Feeling a little like a straight man, I said, "Mad Dogs?"
"Sure. They aren't Englishmen, and they go out in the Noonday sun."
"I get it."
"They call us Aussies, after the old penal colony back on Earth."
"I get the feeling there's not a lot of love lost there."
She made a dismissive gesture. "Most of the government is at Noon. The bulk of white-collar workers live there, bureaucrats, agencies. Six is more working-class. They say the two arcs are growing apart, politically and culturally. We're already as different as Mirandans and Arielites. Before long we're going to be as distinct as East and West Germans were, hundreds of years ago, before they reunified.
I had no idea what she was talking about, but rather than pipe up with "Germans?" I just nodded my head wisely. That usually works, and it did this time, too, with a little help from a spider the size of a brontosaurus.
The elevator slowed to a stop again, and when our chairs reoriented themselves we could see something large and black in the distance.
"It's a D-9 Motherspinner," Poly said, pointing at it.
"That's the big ones, right? I mean, I hope so. I don't like to think of an animal much bigger than that." She nodded, and we watched it approach our capsule.
It was hard at first to make out just what I was seeing, or to realize how huge it really was. It's always a problem in space, with no references. Here, the reference points I could see were already so outlandish in size that at first it seemed the arachnid was really no larger than a big horse. Then it got closer. Oh, my, an elephant, maybe? Then it got closer again, and the light got a little better. Jesus, at least a brontosaurus.
The captain of our elevator (that still sounds weird to me, like the general of our sidewalk) threw a light on it for us. It didn't help as much as you'd think, because the creature was such a deep, perfect shiny black. Its carapace didn't reflect light so much as it reflected highlights, like chrome trim. I'm sure you could shave by looking at its skin.
"Vacuum-proof, of course," Poly said. "It has some beetle genes in it."
"Right," I said. "Cross a beetle with a battleship, and there you go."
"My father works a D-9," she said, proudly, pointing at something on the bug's back.
"My god!" I said. "That's a man. Is that your father?"
"No, he works on the new Eight spoke, just getting started on that one. And that's not Miss Dixie."
It took me a moment to realize she was talking about her father's D-9 Motherspinner. I was still taken aback by the man riding the eight-legged behemoth. Until that moment I had not known they were piloted.
"Miss Dixie," I muttered.
"All Motherspinners are female," Poly said.
And those who ride 'em, much braver than I, I decided.
The rider was in a pressurized box, like a howdah strapped to the back of an elephant. It was mounted behind the basketball-sized eyes and in front of the giant black sphere of her abdomen. He looked like the operator of a big crane or shovel, and that wasn't too far off the mark. He pulled levers and turned pulleys in a competent, businesslike way, and the spider turned or moved forward.
"The driver doesn't run the legs," Poly told me. "He steers, gets her where she needs to go, then stops her and lets the spinning begin."
The closest I saw in a reference book, much later, was the black widow spider. I don't know if she had a red hourglass under her belly or not, but Poly said she definitely was not a black widow. She was a cross between many web-weaving species, with a lot of made-to-order genes stuck in there to make her do the sort of weaving the engineers wanted: a thousand-mile web anchored only at the center, precisely opposite of what most weaving spiders would naturally do.
"The D-9s don't weave," Poly said. "They sit in one spot and start extruding silk, and smaller spiders grab those and start running with them. She can put out thousands of miles of silk at one sitting. He's probably positioning her for that right now."
The spider started moving, off our rail and to one side. The driver waved at us as he went by, and then the elevator started moving again. I got a last glimpse of the thousands of spinnerets on her underbelly. Behind her, very close to the cable itself, was what looked like a tide of black ink.
"D-3s," Poly told me. With horror, I realized the tide was a million "small" spiders, no bigger than a collie dog.
I'm not overly fond of any animal without fur. I don't like spiders at all. I listened with half an ear as Poly told me more than I wanted to know about the sex life, diet, pedigree, care of, and general all-around good social standing of ninety-ton arachnids. When she was a girl, she used to go to the "stables" and her father let her hand-feed Miss Dixie. A vision straight out of Dante, for my money. What did she feed the beast? Sugar cubes? Dead cattle? Giant house-flies? I didn't ask. Then something she said made me sit up straight.
"Here, now," I said. "You say this spider was here to patch up the spoke? You're talking about the spoke that my own very precious body is currently dangling from? The spoke I was led to believe was strong enough to support three Noon Arcs if it had to? This is the spoke that spider is fixing?"
She laughed, but I was only partly in jest. Who wants to be dangling at the end of a rope over the Grand Canyon like The Perils of Pauline and then see the rope start to fray? Not me.
"I didn't say patching up. I said 'strengthening.' One reason it could support three times what it's called on to support is that we keep alert and ahead of any deterioration. Computers figure it out, naturally. The thing is, the stresses on the web are greater during construction than they will be when the rim is complete. Then it'll settle into a state of constant, easy-to-predict stress. We'll need only about one percent of the spiders we use today."
Maybe so, I thought, but it struck me that moving into this damn thing before it was finished might not be such a hot idea. I mean, would you move a chair and a television into an apartment where they were still blasting the kitchen and bedroom out of rock?
And another odd thought. What would happen to those other ninety-nine spiders when the wheel was complete? If their drivers were sentimental enough to name the monsters, would they be eager to see them tossed on a scrap heap? And don't forget about the animal-rights lunatics. Scarcely a flea can be poisoned in Luna without triggering a march. Think what a lobby these critters would have.
Not to worry. I later learned the surviving D-9s (whose life span was not known) would be moved to the Ariel II project.
I was about to make my move on Poly when she headed me off at the pass.
"I was going up to the casino for a while," she said. "Would you like to go with me?"
No, but I'd like to... strike that. I gave her a rueful smile.
"One thing my daddy taught me well," I said. "Never gamble. And I never do."
"I was thinking of going to one of the card tables, play a little five-card draw."
"Poker?" I said. "Why didn't you say so? Lead the way."
I lost a small amount, and by the fifth hand I realized she was working with one of the other players. He looked to be about her age, and had a bad habit of tinkering with his ring that a really alert house would have quickly spotted. But there was no house here, except for the two percent they automatically extracted from each pot: table rental, basically. Few casinos make much money from the card tables. Apparently once you were seated and had your chips in front of you, the house didn't care if you telegraphed your intentions to your partner by farting in Morse code, so long as the other players didn't object. None of the other four had any idea what was going on.