Her voice trailed off. Tears flooded Nai's eyes and she felt her body beginning to tremble. She turned her back and faced the map. "Class dismissed for today," she said.
Patrick stood beside Nai as the two of them watched the twins and Nikki playing with a big blue ball in the cul-de-sac. It was half an hour later. "I'm sorry, Patrick," Nai said. "I didn't expect to become…"
"You have nothing to be sorry for," the young man replied.
"Yes, I do," Nai said. "Years ago I promised myself that I would never show such feelings in front of Kepler and Galileo. They can't possibly understand."
"They've forgotten it already," Patrick said after a brief silence. "Look at them. They're totally engrossed in their game."
At that moment the twins were having one of their typical arguments. As usual, Galileo was trying to gain an advantage for himself in a game that did not have rigorous rules. Nikki stood beside the boys, following every word of their dispute.
"Boys, boys," Nai called out. "Stop it. If you can't play without arguing, then you'll have to come inside."
A few seconds later the blue ball was bouncing down the street toward the plaza and all three children were running gleefully after it. "Would you like something to drink?" Nai asked Patrick.
"Yes, I would… Do you have any more of that light green melon juice that Hercules brought last week? It was really tasty."
"Yes," answered Nai, bending down to the small cabinet in which they kept cool drinks. "By the way, where is Hercules? I haven't seen him for several days."
Patrick laughed. "Uncle Richard has recruited him to work full-time on the translator. Ellie and Archie are even there with them every afternoon." He thanked Nai for the glass of juice.
Nai took a sip of her own drink and walked back into the living room. "I know you wanted to comfort Benjy this morning," she said. "I only stopped you because I know your brother so well. He is very proud. He does not want anyone's pity."
"I understood," Patrick said.
"Benjy realized this morning, at some level, that even little Nikki—whom he still thinks of as a baby—will quickly surpass him in school. The discovery shocked him, and reminded him again of his own limitations."
Nai was standing in front of the map of Earth, which was still affixed to the wall. "Nothing on this map means anything significant to you, does it?" she said.
"Not really," Patrick replied. "I have seen many photographs and movies, of course, and when I was about the twins' age my father used to tell me about Boston, and the color of the leaves in New England during the autumn, and the trip he took to Ireland with his father. But my memories are of other places. The lair in New York is quite vivid, as well as the astonishing year we spent at the Node." He was silent for a moment. "And the Eagle! What a creature! I remember him even more clearly than my father."
"So do you consider yourself to be an Earthling?" Nai asked.
"That's an interesting question," Patrick replied. He finished his drink. "You know, I've never really thought about it… Certainly I consider myself to be a human. But an Earthling? I guess not."
Nai reached out and touched the map. "My hometown of Lamphun, if it were larger, would have appeared here, just south of Chiang Mai. Sometimes it doesn't seem possible to me that I actually lived there as a child."
Nai's fingers ran over the outline of Thailand as she stood quietly beside Patrick. "The other night," she said at length, "Galileo threw a cup of water on my head while I was bathing the boys, and I suddenly had an incredibly vivid memory of the three days I spent in Chiang Mai with my cousins when I was fourteen years old. It was the time of the Songkran Festival in April, and everyone in the city was celebrating the Thai New Year. There were parades and speeches—the usual stuff about how all the Chakri kings since the first Rama had prepared the Thai people for their important role in the world—but what I remember most clearly was riding around the city at night in the back of an electric pickup with my cousin Oni and her friends. Everywhere we went we threw a bucket of water on somebody—and they threw one on us. We laughed and laughed."
"Why was everyone throwing water?" Patrick asked.
"I've forgotten now," Nai said with a shrug. "It had something to do with the ceremony. But the experience itself, the shared laughter, and even what it felt like to have my clothes absolutely soaked, and suddenly to be hit by another burst of water—all that I can recall in detail."
They were again silent as Nai reached up to take the map off the wall. "So I guess Kepler and Galileo will not consider themselves to be Earthlings either," she mused. She rolled up the map very carefully. "Maybe even studying the geography and history of the Earth is a waste of time."
"I don't think so," Patrick said. "What else are the children going to study? And besides, all of us need to understand where we came from."
Three young faces peered into the living room from the atrium. "Is it lunchtime yet?" asked Galileo.
"Almost," Nai replied. "Go wash up first … one at a time," she said, as the young feet pounded down the hallway.
Nai turned around abruptly and caught Patrick staring at her in an unusual way. She smiled. "I'm glad you spend the mornings with us," she said.
Nai extended both her arms and took Patrick's hands in hers. "You have been a big help to me with Benjy and the children these last two months," she said, her eyes meeting his. "And it would be foolish of me not to acknowledge that I have not felt nearly as lonely since you began coming over here every morning."
Patrick made an awkward step toward Nai, but she held his hands firmly in place. "Not yet," she said gently. "It's still too early."
4
Less than a minute after the great firefly clusters in the Emerald City dome announced that another day had begun, little Nikki was in her grandparents' room. "It's light, Nonni," she said. "They'll be coming for us soon."
Nicole rolled over and gave her granddaughter a hug. "We still have a couple of hours, Nikki," she said to the excited girl. "Boobah is still sleeping… Why don't you go back to your room and play with your toys while we take a shower?"
When the disappointed girl finally left, Richard was sitting up, rubbing his eyes. "Nikki has talked about nothing but this day for the last week," Nicole said to him. "She is always in Benjy's room, looking at the painting. Nikki and the twins have even given names to all those bizarre animals."
Nicole reached unconsciously for the hairbrush beside the bed. "Why is it that small children have such difficulty understanding the concept of time? Even though Ellie has made her a calendar and has been counting off the days one by one, Nikki has asked me every morning if 'today's the day.'"
"She's just excited. Everybody is," Richard said, rising from the bed. "I hope that we're not all disappointed."
"How could we be?" Nicole replied. "Dr. Blue says that we will see sights even more amazing than those you and I saw when we entered the city for the first time."
"I guess the whole menagerie will be out in force," Richard said. "By the way, do you understand what the octospiders are celebrating?"
"Sort of. … I guess the closest equivalent holiday I know about would be the American Thanksgiving. The octos call this 'Bounty Day.' They set aside a day to celebrate the quality of their life… At least that's the way Dr. Blue explained it to me."
Richard started to go to the shower but stuck his head back in the room. "Do you think they invited us to participate today because you told them about our family discussion at breakfast two weeks ago?"
"You mean when Patrick and Max said they wished they could return to New Eden?"
Richard nodded.
"Yes, I do," Nicole answered. "I think the octospiders had convinced themselves that we were all completely content here. Having us attend their celebration is part of their attempt to integrate us more into their society."
"I wish I had all the damn translators finished," Richard said. "As it is, I only have two … and they're not completely checked out. Should I g
ive the second one to Max?"
"That would be a good idea," Nicole said, crowding her husband in the doorway.
"What are you doing?" Richard said.
"I'm joining you in the shower," Nicole answered with a laugh, "unless, of course, you're too old to have company."
"Jamie came over from next door to tell them that the transport was ready. He was the youngest of their three octospider neighbors (Hercules lived by himself just on the other side of the plaza), and the humans had had the least contact with him. Jamie's "guardians," Archie and Dr. Blue, explained that Jamie was very much involved with his studies and was approaching a major milestone in his life. Although at first glance Jamie looked almost exactly like the three adult octospiders the clan saw regularly, he was a little smaller than the older octos and the gold stripes in his tentacles were slightly brighter.
The humans had briefly been in a quandary about what to wear for the octospider celebration, but they had soon realized that their clothing was of absolutely no significance. None of the alien species in the Emerald City wore any coverings, a fact that the octospiders had often commented upon. When Richard had once suggested, only partly in jest, that perhaps the humans too should dispense with clothing while they were in the Emerald City—"When in Rome…" he had said—the group had quickly understood how fundamental clothing was to human psychological comfort. "I could not be naked, even among you, my closest friends, without being extremely self-conscious," Eponine had said, summarizing all their feelings.
The motley contingent of eleven humans and their four octospider colleagues traipsed down the street to the plaza. The very pregnant Eponine was at the back of the group, walking slowly and keeping one hand on her stomach. The women had all chosen to dress up a little—Nai was even wearing her colorful Thai silk dress with the blue and green flowers—but the men and children, except for Max (who had on the outrageous Hawaiian shirt he saved for special occasions), were in the T-shirts and jeans that had been their regular costume since the first day they had arrived at the Emerald City.
At least all their clothes were clean. In the beginning, finding a way to do the laundry had been an acute problem for the humans. However, once they had explained their difficulty to Archie, it was only a few days before he introduced them to the dromos, insect-sized beings that automatically cleaned their clothes.
The group boarded the transport at the plaza. Just before the gate marking the end of their zone, the transport stopped and two octospiders they had never seen before climbed into the car. Richard practiced using his translator during the ensuing conversation between Dr. Blue and the newcomers. Ellie read her father's monitor over his shoulder and congratulated him on the accuracy of the translation. The fidelity of the translation was fairly good, but the speed, at least at the normal octospider conversation rate, was much too slow. One sentence would be translated while three were "spoken," causing Richard to reset the system regularly. He couldn't, of course, glean much from a conversation in which he missed two out of three sentences.
Once on the other side of the gate, the view from the transport was a mosaic of strange shapes and bright colors. Nikki's eyes stayed open at their widest levels as she, Benjy, and the twins, with much shouting, identified most of the animals from the octospider painting. The broad streets were full of traffic. There were not only many transports, which moved in both directions on rails like a city trolley, but also pedestrians of all species and sizes, creatures riding wheeled vehicles like unicycles and bicycles, and an occasional mixed group of beings on an ostrichsaur.
Max, who had never once been outside the human zone since his arrival, punctuated his observations with "shits," "damns," and some of the other words Eponine had requested that he remove from his vocabulary before the birth of their child. Max did not start to worry about Eponine's safety until, at the first transport stop after the gate, some strange new creatures crowded onto their car. Four of the newcomers headed immediately in Eponine's direction to examine the special seat the octospiders had installed in the transport because of her advanced pregnancy. Max stood protectively beside her, holding on to one of the vertical rails that were scattered throughout the ten-meter length of the car.
A pair of the new passengers were what the children called "striped crabs," eight-legged red-and-yellow creatures about Nikki's size, with round bodies covered with a hard shell and fearsome-looking claws. Both of them began immediately rubbing their antennae against one of Eponine's bare legs below her dress. They were only being curious, but the combination of the peculiar sensation and the bizarre appearance of the aliens caused Eponine to recoil from fright. Archie, who was standing on the other side of Eponine, reached down quickly with a tentacle and pushed the aliens gently away. One of the striped crabs then reared up on its back four legs, its claws snapping the air in front of Eponine's face, and apparently said something threatening with its rapidly vibrating antennae. An instant later Archie extended two tentacles, lifted the hostile striped crab off the floor of the transport, and deposited the creature on the street outside.
The scene dramatically altered the mood of all the humans. As Ellie translated Archie's explanation of what had occurred for Max and Eponine, the Watanabe twins huddled up close to Nai, and Nikki stretched out her arms for her grandfather to pick her up.
"That species is not very intelligent," Archie told his human friends, "and we have had difficulty engineering out its aggressive tendencies. The particular creature that I threw off the bus has been a troublemaker before. The optimizer responsible for the species had already marked it—you may have noticed—with the two small green dots at the rear of the carapace. This latest transgression will certainly result in termination."
When Ellie finished with the translation, the humans methodically inspected the other aliens on the transport, checking for any more green dots. Relieved that all the other creatures on board were safe, the adults relaxed a little.
"What did that thing say?" Richard asked Archie as the transport approached another stop.
"It was a standard threat response," Archie replied, "typical of animals with constrained intelligence capability. Its antenna patterns conveyed a crude message, with very little real information content."
"Shit," said Max.
The transport continued down the avenue for eight or ten more nillets, stopping twice to receive additional passengers, including half a dozen octospiders and about twenty other creatures representing five different species. Four of the royal blue animals, the ones with the hemispherical tops that looked like they contained undulating brains, squatted right opposite Richard, who was still holding Nikki. Their collective assortment of eight knotted antennae extended upward toward Nikki's feet and became intertwined, as if they were communicating. When the human girl moved her feet slightly, the antennae were quickly retracted back into the strange mass that formed the bulk of the bodies of the alien creatures.
By this time it was very crowded in the transport. An animal the humans had never seen before, which Max later described accurately as a Polish sausage with a long nose and six short legs, raised itself up on one of the vertical bars and grabbed Nai's small purse with its two front paws. Jamie interceded before any damage was done to either the purse or Nai, but a few seconds later Galileo kicked the sausage hard, causing it to lose its grip on the bar. The boy explained that he had thought the sausage was preparing for another grab at the purse. The creature backed away into another section of the transport, its solitary eye fixed warily on Galileo.
"You'd better be careful," Max said with a grin, tousling the boy's hair. "Or the octos will place two green dots on your behind."
The avenue was lined with one- and two-story buildings, almost all painted with geometric patterns in brilliant colors. Garlands and wreaths of brightly colored flowers and leaves festooned the doorways and the roofs. On one long wall, which Hercules told Nai was the back of the main hospital, a huge rectangular mural, four meters high and twenty meters
long, depicted the octospider physicians ministering to their own injured, as well as helping many of the other creatures that lived in the Emerald City.
The transport slowed slightly and began to ascend a ramp. The ramp led to a bridge hundreds of meters long that spanned a wide river or canal that contained boats, frolicking octospiders, and other unknown marine creatures. Archie explained that they were entering the heart of the Emerald City, where all the main ceremonies took place and the "most important" optimizers lived and worked. "Over there," he said, pointing at an octagonal building about thirty meters tall, "is our library and information center."
In response to Richard's question, Archie said that the canal, or moat, completely encircled the "administrative center." "Except on special occasions like today, or for some official purpose approved by the optimizers," Archie said, "only octospiders are allowed access to this area."
The transport parked in a large, flat plain beside an oval structure that looked like a stadium, or perhaps an outdoor auditorium. Nai told Patrick, after they descended from the car, that she had felt more claustrophobic during the last part of the ride than at any time since she had been on the Kyoto subway at rush hour during her trip to meet Kenji's family.
"At least in Japan," Patrick said with a brief shudder, "you were surrounded by other human beings… Here it was so weird. I felt as if I were being scrutinized by all of them. I had to close my eyes or I would have gone crazy."
As they disembarked and began moving toward the stadium, the humans walked in a group, surrounded by their four octospider friends and the other two octos who had boarded the transport before it had left the human zone. These six octospiders protected Nicole and the others from the teeming hordes of living creatures swarming in all directions. Eponine started feeling faint, as much from the combination of sights and smells as from the walking, so Archie stopped their procession about every fifty meters. Eventually they entered one of the gates and the octospiders led the humans to their assigned section.
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