“Hurt yourself,” he warned.
But she was already curled up, asleep. He watched her for a while, wondering why she had tried such a foolish thing as crawling into the womb. He wondered, too, where Wissa had come from. It did not occur to him that Belina could be responsible for that. She was a puppet, after all, and not a puppet master.
In time, he went to sleep.
When he began to snore, Belina’s eyes opened, fresh and observant. For a long time, she watched him, loathing him. But there was nothing she could do about him. Yet. Move cautiously, she told herself, and soon you’ll be able to jam those shears clear through the bastard’s windpipe.
She slept unsoundly.
They drove farther the following day than they had gone in any single stretch in quite some time. The winds had grown fierce, but the idiot still managed to keep the truck near the roadbed where, when the air cushion blasted the snow aside, it could find a good beater surface to keep itself aloft. The snow had given up the form of flakes in favor of gritty, rock-hard granules. The minuscule pellets rang off the metal hide of the vehicle, hissed on the windscreen as they drove into the storm.
When Earth had set out to beautify and modernize the world, there had been no need to conserve money. The old economic system was dead. There were so few left behind after the Emigration that anyone could have anything that he wanted. For some, this was not enough. They were the workers and the visionaries who were only satisfied when they saw their dreams taking form before them. It was these several thousand who reshaped a world, and the waste of putting a superhighway through hundreds of miles of barren land did not occur to them. It was the completed project itself, not what it would accomplish, that made the effort worth their time and lives. And when they were feeling defensive, they would say, yes, well, perhaps it is, not a necessary highway today, but in the future, when the millions return from the stars, we’ll all be thankful for it. Then it will be a highway of need and not just a work of magnificence.
Of course, the millions never returned. But the magnificence remained, and that would have pleased everyone who had a hand in laying the smooth stretch of road.
Late in the afternoon they pulled into one of the widely scattered fueling stops, identical to the one where they had encountered the stranger in the long cargo van. If Sebastian remembered how he had broken Belina’s neck with one quick twist of his hands, he did not show it. He seemed happy and pleased with himself at his continuing skill behind the wheel of the truck.
“Eat,” he told Belina.
She came with him, walking in the path he broke to the front door of the automat. She thought of running, sure that the snow would hide her from him. But that was death, and it was Sebastian who was slated for death, not Belina, not her.
It was in the automat, then, that she found something that she could use to force the idiot to do her bidding. It was something she should have known about before, because he had mentioned it. But so much that he said struck her as meaningless that she had not attached any importance to the things. Spiders.
Spiders.
Although the fueling station automat was warm and tolerably clean, portions of its robotic maintenance system
seemed to have gone dead. There was one corner where dust had gathered and where some mold had sprouted on the plastic wall paneling. Some of the automat doors delivered food while others were empty. And when the idiot pulled open a panel that was supposed to conceal apple pie, he withdrew half a spider’s web that had been woven in the cubbyhole beyond.
A huge, brown spider fell onto his tray, directly in the center of a sandwich he had taken farther up the line.
It was inconceivable that such an enormous spider, fully as large as Sebastian’s thumb, could be indigenous to this place where snow was common nine months of the year and where spring hardly came before it went. More than likely it had been brought up with the construction materials or with supplies for the automat doors. It might have been the hundredth-generation descendant of another brown spider transplanted from warmer regions many years before. Its origin hardly mattered, as far as Bitty Belina was concerned. What mattered was its effect upon Sebastian, whether it was a foreign spider or a domestic one.