Palp semaphore language

Palp semaphore language is the speech of Portia’s people, made by moving the palps and read through the eyes. The feet add a second layer of meaning, and a web stretched between trees carries a whole conversation between several spiders at once.

The two forms

A spider’s name has a simple and a complex form. The simple form is a series of telegraphed gestures, a precise motion of the palps that carries a limited amount of information. The longer form adds a backing of stamping and shivering, a vibrational subtext. That backing changes with mood and with tense, and with whether she is speaking to a dominant female, a submissive female or a male.

The basic content of the speech is visual, a rapid semaphore of the palps. Much of the context comes through the feet instead. When Portia tells her male follower to bridge across a gap, her general dissatisfaction with him arrives in the flurry of her feet rather than in the gesture. The palps are white, and Portia turns the white side out to call him to her. They flash white with anger when he argues with her.

Reach

The palp semaphore carries over a mile in clear conditions, and it is not suitable for complex discussion. Step vibration speech is the more subtle of the two, and it will not travel far across the ground or down a branch.

To hold a free and frank exchange, a local female spins a broad web between several trees, wide enough for every spider to rest a few feet on the anchor points. The talk then runs along the strands. The local leader shudders on the web and shifts her feet to ask a question, and Portia reads the answer as words twanging down a taut line. The locals hold a huddle of speech that is softly stepped out so it does not reach their visitors. The spiders think naturally in terms of information sent at a distance.

Lies and threats

The language is hard to lie in. Enough unintended body language leaks into the motion and the vibration to give a speaker away, and Portia loses a bargain when the big female reads her posture and turns on her. For open aggression the spiders fall back on an older signal, rearing up with two pairs of legs high and the fangs bare, a brute language unchanged for millions of years.

Portia can make her signals large and slow for eyes weaker than her own. She does that while retreating from a troop of Scytodes, and she does not know whether they read her, or whether they have any speech of their own.

Females do not speak the names of males. Portia tells her follower to come here without naming him. Conversation also happens in passing, on the move: males can never keep their feet still when they have something to say, and her sisters touch palps to tell her the news.

Later chapters

The language runs through daily life in Great Nest. At the temple a priestess dances her proofs on the crystal, and every sweep of her palps is part of the performance. The spiders have also worked out a simple language of gestures with the stomatopod sea dwellers, though no Understanding can be traded that way.

Fabian matches Portia’s stance when he wants to match her intonation, and the speech is called a voiceless language of many subtle shades. By the time of the war the radio carries the long messages, and Bianca’s set vibrates with electric current to imitate the dancing rhythms of speech. The Messenger speaks a negotiated language of its own and has begun to show a pair of phantom palps on its screens, a pidgin of the spiders’ visual speech.

Unanswered questions

• Whether the Scytodes read the gestures, and whether they have a language that comes close to this one.
• How far the signals of one nest differ from another.
• Whether the Messenger’s phantom palps carry any meaning beyond emphasis.