Once upon a time (quite an old time, at least compared to now), there was a spider. She was not a particularly strong spider, not a particularly fast spider, not a particularly practiced weaver of webs, nor was she notably bad at any of these things either. Still, this spider did have something special about her: she was a dreamer. And like all small things, her dreams were very large. She would dream for hours and sometimes days, shaking off her fantasies and fancies to find that her prey had been and gone, shaking her web half to pieces in the process. It irritated her, but only mildly, even if it did leave her a little hungry. Still, she disliked the work. It took time away from her dreaming.
It was a nice warm day when the trouble started. The spider was waking up one sleepy summer morning when she heard the funny calls from the humans. Most things humans did was funny, but this was funnier than most. They were going into a strange building, almost all of them, filing in one after another. The spider was curious, and her web had just been destroyed again, so she decided to put off her work and investigate.
It was a long trip, for a little spider. But not too long to make. She got there just in time to hear the man in the special outfit talking. He was talking an awful lot, but no one else was talking back – just listening very carefully. The spider thought this was unusual, and so she listened too.
He was talking an awful lot about something he called a “god.” He thought it was very important, and so did the others humans from the look of it. Whatever it was, it seemed to be very complicated to need so much explanation, but the spider was bored and had time and made a game try at it. As far as she could guess, god was very big and very strong, and she wondered how it’d gotten that way.
“Excuse me,” said the spider to the talking man, as the people filed out of the building beneath her, “what does your god eat?”
The man was a little surprised. Most spiders don’t express any sort of theological interest, even something so relatively down-to-earth as theorizing the dietary habits of deities. “It doesn’t need to,” he explained, “but I suspect whatever it feels like.”
“Hmm.” The spider thought it over, legs tapping in thought (spiders have the most marvellous and complex fidgeting of any animal besides the octopus). “But what made it get so big then?”
“Prayers,” said the man, realizing the spider’s motives and looking for a way to excuse himself so he could go have his post-ceremonial drink. “Lots and lots of prayers.”
“What are prayers?”
“You were watching us, yes? We were praying.”
“Oh. Thank you.”
The talking man left to find his drink, and the spider reeled herself back to the roof, where she thought. Prayers must be fine food indeed, to let something grow as big as a god. Perhaps she should try to catch some herself the next time the humans came into the prayer-building. Best to be discreet then; she doubted they’d be happy with her taking any for herself, even if it was just a little, enough for a meal or two, or three. She just wanted to see how good prayer tasted, that was all. Nothing more.
So she built a big fine web. It took her days to prepare, stretching from one corner of the ceiling to another, fine and yet thorough, unseeable from below and strong enough to catch the wriggliest, canniest prayer and wrap it up tightly. Then she waited as the humans filed in again, exhausted and filled with fierce impatience. She watched as they listened, and watched as they murmured, and watched as they left again and her web remained empty. She was tired, she was hungry, and her spinnerets were aching and sore.
“Hey!” she yelled at the talking man, too irritated to care if he knew her plans or not. “Where were your prayers? I couldn’t catch any of them!”
“Prayers are invisible, untouchable,” the talking man told her. “Only gods can feel them, and the people who make them.”
The spider gnashed her mandibles at this. “That’s silly! How do they do it?”
The talking man just laughed and walked away. That was the moment when the spider decided she’d take more than just a few prayers. She’d take them all, then see how much the talking man would laugh at her.
First, though, she had to think up a new way to catch prayers. She puzzled and thought at it for hours, but got nowhere. Her ideas were getting too hot and thick, clouding each other out and clustering up. So she stopped thinking and started working on her web again, doubling and redoubling its strength, mind wandering, dreaming awake. Her ideas floated away to toy with things unconscious, bouncing away from reality…where they stuck. Stuck fast. And with them dangling there, potential cocooned and on display, thought hit again like a wasp-sting.
“Dreams,” said the spider.
It took many hours of aimless, dreaming spinning and uncoiling and repairing, but at last her web was re-completed, laced with hours of meandering daydreams. It was exactly the wrong sort of web – it was inexact, wandering, imprecise, and would snap apart under the weight of even the least determined and most suicidally-inclined fly ever to live. But prayers were invisible, untouchable. How much weight could they have?
She found out when the people came back. The talking man talked, the people murmured, and the web bulged, strained, and snapped. The spider barely had time to catch herself before she fell, and watched helplessly from midair as her web unravelled in front of her eyes, spidery dreams sprinkling across the people below (a few of them had odd flights of fancy concerning aphids and beetles, but otherwise thought little of it).
The spider cursed old spider curses about the big clumsy stupidness of mammals and other such things, and it took her a little while to calm down and think. They were too big, that was the problem. Her dreams were too small, too differently-shaped to net and snare human prayers; it was like trying to scoop up a lake using a net the size of a thimble. She needed human dreams, and well, look who was walking right underneath her….
Talking man’s home was not far away, and she hid under his bed until his breathing slowed and softened. Then she crept out, quietly as only a spider can move (eight silent little legs, quick and soft as kitten feet), and she spun nets of dreams and silk, dreams to catch dreams, silk to hold form. By morning she was exhausted, but she also had several little silk bags hanging from her abdomen crammed full of the talking man’s nighttime visions, and she was able to hitch a ride back on talking man’s coat with him none the wiser.
Making the new web was hard. The human dreams were strange and complex and often blindingly obtuse. If the spider were a human artist, she would have likened it to a potter trying to sculpt a model using limestone. It took her more than three times as long as her first web, and by completion she was sick and tired of it all. And very hungry. But mostly tired; so very, very, very tired that it outweighed even her hunger and frustrated impatience. She fell asleep while waiting for the people to finish entering the building again, before talking man could even begin his speechifying.
The tugs and jerks of movement, of twitching prey woke her. For a moment she thought that another lazy fly had mistakenly blundered into her web – they had delayed its construction for entire hours at a time, pesky nuisances – but it was too strange, too unfamiliar. It was a prayer, wriggling blindly in its snare, invisible but snagged by dreams.
Quick as lightning she dashed to it, trussed it up firmly, and set about draining it dry. It tasted better than liquid moonlight, riper than a cut of prime aged sedimentary rock, finer than atomic dust, and the spider couldn’t drink enough of it. She gulped it down and all her aches and pains and sore tired legs vanished. It felt like she was strong enough to snare eagles, and that… that was just the first. Already her web was tingling, plunking, twitching under the strain of dozens of prayers, wafting up from below, intercepted before they could reach the god.
After that, it was as smooth as dancing (spiders are as elegant as eels on the ballroom floor). The prayers came up fast and went down fast, and the spider grew and grew. She was fat and happy on prayers, and she no longer wondered how the god had gotten so big – she herself was swelling up and up, to the point where she could no longer hide on the ceiling of the prayer-building any longer, not without being seen. She specially reinforced the web, backing it with the power of her stolen prayers, and it grew strong as steel and nearly invisible. The prayers could squirm all they liked; they would remain safe there until the last human left and she could descend from the attic to snack freely, leaving the spider happy and lazy, free to dream all day and feast all night. Each week there were more and more prayers and the prayers themselves were more confused and easily caught, as the humans bemoaned the apparent silence of their god. Prayers for rain for the crops, prayers for the ill to grow well, prayers that the neighbour might slip in dung and fly head over heels in front of the whole village; children’s prayers, elder’s prayers, all had their own savoury, sweet, or sour flavours to the palate spider’s mind and body.
As for the god, it was wondering exactly why the one prayer-place was so silent. It had always been a good village; not overflowing with prayers, but it was not a large community. It resolved to discover this mystery for itself, and it descended down into the place of prayer quietly, without fuss. It was not a showy god, and did not wish to cause unnecessary disturbance. How vexed it was then, when it found itself bound in a web of prayer and dreams!
The spider knew right away, of course. She’d drawn strings of her webs up into the attic, where she could keep a running tally of how many prayers she might expect to suck up that eve. Such a large and strange twisting in it gave her much concern, and she skittered down immediately, a great crawling thing much bigger than any other spider that walked the earth, big as a plate and more.
“Who are you and what are you doing on my web?” she demanded. “You’ll rip it up if you’re not careful, blundering into it like that!” The spider had never met a god before, and had no idea what the strange not-there-but-there thing taking up valuable prayer-space was.
“No-one important,” said the god. It was as curious about this strange thing as she was about it. After all, it had never met a spider quite so large before. “What is your web for?”
“Prayers,” boasted the spider. “They’re invisible, and they’re untouchable, but I can touch them, touch them and eat them! They’ve made me big, just like a god.”
“I see,” said the god, who was a little worried and wanted to keep her talking. The web was very strong, it was rather stuck (not so much as a finger could budge), and though the spider seemed conversational, it fretted that that without distraction she might remember it had damaged her web and grow angry. “That is very clever indeed. How did you touch them then?”
“Dreams,” she said. “The prayers tangle up in them, and then I can suck them dry. They’re the most delicious thing in all the world, even better than mayflies.”
“Come now. That’s impossible,” scoffed the god.
The spider danced a little tantrum. “Are you calling me a liar? I say they’re the most delicious things there ever have been or will be, and I will prove it! Wait awhile, they’re coming in mere minutes – then I’ll show you!” And with that she turned about, ready to skitter back upstairs in a sulk.
“Wait,” said the god, hastily. “Please, can you loosen my bonds? They’re too tight, and I can’t scratch my nose.”
The spider looked doubtfully at it. “Do you even have a nose?” she asked. “Well, no matter. I will loosen one thread. That will let you scratch, and still keep you out of mischief.” So she reached out with her sharp fangs and carefully nipped one silken thread loose, then she turned on her heels and scuttled away.
The dangling god smiled to itself, and when the people walked in it chuckled, and it began to laugh out loud, very quietly, as the desperate, confused prayers began to bob upwards in innumerable quantities and tangled themselves in the web. It could barely move one finger, but when you’re a god, one finger is all that’s needed. It stretched itself as mightily as it could, and soon a prayer landed on its finger and soaked in, like water in sand. It flexed away more strands and reached further, and they soon flocked to it, vanishing softly into its core.
They were indeed good prayers, the finest the god had seen in many a year, and it began to sing with appreciation as it took them, a quiet, happy tune that the humans heard in the very backmost corners of their brains and fell silent at without quite knowing why, happy and at peace. They left the church in good humour and springs in their steps, and that was when the spider came down, confused at the odd music.
“Where are my prayers?” she demanded, staring at the empty web.
“My prayers,” corrected the god, and the spider’s heart sank as she saw it sitting there in midair quite peacefully, free of the strands.
“It was just a few little prayers!” she protested. “What harm did I do?”
“Very little,” said the god. “But a little was enough. Why did you do this?”
“To be big,” said the spider. “To have time to dream, to be strong and not have to fix my web every day and night.”
“You had time to dream on your web in the first place,” said the god. “You are lazy, and I will punish you for the harm you have done, as laziness is no excuse. But as it is small harm, and you are unhappy, I will also reward you.”
The spider did another little fidget dance at this, but before she could so much as protest, it was done. Her webs were wiped from the ceiling, and try as she might she didn’t have the faintest idea of how to remake them; her silk yet flowed, her spinnerettes were whole, but the memories of her great elaborately woven webs were gone.
“Now go,” said the god. “Go and hunt for your food. In the trees, on the ground. Make a nest if you must, but your webs will do your work for you no more, and you will search for your prey on foot. But I promise you this: you will be big, the biggest of them all, and you will remain strong. You will not need your webs.”
And so the spider (who the god named Tarantula) went into the forest, as she was so large now that the humans shrieked at her and tried to strike her. She wove nests in the trees, she wove nests in the dirt, in burrows, and she hunted (although she preferred to wait and bite things as they came near her dens, that did not always work). She was a little sad that she had no time for dreaming. She was a little angry that she had to spend her time hunting.
But she was the biggest one of all the spiders, and her many children too, and for that she was very thankful.