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When Rorie awoke that morning, she knew it was going to be an exceptional day. In her experience, days that begun exceptionally tended to continue and climax in the same manner, and certainly, this October the thirty-first had started in a way nobody would soon forget.
The screaming began before first-light and continued until her mother, hoarse and exhausted from the exertion, fled the family home in her nightgown. Her father followed suite, stopping only to retch a citrine mixture of phlegm, bile and water. He raced out after his wife, throwing off his undershirt and clawing violently at his skin. They slammed the door shut behind them and locked it, leaving passers by to wonder at why Neo and Trinity were half-naked on the catwalk. Another of their kinky love games gone awry? Trinity was certain the neighbors would say so.
Inside, the spiders homed to the vomit as their natal feast, though Rorie puzzled over this. She noted the odd behavior in her log. Fascinating! she scrawled emphatically, underlining it twice. Absolutely brilliant!
She was in raptures. There were hundreds, or even hundreds of hundreds of baby spiders to collect, catalogue and study. Perhaps for obvious reasons, many had cumulated in the warm folds of the family beds. Rorie commenced work by shaking out her sheets and blankets, pausing every now and then to pick another specimen from her clothing or her hair.
(In a not necessarily unconnected event, Rorie had dreamed of being kidnapped by a masked assailant who brutally stripped her of her clothes, strapped her down and tickled her to madness with the tip of a raven feather. She awoke laughing and crying all at once, her shrieks of erotic torment mingling with the chorus of terror that had already begun in her parents' bedroom.)
Ineed, The Daughter of The One was a queer bird by all conventional measures. At the fanciful age of seventeen she called herself a biologist, which in Zion was rare enough to be considered eccentric (or possibly evil, depending on whom you asked). If she were foolish enough to use the word entomologist, the reaction would be even worse. 'I study bugs,' she'd finally concede, usually to a council member's daft mistress or deaf mother at a temple gathering. 'You know… bugs?'
The reaction was as priceless as it was predictable. Aurora, the much celebrated daughter of the great war heroes Neo and Trinity wanted to study bugs for a living. And the angels wept! All of humanity was doomed! (And a whole bunch of other nonsense that Rorie complained about in her diary nightly.)
"Well, we've really done it this time," she admitted, rueful as she addressed the infestation at large. "Mom's gonna kill me."
The most critical question was where all the spiders had come from. This was not one of her experiments gone wrong (although Rorie was certain that she'd be blamed for everything). If she weren't so stubbornly logical in her science, she would have used the term paranormal.
At least, maternal origin was clear enough. Rorie kept a large Golden Orb sewer spider named Pyro as a pet, and that morning she'd found her shivering in her cage, belly torn open and blood everywhere. (Rorie wrote in her notebook: method of delivery – explosion?) It was perplexing when one considered that spiders were known to lay eggs. And what of the father? Rorie had never even seen a male Golden Orb.
"Pyro's been naughty," was Knight's highly scientific analysis of the situation. "Your pet has more of a sex life than you do. Write that down in your notebook."
But he was an idiot. She couldn't even begin to tell him how much of an idiot he was. With an aggression that was half-serious, she mussed the back of his blonde, curly head and formed a fist in his hair. He was sitting at her kitchen table and she was standing behind his chair, so that when he leaned his head back his face was upside down. His eyes - amber colored with flecks of gold – stared up at her with amused suspicion. She liked his eyes, but something about his expression was insufferable. She let him go.
They were childhood playmates and adolescent confidantes, she and Knight. It was an improbable friendship that nobody could explain, given that he was an orphan of the matrix and a full four years older than her. Her parents had brought him back from the fields a decade ago, and since then he'd become something of a protégé to Trinity, wowing the Academy with record-setting test scores and now serving his fourth year as an officer on the Neb. Rorie still considered him her best friend, despite the fact that recently, they had reached a point in the relationship where they didn't quite know what to do with each other.
Sometimes, Rorie feared that they were growing apart. Perhaps, she worried, they were just too different to stay close. He was gregarious and whimsical, which made her bookish and tiresome– though Knight laughed at her when she said so. Of course you are! he'd exclaim joyously, as if he hadn't been listening to her at all and only guessed that she'd given herself a compliment. But then he'd add, You're also boring!
And what could she say to that? She found herself furious with him that he couldn't be serious. But whenever she tried to call him on it she ended up sounding like a fool, picking a fight over nothing. It wasn't nothing. There was something between them, she knew it was there, and the imminent confrontation (whatever it was to be about, for she hadn't yet decided on the source of the tension) bothered her like an itch that she couldn't scratch.
Knight was helping her collect spiders into laboratory glassware, coffee cups and condiment jars when he paused and said, "Your mom's talking about selling the cave and moving to the east arc."
"Great. An even snobbier neighborhood."
"She's also talking about taking a trip to the dock for a plasma gun."
"You can't kill spiders with a plasma gun."
"No, the plasma gun is to kill you. I'm telling you, Trin is mad."
Knight liked to use her mother's shortened name, and he liked even more to know when she was in certain moods. Rorie chalked it up to his way of assuring his place in the family, of reminding everyone that he belonged, though the insecurity was utterly misguided. Everyone knew Trinity adored him like a son. Often, Rorie felt he belonged in this family more than she did.
"She's scared of spiders, did you know that?" he asked. "Terrified of them. She saw one on the Neb once and she was so freaked out she asked me to kill it with the blowtorch. Like, stepping on it wasn't enough. It had to fry."
"Naturally, it never occurred to either of you that I might want to study it." Of course, the complaint sounded ridiculous given that her home was now overrun with specimens. Knight seemed to be thinking the same thing, and shrugged it off.
"One of the guys paid me five and a half to eat it. It was pretty good, actually. Crunchy. Maybe I've discovered a new delicacy."
"It's already a Zionist delicacy. They sell cooked insects at the bazaar all the time. Beetle, spider, cicada, roach, centipede. They're high in protein, vitamins, niacin and riboflavin…"
He was making a face, so she stopped talking. It was that look of smiling curiosity again. He didn't want a biochemistry lecture. She sounded silly.
Rorie looked away to hide irritation. This is how it was with them lately. The conversation never flowed smoothly, it was all jumps and gaps and sharp edges. She wasn't imagining it - he'd changed. She didn't understand him.
When Knight spoke again he was perfectly pleasant. "It's Halloween," he said. "You're still coming to the play, right?"
"Oh, is that tonight?" she was teasing now, determined not to let him see how frustrated she was. "I forgot."
"Nervous?"
"Shouldn't I be asking you that? You're the one that's going to be on the stage in front of hundreds of people, wearing almost nothing."
"I meant are you nervous about losing that Rocky Horror virginity? Are you ready to the thrilled, chilled and fulfilled?"
She didn't know what to say. Knight's Halloween tradition of dressing in women's clothing and singing rock 'n roll show-tunes fell somewhere in the great social divide between the free-born and those from the fields. From the little she understood of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, a cast of actors stood in front of a movie screen and acted out the film while it was playing. The plot was a kinky parody of the traditional horror genre, amok with dancing, singing, sex and gore. The audience was supposed to dress in costumes as their favorite character, and heckling was encouraged. Diehard fans recited the script word for word and brought props to enhance the experience.
Rorie said honestly, "I don't know. I don't think it's my kind of scene."
"You'll love it. I promise you you'll love it. Our cast this year is great. Well, I'm the best, of course, but not everyone can be held to the same standards of comedic genius."
She rolled her eyes and made sure he saw it. "As I recall, last year you broke your heel and had to be rushed to the hospital."
"One must suffer for one's art. Now I'm a legend. People are coming just to see if I fall again."
Rorie couldn't argue with that. Academy hallways and community billboards were filled with advertisements for the Show, giving Knight top billing as the cross-dressing bisexual transvestite turned mad-scientist, Dr. Frank N. Furter:
Like last year, come see him sing and dance!
Like last year, come see his pretty hair shine and bounce!
Like last year, come see his right ankle snap like a twig!
Give yourself over to absolute pleasure!
Rorie's memory of the night her friend made theatrical history was a little different than most. She hadn't been there, but recalled vividly that the household was woken up near one in the morning with a phone call. Knight was hurt and her mother was going to the emergency room to see if he was alright. Rorie decided to go with her. What the two women found when they arrived was a sight neither would ever forget. Knight was lying on a gurney, one of his legs in a cast, the other sausaged in fishnet hosiery. He wore a corset, black panties, lipstick and eyeliner – but not even cakes of makeup could hide the mortified expression on his face. "Trinity!" he gasped, and yanked so hard at the blankets underneath in an attempt to cover himself that he rolled right off the table and onto the floor. At this point, Trinity deadpanned to the doctor, "How many operations would it take to change him back into a man? Ball park figure."
But unlike her daughter, Trinity had required no explanation of the Rocky Horror subculture. As it so happened, long ago in the matrix she'd been a fan herself. Recently, she'd even taken to helping Knight with his lines. "I grow weary of this world!" she'd exclaim in a comically exaggerated Hungarian accent. "When shall we return to Transylvania?"
Needless to say, Trinity was also coming to the Show that night and Rorie planned to sit as far away from her as possible.
"I could kill you for inviting my mother," Rorie said for what must have been the tenth time in the span of a few weeks. They had finished hunting for spiders in the kitchen and had moved to her bedroom. "She's sure to embarrass me."
"Are you kidding? You have the coolest mom in the city."
"Not everyone shares your idol-like worship of her, Knight." She wasn't looking at him, but searching her dresser for spiders. "How would you feel if I invited your mom to everything?"
He didn't answer, and Rorie instantly regretted the question. In ten years, she'd never heard Knight so much as mention the woman that he'd call his mother. It wasn't for her to bring it up. Another misstep. What was it with her lately? Subconsciously, was she trying to goad him?
Angry with herself, Rorie yanked open a dresser drawer a little too aggressively. She screamed. In the center of a pile of her underthings – bras, panties and slips, hundreds of spiders had made some kind of nest. They swarmed out and away from the light, disappearing into the inner working of her furniture. By the time Knight had come over to see what had startled her, every single one had vanished.
