The Thread That Won't Be Copied

The fishing line snapped for the fourth time, and the kite folded out of the sky like it had given up on the whole idea of being a kite.

"That was the strong stuff," Soren said, reeling in the dead line. "The package said forty pounds."

"The kite doesn't weigh forty pounds." Maya was already looking at the spool, turning it over. "It's not the weight. It's the snap. The gust hits, the line goes tight all at once, and there's nowhere for the force to go."

"So we need something stretchier."

"Stretchier and stronger. Both." She set the spool down. "Those usually fight each other. Strong things snap. Stretchy things go slack."

Soren wrote something in the notebook on his knee, then stopped, because something in the corner of the shed had caught the late light.

It was a web, strung between the window frame and an old rake. A fat orb of one, with a beetle stuck in the lower third, still kicking.

"Look at that," he said.

The beetle was enormous next to the strands holding it. It thrashed, and the whole web bowed inward, stretched, and sprang back. It did not snap.

Maya crouched until her nose was almost touching it. "It bent. The whole thing bent and then came back." She watched the beetle slam again. The web took it. "That's the thing we want. That exact thing."

"Spider silk," Soren said. "I read about it. It's stronger than steel for how light it is. Like five times."

"That's not the part that matters." Maya pointed at the bouncing strand. "Steel doesn't do that. Steel would have cut the beetle or broke. This stretched and held. That's a different word than strong."

"Tough," said Soren slowly. "Toughness is how much you can take before you break. Not how hard you are. How much you can soak up." He looked at the strand the beetle was fighting. "It's tougher than Kevlar. That's the bulletproof stuff. This little thread is tougher than bulletproof."

Maya sat back on her heels. "Then forget the fishing line. Let's just use this."

"Use what?"

"Spider silk. People must make it by now. If it's that good, somebody's making spools of it. We buy a spool, we put it on the winch, the kite never comes down."

Soren paged back through the notebook to something he'd copied from a library book months ago. He read it twice before he said anything.

"They can't," he said.

"Can't what?"

"Make it. At any size that matters." He looked up. "People have been trying for decades. Real scientists, big companies. They put the spider genes into goats so the goats would make silk protein in their milk. They put it in bacteria. They got the protein. They still can't spin it into thread that's as good as that." He pointed at the web.

Maya stared at him. "Goats."

"Goats."

"And it didn't work."

"They get something. It's just not this. The spider does something when she spins it that nobody can copy. She pulls the liquid through her body and it turns solid in exactly the right way, and we don't fully know how. The pulling is part of it. The speed. The acid. Something." He shrugged, and it was not a giving-up shrug. "A spider the size of my thumbnail does the thing a whole laboratory of grown-up geniuses can't."

Maya turned back to the web. The beetle had stopped fighting. The strand held it, perfectly still now, swaying a little in the air from the open door.

"Say that again," she said quietly.

"Say what."

"That nobody can make it."

"Nobody can make it. Not the real thing. Not yet."

Maya did not move for a long moment. Then she reached out, very carefully, and touched one of the anchor lines at the edge, the thick one going to the rake. It did not break. It pulled, and let her pull, and tugged her finger gently back toward the center.

"There's a spider in this shed," she said, "making something the smartest people on the planet have been chasing for thirty years and can't catch."

"More than thirty."

"And she's not even thinking about it. She just does it. Every night. She probably ate the last web and made a new one."

"They do that. Eat it and respin it."

Maya laughed, but it came out small and strange, like the laugh had surprised her on the way up. "We came out here to fix a kite string. And there's a thing twelve inches from my face that is basically magic, except it's not magic, it's just real, and it's just sitting here, and almost nobody is looking at it."

"We're looking at it," Soren said.

"Yeah." She wiped her hands on her jeans. "But I mean the answer is somewhere in how she pulls it. The whole thing is in the pulling. Somebody who figures out the pulling figures out the whole thing."

"Somebody who pays really close attention," Soren said. "To the part everybody else skipped."

Maya looked at him. Then she looked back at the spider, who had come down from the upper corner now, walking the radius lines toward the stilled beetle, light as a question.

"The fishing line," Soren started.

"Forget the fishing line." Maya hadn't taken her eyes off the spider. "Get your phone. The slow-motion one. The really slow one."

"Why?"

"Because she's going to spin again tonight. And I want to watch her hands."

"Spiders don't have hands."

"You know what I mean. The spinning part. The end where it comes out." Maya finally looked at him. "Nobody's solved it. Soren. Nobody. It's just sitting in this shed waiting."

Soren set the camera on the workbench and aimed it at the web, and the two of them sat down on the floor in the dark to wait for the spider to start.