Sixteen spiders of burnished gold; sixteen spiders, live and real. Two hundred fifty-six scurry-legs, thirty-two clicking mandibles.
Eight hundred shining webs, waiting for harvest.
No flies, no carrion; live spiders, like trapdoor spiders, learning to burrow into soft earth, waiting; robot spiders, retrieving meals, feeding their living brethren, dancing into artificial sun, raising arms, fed by sun-like rays. Breezes; no breeze can tear these webs.
Sundown; odd spider circadians; odd music, made not of pitch, but vibration. Live spiders perk; golden spiders anticipate.
Golden spiders, gears working beneath geary thoraxes, bodies sensing the dips of the great altered clypsedra. The clypsedra, looming wide and tall and sideways and grand, its odd works banging into each other in fourfold time and then four over four and then in offbeats, a torrent of ginger wine rushing through its works all the while.
Sixteen auric spinarettes play out lines of thrillingly nectareus golden thread; thread's seized, caught by one hundred twenty-eight legs. Pulled.
What lies between mazurka and do-si-do? This; this reeling hoedown of clinking metal and deft-scrabbling chitin, no tunes but the resonance of that ancient and unstately water clock. They pull and turn, pull and twist, pull and double and redouble and pass and re-pass; they make webs.
No two webs alike, no hundred webs anything but subtly not-the-same, and each web holds a silent beating eight-legged thought, each thought a different motion in the long spider tale, as long in the telling as the many planets and suns spider have known, before they were earthbound.
Human skulls feel spider thoughts but vaguely, just as spiders feel only the reverbations, not the meaning or tune, of human song. They are old thoughts, they are slow thoughts; yet they are sprightly, thin and cool, then galvanic on the tongue, and lastly thrumming in the stomach, easily satisfying (and this is the part which requires caution) the desire for food, without supplanting the need. Prized are these webs; joy at the harvest.
And then the clypsedra, its profound flaw causing its works once again to jam, is stopped for a time; until, at least, tomorrow. The spiders cannot know when this will happen, perhaps cannot even know that this happens every day; for thousand-year thoughts, spoken through the birthing of children of children of children, days are very hard to parse. Yet the web is somehow complete, as if these spiders knew the dance better than its begetter.
Spider things, insensate things; and still, sun-thing falls, and one hundred twenty-eight eyes glint with oddly unison, curiously hungry satisfaction.