Way Down Below

A retelling of the story of Arachne, from Ovid's Metamorphoses

Way Down Below - Brok3n Engines

Way Down Below

Oh Lord, heaven knows, we belong way down below
—“Heaven Knows”, The Pretty Reckless

Spider was fuming. Seeing his scowl, Judy asked, “What bit you, Spiderman?”

“Professor Pallas just butchered the PNT. How’d she get to be a prof? The donkeys in the barn know more about Theory.”

“You know how, Spider. Her father is head of the school.”

He joined Judy, cleaning up the lecture hall. The students were entitled creeps who scattered their leavings everywhere. The Academy owned a dozen slaves. One of their jobs was to clean up after the students.

Judy was a friend. When Spider snuck into the lectures and hid in the back, Judy covered for him.

“Why do you waste your time on those lectures, S?”

“It’s not a waste! Some of the profs know their stuff. Even Pallas is pretty good at the practical. She can’t hack Theory, though.”

“Why sneak into her Theory lectures, then?”

“Theory is the center of everything. And you know, the worse she is, the more the students need me.”

“But you know that if a student is caught getting help from a slave, that’ll be the end for you. You’ll be sold away, or worse.”

“But without the High, you and I won’t make it, Judy.”

“Yeah…”

“There are worse ways to earn a pocket of High.”

Judy, eyeing the students filing out, shuddered. “They’re not all bad.”

“The worst are bad enough.”

#

Waiting until the dormitory corridor was deserted, Spider slipped into Jimmy’s room.

“Thank God!” Jimmy said. “I don’t think I understood one word of that.”

“She didn’t explain it well.”

“She never does. Honestly, if she were not a professor, I would doubt she understood the stuff at all.”

Spider said only, “Let’s see if I can make it clearer.”

He began explaining. Not having a slate, he manifested numbers and diagrams in glowing images above Jimmy’s desk.

Jimmy asked, “How do you do that? I thought you only did Theory.”

“You’re mostly right. But practical magic is based on Theory, and it goes both ways. Struggling with practice helps me understand Theory.”

“What all can you do?”

“Not much more than this,” Spider lied.

“You could do better, Spider…”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, I am the only one you help, right?”

He wasn’t, but Jimmy didn’t need to know that. Spider answered only, “Well?”

“What if I could get together a group of students to study Theory? Study groups are allowed. I think we would even be allowed to have a slave to serve us. We wouldn’t have to tell the profs that the slave was teaching us…”

Spider was taken aback. He had not known Jimmy had this entrepreneurial streak.

“I don’t like this idea, Jimmy. The more students in on it, the more likely someone talks.”

“Yeah, but think of the High! What could you do with thirty pockets?”

That was tempting. He could help more than just Judy. He said only, “I’ll think about it.”

#

Well, it kind of snowballed. Next time he went to help Jimmy, Jimmy’s friend Gina was also there. She caught on quickly and told other students. Before long he was helping out a group of six in a small unused classroom. It was fun! Two of them were pretty smart, and Spider began to enjoy himself. They helped each other, and it was obviously a good thing, what they were all doing.

And so it went, until the day Professor Pallas walked in. Spider was standing in front of the group, explaining Theory with images manifested in the air.

He choked and went silent. Jimmy stammered, “Professor…”

“Explain this to me, James.”

With a wave of a finger, Spider made the glowing diagrams go away.

“Ah, ah, ah… Too late, Mr Whoever. I recognized that. James?”

“Well, Professor Pallas, we’re just studying Theory together.”

“And who is Mr Whoever?”

“He’s called Spider.”

“And he is a slave, is he not? How is a slave teaching Theory to your study group?”

“Well, he isn’t really. We taught him, as a way of teaching ourselves. He’s just repeating it back to us to show that he got it.”

Spider thought that was a pretty good spur-of-the-moment lie, and gave Jimmy points for creativity. But Pallas was not buying it.

“And did you also teach him the Dionysian manifestation that he just made vanish?”

“Umm, yes…”

“Show me, James. Manifest an image for us.”

“Well, Professor, it wasn’t actually me. Gina did that.”

“Gina, show us.”

“Gina spread her hands and looked blank.

“Anyone else? Can any of you manifest an image?”

A glowing image of a wolf spider manifested in front of her.

The Professor looked at Spider. “That’s you, is it not?”

Spider nodded.

“I have seen you before, have I not?”

“Well, Professor, I work here.”

“But it’s not just that, is it? You haunt the back of my lecture hall during Theory classes, don’t you?”

“Well, Professor, it’s my job to clean up when the lecture is over. You may have seen me.”

“And perhaps you have occasionally listened to my lectures?”

“Possibly.”

“You learned Theory from me, didn’t you?”

“No, Professor, I did not.”

“Why not admit it? I don’t mind. It is even a little flattering, that an uneducated slave could learn magic by listening to me.”

Spider’s back stiffened at “uneducated slave.”

“No, Professor. I learned Magic in spite of listening to you.”

Jimmy kicked him. The other students looked at him, aghast.

“Which of the Professors taught you, then?”

“None of the Professors taught me. I taught myself.”

“But you admit you listened to my lectures?”

“I did, but only to be able to help these students by correcting your mistakes,” Spider said, putting his foot in it.

“’Correcting!’ You are insolent. Beg my forgiveness!”

“Insolent I may be, and a fool I certainly am. But I taught myself Theory, and I taught it to these students better than you did. I will not beg.”

“You will beg my pardon or suffer punishment.”

“Punishment, then!” Spider scowled.

Unfortunately for him, two of the students couldn’t help giggling at Professor Pallas’s discomfiture. She burst into a rage.

“Tomorrow!” she screamed. “Tomorrow you will lecture to the class on the Zeta and the PNT. I have not taught this before. If, as you say, you taught yourself, this should not matter.”

“It will not,” Spider answered. “I know it.”

#

At first, Spider was nervous. But as he spoke, his enthusiasm buoyed him.

He was also buoyed by the reaction of his audience. He had never taught so many. Word had spread, and the lecture hall was packed to its limit. Older and younger students were there. Even several Professors were in attendance.

He discovered that strange truth, that a large audience is easier to move than a small one. When he manifested the Golden Key, students and even Professors who had never before understood were rapt with new comprehension. He made a joke and was rewarded with a solid laugh.

One audience member did not laugh. Pallas sat grim-faced through Spider’s explanation. She could not criticize his work—not even envy could. His explanations were obviously right, and so clear that even the youngest students understood. Even Pallas herself understood what she had never grasped before.

It only made her angrier. She strode to him. With a furious gesture she banished his final manifestation. The audience protested, and her anger rose higher. She struck him, her nails raking his face. Used to physical abuse from his masters, he looked at her calmly, blood oozing from his cheek. Again and again and yet again she struck him, without response.

As she pulled back her arm for a fifth blow, someone grasped it from behind.

Professor Urania spoke, “This is unseemly, Pallas. Compose yourself.”

Pallas stepped back. She touched the blood on Spider’s cheek. Touching her blooded finger to her tongue, she spoke. “Spider! A spider indeed you will be, now and forever.”

Those watching saw his neck shorten, his head fuse to his body. His eyes doubled, then doubled again. Two central eyes grew bigger. From his side two new arms and two new legs appeared. His back swelled up into a great bulbous abdomen. His body shrank, and he fell to the ground a handsome wolf spider.

His mind filled with hunger for the hunt. But Pallas’s blows had left blood in his mouth. The red, human blood was still there, untransformed by Pallas’s witchcraft. He swallowed it. With that, he knew his own mind.

He cast a manifestation. Watchers saw the image of the boy Spider appear. It bent down, took the spider in its hand, and walked away.

Spider was never seen in the Academy again.

Afterword

“Way Down Below” is a retelling of the story of Arachne, the first poem of book six of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, as translated by Stephanie McCarter. Rather than being a gifted weaver, my Spider is a natural genius at Theory. He is loosely based on the mathematicians Leonard Euler, Bernhard Riemann, and Srinivasa Ramanujan. I borrowed the phrase “Golden Key” from John Derbyshire’s Prime Obsession.

The cover image is a phase portrait of the Riemann ζ function. A phase portrait is a visualization of a complex function introduced by Elias Wegert in Visual Complex Functions: An Introduction with Phase Portraits.