PART III: WEBBERS

When the first webbers emerged, Renata sat transfixed.

There was sharp debate within the CU whether the webbers were sentient. Were they just oversized arachnoids with bulky bodies and tennis-ball brains? Or were they an intelligent species with language, art, math, and culture? The mother cable was impressive, but even non-sentient creatures could still accomplish amazing feats. Just look at orb weavers and termite mounds. Web-spinning on its own was not proof of smarts, much less consciousness.

They needed to capture the webbers in the act of communicating. Yet what would such communication look like in an animal that lacked eyes, ears, and even noses? Renata thought she knew the answer: vibrations. The webbers felt their way through the world.

When the webbers emerged, each member of the CU was hyper-focused on a different aspect: Trevor with the air-sacs, Madison with the biomechanics, Hassani with the cave atmospherics, and MeiWei with the big picture—what were the Webbers setting out to do? Renata zeroed in on the webbers' feet.

The rift was the perfect experimental laboratory. Sealed off in their self-contained bubbles, the webbers could not directly exchange visual, auditory, or chemical. Any electromagnetic waves would have been picked up by the froggers, so those could be ruled out as well. Therefore, for information to pass between the webbers, it would have to flow along the silk cables.

Right from the start, the coordination between the five riftonauts was apparent. The first four webbers traversed from the cross-cord to the mother cable without event. But the last one shot out in a wild spin. The tether line wrapped around its air-sac, causing it to bulge out unevenly. With half of its legs pinned, the webber dangled helplessly, unable to scale the tether up to the cross cable.

For a few seconds, the webbers on the mother cable did not react. Then, as if on cue, they sprang into motion. One webber scuttled out on the cross-cable to help stabilize the tether while another extruded a fresh glob of silk from its spinnerets and attached it to the end of its own tether, which it had coiled up. Using a hind leg attachment like a sling-arm, it projected the thread at the swinging bubble. It missed on the first try but stuck it on the second. It reeled it in to the mother cable where the other webbers carefully cut away the snarls.

While MeiWei was impressed, she reasoned that the response could have been instinctual. Group behaviors were hard-wired into many species. But Renata had a different theory. She returned to that moment of stillness. If the riftonauts had already known how to respond, then how come they had hesitated, wasting precious seconds that could have proven deadly?

She zoomed in the on the feet, separating each into its own tile, grouped according to webber. While most were still—the cluster of spikes on the hind legs barely moving at all—occasionally the thin nails, which were suggestively shaped like guitar picks, would flutter at hummingbird speed against a silk cord, all but invisible to the naked eye. Fortunately, the hundred-eyed frog-swarm, using frame-rate staggering, could slice time down to the millisecond. The motions were rapid and rhythmic, forming non-repeating sequences of varying lengths.

Next, Renata examined the cords between feet. Was there a correlation? Yes! For every strummer there was at least one listener with the pad of its foot pressed against the same cord. Oddly, the interchange appeared to take place between pairs of feet rather than at the webber level. Each right-left pair operated independently from the others. Perhaps this had something to do with their modular brain structure? One webber—the leader perhaps?—did slightly more of the strumming, but the others were highly active as well.

Holy mother of God, Renata thought. They were talking!