Spider Legs (9 page)

“Look at that.” Nathan pointed upward. A shimmering, gossamer curtain called the aurora borealis, or northern lights, hung above them.

“Looks like a streamer of light! The aurora!” she agreed. The name “aurora” came from the Roman goddess of the dawn, often represented as rising with rosy fingers from the saffron-colored bed of Tithonous.

“This is really beautiful. So much different than the American coast,” Nathan said. He thought he saw the constellation Orion as he gazed past huge green rocks that loomed at their sides. Unusual weathering of the rocks resulted in a green web of copper tracings.

He looked toward Natalie. She smiled. Nathan's heart beat a little faster: he found himself attracted to her on several levels. She was a woman he would never find boring.

“Let me show you the forest before it gets too dark,” Natalie said. The two turned slightly and walked along a trail full of pine needles. Main Street was far in the distance. Yellow birch, white birch, black spruce, white spruce, and balsam firs rose above a carpet of moss and yellow leaves. Beyond was a scrim of dark mist. The shadows looked like stalking gray cats. Daytime was dying.

After another ten minutes of walking, they saw the trees became scarce. Faint puffs of vapor hung over the sodden fields. They looked across the barren lands and bogs; the only signs of vegetation were mosses, lichens, grasses, and stunted trees.

“What animals live around here?” Nathan asked, stopping for a minute to catch his breath.

“The Island of Newfoundland teems with wildlife and freshwater fish. The chief fur-bearing animals are the otter, beaver, muskrat, fox and lynx. Game animals include hares, moose, and caribou, and black bear. I should know, I once came face to face with a black bear and had to shoot it.”

A cloud reached out and grappled with the moon for possession of the night. As they walked down the forest trail, Nathan looked into a bank of snow and saw a sled dog's body preserved by the cold. Its rib cage was white, with bits of hair and flesh. “Wonder whose dog that was,” he said.

“Good question.”

“Let's find our way back to Main Street.”

When the end of Main Street was in sight, they saw a wood bench facing the bay.

“Shall we sit for a while longer?” Natalie suggested.

“Sure.” Nathan consciously strived to make himself as kind and easygoing as his father was high-strung, hoping that Natalie noticed and liked such calmness. Even though he had known her for just a few hours, Nathan liked everything he knew about Natalie, and hoped that the sentiment was being returned.

“May I make a rather personal remark?” she asked softly.

He forced a laugh. “I hope it's not that I smell bad.”

“I think you are perhaps the nicest man I've met.”

He was stunned. All he could manage to say was “Thank you.”

Even at night the bay displayed a remarkable panoply of life. Elegant black-browed albatrosses floated in the air currents and squabbled over what was probably fish head. Arctic pigeons in dazzling brown and burgundy plumage swirled close to where Nathan and Natalie sat. Far away in the distance a group ofWilson's storm-petrels dabbled their wings in the sea as they hunted for tiny prey. Such exuberance of life, coming after months of the barren emptiness of the North Atlantic, had led early explorers to believe that the bay possessed infinite fecundity. Today, unfortunately,
hundreds of gallons of diesel fuel all too often fouled beaches and destroyed wildlife.

They got up and walked closer to the sea. They looked up at the stars shining between a few wisps of clouds. On their left were long blades of Deschampsia and tufted Colobanthus. It was difficult for these plants in the winter, he was sure: temperatures often held all moisture hostage in ice. The grasses were as high as their knees, lush from recent rains. A father and his son were sitting on some large rocks with a tackle-box between them and a big yellow thermos at their feet. Occasionally the father said something to the boy as he held a rod with one hand and a cup of coffee in his other.

“Look at that yacht.” Natalie pointed to a swiftly moving craft near the horizon.

“That's something.” Nathan whistled.

“It's the Italian yacht
Destriero.
I read about it in the local newspapers. It's built out of light alloy and equipped with three gas turbines that drive water jets. I think it broke the world record for fastest eastbound crossing of the Atlantic Ocean. It can cruise at more than sixty-nine miles per hour.”

“I wouldn't mind owning that one. But it's a little hard on a professor's salary.”

They dug their fingers into the sand, making small puddles. The water was cold and clear. Nathan wiggled his fingers and felt the sand crumble slowly. The day was ending beautifully—a lovely beam of moonlight pushed through the cumulus clouds. The air stirred under a light northerly wind; the sea was calm. They walked some more, as the
Destriero
disappeared over the horizon. In the distance, Natalie saw a moose calf with its watchful mother. The mother's coat was fluffy and gray. Her hooves were scratching at the thin snow cover and soon she uncovered a meal, perhaps a lemming.

“Do you think we should go so close to the ocean with the sea spider on the loose?” Natalie asked as her feet crunched clam and scallop shells which lined the white beach.

“There's no need to worry. What's the chance that the pycnogonid would pick this time and this beach to make an attack? Near zero, I think.”

Rapidly moving clouds delicately laced with snow soon blocked the moonlight. A cool sea wind whispered through the grasses and sand dunes. Occasionally a few night birds passed overhead or swooped to a nearby jetty.

Nathan wished he could put his arm around Natalie, but was wary of presuming and ruining the moment. She had complimented him, but that was perhaps because of his diffidence. Above, the celestial light fringed the moving waves in a curtain of stars. As they stood together near the gray-green gloom of the sea Nathan couldn't help hearing in his mind the words of his favorite 20th-century poet, John Celestian. “I'd like to carry this moment of time on forever,” he murmured.

She turned to him. “Pardon?”

“Sorry,” he said, embarrassed. “I was remembering a poem.”

She smiled. “Will you quote it for me?”

“Why certainly, if you wish,” he agreed, surprised. He focused his memory, and recited:

"I'd like to carry this moment of time on forever
. . .

Hanging on to joys which spring out into misty airs . . .

“That's lovely,” she said.

Shadows sprang up about them as if they were living creatures. Tidewater seeped into their footsteps, and they heard the sounds of water crashing on the nearby jetty. He finally made what seemed like a supreme gamble, and took her hand. She did not withdraw. The silence was broken by nothing louder than the
fragile chirps of shorebirds. The only illumination came from the green and red light emitted by the bioluminescent bacteria coating the wet rocks sticking out of the sea. It was if they were standing in an ice and rock cathedral of stained glass.

It reminded him of Christmas.

PART III

Phantom

Loving

The first great step towards progress is for man to cease to be the slave of man; the second to cease to be the slave of the monsters of his own creation
—
of the ghosts and phantoms.

—R
OBERT
G. I
NGERSOLL,

The Ghosts and Other Lectures

CHAPTER 14

Fish Store

T
HE
LITTLE CARD
on the wall read:

The average person

sheds one-and-a-half

pounds of skin a year.

Martha Samules was fond of such curious facts and had dozens of notecards containing trivia taped to the back wall of her fish store. Another read:

If continually suckled,

a lactating woman will produce

milk for several years.

Indeed, in some primitive tribes even today women nursed their children for up to five years, and could go longer if circumstances warranted. Nursing was one reason that third world children often did better than those in “advanced” nations—until they got off the breast and started eating degraded western foods. Similarly, babies in poor regions who slept with their mothers had lower rates of sudden death than those who had to
sleep alone. Wherever man interfered with nature, man suffered. But not enough for Martha's taste.

Today she was in a small, lightly soundproofed laboratory. Inside there was an array of aquarium filters, air pumps, and various tubes leading to a water-filled tank against a wall of the lab. The tank looked big enough to hold a large shark. On a dissecting table in front of her was a fist-sized pycnogonid. It lay dead on its back in a metal pan with a cork lining. The sea spider's legs were pinned to the cork to stabilize the body.

“Here goes,” Martha said as she cut a small square opening in the body's hard exoskeleton using a dissecting scissor. The long legs reminded her of her own fingers. In some strange way, Martha felt that the bony sea spider was a kindred soul.

“Careful,” she said to herself as she attempted to complete the cuts without damaging the underlying tissues. Finally she removed a postage-stamp-sized plate of shell from the creature's belly.

“That's interesting,” she said to herself. After placing the square hatch to the side, she probed at the white, fleshy interior of the sea spider with her long finger and found a cavity, an air pocket, big enough to fit a sugar cube. Perhaps the air pocket aided in buoyancy when the animal rose to the surface of the water, she thought. Did it contain air or some other gas when the spider was submerged under the sea? Or did the body tissues simply shift into the cavity when the pressure of the sea compressed the pycnogonid's body?

This was of course not the first time she had made this discovery, but she liked to verify it in different species. She wanted to know as much about sea spiders as possible, and sometimes a routine dissection could lead to a significant breakthrough. The pycnogonid was a truly remarkable creature in its own right, and with her help it was becoming more so.

Martha Samules was born into a comfortable, happy household in a rural town in Prussian Silesia, about twenty miles south of Warsaw. She was the only daughter and third child of Ismar
Samules, a respected but somewhat eccentric Jewish distiller, innkeeper, and tropical fish hobbyist. She inherited her father's characteristics—excitability, intelligence, and deformities of the hands. At the age of six, Martha entered the local primary school, and at the age of eleven she went to the St. Maria Magdalena Humanistic Gymnasium in Breslau. Her favorite subjects were biology and Latin. She was always near the top of her class, despite the cruel teasing she suffered from the children as a result of her long fingers and teeth, and her sometimes strange behavior. At times she felt she was living with dark tormenting clouds around her. The clouds were the bullies, the teasers, and the embarrassed looks of her few friends.

There was a knock on her lab door. Irritated, Martha set down her scalpel, rinsed her hands, and went to it. There was the teenage girl whom Martha hired to work for her in the store during the week. “Lisa, I told you I don't want to be disturbed for less than an emergency,” she snapped at the girl.

“The people—they—they want a refund,” the girl stammered.

“Well show them the damn sign!” Martha snapped. “You know the policy. I do not give refunds.”

“I—I know. But—”

Martha looked more closely at the girl. Lisa was too young and pretty for her own good, but she did have a certain talent for inducing smiles and sales, and she didn't make many mistakes. At the moment her eyes were puffy as if she'd been crying. Something was going on. Maybe she had lost a boyfriend, been foolishly distracted, and made a mistake in the store. This required a direct investigation.

Martha pushed by her and went into the store proper. There was a plump woman and a brat of a boy. “What's the problem?” Martha demanded.

“My son bought a fish here, and it ate our other pet fish and then died,” the woman said.

“Where's your sales receipt?”

The woman produced it. Martha saw that it had been issued to one Brenda something or other, and that Lisa had handled it. It was for a lovely but predatory fish that had to be isolated from smaller species. An Aruana, a long silver fish resembling a snake or eel with a pair of barbels projecting from the mouth. It was cute in its fashion when small, but would quickly consume other fish and attain lengths of several feet if the aquarium was large enough. “You put this in with your others?” Martha inquired grimly.

Brenda nodded. “And it—”

“I know what it did. Weren't you warned not to do that?”

Both Brenda and her son shook their heads.

And Martha couldn't prove that Lisa had told them. The girl had probably been thinking of something else, so could have overlooked that vital detail. She was stuck for it, because she just might have been placed in the wrong.

She went to the cash register. “What was the value of the other fish you lost?”

Brenda told her. Martha dug out the money and paid for the refund and the other fish.

Brenda was evidently amazed. She surely had expected a hassle. “Well, thank you—” she started.

“Just get out of my store,” Martha said tersely. “And don't come back.”

“But we didn't know what would happen.”

“You should have asked.” Martha turned her back and stalked away.

She spied Lisa. “That will come out of your pay, you know.”

Lisa gulped. “I know. I'm sorry I—”

“Don't be sorry. Just see that it never happens again.” Martha went to the lab and closed the door.

The problem with Lisa was that she was typical of her generation and indeed the human kind. She just didn't think far enough ahead. As far as Martha was concerned, the whole lot of them could be dispensed with. There were just too damned
many ignorant, thoughtless, garbage-generating hairless apes in the world, ruining it for all the natural creatures. She had to do business with them, because she needed money to finance her researches, but she was disgusted by the necessity.

Martha put the matter aside, and returned to her work. This was what she lived for: research, discovery, creation. It had taken her time to get here, but now she was making real progress.

After receiving her Ph.D. in molecular biophysics and biochemistry from Harvard as a result of her studies on the invertebrates in the North Atlantic oceans, Martha had been unsure where to go next. After some soul searching, she decided not to pursue an academic career with the accompanying pressure of fighting for tenure and grants. Instead she set up a small private laboratory in a rented flat near Bonavista Bay in Newfoundland. This was an incredible change of life for her, but she enjoyed it. The variety of fishes and invertebrates in the bay were a source of constant pleasure.

After a few years of research and teaching at the local high school, Martha had a touch of the entrepreneurial spirit and opened a tropical fish and aquaria store. She still maintained a small marine biology laboratory in a room in the back of the fish store where she dabbled in a variety of breeding and other small-scale research projects. Of course she kept this quite limited, because the store wasn't sufficiently private. She knew better than to risk the disaster of premature discovery. Her most significant work was scrupulously hidden elsewhere. She couldn't afford to have Lisa make a stupid mistake and let someone in there.

“Where did I put the growth hormone?” Martha whispered to herself, as she paced back and forth in the small lab like a caged tigress. This lab was an afterthought, tucked away between a bathroom and a supply closet. The shelves were covered with various scientific paraphernalia: test tubes, litmus paper, large Fluval canister filters, and worm feeders. In one fish tank were African cichlids. Another contained a vat of corrosive goo, the
composition of which still eluded her. She was saving that particular challenge for an off moment, when she didn't have more important work to do.

“There it is.” She grabbed a vial of green fluid and dumped it into a small aquarium filled with plants but devoid of animal life. Since Martha left Harvard she had decided to become an inventor of sorts. After some disastrous attempts to build the world's best fish tank filter, she did receive $30,000 from a prominent filter company for the rights to a canister filter which permitted mechanical, biological, and chemical filtration all in one filter medium for optimum water purification.

There was another knock at her lab door. She knew what that was for, because of the time. Martha reached for a single light bulb which hung down from the tile ceiling on a cord. She then shut the light off and left her lab, closing the door behind her. On the side of the metal door facing the fish store, stenciled in orange paint, were the words:

NO ADMITTANCE—AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY

“I'm going home now,” said Lisa. Sometimes Martha wondered why she bothered with the stupid girl. But she reminded herself again that Lisa made it possible for Martha to fit in extra research sessions during slow times in the store. Still, she had been a nuisance today.

Lisa backed up when the smelled the stench of decay coming from the lab. Perhaps it was Martha herself who exuded the pungent aroma, she thought with satisfaction. She liked getting into her work, and the smell didn't bother her at all.

Lisa was the long red-haired cheerleader type. Hardly the kind one would expect to be working in a fish store, but she clearly needed the money and enjoyed the exotic sea life in the store. Those were motives Martha trusted. She would not have hired someone who could quit with impunity at any time. “See you tomorrow.” Lisa looked at Martha. There was something very fragile in her swollen eyes. That, too: Lisa was the
type who could be pushed quite far without resisting. Martha did not want indepence of spirit here. Her brother had entirely too much of that, which was part of her problem with him.

“See you tomorrow,” Martha said as she grinned. Martha knew that her teeth reminded Lisa of bicycle spokes. “Before you go, did you feed all the guppies?” Martha began to drool slightly as she looked at the splashes of water on Lisa's ivory linen short pants. Lisa followed her glance.

“I spilled a little water from the guppy tank on my pants,” Lisa said as she gestured to herself. Then she pushed her shiny hair away from her face. Yes, she definitely was distracted today. As if she had any real concerns.

“Did you feed the guppies?” Martha asked again, stepping a little closer. Lisa opened her mouth. Closed it. Opened it.

“Stop that,” Martha said. “You're beginning to look like a gold fish.”

Lisa began to recover her composure and smiled a little. “Sure,” she said with a quick intake of breath. “I fed them.”

Martha grabbed Lisa's hand and gave it a shake. She held the hand in a clammy grasp for about five seconds. Then Martha held out one bony forefinger and tapped it on Lisa's chest for emphasis.

“Hey,” Lisa said, perhaps noticing for the first time that Martha's fingernails were long and fat and almost brown. Some seemed as sharp as razors. Martha was proud of the effect. Had she had to get really rough with those punks who invaded her store the other day, those nails would have been useful.

“Be careful of the sea spiders,” Martha told her. Then her voice turned cheerful and she said, “OK, have fun.” Lisa scurried from the store like a rabbit fleeing a fox.

Martha started to laugh. Great big laughs. Her voice rose in intensity until it was a high-sonic stiletto. Black mollies in a nearby tank felt the vibrations of Martha's laughter and quickly retreated behind a rock. A tin foil barb floated belly up. Martha took off her “FISH ARE FUN” button and tossed it on the counter. It was closing time at Martha's Tropical Fish Store.