“Why, Margaret Young, I’m astonished to see you here,” Emily Bronson said. “You must not have heard that the Council extended the boycott last night.”
The two men who had entered the room with Ms. Bronson, one of whom was Garland of the swimming pool incident, had followed her over to Nicole’s table. All three of them were standing over Margaret.
“Emily . . . I’m sorry,” Margaret replied with her eyes downcast. “But you know how I love bridge.”
‘There’s a lot more than games at stake here,” Ms. Bronson said.
Ellie had risen from a nearby table and now made an appeal to Big Block to stop the disruption. But Emily Bronson was too quick. “All of you,” she said in a loud voice, “are showing your disloyalty by being here. If you
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leave now, the Council will not hold it against you. If you stay, however, after having been warned—”
Big Block now intervened and informed Ms. Bronson that she and her friends were indeed disrupting the game. As the trio turned to leave, more than half of the humans rose from their chairs to follow.
“This is preposterous,” a voice with astonishing clarity and power said. Nicole was standing iii her place, leaning on the table with one hand. “Sit back down,” she said in the same tone. “Do not allow yourself to be bullied by a hatemonger.”
All the bridge players returned to their seats. “Shut up, old woman,” Emily Bronson said in anger from across the room. ‘This is none of your concern.” Big Block escorted her and her companions out the door.
“You don’t have any idea, do you, Mrs. Wakefield, what any of the objects are?”
“Your guess is as good as mine, Maria,” Nicole answered. ‘They probably had special meaning, in some way, for your mother. I thought at the time that the silver cylinder implanted under your mother’s skin was some kind of zoo identifier, but since none of the zookeeping staff survived the bombing and very few of the records remain, it’s unlikely that we will ever be able to verify my hypothesis.”
“What’s a ‘hypothesis’?” the girl asked.
“It’s a tentative assumption or explanation for what’s happened, when there’s really not sufficient evidence to come to any definite answers,” Nicole said. “By the way, 1 must say that your English is quite impressive.”
“Thank you, Mrs. Wakefield.”
They were sitting together in the communal lounge just off the observation deck. Nicole and Maria were both drinking fruit juice. Although Nicole had been in the Grand Hotel for a week already, this was the first time she had had a private moment with the girl she had found amid the octospider zoo ruins sixteen years earlier.
“Was my mother really pretty?” Maria asked.
“She was striking, I remember that,” Nicole sai8, “even though I couldn’t see her very well in the dim light. She
appeared to have your same coloring, maybe a little lighter, and was of medium build. I would have guessed she was thirty-five years old or maybe slightly less.”
“And there were no signs of my father?” Maria asked.
“None that I saw,” Nicole said. “Of course, under die circumstances I did not make a very thorough search. It’s possible that he might have been wandering somewhere in the Alternate Domain looking for help. The fence that enclosed your compound had been flattened in the bombing. I worried, when we woke up the next morning, mat your ‘father might have been looking for you, but I later convinced myself, based on what I had seen in your shelter, that you and your mother lived alone.”
“So is it your hypothesis that my father had already died?” Maria said.
“Very good,” Nicole replied. “No, not necessarily. I wouldn’t be that specific. It just did not look as if anyone else had lived there in your enclosure for some time.”
Maria took a drink of her juice and there was a momentary silence at the table. “You told me the other night, Mrs. Wakefield,” the girl said, “when we were talking with Max and Eponine, that you presumed my mother, or maybe both my parents, had been kidnapped much earlier by the octospiders, from a place called Avalon. I didn’t understand completely what you were saying.”
Nicole smiled at Maria. “I appreciate your politeness, Maria,” she said. “But you’re certainly part of the family— you can call me Nicole.” Her mind drifted back to New Eden—it seemed so long ago—and then Nicole realized that the girl was waiting for an answer to her comment.
“Avalon was a settlement outside of New Eden,” Nicole said, “in the dark and cold of the Central Plain. It was originally created by the government of the colony to quarantine those people who had a deadly virus called RV-41. After Avalon was built, the dictator of New Eden, a man named Nakamura, convinced the Senate that Avalon was also a perfect place for other ‘abnormal’ humans, including those who protested against the government and those who were mentally ill or retarded.”
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“It doesn’t sound tike a very nice place,” Maria commented.
Benjy was therefor over a year, Nicole was thinking. He never talks about it. She began feeling guilty about not having spent enough private time with Benjy since she had awakened. But he has never once complained. ‘
Again Nicole had to force herself to pay attention to her conversation with Maria. We old people have drifting thoughts, she said to herself. Because so many things we see and hear remind us of memories.
“I have done some checking already,” Nicole said. “Unfortunately, all the administrative personnel from Ava-lon died in the war. I have described your mother to a few of the people who spent considerable time in Avalon, but none of them remember her.”
“Do you think she was a mental patient?” Maria asked.
‘That’s possible,” Nicole replied. “We may never know for certain. Your necklace, incidentally, is our best clue to your mother’s identity. She was clearly a devotee of the order of the Catholic church started by Saint Michael of Siena. There are some other Michaelites on board, Ellie says. I intend to talk with them when I have the time.”
Nicole stopped and turned toward the observation deck, where a commotion had started. A few humans and a large group of octospiders were pointing out the window and gesticulating wildly. A couple of people raced off toward the main corridor, presumably to bring back others to observe whatever it was they were seeing.
Nicole and Maria left their table, walked up the steps to the deck, and looked out the large window. In the distance, beyond the tetrahedron of lights, a huge, flat-topped spacecraft that resembled an aircraft carrier was approaching the Node. Nicole and Maria watched for several minutes without speaking as the new spacecraft loomed larger and larger.
“What is it?” Maria asked.
“I have no idea,” Nicole answered.
t*
The observation deck filled rapidly. The doors were constantly opening as more humans, octospiders, iguanas,
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and even a pair of avians came into the room. The crowd began to press against Nicole and Maria.
The flat-topped vehicle was extremely long, longer even than the transportation corridors connecting the spheres of the Node. Several dozen big transparent “bubbles” were scattered around its surface. The carrier stopped near one of the spherical vertices of the Node and extended a long transparent tube that fit neatly into the side of the sphere.
The deck was in turmoil. All kinds of creatures were pushing, pressing to move closer to the window. A pair of ‘ iguanas leaped upward against the window in the weightlessness and were quickly joined by ten to twenty humans. Nicole began to feel claustrophobic and tried to move out of the way. There was no room through the mob. Nicole was pushed in all directions. She lost contact with Maria. A strong wave caught Nicole from the side and smacked her against the wall. Nicole felt a sharp pain in her left hip upon impact. In the ensuing melee, she might have been trampled and injured even more except that Big Block and the blockheads swept into the mob and restored order.
Nicole was badly shaken when Big Block reached her. The pain in her hip was unbearable. She could not walk.
“It’s just part of being old,” the Eagle said. “You must be more careful.” He and Nicole were alone in her apartment. The others were eating breakfast.
“I do not like being fragile,” Nicole said. “Nor do I like not doing things because I’m afraid of injuring myself.”
“Your hip will heal,” the Eagle said. “But it will take a while. You’re lucky it’s only badly bruised and not broken. At your age a broken hip can make a human a permanent invalid.”
‘Thanks for the words of reassurance,” Nicole said. She took a small sip of her coffee. She was lying on her mat with her head lifted up slightly by several pillows. “But enough about me. Let’s move on to more important things. What is that flat spacecraft all about?”