50: Spider Sense

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“This is where we leave you,” Saima says in the morning, as the neima take one last look over the farm to make sure it’s all in order and load Tyk up with so much food that she wonders if she’ll need to forage again at all before reaching Glittergem.

“Can’t we go a bit further?” Tama asks. “Those of us who aren’t exiles could escort them all the way up to – ”

“Now, Tama, you know how unsafe it is to break up a group as small as ours,” Saima says. “We wouldn’t be able to wait around for you.”

“Yeah, I know,” she grumbles.

“I’ll miss you, Tama,” Tyk says. She doesn’t bring up the fact that Tama could come to Glittergem with them and stay there. She doesn’t want their goodbye to be an argument. Besides, Tama has many years ahead of her in which to grow up and make that decision, and if she never does… well, the rest of the neima seem to be doing okay. Maybe a hive can just be eight people.

“I’ll miss you, too,” Tama says. “I hope we run into you again on your way back.”

“Me, too.” On her way back to the Redstone River Hive – she hasn’t even thought about how she’ll get back, or when. With some traders, she supposes, after the Rayjo Tau is built, however long that takes. “Hey, it’s a fifty per cent chance that this’ll be your territory then and not the nedorm’s, right?”

“Yeah. Fifty per cent chance. I’ll keep an eye on the road.”

“I imagine they’ll start sending traders again soon enough, wingsong stream or no,” Kebin says. “Hives can only stay isolated for so long. Send word with the traders so we can know you made it safely.”

“We will.”

“The sky people at the reservoir would never forgive us if we didn’t,” Smon adds. “We will keep everyone updated on the Rayjo Tau.”

“That’s less important than the three of you being safe,” Sabin says, “but also good to know.”

And so the trio head off, leaving the neima behind. Even on the road, it’s much slower going without Samet’s brute strength to help pull the farm. Ketyk flits back and forth on Tyk’s horns, confused. The ‘what’s that?’ in their private language has diversified into multiple subtle variations by now, such as ‘where’s that?’ and ‘why’s that?’, and he looks at the farm and at Smon, asking “Where? Where? Samet.”

“Away,” Tyk replies, using the gesture she would use to answer questions about the neima being off foraging.

“When Samet?”

“No-time.” Their private language isn’t sophisticated enough to distinguish between ‘unknown’ and ‘never’; she has no way of telling him that the neima won’t be back, as opposed to not knowing when they’d be back. With some work, she could probably get the message across, but she doesn’t feel like putting that work in right now. It’s probably better if he’s distracted by new friends and new sights at Glittergem before he understands that most of the people he knows are gone forever. “We and Smon go. More people place.”

He drops his body low. “More people unsafe/bad.”

“Explain.”

“Unsafe/bad to we.”

It takes her a moment to figure out his trepidation. The neima. He’d picked up on her nervousness during that encounter, and they’re the only strangers he’d ever met.

“More-more people,” she explains. “Safe/good/love more people.” She hopes that that’s true. If the Glittergem Hive isn’t safe, they’ll have a serious problem. “More what’s-that-see. More who’s-that-see. Learn/fun.”

He flicks his wings in a surprisingly sophisticated uncertain gesture that he must have picked up off the neima men, but he doesn’t protest. She hopes she hasn’t frightened him.

“He’ll be fine,” Smon says. “My family moved when I was young. I made new friends.”

Tyk hadn’t been aware that Smon was paying attention to their conversation, or that she’d been paying enough attention in the past to pick up on the language. But she hides her surprise. “Leaving Glittergem for Redstone River will be a bigger move. He’ll be older by then, and know the Glittergem people better. But at least he’ll get to know his family first on the wingsong stream. And have more context for what it means to leave a place. This time…”

“This is how he gets context,” Smon shrugs. “He’ll be fine. You’ll be fine.”

‘You’ll be fine, too,’ is what Tyk wants to say, but she knows that she can’t promise that. There’s no way that Tyk will back down on building Rayjo Tau, so depending on how things go with the Glittergem Hive…

The mountains loom closer as they travel, turning from distant objects to landmarks to a destination. It’s after a few days, when they do start to look like a realistic destination, that the land around them changes too, adopting the unmistakable signs of a well-travelled area close to a hive; the road becomes firmer, the grasses around them well-tended. They’re close enough now that they can expect to run into a Glittergem man who’s out and about at any time.

Tyk prompts Ketyk to keep his eyes on the sky while she forages or pulls the farm, but he’s too young to have the patience to do it for long. He’s spending more time off her horns and has taken to riding on the farm, or on Smon’s shoulders, or leap-flying in short spurts to keep up as he travels along the ground. Letting him explore and strengthen his wings and body instead of staying safe and protected on her horns takes more willpower than anything Tyk has done in her life.

At one point, Ketyk forces a stop when he gets so entranced in watching something that Tyk has to go and get him. She finds him staring at a large spider lying on her back under a broad leaf, twitching.

“Spider,” he says.

“Yes,” Tyk confirms.

“Hurt spider.”

Technically true, but not the whole story. “She is laying her truebrothers. Many many truebrothers.”

“Many truebrothers?”

“Yes.”

That gets Ketyk back onto her horns immediately. “Tyk will lay many truebrothers?”

“No. One truebrother for Tyk. Just you. Only always you.”

He settles down on her head, pressed into her as much as he can manage, wings humming. And she gets back on the road before he can see the spider die.

The first time Tyk saw a laying spider, she was young, but not nearly as young as Ketyk. She had enough of a vocabulary that Kesan could explain the situation to her. Spiders, like many small, non-social animals, don’t raise their families in the same way that people do. A female spider lives for about four or five years, usually alone, although some of them stay with their daughters for a half-season or so to teach them how to be spiders. During that time, she will lay many daughters, between one and four at a time, randomly throughout the year when the weather and the access to food is good. Spiders aren’t like people, who start growing a daughter within them almost immediately after mating; they can delay an egg for, well, nobody really knows how long.

When a spider gets old, she stops raising daughters, and instead finds a sheltered place to lie down and go to sleep. Her insides fill up entirely with male eggs, eating away at her flesh to grow until her carapace splits open and they hatch, a mass of tiny winged creatures, and take to the sky immediately, flying off in every direction to find female spiders to mate with like pollen released to the wind by a flower. Different types of spiders lay different types of truebrothers; dozens of little boys who won’t live more than a few days, a few larger and more resilient types who could live up to a year, something in between. Some kinds of spiders have multiple types of males that could hatch from the same truesister; others have only one type. But in all cases, it’s the same; they live their lives alone. They die. They lay truebrothers. No spider ever gets to meet their truesiblings.

And it occurs to Tyk for the first time, heading back towards Smon and remembering the strange sadness in Kesan’s voice when he explained this all to her years ago, no spider ever gets to meet their fathers, either.

“Smon,” she asks as she returns to the farm, “do you know your parents?”

Smon shoots her a confused look as she helps her strap back into the yoke. “Of course. I mean, I used to. They’re back on my Earth.”

So she’s never going to see them again. “I’m sorry.”

“Can’t be helped. What did you want to know about them?”

“Nothing, really. I was just thinking about spiders. And the Hiveless, and stuff. I mean, who do you think Tama’s parents are?”

“Sabin and Kebin, I assumed,” Smon says, “but I might be wrong. I didn’t ask, and they all seemed to help raise her.”

“Yeah. I was just wondering how that worked for sky people. I mean, you don’t have a father, right? Because you don’t have truesiblings.”

“That’s technically true, yes. But our hives are different. To us, a father is what you would call an alt-father.”

“And you don’t have an alt-mother, because your alt-father has no truesister.”

“Yes, exactly.”

“Well, doesn’t that get confusing? I mean, if it’s like with my parents and they keep coupling with the same people, fair enough, but most people don’t do that. So you’d have five or six people with the same ‘father’ and all different mothers. That sounds really messy.”

“Different hives do it differently. Some hives don’t have a ‘father’ at all, or have many people acting as mothers and fathers, like the neima seemed to do. In many hives, a mother and a father are pretty much the same after the baby has hatched, since our bodies are so similar, so it doesn’t really matter which is which or how many of each type of parent you have. And sometimes, children are raised by different people who decide to become their parents even if they didn’t lay them, because the ones who laid them can’t do it, or don’t want to. But most of the time, sky people just decide to mate with the same people for many years, if they plan to have children. They’ll make a promise not to mate with anybody else.”

“And that works?”

“Sometimes yes. Sometimes no.”

“It sounds a lot more complicated than our way.”

Smon laughed. “Yes, well, you have a biological advantage, there. Or difference, anyway. Your way has its own vulnerabilities.”

Such as the loss of a truesibling being permanently crippling and often fatal. Smon was safe from that permanent worry. But also, Tyk reflected, deprived of the joy of having a truesibling in the first place. Would she trade places with Smon in that regard?

Ketyk felt heavy between her horns. No. No, she would not.

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