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
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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.1”
“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 give 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.”
a» Jamie came over from next door to tell them that the
transport was ready. He was the youngest of their three
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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 drornos, insect-sized beings that automatically cleaned their clothes.
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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-yeilow creatures about Nikki’s size, with round bodies covered with a
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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.
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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.