…AS THEE AND ME CONCURRED THE FAT FUNNELSPACE THE CLOT AT CITYWEB CENTRE SEES US CONFLAB…came the unearthly voice in all of their skulls, and the great spider stepped out lightly from the kink in the air and danced towards them, its shining body dwarfing them.
Isaac gave a barking breath, a sharp moan of relief. His mind juddered with the awe and terror the Weaver induced.
“Weaver!” he shouted. “Help us now!” He held out the other communicating helmet to the extraordinary presence.
Andrej had looked up and was shying away in a paroxysm of terror. His eyes bulged with the pressure of his blood and he began to retch behind his mask. He wriggled as fast as he could towards the edge of the roof, a terrible inhuman fear jack-knifing his body away.
Derkhan caught him and held him fast. He ignored her gun, his eyes empty of everything but the vast spider that loomed over him, peering down with slow portentous movements. Derkhan could hold him easily. His decaying muscles flexed and twisted ineffectually. She dragged him back and held him.
Isaac did not look at them. He held out the helmet to the Weaver beseechingly.
“We need you to put this on,” he said. “Put this on now! We can take them all. You said you’d help us…to repair the web…please.”
The rain sputtered against the Weaver’s hard shell. Every second or so, one or two random drops would sizzle violently and evaporate as they struck it. The Weaver kept talking, as it always did, an inaudible murmur that Isaac and Derkhan and Yagharek could not understand.
It reached out with its smooth, human hands, and placed the helmet on its segmented head.
Isaac closed his eyes in brief exhausted relief, then opened them again.
“Keep it on!” he hissed. “Fasten it!”
With fingers that moved as elegantly as a master tailor’s, the spider did so.
…WILL YOU TICKLE AND TRICK…it gibbered…AS THINK-LINGS TRICKLE THROUGH SLOSHING METAL AND MIX IN MIRE MY IRE MY MIRROR MYRIAD BURSTING BUBBLES OF BRAINWAVEFORMS AND WEAVING PLANS ON ON AND ONWARD MY MASTER CRAFTY CRAFTSMAN… and as the Weaver continued to croon with incomprehensible and dreamlike proclamations, Isaac saw the last fastening snap tight under its terrifying jaw, and he snapped on the switches that opened the circuit-valves on Andrej’s helmet, and he pulled the succession of levers that geared up the full processing power of the analytical calculators and the crisis engine, and he stepped back.
Extraordinary currents surged through the machinery assembled before them.
There was a very still moment, when even the rain seemed to pause.
Sparks of various and extraordinary colours sputtered from connections.
A massive arc of power suddenly snapped Andrej’s body absolutely rigid. An unstable corona briefly surrounded him. His face was glazed with astonishment and pain.
Isaac, Derkhan and Yagharek watched him, paralysed.
As the batteries sent great gobs of charged particles racing through the intricate circuit, flows of power and processed orders interacted in complex feedback loops, an infinitely fast drama unravelling on a femtoscopic scale.
The communicator helmet began its task, sucking up the exudations of Andrej’s mind and amplifying them in a stream of thaumaturgons and waveforms. They raced at the speed of light through the circuitry and headed towards the inverted funnel that would blare them silently into the aether.
But they were diverted.
They were processed, read, mathematized by the ordered drumming of tiny valves and switches.
An infinitely small moment later, two more streams of energy burst into the circuitry. First came the emissions from the Weaver, streaming through the helmet it wore. A tiny fraction of a second later, the current from the Construct Council came sparking through the rough cable from the Griss Twist dump, slamming up and down through the streets, through the circuit-valves in a great slew of power and into the circuitry through Andrej’s helmet.
Isaac had seen how the slake-moths slavered and rolled their tongues indiscriminately across the Weaver’s body. He had seen how they had been giddy, but not sated.
The Weaver’s whole body emanated mental waves, he had realized, but they were not like those of other sentient races. The slake-moths lapped eagerly, and drew taste…but no sustenance.
The Weaver thought in a continuous, incomprehensible, rolling stream of awareness. There were no layers to the Weaver’s mind, there was no ego to control the lower functions, no animal cortex to keep the mind grounded. For the Weaver, there were no dreams at night, no hidden messages from the secret corners of the mind, no mental clearout of accrued garbage bespeaking an orderly consciousness. For the Weaver, dreams and consciousness were one. The Weaver dreamed of being conscious and its consciousness was its dream, in an endless unfathomable stew of image and desire and cognition and emotion.
For the slake-moths, it was like the froth on effervescent liquor. It was intoxicating and delightful, but without organizing principle, without substratum. Without substance. These were not dreams that could sustain them.
The extraordinary squall and gust of the Weaver’s consciousness blew down the wires into the sophisticated engines.
Just behind it came the particle torrent from the Construct Council’s brain.
In extreme contrast to the anarchic viral flurry that had spawned it, the Construct Council thought with chill exactitude. Concepts were reduced to a multiplicity of on-off switches, a soulless solipsism that processed information without the complication of arcane desires or passion. A will to existence and aggrandizement, shorn of all psychology, a mind contemplative and infinitely, incidentally cruel.
To the slake-moths it was invisible, thought without subconscious. It was meat stripped of all taste or smell, empty thought-calories inconceivable as nutrition. Like ashes.
The Council’s mind poured into the machine-and there was a moment of fraught activity as commands were sent down the copper connections from the dump, as the Council sought to suck back information and control of the engine. But the circuit-breaker was solid. The flow of particles was one way.
It was assimilated, passing through the analytical engine.
A set of parameters was reached. Complex instructions pattered through the valves.
Within a seventh of a second, a rapid sequence of processing activity had begun.
The machine examined the form of the first input x, Andrej’s mental signature.
Two subsidiary orders rattled down pipes and wiring simultaneously. Model form of input y one said, and the engines mapped the extraordinary mental current from the Weaver; Model form of input z, and they did the same job on the Construct Council’s vast and powerful brainwaves. The analytical engines factored out the scale of the output and concentrated on the paradigms, the shapes.
The two lines of programming coalesced again into a tertiary order: Duplicate waveform of input x with inputs y and z.
The commands were extraordinarily complex. They relied on the advanced calculating machines the Construct Council had provided, and the intricacy of its programme cards.
The mathematico-analytical maps of mentality-even simplified and imperfect, flawed as they inevitably were-became templates. The three were compared.
Andrej’s mind, like any sane human’s, any sane vodyanoi’s or khepri’s or cactacae’s or other sentient being’s, was a constantly convulsing dialectical unity of consciousness and subconsciousness, the battening down and channelling of dreams and desires, the recurring re-creation of the subliminal by the contradictory, the rational-capricious ego. And vice versa. The interaction of levels of consciousness into an unstable and permanently self-renewing whole.