of Jerez stepped from behind the yellow

flap into their paths.

The boy saw that she was not a maybe-old woman, she was antiquity

given flesh. Her hair was stringy magenta. Her albino eyes stared out of

the crimson-brown stain of a face rivuleted with time webs. She wore

brown sacks. A witch for really real, the boy thought. And the witch

twisted her head upward in order to see him from her stoop.

"Allo, N'tee Swain," she said to the H'Sej. (A voice like the high notes of

an aeolectic flute.) "Is this the boy you bring us to put out for the

blooding?"

Michael Bishop - Blooded on the Arachne(1).pdf

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