OK, a little bit of business and promotion to get out of the way first. Outland Entertainment is currently funding APEX on Kickstarter. It's an anthology about dinosaurs, and my story Joan of Archaeopteryx is in it!
Check it out here: https://t.co/FNopmlKGAU
To celebrate reaching $5000, I said I would post a free reprint story on my blog, a story that has not been available for free anywhere else. I think all of my dinosaur stories are available online, so I went with The Courtship Dance.
Originally published in The Tangled Web https://www.purpleturkeypress.com/thetangledweb in 2018, The Courtship Dance is a classic example of Jennifer Lee Rossman stories: dorks in space, too many 80s references, loooove (ew), and weird science facts.
I chose this one because even though my story is about spiders, I don't think it should trigger anybody's arachnophobia; the cover of the anthology, however, and some of the other stories… they might. And I want people to be able to enjoy my story without having to purchase a book that might bother them.
Which is not to say there is anything wrong with the book. I quite liked a lot of the stories. But anyway. Please enjoy.
The Courtship Dance
By Jennifer Lee Rossman
Outer space was, to use a highly technical astrophysics term, absolutely freaking awesome.
There were many reasons humanity had reached for the stars, ranging from exploration and mining to the very real possibility that humanity would one day render Earth totally unable to support life. But mostly, Judith decided as she watched Jupiter swirling outside her bedroom window like a giant creamy candy, it was the awesomeness factor.
Space made everything graceful. You couldn't fall, you couldn't drop things. Everyone became a ballerina in zero-G, twirling weightless and unencumbered.
Even her body, clumsy and chubby and with its atrophied muscles that couldn't bear their own weight back home, worked like everyone else's. Just a simple push off the wall, and off she went, gliding free until she encountered an object with more inertia.
Judith spent every spare moment doing just that, trying to move faster, fling herself farther each time. She'd come to space to work on the ship's engineering deck, but now that she was there, she wanted to dance.
Not the ballet and classic waltzes Arabella taught in the exercise classes down on Deck Seven. No. Judith wanted disco, modern, jazz. The kind of wild, exciting moves where dancers flung their limbs like trees in a hurricane, flouncy dresses spinning and billowing.
You know. Dance.
Her favorite Prince song rocked from her speakers, shaking the steel walls of her quarters and reverberating through the spiderwebs in the corner. No one else on the ship enjoyed her centuries-old music, but Judith couldn't get enough of the era of day-glo and side ponytails.
She pressed her back to the wall, tensing every muscle while she waited for the chorus, then flung her limbs back to propel herself forward with as much strength as she could muster.
In her mind, she was an explosion of movement and energy, striking a dramatic pose as the music hit its little red crescendo. In reality, however, she merely drifted across the room at a brisk pace, and with nothing to stop her forward momentum, her attempt at a dramatic pose tipped her upside down as she gently collided with the wall.
"Blast," she muttered, pouting as her spider hovered in front of her face on a gossamer filament.
In the silence between songs, Judith heard a steady rhythm outside her door that her brain first labeled as footsteps, but no one walked in space. More likely, it was the sound of someone pulling themselves along the handles installed in the hallway for just that purpose.
"Blast again."
She scrambled to shut off the music and smooth out her dress--a futile act in zero-G, but, like the title of the songfic she'd written in high school about John MacLean teaming up with an aging nun said, Old Habits Die Hard-- and opened the door as soon as he knocked.
"Hey," Ian said, turning himself upside down to match her current orientation. He was a pretty man, all long legs and floppy hair, with a smile that rivaled the stars in brightness. "You, ah... Do you know you have a spider in your hair?"
"Yes," Judith lied with confidence, never considering that it might be more odd to knowingly have a spider in your hair than it was to be unaware of it.
He reached out with his prosthetic hand--the same deep brown as his skin, but with rainbow glitter mixed into the plastic--and untangled the web from her curls. Though he did so gently, Judith's chest tightened and she intercepted the dangling spider, pulling her close out of fear of her tiny friend being squooshed.
"Her name's Anita," she said awkwardly, the floating spider tethered to her hand like an astronaut on a spacewalk. "She's an orb-weaver. Not sure what subspecies yet; I'm going to download a book next time we're near a satellite."
Ian nodded slowly. "Is she from the gardening deck?"
"Maybe."
...By which Judith meant definitely. That deck was the only one on the ship that had animal life. Insects, mostly, to pollinate the crops that sustained the hundred-and-some-odd people aboard, and some spiders and birds to keep the insect population in check. But she wasn't sure whether it would be frowned upon to steal a spider, so she didn't want to admit to anything.
If this fazed Ian, he didn't let it show. "Anyway, some of the senior crew are throwing a party to welcome the vyomanauts."
Derived from the Sanskrit word for "sky," a vyomanaut was the Indian equivalent of an astronaut or cosmonaut. The word had been used onboard a lot since the Indian Space Program announced they wanted to send some of their scientists to assist the Iktomi crew in building a better communications system.
"And you want me to make my famous fried jalebis?"
"No. Well." He reconsidered. "Yes. But mostly I want you to be my date."
Judith's heart went all fluttery for a second. "Me."
"You."
"Okay." She quickly closed the door in his face before he could reconsider, and twirled in excitement, Anita trailing on her web.
***
Everything Judith knew about courtship, she had learned from studying spiders. And from watching an old VHS of Dirty Dancing over and over and over until it wore out. But mostly it was the spiders.
The majority of the courtship was done by the male. Well, screw that. This was the future--she knew it was officially the future, because people lived in space--and she decided it was high time females took the lead.
Of course, it wouldn't all translate to human behavior. She doubted there would be a second date if she tried to eat him at the end of the first date, for example, but the rest of it seemed about right.
Step one: be larger than your competition. Judith hovered in front of her mirror, watching her voluptuous stomach and thighs jiggle long after she stopped moving. She gave Anita a thumbs-up, and imagined the little spider writing something encouraging and fat-positive in her web.
"I'm gorgeous?" She put her hand to her cheek in mock shyness. "Oh, Anita, you flatter me."
Step two: ornamentation. With a little help from the riveting machine she had Frankensteined into a bedazzler, she would have the flashiest dress on the ship. It would say "style," it would scream "sexy." Ideally, it would even yodel "my bright colors indicate that I am a healthy individual who has reached sexual maturity!"
So yeah. Step two, check.
Which just left step three: dance.
Orb-weavers like Anita had a more simple courtship, but Judith's favorite jumping spiders were born to boogie.
They had iridescent flaps on their abdomen, the colors varying by species but always looking like
something off the cover of a Lisa Frank notebook. The male flipped this flap up like a peacock fanning its tail, shook his little spider booty, and waved his fuzzy forelegs in the air like he just didn't care. And then, presumably, came much smooching and rubbing of spinnerets.
Judith felt herself blushing at the very thought. Back on Earth, she'd been too busy getting her engineering degree and training for this mission to pay attention to men. Or people of any gender, really. She was out of practice.
She looked at the web in the corner. "I got this, right?"
"Sure do!" she said in Anita's voice, which she decided was a Russian accent. "You are the prettiest girl on this ship, and he would be lucky to have you. So confident, too, and brilliant. All the other girls are going to be super jealous."
Judith decided to believe the spider, and went to work bedazzling.
***
She just couldn't move fast enough. Weightlessness stole the drama from her dramatic sleeve swishing, and turned her rapid spins into graceful twirls no matter how she tried to speed them up.
She flopped on her bed--which was a feat in and of itself, what with all the straps needed to keep her from floating off--and she sulked.
Logically, Judith knew Ian would feel however he was going to feel regardless of how she danced, but logic had absolutely no place in hormones. She wanted to dance for him. That was the best way she knew to show him how she felt.
Anita hovered unhelpfully in the corner, like Jennifer Grey before Patrick Swayze showed up.
"Oh, right," Judith said, digging around in her pocket. "I got you a snack." She held up a fly--dead, but still nice and juicy. She closed one eye, lining up the shot, and flicked the treat toward the spider.
It tumbled through the air and plinked off the wall. Anita scurried to the edge of her web, but the fly was out of her reach. She scuttled back and forth a bit, as if judging the distance, and leapt.
The spider sailed through the air, swimming in a graceful doggy-paddle, and latched onto the fly with all eight legs. Momentum carried them both farther from the web, floating all the way to the opposite wall and leading to the tricky task of getting her snack back home.
Judith expected Anita would carry her fly around the perimeter of the room. But as she watched, Anita angled herself to face the web, and produced a silky thread from her spinnerets.
In Earth's gravity, such an action would have had little effect on Anita's momentum. But in zero-G, Newton's second law reigned supreme, and the action of expelling the silk from her back end had the equal and opposite reaction of propelling Anita gently toward her web.
Across the room she went, angling her posterior ever so slightly to adjust her course as she left a nearly invisible trail of silk behind her.
Judith sat upright in bed. Tried to, anyway--she forgot about the straps holding her in. "Anita," she said, "you're a genius."
***
A distinctly Bollywood vibe pulsed from the recreation deck as the crew welcomed the vyomanauts, sitar and harmonia music mingling with the aromas of spices and Judith's fried dough jalebis. People danced gracefully, some in colorful saris and some in their everyday silver space clothes.
Judith stood on the periphery, the billowy sleeves and folds of her dress tucked around her in a deliberate way that hid the most vibrant colors inside the pleats. She chatted with some of the newcomers, but most of her attention was on the doorway.
When Ian entered, his arm glittering in the lights, she sucked in a breath. This was it, her big moment. She put a hand to her necklace, a clear plastic sphere dotted with air holes. Inside, Anita's pedipalps quivered in anticipation.
"Here we go," Judith whispered, and glided forward.
The crowd parted, or maybe she only imagined it did, and she locked eyes with Ian from the center of the dancefloor as the band began an instrumental rendition of "(I've Had) The Time of My Life."
She slowly extended a leg, revealing a flash of pink and the merest twinkle of rhinestones beneath the dull gray of her dress, and tapped the ground with her foot like a spider. Thus began the courtship ritual.
She swayed with a rhythmic purpose, watching as Ian's expression went from confusion to amusement. She had to keep her eyes on him, for if she let herself remember all the other eyes around her, she would be too embarrassed to continue.
The song ramped up, the energetic dance break fast approaching. Judith did a little twirl, her skirts rising gently around her legs. When the music exploded into its frenetic chorus, the part so toe-tapping-irific that not even John Lithgow's character from Footloose could resist, Judith flicked her wrists and legs to unfurl the full brilliance of her dress.
Yards upon yards of fabric in every color of the rainbow, suspended weightlessly around her as if floating in water, with sparkles that traced her full figure and trailed like strands of spider silk down her limbs.
She soaked up the oohs and aahs from the crowd, but it was the awe in Ian's eyes that gave Judith the courage to engage the CO2 canisters strapped to her wrists.
Newton would have been proud of this application of his second law, as the equal and opposite reactions spun Judith faster and faster, until she became little more than a blur of color and motion. She turned off the canisters, gave the floor a gentle kick, and rose up, up, up, still spinning, still moving, never wanting to stop.
But all songs had to end, and she wasn't about to miss her cue.
As the very last note rang out, she altered her arm position and gave a short burst of CO2, countering her spin and giving her the opportunity to strike that dramatic pose.
As people applauded, Judith pushed off the ceiling and descended with Anita, like a spider on her silk, into Ian's waiting arms in the most perfect Dirty Dancing lift ever executed.
And it was, to use a highly technical astrophysics term, absolutely freaking awesome.
