I can do nothing but watch as his forelegs stride out in front of us, picking a route through the gnarled limbs. Tufts of fur decorate each joint, a softer grey next to the chitin’s inky black.
It’s a good thing his species doesn’t have the urticating hairs common to Earth’s fuzzy spiders. Many tarantulas can evenfling the barbed, irritating hairs at-will. I’m sure this guy would love to turn my face into a pincushion.
After a few minutes, I can ‘see’ the path that he sees, a three-dimensional tunnel through the leaves not unlike the deer path I was following.
Patches of webbing shore up areas that would otherwise lack a convenient foothold. As we proceed, those patches get denser, less functional, more… decorative. A declaration of territory.
The webs converge to a single point ahead—a dark, foreboding hole at the base of a jagged cliff.
We plunge inside.
CHAPTER 2
ANDROMEDA
Inside the web-lined cave,the Arachnoid walks up onto the wall. Gravity pulls my weight away from him, leaving me dangling from the strap that connects my shoulders and hips. It could be scarier; what lies below is a sheet of webbing, and I’m sure if I fell, it’d be springy enough.
Webbing coats the entire interior space, layer upon layer of it, dividing the cave into chambers. It’s warmer and drier than I expect—no doubt by design.
The licorice smell is stronger here.
The spatial logic of this place breaks my brain. It’s obviously a house, but for a creature that moves through the world in an entirely different way than I do. There are no stairs, no right angles, no chairs.
But there’s decor. Bundles of dried herbs hang in intentional displays, casting subtle scents into the warm air.
On one panel of web, a network of unsticky silk creates a set of little nooks, and each holds a different object: a gleaming sapphire, an odd skull, a bundle of feathers, and more.
He goes fully upside-down, clearly traveling along the most natural path to him, treating me to a view of a ‘floor’ that’s more decorative than functional—a carpet of living plants with stout, succulent-like leaves in shades of lilac and seafoam green, arranged in a spiral pattern.
How do they look so healthy in this dim place? The answer soon becomes clear: a long, dark leg reaches out with pincer-like toes to tug a thick cable of silk. Light floods the dim space, diffused soft and silvery white by the silk above. If I had to guess—and I do, this guy’s not gonna tell me jack shit—I’d say he’s turned a gap in the top of the cave into a skylight and rigged it with a pulley system.
Clever. Guess I’m not the only tinkerer.
The space around us is baffling at first, given the Arachnoid’s tenuous grasp on the concept of right-side-up and the lack of right angles. But I’ve always been good at pattern-matching.
There’s an area with a large, flat plane of metal and a series of cubbies lined with utensils. A tight, dense tunnel leads away from the cooking area toward the top of the cave—a vent for cooking fumes? So, that’s probably the kitchen.
Nearby, a cluster of computer monitors and an input panel are instantly recognizable as his office, more or less.
As his movement sends me spinning slightly, I see a particularly cozy area. A silk hammock sits in front of a large screen, and the cubbies there hold vid-disc cases, video game controllers, incomprehensible chunks of plastic and metal that are probably also video game controllers, wood carvings, and even a few carefully arranged stacks of bona-fide, leather-bound, cellulose-paged books.
All in all, the space is similar to my studio apartment. Albeit about ten times the size and dimensionally dizzying.
He carries me over to what I identified as the kitchen area, mercifully returning to a right-side-up orientation. Still slungover his shoulder, I get a better view of a particularly dense silk tube that ends over a stone basin. One of his legs tugs a loop of silk, and clean, clear water pours out.
More silk cubbies serve the purpose of cabinets, deep and opaque enough that I can’t see what they hold. He uses another leg to grab a metal cylinder that’s so quintessentiallya tea kettleI laugh aloud.
Or, well, I laugh muffled by the silk tape over my mouth.
He glances down and raises a brow at me. “You have something to say?”
I’m almost surprised that it’s his humanoid hand instead of a spider leg that reaches down and yanks the silk tape off my face.
“Ow!”
“If that’s all…” The tape approaches again.
Eager to keep my mouth free, I say, “I just didn’t expect to see a very-much-from-Earth tea kettle… here. That’s all. It’s… nostalgic, I guess.”
