4.44: Mother Knows Best

We weren’t going to lose track of each other at the edge of a clearing. We let each other go, and Hammond pulled out the map again.

In shadows of oaks old and deep, among her children, mother sleeps.

To convince them that you belong, you must dance to a hidden song.

Be the music, feather-light, lest she wake and hear your flight;

Move softly under silk-strewn skies and dance a moonlit lullaby.

“Moonlit lullaby,” I murmured. “So...”

“We’re going to have to kill the lights, aren’t we,” Hammond sighed.

“Maybe we can backtrack, find a way around?” I asked.

Peter shook his head. “Waste of time. This was set up as part of the competition, remember? There won’t be a way around. Let’s figure out what we need to do here. Hammond, you holding up okay?”

“Yeah, I’m fine. I wish there wasn’t the sudden appearance of a bunch of giant spiders, but whatever.”

“If it helps,” Saina chimed in, “their appearance isn’t sudden. There have been giant spiders in the trees the whole time. It just didn’t seem worth mentioning.”

“No, Saina, that does not help! Why would that help?”

Peter ignored this. “We have to ‘dance a hidden song’ and ‘be the music’, to avoid waking this mother spider. Any clue what that means?”

Everyone looked at me.

“How would I know?” I asked.

“You’re the riddle guy,” Saina said.

“And sound is your elemental designation, isn’t it?” Peter asked. “If this is a sound thing – ”

“Just because sound is my elemental designation doesn’t mean I’m a musician! I don’t know shit about music!”

“Well, that’s unfortunate.”

“Sound,” Hammond said thoughtfully, “isn’t a thing.”

“… Okay?”

“It’s a type of motion. Sound is a way that things can move, not a thing in its own right. It’s a pattern of energy, that can transmit through objects.”

“Thanks for the physics lesson,” I said. “How does it help with the giant spiders?”

“I’m not sure,” he said. “But we’re trying to move through a web. Maybe the spiders don’t matter. The ‘dance’ is, presumably, about how we move through the web.”

“And the moonlight shoud reveal the path somehow,” Peter said. “Alright. We ready?”

Hammond and Saina turned off their lights.

It didn’t take all that long for my eyes to adjust to the darkness, largely because it wasn’t particularly dark. The cobwebs had looked a dull white in the strong artificial light, but under the moon (well, that was still artificial, the moon was part of the simulation, but whatever), they glowed, bouncing the moonlight around the space to bathe everything in a soft silver-white. It was pretty disorienting, actually; the light bouncing around left no shadows, which made it a little tricky to tell exactly where everything was. And since ‘everything’ was mostly ‘giant spiders’, that was a problem.

“This hasn’t really helped anything,” I pointed out.

“Wait,” Saina said. “Look.”

I looked. My eyes adjusted further. Then I saw it.

The strands of webbing weren’t all the same colour. Networked among sheets of white were robes of silver, darker and dimmer than the white. The white threads glowed so much that it was impossible to tell the colour difference more than a few metres ahead of us, but close up, the difference was stark.

A giant spider scampered past, right in front of us. We all jumped.

It only walked across the silver threads.

“Okay,” Peter breathed. “So… only walk on the silver? Is it that easy?”

“I doubt it,” Hammond mumbled. “All that stuff about dancing and music or whatever suggests a specific pattern. I don’t think that walking on just any silver threads will do.”

“Can you guys believe that we signed up to do this, voluntarily, for fun?” I said weakly.

We all stared at the cobwebs for awhile.

“Screw it,” I said, stepping forward.

Peter pulled me back. “What are you doing?”

“If I fake-die by spider attack, you’ve got three more chances to get it right,” I said, “but us standing around here waiting for an epiphany isn’t helping. We’re on a clock and we have no other way to get more information, so...”

Peter didn’t look happy, but he let me go.

I stepped onto a silver strand of webbing.

It vibrated under my foot, a low, solid thrum that I couldn’t hear but I could feel all the way up my spine. The vibration caried, louder and quieter, louder and quieter, a repeating rhythm like breathing. Like a purring cat. The gentle snoring of the Mother in the middle of the glade.

I knew that was nonsense, of course; spiders didn’t breathe. But this was a giant fake magical spider, so maybe it did. Whatever. It was hers, somehow. Moving with her.

“Oh,” I said. “I think I get it.”

“What’s happening?” Peter asked. “What’s going on.”

“It’s alright,” I reassured him. “Just be gentle.”

I stepped out and put my other foot on another silver rope. The silver parts of the web were made of many strands, thick enough for human feet to stand on; it would be an impossible puzzle if they weren’t. The vibration echoed up both of my feet now, both strands in concert.

I took another step forward, then another. My teammates followed me out onto the web. I took another step, putting my foot on a new strand, and there was something wrong about it. Discordant. The vibrations didn’t match with the vibrations of my current strand; they clashed, somehow, making me feel sick.

The Mother stirred.

I pulled back, and she relaxed again. Okay, so that was the game. Some of the strands were out of sync with each other in some kind of musical way I didn’t understand (were there… notes that clash with each other, somehow? I’m not a music guy), and standing on two clashing strings caused problems. We could move between strands that had different vibrations so long as they were… complimentary. I don’t know how I knew what was complimentary, it was just obvious by feel. Maybe if one vibrated twice or three times as fast as another, so the vibrations synced up, or something? I don’t know. Some matches felt fine, and some felt weird, and the weird ones were bad. That’s all I know.

It occurred to me, as I carefully picked my way around the Mother’s slumbering form, that we probably should have done this one person at a time. Keeping both feet on ‘complimentary’ strands wasn’t too difficult; you put your foot down on a new strand and it either felt right or it didn’t. Keeping all eight of our feet on complimentary strands? That was a lot harder. There were a few points of testy trial-and-error where one person was trapped and absolutely couldn’t move forward until another person repositioned themselves on different strands. We had to be doing this wrong, there had to be a way to figure this out that wasn’t just brute forcing it, but none of us could figure out what that might be.

Anyway, our method was working perfectly fine. I rounded the bulk of the Mother and set my eyes on the opening on the other side fo the clearing. Beyond, there were no trees, just a wide, stony path up the mountain.

And then, the Mother moved.

She pulled in a couple of her legs, rearranging several of the strands of webbing around her, then settled back down. This wouldn’t be a problem, except that we were standing on that webbing. I tipped forward and managed to catch myself on another strand; Saina threw herself down and grabbed a strand with both hands until the movement stopped. But Peter slipped, and when Hammond grabbed him and yanked him safely back, Hammond overbalanced, stumbling forward and into the bright white webbing.

“Hammond!” Saina called.

“I’m okay, keep going!” The white webbing was sticky; it clung to him while he tried to get up, trapping him. I’d heard somewhere that spiderweb was stronger than steel, but this illusory web clearly wasn’t; with a mighty effort, Hammondpulled himself to his feet, and the webbing, while it didn’t let go of his skin, tore. I was pretty sure I’d never he able to rip it, but Hammond is basically a grizzly bear in human disguise, so.

Everything probably would have been fine, except that we were still in the web, still surrounded by those silver threads, and Peter, Saina and I had all ended up on new, random silver threads. Hammond was pulling himself up onto another silver thread. At least one of us, possibly all of us, were out of sync.

The Mother woke up.

It took her a few seconds, because the white webbing stuck to her as easily as it did to Hammond; she had to tear it free to stand. But she did so quickly, and she was right in front of me. The other spiders, which I’d largely been ignoring, skittered about in a panic. They still didn’t seem to care about us at all, so I focused on the main problem; the giant pair of mandibles bearing down upon me. I jumped back, aiming for another silver thread, but I knew there was no wayI could outrun this thing. If I stood in the white webbing, I’d be stuck; movement was slow, and the spiders moved across the web like it was nothing.

Then Hammond was in front of me, luminous white webbing hanging from his arms and shoulders like a tattered cloak, reaching up to grab the mandibles of an elephant-sized spider as if he could somehow do anything against it.

“Run!” he bellowed.