Trunco Butto: The Oiled Warrior

¿The starships were gone for long ages, and the people of the Earth learned many of its secrets, which they called supernature, or mother science, and they bred huge spiders to catch whatever appeared in the heavens above and beyond the blue skies and pinkly luminous sun-burnished clouds of the planet. Occasionally there¿d be some furor skywards and the peculiar mass of the intelligent arachnid would be scene scurrying across its invisible web towards a starship caught in its web. It¿d become a part of the Earth¿s scientific ecosphere that returning ships could rely on the spiderly superscience of nature to give them a safe harbor. The starships would hang there in the silvery clouds as dark shapes beneath the bone white moon; as flies trapped in ice, their location pinpointed by their relation to the constellations of the diamond bodies of the stars. The starship Perseus, kept hanging amidst the fogs about the moon, its location had by reference to its namesake constellation, Perseus, was all very fine and good from a romantic perspective, but the engines were cold and dead, and the vessel couldn¿t any longer reach the belt of Aurora to escape with its crew beyond the barrier.'