Back at the office, Vellie decides he needs to do some sleuthing. He sends several tele-texts to the Operator, trying to glean some information about a child from the world known as Earth who answers to the name ‘Paul.’ He is completely unsuccessful. TULIP has no record of Paul from Earth ever leaving his home world. Paul’s journey must be chronicled only in the Dark Web. The fact this lone traveler has remained hidden even to TULIP is perplexing and more than slightly concerning. Vellie wonders if Paul’s journey is being tracked in the Dark Web. There is no way of knowing.
Having had no success searching for Paul, Vellie telepathically texts the Operator, to see what record TULIP has of someone named The Eighth:
@Operator: who is The Eighth?
Immediately, he receives this response:
@SeerVellie1530: @The Eighth[archived]was once a member of the Council, after @The Seventh. @The Eighth[archived] is now thought to be deceased.
What had got Vellie’s attention, what perked the two long, pointy ears on either side of his hat, made the hair between his unused Dragon Fairy wings underneath his robe stand on end, was the following little word: thought to be deceased. Because TULIP does not assume, postulate, surmise, opine, suspect, believe or think. TULIP knows things for certain. Shuddering internally, he pushes on:
@Operator: pls clarify. reveal what is known of @The Eighth[archived]?
@SeerVellie1530: subject in question spent 18 moon cycles in Council, then departed Council. Reasons cited: impatience resulting in insubordination, lack of Council collaboration, desire for unilateral domination. Ultimate cause of departure from Council for @TheEighth[archived]: selfish use of time-making ability.
Vellie is shocked. Seers are taught to make time for worlds. To make time only for one’s own goals, only for oneself: this would be the cardinal sin for a Seer. Vellie wondered why he has never heard of The Eighth, and simultaneously realizes the precise reason for this omission: an action as terrible as selfish time-making would certainly be struck from the record. It might be a glitch in the Operator that even allowed him to learn this much. It is this conviction that causes him to text:
@Operator: pls. delete telepathic text record related to @TheEighth[archived]
@SeerVellie1530: be advised this action cannot be reversed. pls confirm deletion.
@Operator: confirmed. delete telepathic text record related to @TheEighth[archived]
Vellie hears the sound of crumpling paper, which confirms for him that the Operator has, indeed, trashed their conversation about The Eighth. He breathes an uneasy sigh of relief. Best no one on the Council know what he knows about its indecorous, fallen member.
He must be traveling via Dark Web. Vellie thinks after a few pensive breaths. He must be utilizing it to travel between worlds. We Seers would detect him, otherwise. If he utilized the regular channels, we would see. But he could, he could, he could…make time for the Dark Web, thereby extending it…” His thoughts trail off.
Of all the rumours the younger Seers love to tell, the one about the Dark Web is the most far-fetched. According to Seers’ lore, there is a natural extension of the web used by tarantulas in the Now Here to carry their amnesiac riders through their migratory patterns. It is a shadow web, undetectable and unmonitored. It, too, can be used to transmit and store memories and knowledge. Unlike the knowledge stored in the Now Here’s extensive web, this is dark knowledge. The Seers cannot see or understand what it is, how much of it there is. They can’t even tell how this Dark Web is constructed. No knowledge about the Dark Web is stored inside TULIP. This lack of visibility is what scares the Council of Seers, whose job it is to see how time is used within each world. None of them knows what goes on inside of the Dark Web. A lesser, more junior Seer might choose not to concern themselves with such a Council-level issue. Many junior Seers even doubt the existence of the Dark Web. ‘How can it exist, if none of us makes time for it?’ the younger Seers ask themselves. Vellie, however, is neither lesser, nor junior. He knows when something should be believed in and feared, and he fears the Dark Web. And now, he realizes, the Eighth could be making time for the Dark Web. And then using its inscrutable undetectability to store information and even to travel to other worlds. This idea scares him a lot.
Vellie stealthily prepares to travel back to Oliver and Olivia where he stashed them with the Maker. He must explain this to the children straightaway. Especially Olivia must learn the tragic truth about the role she must play in stopping the Eighth. There is no other way. He is certain of this. Before he heads out, he telepathically texts the Operator:
@Operator: confirm location of Earth children Oliver and Olivia.
@SeerVellie1530: Oliver and Olivia are in the NowHere.
Vellie is confused. He is certain he left the children with the Maker. Of course, Olivia has her own passport, issued by those infernal rabbits. Could she have figured out how to travel back to Arachne and Rick? He double-checks to make sure there wasn’t a glitch:
@Operator: pls. confirm location of Earth children Oliver and Olivia.
@SeerVellie1530: confirmed. children are in the NowHere.
Could Olivia already know what he was going to tell her? It would make his job easier. He must port into the NowHere right away.
----------------------------------------
Vellie and Oliver arrive in front of Rick and Arachne’s encampment at almost the same time. After their fight, Oliver almost decided not to come, and he did sit down in the dirt and play a few minutes of his video game before his conscience got the better of him. Plus, he didn’t want Olivia to be right about him just playing on his Switch instead of making progress toward saving Paul and finding their way home. So, he dusted himself off and reluctantly stalked toward the camp on the horizon.
The tents are impossibly white, gleaming under the twin setting suns. Oliver looks down to see the colour of his own high-tops unrecognizable by comparison. They are streaked with red sand dust and brown dirt from various worlds. He sighs deeply and wets a corner of his blue hoodie sleeve in his mouth, bends to try to repair some of the damage. It’s futile. That’s when he feels a light wind and senses the presence of a being beside him.
Somehow, instinctively, he knows it’s Vellie. He turns to look the Seer in the eyes through the thick coke-bottle plastic of the glasses.
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“We have not got any time for staring at one another,” Vellie says, furrowing his eyebrows at Oliver in extreme displeasure. “Come on. I know where she will be. The ones who commit the act via arachnid always do so by utilizing the feeding troughs.” He raises the index finger of one hand like a pompous professor might. Oliver looks at him, confused.
“…the act? What act?”
“Do not make me explain everything to you,” Vellie says impatiently. “You must know why she has come here. She has decided to fulfil the oracle — quite wisely, I might add. Come along. I cannot think why you are not with her already. It does not matter. I will take you to her.” Oliver shakes his hand free of Vellie’s sweaty palm. He’s sick of being pulled around, but finds himself following Vellie across the threshold into the camp, and along the edge of three or four of the large, octagonal white tents. The doors are staked shut from the inside and there are no windows. Vellie doesn’t appear worried about being discovered. The light wanes considerably as one sun, then the second, dips below the distant horizon. Oliver shivers and pulls the arms of his hoodie down around his fingers. Vellie stops suddenly. He turns to face Oliver.
“There,” says the Seer. He is a flowing tower of robe in the near-pitch-darkness. The orb, still spinning in his lower two hands, emits a steady, pulsing glow. Oliver imagines it as a flashlight to calm the eerie feeling he gets from watching the orb spin. “Look.” Vellie grabs Oliver’s head and points him 90 degrees to his left. “See? There is the trough.” Oliver squints. He can make out the outline of furry legs attached to a twitching and thrashing body. Noises like crunching and munching waft over to his ears on a light desert breeze. He and Vellie walk toward the noises. When they are still a few steps away, Vellie grabs hold of a shoulder of Oliver’s hoodie and pulls him over to one side and down onto the ground.
Oliver lays, military-style, on his belly. He feels the plastic edges of the Switch digging into his abdomen. Vellie lays on his side, the lower two hands never pausing from their work on the orb, which illuminates the area immediately around them. In the pale, strobing glow, Oliver can see the wall of a rough wooden structure about two meters in front of them. The sound of small insects rises from within it. Two dessert beetles hop over the edge and scuttle for their lives away from the spider’s dinner plate, toward where Oliver is lying with his face just above the red dirt. A grasshopper flies up for a second, its wings whirring. Without warning, Arachne spins around and catches the unfortunate bug in her fangs. She rears her head back as she eats. The rest of the bugs seem to shudder in horrified anticipation. A horrendous crunching sound reverberates around inside Oliver’s head. He feels like his brain is being scrambled. Then pulsating light of the orb illuminates a very familiar shape. A single dark, shiny braid; it is there for an instant, then flickering into darkness, then there again in front of him. Unmistakably Olivia’s.
“You can’t let that spider kill my sister!” Oliver whispers desperately to Vellie.
“Shush now, Earth child. This is what the oracle demands. It is both pleasure and pain to witness a sacrifice. Like the acorns, who with their passing create life in oak trees, so too will your sister bring life for your lost friend Paul, and for you, through her own voluntary death. Let it be a lesson to you. It may be the only redeeming act I have yet to witness in any Earth child.” Vellie says this last part condescendingly, but Oliver sees tears of some new expression in the Seer’s eyes. (If Oliver took time to think about it, he would recognize this expression as reverence mixed with pride. Vellie is in awe of Olivia.)
“That’s CRAZY!” Oliver whisper-yells, earning him the familiar look of disapproval.
“Hush, I said. Or we ourselves will become hapless nourishment for this carnivorous beast.”
Oliver watches as Arachne turns her attention back toward the trough, the grasshopper already ancient history. She advances her hairy chelicerae in Olivia’s direction. Oliver hears a slight whimper, and then —
“Arachne! ARACCCHHNEEEE!” A voice calls from one side of the camp. Oliver and Vellie turn their heads sharply up and to the right in unison. It’s Rick. The spider stops her reach toward the terrified girl and looks over in her master’s direction. “Arachne, sweetheart, I need you — ” Rick is approaching at a quick clip. A spider-bridle and reigns are looped over his shoulders, indicating he intends to take Arachne for a ride somewhere. Oliver exhales a sigh of relief as he prepares to lurch forward and grab Olivia, but then something totally strange happens. Rick’s feet slow down. But not just Rick’s feet, everything around them seems to be happening in slow motion. The wind rustles a tent flap in the background and it looks like the white canvas is moving through clear jelly. The two shiny black dessert beetles who managed to escape Arachne’s trough seconds before make their way toward Vellie and Oliver as if in freeze-frame. Oliver sees every tiny motion of each of their six legs (with feet wearing tiny red-bottom high heels, he now notices) like a series of jerks in a bad stop-motion animation film.
He looks over at Vellie to ask what’s happening. Vellie’s features, usually so judgemental or serene, are overtaken by intense stress. A drop of sweat plops onto the parched desert floor from under Vellie’s pointed hat. A lump of something bright glows through the fabric of his robe. Vellie must have put the orb in his pocket. The set of fingers on Vellie’s lower hands is now directed at the scene in front of them, where everything is still happening regular-speed. It’s like Arachne and the trough containing Olivia and other spider food is starkly separate from Rick and everything else. Oliver sees long strands of something translucent weaving through Vellie’s long fingers. The strands form a dome shape around Arachne and her dinner. Vellie is gritting his teeth. Whatever he’s doing must take a lot of effort. Arachne’s fangs wave over her feeding trough until they come to rest on Olivia’s head. Oliver can feel the spider’s hot breath on his face, smelling sickly-sweet, like things recently killed. There is a sniffing sound as Arachne rears her hairy, eight-eyed head back and a whimper as Olivia’s shoulders shake in anticipation. The fangs ascend and then go swoooosshhing through the air toward Olivia’s head —
“STOP!” Oliver screams, and then he says: “NET! Big net with strong wires to hold the spider. BIG NET TO STOP THAT SPIDER!” He is out of control, screaming his description in Arachne’s direction and flailing his arms around as he launches his body desperately toward Olivia. Vellie watches with eyes as wide as his coke-bottle glasses. The veins in his neck are popping out from the strain as he pulls threads of the ether through his fingers. The Seer’s mouth opens. He mouths the word noooo in slow motion as Oliver enters Olivia and Arachne’s timeline, still yelling “NET BIG NET BIG NET TO STOP SPIDER!”
SNAP- SNAP! At first they both think the spider’s jaws have finally crushed Olivia’s skull. Oliver squeezes his eyes shut. He feels vomit rising in his throat. His head is pounding. Then he hears a great thrashing and groaning. Could it be…? He forces his eyelids open and there is Arachne, nearly belly-up, struggling uselessly with the biggest, strongest wire net Oliver could have imagined.
“Ola! Ola! Are you ok?!” Frozen, Olivia stares in mute shock at the trapped spider, and then at Oliver and then back at the spider.
“Oli, did you…?” She begins and is interrupted by a massive wwwhhhoooosssshhh — whump. Vellie has fallen to the ground, midnight-blue robe on dark desert sand. Everything is back in the right timeline again.
“Arachne! My sweet pet! What happened?!” Rick runs over, dropping her harness in alarm. He fishes a knife from the pocket of his khakis and begins to saw at the wires of the net. The spider groans and thrashes.
“I don’t know how it happened.” Oliver says to Olivia in disbelief. “I just did what the Maker taught us. Vellie was making some kind of dome around you and Arachne. I think he wanted her to eat you — ” He looks over to where Vellie fell to demand an explanation about what happened but there is no trace of him anymore.