So. There’s this thing you need to know about me: I’ve got arachnophobia. I’ve got it bad.
That means I dislike spiders. A lot. So much that if one so much as touches me, I literally swoon—knees weaken too much to support me. I begin sweating like a horse after running the quarter mile, and my pulse simultaneously accelerates and weakens. If I’m not sitting already, I sit down hard. When I was a child, my family once rented a summer cottage by the sea, where the tussock grasses that fringed the beach and the tangy, salty air were replete with delicious creeping, crawling, or flying spider food. For that whole summer, I wore a bike helmet continuously to protect my head from those times when I saw something with eight legs and hit the ground hard.
Let me be clear: Insects don’t bother me. Neither do centipedes nor millipedes nor crayfish nor crabs nor cephalopods. Only spiders. Look: it’s a phobia. It’s not supposed to be rational.
To be even clearer, it’s also not xenophobia. When I joined the diplomatic corps, I did so with full knowledge I was going to meet myriad strange creatures. Lots of hairless-ape kin with oddly shaped skulls, since upright bilateral symmetry works well evolutionarily. Lots of furry critters—lots!—with up to six legs. The Centaurids didn’t come from anywhere near the constellation Centaurus, but they had four, count ’em four, legs and two arms. There were lots of chitinous insectoids too; if God loved beetles and ants on Earth, he clearly adored them in the universe writ large. And, of course, there were cephalopods with varying numbers of tentacles, because evolution occasionally goes to work drunk. No spiders thus far, thankfully.
I met all of these species in basic training, in the flesh or in virtch, and unlike some of my less open-minded colleagues, I not only survived to tell the tale—I flourished. If anything, I turned out to be a xenophile. Give me a little time to bone up on the customs of a species, and with a little help from my implant, I was speaking their lingo like a long-lost native cousin, assuming human vocal chords could shape the right sounds. If not, my voder could translate.
During one of my annual assessments, the shrink made the mistake of leaving his computer logged in while he went to deal with some emergency. I took the opportunity to review her private notes on my psych profile; the short version is that I was “enthusiastically phlegmatic”, far out on the thin end of the bell curve in terms of enthusiasm for meeting new peoples and calm levelheadedness while doing so. Nowhere did it mention my dark secret.
My Achilles heel.
My arachnophobia.
Cue the ominous music. (From my implant. I use Mussorgsky’s Night on Bald Mountain for calls from my boss. Yes, I have retro taste in music.)
“Esperanza! Always a pleasure. What new challenge do you have for me?”
I could tell her stress level from how she skipped the pleasantries and undiplomatically jumped right to business. “Chandra, we need you now. How fast can you pack your bags?”
Not an unexpected summons; they knew I was good, I knew I was good, and I kept a go bag always packed and ready in case of emergencies. A quick check showed nothing on my calendar today, and nothing coming up that couldn’t be postponed for a few weeks.
“I can leave now. What’s up?”
“The Rendi ambassador will only say that it’s important. New species, potentially aggressive—a handle with kid gloves sitch. Briefing to be provided once you’re aboard.” An icon lit up in my implant. Travel orders.
“That’s not good.” The Rendi were our best frenemies. Felids, and if you petted them just right, they purred and everyone felt better. But they had a felid’s love of lying in wait and pouncing without warning, unworried about who got clawed by mistake. They rarely killed anyone; it was more a genetic-level predator reflex they sometimes had difficulty overcoming. In person, you could generally tell you were in trouble if their long tail started lashing, though the more skilled negotiators could repress the motion to conceal their thoughts, and could wag on demand to make you think they were up to something. Recorded transmissions were trickier to parse, since they were generally rehearsed and edited.
“The ambassador assures me it’s nothing we—nothing you—can’t handle.”
“Imagine my relief.”
“Yeah. Anyway, I’ve got to go. I’ve got a morning full of the day’s crises to deal with on top of this one. You’ll do fine,” she added. “I’m not getting any disaster vibes from the Rendi.”
Superficially reassuring, but see above re. Rendi dissimulation. “Will do.” I checked the itinerary, set my implant to rebook various minor commitments scheduled during the time I’d be away, hit the bathroom, then grabbed my bag and headed out the door.
Thirty minutes later, I was aboard the Painted Lady, a fast Navy frigate that looked from the shuttle like it could punch hard and fast before being forced to flee. Reassuring, if one didn’t dwell too long on the implications of using heavily armed vessels in diplomacy. Captain Hennesey, a tall, thin redhead with close-cropped hair and a severe expression, welcomed me aboard personally, blipped me the location of my bunk, and left me to deal. She’d clearly read my service record, and knew this wasn’t my first cotillion.
We were halfway to our jump point before the briefing reached me. The Araneae were arachnids. I behaved like the trained professional I was. That is, I sank to my knees and began weeping. My bunkmates, both marines, exchanged knowing glances. Weeping became wailing, and their glances grew alarmed. Wailing become language that was undiplomatic in the extreme, and my bunkmates relaxed, having repeatedly heard far worse and learned that it was a sign that all was well. (When marines stop cursing, that’s when you need to worry.)
That’s all I remember. At some point thereafter, someone must have sedated me, since I woke up in Sick Bay, strapped to a bed.
“Feeling better?”
Chao, my implant suggested. “Yes, Dr. Chao. Much better.”
His eyes narrowed. “You’re sure?”
I nodded, head bobbling side to side, as I didn’t trust myself to try an overt lie.
“Very well.” He pressed a pill container into my hand and closed my fingers around it. He began removing the restraints. “A maximum of one pill every six hours, only as necessary. Better if you never take one again; acceptable if you take them only when you really need them.
I nodded, pocketed the pills, and did what any sane man would have done in my position. The Navy being nothing if not efficient, they retrieved my escape pod about 15 minutes later, promptly changed the door code for the pod bay, and sat me down with Captain Hennessey for a stern lecture that started with the threat of brigging me and escalated from there to include anatomically unlikely forms of chastisement. Before you ask: Yes, they changed the airlock codes too. The Navy generally doesn’t put idiots in charge of ships with enough firepower to vaporize a small moon.
Plan B was a hail Mary pass, also known as accepting the inevitable. I began studying spiders of all sorts from a safe distance, in VR. Knowing that I was seeing pretty, if creepy, pictures made them tolerable, so long as I avoided videos. At virtual arms length, I began watching them with increasing proximity, and began, reluctantly, to appreciate some of their sinister beauty. I liked peacock spiders so much that I risked a video. Good call. Something about the way the males waggled their ass to attract a mate cracked me right up. Sexual behavior is hilarious for pretty much any species, and the more intimidating the species, the funnier the incongruity.
A week into our flight, I swallowed of couple of Chao’s pills and touched a spider virtually, its bristly hairs raising goosebumps all along my neck and arms. Then, in a spasm of courage, I let it touch me back. I’m not going to lie; the next thing I recall, I was scrabbling at the airlock, trying to crack the door code. Two crew passed me by, smirking and pausing only long enough to raise their hands to their cheeks and waggle eight fingers at me before leaving.
I intensified my daily meditation, with an emphasis on clearing my mind of anything vaguely arachnid. It didn’t help. VR was one thing, but reality would be far different.
Nonetheless, progress was made. Proof that my labors were succeeding came when I sat down with the bridge crew in the officer’s mess. Any ship that’s been in use for a significant time acquires stowaways, usually insects in the galley or roaches in the head. Where there are insects, there are spiders. At dinner one night, an enormous spider—wider than a fingernail—descended on an invisible thread, and landed on the back of my hand. I neither screamed nor swooned nor stabbed it. Instead, I took my butter knife (no steak knife for the vegetarian) and gently flicked it away from me. It struck the wall, clung, and then rapidly ascended, disappearing into an air duct. Hennessey’s eyebrow raised, then she nodded, satisfied.
As my training intensified, I became capable of voluntarily touching a spider without pharmacological aid. I lived and breathed spiders. I began seeing spiders everywhere. I dreamed of spiders, waking with a gasp and sweat staining my sheets. By the time we reached Aranea, I was as ready as I was ever going to be. Aranea station, which we would not go aboard, resembled an enormous funnel web, its threads crawling with giant spacesuited spiders, their visors gleaming in the blue sun’s harsh light. I broke a sweat, but neither recoiled nor fainted.
Captain Hennessey brought me to stand outside the meeting room by the airlock where the Aranean ambassador would enter the ship, then stood back, against the wall. I dry-swallowed one of my sedatives, then accompanied the Marine honor guard to the airlock to await our visitor. The airlock chimed, and a marine spun the wheel to undog the hatch. I took a deep breath, held it, resisted the urge to step backwards into the Captain, and forced myself to relax.
The hatch opened, and the Rendi ambassador entered, tail twitching. Not knowing this particular Rendi, I withheld judgment, but narrowed my eyes. The spider ambassador followed, and mirabile dictu, I didn’t turn and run, though I noticed the second marine, who’d moved to stand by my shoulder, relaxing visibly. I even managed a smile, though without showing teeth—a hostile gesture in many alien cultures—as it began removing its helmet. My heart rate accelerated as the suit hissed and cracked open like a lobster at a Michelin-rated restaurant and it stepped gracefully out of its suit, eight tarsi clicking an ominous staccato upon the deck. The organs that forced air through its spiracles hissed quietly, just audible above the omnipresent whoosh of the ship’s ventilation system. I took another long, slow breath as it raised its head, chelicerae widening as it turned towards me. Eight eyes rose to meet my two.
And the Aranean ambassador gave what was clearly a thin shriek of horror, air whoosing from its spiracles in a vast asynchronous gasp, and rolled onto its back. Where it lay, feet kicking feebly in the air.
I glanced at the marine. A large drop of sweat rolled down his forehead, across the bridge of his nose, and down his cheek.
It would have been undignified to laugh, and possibly a mortal insult, so I bit my lip and went to help the ambassador back onto its feet. Spiders can’t close their eyes, but once it was standing again, its eyes met mine. With clear trepidation, it held out a trembling forelimb, and I reached out and grasped it gently in my hand.
I’d had worse starts to a first contact.
This story previously appeared in Jayhenge Press.
Edited by E. S. Foster.
Geoff (he/him) works as a scientific editor, specializing in helping scientists who have English as their second language publish their research. He’s the author of the popular Effective Onscreen Editing and Write Faster With Your Word Processor. He also writes fiction in his spare time, and has sold 77 stories thus far. Visit him online at www.geoff-hart.com.