Spider Legs Read online

  Spider Legs

  Piers Anthony and Clifford A. Pickover

  Preface

  We originally conceived of Spider Legs partly as a farce within the genre of science fiction. In theater and film, a farce often entertains the audience by means of improbable situations. Also, we had considered the notion of presenting Spider Legs as a graphical novel, given the novel’s vivid imagery, and we invite interested readers to submit possible illustrations that we might feature on a Web site for Spider Legs.

  Note that pycnogonids, or sea spiders, are real; however, the life cycles of the large, deep-sea forms, especially members of the genus Colossendeis, are still largely unknown to scientists. We hope the quirkiness, dread, and Théâtre de l'Absurde elements of Spider Legs continue to resonate with readers of this revised electronic edition.

  Contents

  Intro

  PART I: PHANTOM RISING

  1. Pycno

  2. Friends

  3. Ice

  4. Spider

  5. Dream

  PART II: PHANTOM HUNTING

  6. Head

  7. Environment

  8. Nathan

  9. Hospital

  10. Call

  11. Research

  12. Pilot

  13. Date

  PART III: PHANTOM LOVING

  14. Fish Store

  15. Coma

  16. Restaurant

  17. Population

  18. Come By Chance

  19. Monster

  20. Lisa

  21. Hatch

  22. Storm

  PART IV: PHANTOM KILLING

  23. Mission

  24. Hunt

  25. Ferry

  26. Captain

  27. Teens

  28. Prey

  29. Shop

  30. Hunger

  31. Snack

  32. Siege

  33. Snout

  34. Attack

  35. Battle

  36. Decision

  Epilogue

  Author's Note (Piers Anthony)

  Author's Note (Clifford A. Pickover)

  Intro

  For thousands of years it was believed that ghosts, good and bad, benevolent and malignant, weak and powerful, in some mysterious way produced all phenomena; that disease and health, happiness and misery, fortune and misfortune, peace and war, life and death, success and failure, were but arrows from the quivers of these ghosts; that shadowy phantoms rewarded and punished all mankind; that they gave prosperous voyages, allowing the brave mariner to meet his wife and child inside the harbor bar, or sent the storms, strewing the sad shores with wrecks of ships and the bodies of men. Formerly, these ghosts were believed almost innumerable. Earth, air, and water were filled with these phantom hosts. In modern times they have greatly decreased in number. The remaining ghosts, however, are supposed to perform the same office as the hosts of yore.

  —ROBERT G. INGERSOLL (1881),

  The Ghosts and Other Lectures,

  14th Edition. C. P. Farrell:

  Washington, D.C.

  PART I

  Phantom

  Rising

  The history of life is written in creatures that we've barely begun to get acquainted with—jellyfish, the sponges, starfish—creatures that are found in fossil records back, in some cases, a billion years.

  —SYLVIA EARLE

  CHAPTER 1

  Pycno

  IT CRAWLED ALONG the hell-black ocean floor, searching with its five large dark eyes. It was not a crab—rather it was more spiderlike in appearance with obscenely thin long legs. Its mouth was a triangular opening at the end of a sucking appendage longer than its body. So ravenous was the creature that its body was not sufficient to contain its entire stomach; it carried its digestive and reproductive organs in long branches packed like sausages inside its legs.

  The early morning light began to penetrate the darkness. At its current depth in the water, the phantom creature could see clearly for perhaps thirty feet. Beyond that was just a blur of blue-green. The water attenuated the red and orange colors first, giving its environment a curious cyan sheen. Beneath its feet the ocean floor was a tangled mass of vegetation, sea sponge, and shell.

  As the thing walked, a small fish swam by. The spiderlike creature was of such Olympic porportions that the small fish did not realize that this was a living, potentially dangerous entity. Suddenly the creature stood still, not because it cared about the little fish, but because it sensed the presence of a larger multitentacular intruder. It began to move with a stalking, purposeful intent and then swam toward the other animal by treading water.

  About twenty feet away, a giant octopus was feeding on a spiny dogfish shark. Disdaining the skin, the octopus ripped the shark open behind its gills, in order to remove its internal organs. The spiderlike creature watched the carnage for a few seconds, and then with surprising speed it snatched at the large octopus. With a sudden contraction of its body, the octopus turned brown and jetted for safer water. Black ink billowed but did not confuse the attacker. It followed its prey.

  The giant octopus was once the stuff of legends, a monster that ravaged sailing vessels and lifted horrified men from the decks like bite-sized appetizers. Now the mature 500-pound male was fleeing for its life—the last large octopus of its kind in these cold waters. Unfortunately there were relatively few octopuses left, even though the harvesting of octopuses, favored as bait by the local Newfoundland fishermen, was officially banned. This was not entirely the result of local poaching.

  The spiderlike creature made a second attempt to grab the octopus, which reacted by sucking water into its baglike mantle, and expelling it though a siphon. As the octopus jetted along the sea bed, the tips of its arms sometimes brushed against the ocean floor, making a slight rustling sound like leaves scraping on asphalt.

  Suddenly the huge spider-creature snatched at one of the octopus's arms—which broke off and sank to the ocean floor. Unfortunately for the sea spider, the arm was quickly snatched by a smaller octopus. Cannibalism was common in the sea. Octopuses were known to eat their own kind, and when under stress, as when confined to a small aquarium tank, some octopuses even ate their own arms, which grew back in a few months.

  The giant octopus would never have time to grow another arm. The sea spider grabbed it in a muscular bracelet of death. It began feeding on the soft parts and sucking out the body juices. For a few minutes there was an undulating umbrella of 20-foot-long tentacles as the octopus struggled. Its body colors darkened. It wriggled and shook as it sensed itself being slowly absorbed by the frightful proboscis, and its primitive brain felt a little of the terror of being eaten alive, of being imbibed while struggling. Even though the octopus had a beak as hard as a parrot's and could pierce Crustacea shells, it had no chance. So strong was the sea spider's body, that the octopus was a tiny toy in its pair of pincerlike chelicerae.

  In one last futile escape attempt, the octopus contracted its body to a fourth of its normal diameter, distorted its pliable eyeballs, and removed one of its arms through a gap between the spider's pincers. The sea spider responded by drawing the baglike mantle of the octopus deeper into its own sucking appendage. The octopus's body took on a white hue, then a dark red. The octopus lifted its weary arms as it died of oxygen starvation. Finally, it stopped moving.

  Unlike the octopus and other reclusive creatures of the sea that preferred to hide in a rocky crevice or empty shell when menacing intruders approached, the huge sea spider—the pycnogonid—never felt fear. It had no natural enemies. But while the sea spider was fearless, it was certainly not stupid. It had several large, highly developed brains and was among the most intelligent of invertebrates. The pycnogonid not only learned quickly but remembered what it learned. It also revealed
behavioral repertoires resembling emotion: irritability, aggression, rage—but never fear.

  The surrounding ocean was a noisy place: the creature's environment was bathed in a medley of chirping, bubbling sounds. Here sound traveled at quadruple its speed in air, and it carried much better. Lately even the deep oceans were becoming polluted with the chemicals and sounds of humans, so the creature sometimes became disoriented and sought the source of the offending stimuli. The local transgressors were broad-beamed offshore service vessels which shuttled between Newfoundland and the Hibernia oil field, 170 nautical miles east of the island. Unfortunately for the pycnogonid, all the oil in the North Atlantic was in “iceberg alley”, the pycnogonid's home, where the Labrador Current pulled icebergs southward from Greenland.

  Ample food supplies which once had been plentiful were now becoming scarcer. The spider began to move toward the surface in search of food. Occasionally it swatted at nearby small fish and watched them die—as if for the sheer pleasure of seeing smaller, weaker animals suffer. Again and again it thrust at nearby sea creatures, too small to serve as food.

  And so, swimming with its eight gigantic legs, the psychotic, serial-killing invertebrate rose slowly in the frigid darkness. It was hungry. Its digestive organs spasmed. It wished to eat.

  Like a phantom rising from the depths of a dark dream, or a ghostly submarine rising from an oceanic abyss, it quietly ascended into more fertile territory. The realm of humans.

  CHAPTER 2

  Friends

  NATALIE SHEPPARD BLINKED. “What is that?” she murmured, surprised.

  Her friend followed her gaze from the wooden dock to the dark ocean. “Something in the air, or in the water?” Garth James asked, not seeing it.

  “It's gone now. It—it must have been a reflection from a wave,” Natalie said. “I shouldn't have spoken. I'm so accustomed to looking for suspicious things, I must be imagining them.”

  He smiled. “I doubt it. You strike me as an exceptionally levelheaded woman. Could it have been an iceberg fragment?”

  “More like a whale. Something alive, I think. But it wasn't a whale, or anything I recognized, really. I—” She shrugged.

  “You could join us on our new schooner, the Phantom, and we'll look for it,” he suggested.

  Natalie smiled. “I'd love to. But I'm on duty, and my lunch break is just about done.” She looked at her watch.

  “Don't let him get you alone on that boat,” a new voice said cheerfully. It was a beautiful young woman. “He's a demon lover on the water.”

  Natalie, embarrassed by the implication, was momentarily flustered. She did not know how to deal with pseudo-passes. For the stunning creature was Garth's wife, Kalinda. Natalie had encountered them routinely a week ago, and liked them immediately. She privately envied their easy marriage. It was obvious that they had no fears of alienation. She knew she could go out all day alone with Garth, and not only would he be a perfect gentleman, Kalinda would have no concern. Oh, to have such mutual trust!

  “You promised not to tell,” Garth said, smiling at his wife. “But seriously, Natalie, maybe on your day off. We'd be glad to have you.”

  “For sure,” Kalinda agreed warmly. “There's just nothing like going out on the Phantom.”

  Natalie was sure it was so, and not merely because of the boat or the experience. Anywhere these folk went would be pleasant for all concerned. “Maybe I will,” she agreed, reluctant only because she did not wish to impose. “How much longer will you be here?”

  Garth shrugged. “As long as we choose. But perhaps a week, if that's convenient for you. I need to spend a bit more time with my little sister before moving on.”

  “Your sister?”

  “Lisa. She works at Martha's Fish Store. Do you know it?”

  Natalie nodded. “Yes. I've never been inside, though. I hear that—” She hesitated.

  Kalinda laughed. “It has an eerie proprietor,” she said. “That's what you've heard, isn't it?”

  “Yes. But I'm sure that's an exaggeration.”

  “No, Lisa filled us in. She wouldn't work there, except that she needs the money.”

  “Why? Does Martha mistreat her?”

  “Not exactly,” Garth said. “But she can be very strange. Lisa's always afraid that one day something truly weird will happen, and she'll have to quit. But I think it's all right. Lisa's young, and hasn't met all the strange folk she's going to.”

  “All she meets are men hot to get into her pants,” Kalinda said. “I know the feeling.”

  Garth patted her bottom. “So?”

  “So she doesn't know how to relate to someone who isn't hot for her.”

  “But Martha's a woman!”

  “So?” Kalinda retorted in the same tone he had used.

  He looked thoughtful. “No, I don't think Martha's of that persuasion. She's just more interested in fish of any type than in people of any type.”

  Natalie made a mental note: check out the interior of that store, when she had a pretext. She wanted to know just how weird the proprietor of Martha's Fish Store was. Just in case something did happen. It was always better to be prepared with accurate information before a crisis occurred.

  Garth reached out and touched Natalie's forehead with a gentle knuckle. He had an easy familiarity that amazed her, because she accepted from him what would have infuriated her from anyone else. “You can just about see those criminal assessment thoughts churning in there,” he said, smiling. “You'd know she's a cop even without the uniform.”

  “He can be so obnoxious,” Kalinda remarked fondly, gazing away as if addressing a video camera. “He gets worse the longer he spends on land.”

  Natalie put her hands on her hips. “But you were sailing just this morning!” she said.

  “All of three hours ago,” Kalinda agreed. “We're approaching the danger zone for his tolerance.”

  “I don't see why there has to be land anyway,” Garth growled. “It should all sink under the sea, and take its landlubbers with it.” He smiled winningly. “Present company excepted.”

  Natalie laughed, which was something she did not ordinarily do in public. There was something about these people that made laughter easy, even when the interaction was routine. “Well, I shall just have to suffer through the rest of my shift,” she said, rising. “Do keep an eye out; I'd certainly like to know what I saw out there, if I saw anything.”

  “We will,” Kalinda agreed. “See you soon, Natalie.”

  “And bring your bikini,” Garth said.

  “My—” Natalie paused. He had succeeded in startling her. It was a verbal trap; if she said she didn't have one, he'd suggest nude sunning. Natalie would not care to expose her body in either fashion; she was simply too lean. But his implication that she was otherwise was unsubtly flattering despite being unwarranted. “Some other decade,” she said as she walked away.

  “There was a day when I was the only one you teased,” she heard Kalinda say to Garth.

  “But we've been married ten years!” he protested. “You're all teased out.”

  "Nine years. There's still a year to go.”

  That was all of their banter Natalie was able to hear. Nine years? She had not guessed it was that long, because they still acted like almost-newlyweds. Probably it was a show for others. Still, it evoked desire in her—desire for a relationship like that. But she didn't ever want to get serious about a policeman, and what other type of man would tolerate a policewoman? The hours, the crises, the occasional dangers—he would surely insist that she quit her job, and she simply wasn't ready to do that. Not for anybody. Because she liked her work. It gave her life definition.

  She put that disquieting thought aside. But it was immediately replaced by another: what had she seen in the sea? Probably just a piece of driftwood. But for an instant it had looked almost like a giant, gross, insect leg. Impossible, of course. Yet her fleeting glimpse had been so camera certain, until her rational mind corrected it. If only someone els
e has seen it too, to identify it as an unusual bit of flotsam, caught at an odd angle. As it was, the foolish image remained to haunt her. She couldn't afford to start seeing things that weren't there. It could play merry hell with her job performance.

  Natalie knew she'd be watching the sea again, hoping to see the thing, and identify it, and dissipate the trick her eye had played on her. Maybe she would take Garth and Kalinda up on their offer to sail briefly, just to reassure herself that there wasn't anything fantastic out there. She didn't like foolishness, especially in herself.

  CHAPTER 3

  Ice

  THE SMALL PLEASURE boat was dwarfed by the strangely shaped icebergs floating nearby along the Newfoundland coast. In the fractured sides and grottos of these massive chunks of ice were strange rich blues and weathered aquamarines. The ocean surged into the cavernous bellies worn at the icebergs’ waterlines and exploded in steepled and gabled sprays of foam. In this part of Newfoundland icebergs frequently changed shape under the chisels of the swift Labrador Current.

  From far away, the small two-masted schooner blended in perfectly with its surroundings and looked like a long thin piece of ice drifting through a chilling white mosaic on the celadon sea. Closer, an observer could easily discern the boat's name engraved in golden letters on a wooden plaque hanging on the back. The sign read: PHANTOM.

  The boat's occupants looked at a map of the area which showed that Newfoundland comprised two main areas, the Island of Newfoundland and the Coast of Labrador. The Island of Newfoundland, roughly triangular shaped, was separated from the Canadian mainland by the narrow Strait of Belle Isle on the northwest, the seventy-mile-wide Cabot Strait on the southwest, and the broad Gulf of St. Lawrence on the west.

  The early morning rain had stopped, but the deck was still slippery near the engine hatch where oil had soaked into the wood. Garth James sat in the cockpit of his boat with one bare foot resting on a spoke of the wheel. In his right hand was a cup of coffee. Garth was big, fairly muscular, dark-haired and swarthy, and appeared to be in his early thirties. He wore bold-colored Hawaiian swim shorts and a denim windbreaker. As he gazed across the horizon, the boat rocked gently in the deep swells. An invigorating whiff of pungent sea air filled his nostrils.