"Put more syrup on it," Eponine said, laughing. "And pass the plate over here."
Max handed the waffles across the table to his wife. "Shit, Frenchie," he said, "these last few weeks you've been eating everything in sight. If I didn't know better, I would think that you and that unborn child of ours both had one of those 'intake buffers' Nicole was telling us about."
"It would be handy, though," Richard said distractedly. "You could load up on food and not have to stop work just because your stomach was calling."
"This cereal is the best yet," little Kepler said from the other end of the table. "I bet even Hercules would like it—"
"Speaking of whom," Max interrupted in a lower voice, glancing from one end of the table to the other, "what is his, or its, purpose? That damn octospider shows up every morning two hours after dawn and just hangs around. If the children are having school with Nai, he sits in the back of the room—"
"He plays with us, Uncle Max," Galileo shouted. "Hercules is really a lot of fun. He does everything we ask. Yesterday he let me use the back of his head as a punching bag."
"According to Archie," Nicole said between bites, "Hercules is the official observer. The octospiders are curious about everything. They want to know all about us, even the most mundane details."
"That's great," Max replied, "but we have a slight problem. When you and Ellie and Richard are gone, nobody here can understand what Hercules is saying. Oh, sure, Nai knows a few simple phrases, but nothing that's involved. Yesterday, for example, while everyone else was taking the long nap, that damned Hercules followed me into the crapper. Now, I don't know about you, but it's hard for me to do my business even with Eponine within earshot. With an alien staring at me from a few meters away, my sphincter was absolutely paralyzed."
"Why didn't you tell Hercules to go away?" Patrick said, laughing.
"I did," Max answered. "But he just stared at me with fluid running around in his lens and kept repeating the same color pattern that was totally unintelligible to me."
"Can you remember the pattern?" Ellie said. "Maybe I can tell you what Hercules was saying."
"Hell, no, I can't remember it," Max replied. "Besides, it doesn't make any difference now—I'm not sitting here trying to shit."
The Watanabe twins broke into howls of laughter and Eponine frowned at her husband. Benjy, who had said very little during breakfast, asked to be excused.
"Are you all right, dear?" Nicole asked.
Benjy nodded and left the dining room in the direction of his bedroom.
"Does he know anything?" Nai said quietly.
Nicole shook her head quickly and turned to her granddaughter. "Are you finished with your breakfast, Nikki?"
"Yes, Nonni," the little girl replied. She excused herself and moments later was joined by Kepler and Galileo.
"I think that Benjy knows more than any of us give him credit for," Max said as soon as the children were gone.
"You could be right," Nicole said softly. "But yesterday when I talked to him, I saw no indication that he—" Nicole stopped in midsentence and turned to Eponine. "By the way," she said, "how are you feeling this morning?"
"Great," Eponine replied. "The baby was very active before dawn. He kicked hard for almost an hour—I could even watch his feet moving around on my tummy. I tried to get Max to feel one of his kicks, but he was too squeamish."
"Now, why do you call that baby 'he,' Frenchie, when you know damn well that I want a little girl who looks just like you."
"I don't believe you for a moment, Max Puckett," Eponine interrupted. "You only say you want a girl so that you won't be disappointed. Nothing would please you more than a boy you can raise to be your buddy. Besides, as you know, it's customary in English to use the pronoun 'he' when the sex is not known or specified."
"Which brings me to another question for our octospider ex-perts," Max said after taking a sip of quasi-coffee. He glanced first at Ellie and then at Nicole. "Do either of you know what sex, if any, our octospider friends might be?" He laughed. "I certainly haven't seen anything on their naked bodies that gives me a clue."
Ellie shook her head. "I don't really know, Max. Archie did tell me that Jamie is not his child, and not Dr. Blue's either, at least not in the strictest biological sense."
"So Jamie must be adopted," Max said. "But is Archie the man and Dr. Blue the woman? Or vice versa? Or are our next-door neighbors a gay couple raising a child?"
"Maybe the octospiders don't have what we call sex," Patrick said.
"Then where do new octospiders come from?" Max asked. "They certainly don't just materialize out of thin air."
"The octospiders are so advanced biologically," Richard said, "they may have a reproduction process that would seem like magic to us."
"I have asked Dr. Blue about their reproduction several times," Nicole said. "He says it's a complicated subject, especially since the octospiders are polymorphic, and that they'll explain it to me after I understand the other aspects of their biology."
"Now, if I were an octospider," Max said with a grin, "I would want to be one of those fat slobs Nicole saw yesterday. Wouldn't it be great if your only function in life was to eat and eat, storing food for all your brethren? What an existence! I knew a pig farmer's son back in Arkansas who was like a re-plete. Only he kept all the food for himself. Wouldn't even share it with the pigs. I think he weighed almost three hundred kilograms when he died at the age of thirty."
Eponine finished her waffle. "Fat jokes in the presence of pregnant women show a lack of sensitivity," she said, feigning indignation.
"Oh, shit, Ep," Max replied, "you know that none of that crap applies anymore. We're zoo animals here in the Emerald City, and we're stuck with each other. Humans only worry about what they look like if they're worried about being compared with someone else."
Nai excused herself from the table. "I have a few more preparations to complete for today's school lessons," she said. "Nikki will be starting on consonant sounds—she has already breezed through the alphabet drills."
"Like mother, like daughter," Max said. After Patrick left the dining room, leaving only the two couples and Ellie at the table, Max leaned forward with a mischievous smile on his face. "Are my eyes deceiving me," he said, "or is young Patrick spending a lot more time with Nai than he did when we first arrived?"
"I think you're right, Max," Ellie said. "I have noticed the same thing. He told me he feels useful helping Nai with Benjy and the children. After all, you and Eponine are engrossed with each other and the baby that is coming, my time is completely occupied between Nikki and the octospiders, Mother and Father are always busy—"
"You're missing the point, young lady," Max said. "I'm wondering if we have another cup-el forming in our midst."
"Patrick and Nai?" Richard asked, as if the idea had just occurred to him for the first time.
"Yes, dear," Nicole said. She laughed. "Richard belongs to that category of genius with very selective observational skills. No detail from one of his projects, no matter how small, goes unnoticed. Yet he misses obvious changes in people's behavior. I remember once in New Eden when Katie started wearing low-cut dresses—"
Nicole stopped herself. It was still difficult for her to talk about Katie without becoming emotional.
"Kepler and Galileo have both noticed that Patrick is around every day," Eponine said. "Nai says that Galileo has become quite jealous."
"And what does Nai say about Patrick's attention?" Nicole asked. "Is she happy with it?"
"You know Nai," Eponine replied. "Always gracious, always thinking of others. I think she's concerned about how any possible relationship between Patrick and her might affect the twins."
All eyes turned toward the visitor who appeared in the doorway. "Well, well. Good morning, Hercules," Max said, standing up from his chair. "What a pleasant surprise! What can we do for you this morning?"
The octospider stepped into the dining room as the colors streamed around his
head. "He says that he has come to help Richard with his automatic translator," Ellie said. "Especially the parts outside our visible spectrum."
2
Nicole was dreaming. She was also dancing to an African rhythm around a campfire in an Ivory Coast grove. Omeh was leading the dance. He was dressed in the green robe he had been wearing when he had come to visit her in Rome a few days before the launch of the Newton. All of her human friends in the Emerald City, plus their four closest octospider acquaintances, were also dancing in the circle around the campfire. Kepler and Galileo were fighting. Ellie and Nikki were holding hands. Hercules the octospider was dressed in a bright purple African costume. Eponine was very pregnant and heavy on her feet. Nicole heard her name being called from outside the circle. Was it Katie? Her heart raced as she strained to recognize the voice.
"Nicole," Eponine said beside her bed. "I'm having contractions."
Nicole sat up and shook the dream from her head. "How often?" she asked automatically.
"They're irregular," Eponine replied. "I'll have a couple about five minutes apart, and then nothing for half an hour."
"Most likely they're Braxton Hicks contractions," Nicole said to her friend after she put on her robe. "You're still five weeks short of full term."
"What's a Braxton Hicks contraction?" Eponine asked.
"Fake labor, essentially. It's as if your body is practicing. Come lie down on the couch, and I'll take a look."
Max was waiting in the living room with Eponine after Nicole finished washing her hands. "Is she going to have the baby?" he asked.
"Someday," Nicole said, smiling at the nervous father. "But probably not now." She began putting slight pressure on Eponine's midsection, trying to locate the baby. "Tell me when the next contraction begins," she said.
Meanwhile, Max paced fitfully around the room. "I would absolutely kill for a cigarette right now," he mumbled.
When Eponine had another contraction, Nicole noticed that there was some slight pressure on the undilated cervix. She was worried because she wasn't absolutely certain where the baby was. "I'm sorry, Ep," Nicole said after another contraction six minutes later. "I think this is all Braxton Hicks, but I could be wrong. I've never dealt with a pregnancy at this stage before without some kind of monitoring equipment to help me."
"Some women do have babies this early, don't they?" Eponine asked.
"Yes. But it's rare. Only about one percent of first-time mothers deliver more than four weeks before their due date. And it's almost always due to some kind of complication. Or heredity. Do you know by any chance if you or any of your siblings were premature?"
Eponine shook her head. "I never knew anything at all about my natural family," she said.
Nicole told Eponine to dress and return to her home. "Keep a record of your contractions. What is especially important is the interval between them. If they start occurring regularly, every four minutes or so without significant gaps, then come and get me again."
"Might there be a problem?" Max whispered to Nicole while Eponine was dressing.
"Unlikely, Max, but there is always that possibility."
"What do you think about asking our friends the biological wizards for some help?" Max asked. "Please forgive me if I am offending you, it's just—"
"I'm ahead of you, Max," Nicole said. "I had already decided to consult with Dr. Blue in the morning."
Max was nervous long before Dr. Blue started to open what Max called the "bug jar." "Hold on, Doc," Max said, gently putting his hands on the tentacle holding the jar. "Would you mind explaining to me just what you're doing before you let those creatures out?"
Eponine was lying down on the sofa in the Puckett living room. She was naked, but mostly covered by a pair of sheets provided by the octospiders. Nicole had been holding Eponine's hand during most of the several minutes that the three octospiders had been setting up the portable laboratory. Now Nicole walked over beside Max so that she could translate what Dr. Blue was saying.
"Dr. Blue is not an expert in this field," Nicole interpreted. "He says that one of the other two octospiders will have to explain the details of the process."
After a short conversation among the three octospiders, Dr. Blue moved aside and another alien stood directly in front of Nicole and Max. Dr. Blue then informed Nicole that this particular octo, whom he called the "image engineer," had only recently started learning the simpler octospider dialect used to communicate with humans. "He might be a little difficult to understand," Dr. Blue told her.
"The tiny beings in the jar," Nicole said several seconds later as the colors began streaming around the engineer's head, "are called … image quadroids, I guess would be a satisfactory translation. Anyway, they are living miniature cameras that will crawl inside Eponine and take pictures of the baby. Each quadroid has the capability of … several million photographic picture elements that can be allocated to as many as five hundred and twelve images per octospider nillet. They can even create a moving picture if you choose."
She hesitated and turned to Max. "I'm simplifying all this, if that's all right. It's highly technical, and all in their octal mathematics. The engineer was explaining there at the end all the different ways in which the user can specify pictures—Richard would have absolutely loved it."
"Remind me again how long a nillet is?" Max said.
"About twenty-eight seconds," Nicole replied. "Richard named all the time terms. The nillet is the shortest unit in octospider time: Eight nillets in a feng, eight fengs in a woden, eight wodens in a tert, and eight terts in an octospider day. Richard calculates their day at thirty-two hours, fourteen minutes, and a little more than six seconds."
"I'm glad somebody understands all this," Max said quietly.
Nicole faced the image engineer again and the conversation continued. "Each image quadroid," she translated slowly, "enters the specified target area, takes its pictures, and then returns to the image processor—that's the gray box over against the wall—where it 'dumps' its images, receives its reward, and returns to the queue."
"What?" said Max. "What kind of reward?"
"Later, Max," Nicole said. She was struggling to understand a sentence that she had already asked the octospider to repeat. Nicole was silent for a few seconds before she shook her head and turned to Dr. Blue. "I'm sorry," she said, "but I still don't understand that last sentence."
The two octospiders had a rapid exchange in their natural dialect and then the image engineer faced Nicole again. "Okay," she said at length, "I think I've got it now… Max, the gray box is some kind of a programmable data manager, both storing the data in living cells and preparing the outputs from the quadroids for projection on the wall, or wherever we want to see the image, according to the protocol selected—"
"I have an idea," Max interrupted. "This is all way beyond me. If you're satisfied that this contraption is not going to hurt Ep in any way, why don't we get on with it?"
Dr. Blue understood what Max said. At a signal from Nicole, he and the other octospiders walked outside the Puckett home and retrieved what looked like a covered drawer from the parked transport. "In this container," Dr. Blue said to Nicole, "are a group of twenty or thirty of the smallest members of our species, morphs whose primary function is to communicate directly with the quadroids and the other tiny creatures that make this system work. The morphs will actually manage the procedure."
"Well, I'll be goddamned," said Max when the drawer opened and the tiny octospiders, only a couple of centimeters tall, scampered into the middle of the room. "Those…" Max stammered excitedly, "are what Eponine and I saw back in the blue maze, in the lair on the other side of the Cylindrical Sea."
"The midget morphs," Dr. Blue explained, "take our directions and then organize the entire process. It is they who will actually program the gray box. Now all we need to start is a few specifications on what kind of images you want and where you want to see them."
The large colored picture on the wall in the
Puckett living room showed a perfectly formed, handsome boy fetus filling almost all of his mother's womb. Max and Eponine had been celebrating for an hour, ever since they had first been able to distinguish that their unborn child was indeed a boy. As the afternoon had progressed and Nicole had learned better how to specify what she wanted to see, the quality of the pictures had improved markedly. Now, the twice-life-size image on the wall was stunning for its clarity.
"Can I watch him kick one more time?" Eponine asked.
The image engineer said something to the lead midget morph and in less than a nillet there was a replay of young master Puckett kicking upward against his mother's tummy.
"Look at the strength of those legs," Max exclaimed. He was more relaxed now. After he had recovered from the shock of the initial images, Max had become concerned about all the "paraphre-nalia" surrounding his son in the womb. Nicole had calmed the first-time father by identifying the umbilical cord and the placenta and then assuring Max that everything was normal.
"So I'm not going to deliver my son anytime soon?" Eponine asked when the replay of the movie was over.
"No," Nicole answered. "My guess is you have five or six more weeks. Often first babies are a little late. You may still have some of those intermittent contractions between now and the birth, but don't worry about them."
Nicole thanked Dr. Blue profusely, as did Max and Eponine. Then the octospiders gathered up all the components, both biological and nonbiological, of their portable laboratory. When the octos had departed, Nicole crossed the room and took Eponine's hand. "Es-tu heureuse?" she asked her friend.
"Absolument," Eponine replied. "And relieved as well. I thought that something had gone wrong."
"No," Nicole said. "It was just a simple false alarm."
Max crossed the room and gave Eponine a hug. He was beaming. Nicole withdrew slightly and watched the tender scene between her friends. She started to leave the house. "Wait a minute," said Max. "Don't you want to know what we're going to name him?"
"Of course," Nicole replied.
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