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 rn^ny of the other creatures that lived in the Emerald City.
The transport slowed slightly and began to ascend a
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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. 1 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.
There was only one seat in the section that had been reserved for the humans. In fact, Eponine may have had the only seat in the stadium. Looking around the upper deck of the arena with Richard’s binoculars, Max and Patrick saw many beings leaning against, or holding on to, the sturdy
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vertical poles scattered throughout the terraced bleachers, but nowhere else could they find any seats.
Benjy was intrigued by the cloth bags that Archie and a few of the other octospiders were carrying. The off-white bags, all of which were identical, were about the size of a woman’s purse. They hung at what might be called octospi-der hip level, attached over the head with a simple strap. Never before had any of the humans seen an octo with an accessory. Benjy had noticed the bags immediately and had asked Archie about them while they had been standing together at the plaza. Benjy had assumed that Archie had not understood his question at that time, and Benjy had in fact forgotten it himself until they reached the stadium and he saw the other similar bags.
Archie was uncharacteristically vague in his explanation of the purpose of the bag. Nicole had to ask the octospider to repeat his colors before she told Benjy what had been said. “Archie says it’s equipment he might need to protect us in an emergency.”
“What kind of equipment?” Benjy asked, but Archie had already moved several meters away and was talking with an octospider in an adjacent section.
The humans were separated from the other species both by two strips’of taut metal rope around the tops and bottoms of the vertical poles on the outside of their enclave, and by their octospider protectors (or “guards,” as Max called them), who stationed themselves in the empty area between the different species. Beside the humans on the right was a group of several hundred of the aliens with the six flexible arms, the same creatures who had built the staircase under the rainbow dome. On the left and below the human clan, on the other side of a large empty area, were as many as a thousand brown, chunky, iguanalike animals with long, tapered tails and protruding teeth. The iguanas were the size of domestic cats.
What was immediately obvious was that the entire stadium was rigidly segregated. Each species was^sitting with its own kind. What’s more, except for the “guards,” there were no octospiders on the upper deck. All fifteen
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thousand of the octos (Richard’s estimate) who were present as spectators were sitting in the lower deck.
“There are several reasons for the segregation,” Archie explained, with Ellie translating for everyone else. “First, what the Chief Optimizer says is going to be broadcast in thirty or forty languages simultaneously. If you look carefully, you’ll see that each special section has an apparatus—here’s yours, for example, what Richard calls a speaker—that presents what’s being said in the language of that species. We have been working with the Chief Optimizer’s text for days, preparing the proper translations. Since all the octos, including the various morphs, can understand our standard language of color, they’re all down on the lower deck, where there is no special translation equipment.
“Let me show you what I’m talking about. Look over there.” Archie extended a tentacle. “Do you see that group of striped crabs? See the two large vertical wires on that table at the front of their section? When the Chief Optimizer starts to speak, those wires will activate and present what is being said in their antenna language.”
Far below them, over the top of what would have been a sunken field in an Earth stadium, a vast cover with colored stripes was suspended from stanchions attached to the bottom sections of the lower deck.
“Can you read what it says?” Ellie asked her. father.
“What?” said Richard, still stunned by the magnitude of the spectacle.
“There’s a message on the cover,” Ellie said, pointing downward. “Read the colors.”
“So there is.” Richard read very slowly. “Bounty means food, water, energy, information, balance, and . . . What’s the last word?”
“I would translate it as ‘diversity,'” Ellie said.
“What does the message mean?” Eponine asked.
“I guess we’re going to find out.”
A few minutes later, after Archie had told the humans that another reason for the species segregation was to confirm the octospiders’ census statistics, the field cover
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was rolled up on two long, thick poles by two pairs of giant black animals. The pairs started on opposite sides of the middle of the arena and then moved toward the ends of the stadium, wrapping the cover around their poles to unveil the entire field.
Simultaneously, an additional cluster of fireflies descended from far above the stadium so that all the spectators could clearly see not only the abundance of fruits, vegetables, and grains stacked in hundreds of piles on both ends of the field, but also the two collections of diverse beings that were in separate regions on the floor of the arena, on either side of its middle. The first group of aliens was walking around in a large circle on a normal dirt surface. They were attached to each other by some kind of rope. Next to them was a large pool of water, in which another thirty or forty species, also connected to each other, were swimming in a second large circle.
In the absolute center of the field was a raised platform, empty except for some scattered black boxes, with ramps descending in the direction of me two adjacent regions. As everyone watched, four octospiders broke from the circle in the swimming pool and climbed the ramp onto the platform. Another four octospiders left the group walking on the dirt surface and joined their colleagues. One of these eight octos then stood up on a box in the middle of the platform and began to speak in color.