Nicole looked at Ellie with surprise. “So you would like to leave too?” she said.
“Yes, Mother.”
Nicole glanced around the table. She could tell from Eponine’s and Patrick’s expressions that they agreed with Max and Ellie. “Does anyone know how Nai feels about this subject?” she inquired.
Patrick blushed slightly when Max and Eponine looked at him, as if he were expected to answer. “We talked about it last night,” he said at length. “Nai has been convinced, for some time, that the children have too narrow a life isolated here in our own zone. But she is also worried, especially after what happened yesterday, that there are significant dangers to the children if we try to live freely in the octospider society.”
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“I guess that settles it,” Nicole said with a shrug. “I will talk to Archie about our leaving at the first opportunity.”
Nai was a good storyteller. The children loved the school days when she would dispense with the planned activities and simply tell them stories instead. She had been telling the children both Greek and Chinese myths, in fact, the first day that Hercules had appeared to observe them. The children had given the octospider his name after he had helped Nai move the furniture in the room into a different configuration.
Most of the stories that Nai told had a hero. Since even Nikki still had some memory of the human biots in New Eden, the children were more interested in stories about Albert Einstein, Abraham Lincoln, and Benita Garcia than they were in historic or mythical characters with whom they had had no personal involvement.
On the morning after Bounty Day, Nai explained how, during the last phases of the Great Chaos, Benita Garcia used her considerable fame to help the millions of poor people in Mexico. Nikki, who had inherited the compassion of her mother and grandmother, was moved by the story of Benita’s courageous defiance of the Mexican oligarchy and the American multinational corporations. The little girl proclaimed that Benita Garcia was her hero.
“Heroine,” the always precise Kepler corrected. “And what about you, Mother?” the boy said a few seconds later. “Did you have a hero or heroine when you were a little girl?”
Despite the fact that she was in an alien city on an extraterrestrial spacecraft at an unbelievable distance away from her hometown of Lamphun in Thailand, for an extraordinary fifteen or twenty seconds Nai’s memory transported her back to her childhood, and she saw herself clearly, in a simple cotton dress, walking barefoot into the Buddhist temple to pay homage to Queen Chamatevi. Nai could also see the monks in their saffron robes, and she believed that for a moment she could even smell the joss in the viharn in front of the temple’s principal Buddha.
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“Yes,” she said, quite moved by the power of her flashback, “I did have a heroine . . . Queen Chamatevi of the Haripunchai.”
“Who was she, Mrs. Watanabe?” Nikki said. “Was she like Benita Garcia?”
“Not exactly,” Nai began. “Chamatevi was a beautiful young woman who lived in the Mons kingdom in the south of Indochina over a thousand years ago. Her family was rich and closely connected to the king of the Mons. But Chamatevi, who was exceedingly well educated for a woman of that time, longed to do something different and unusual. Once upon a time, when Chamatevi was nineteen or twenty years old, a soothsayer visited—”
“What’s a soothsayer, Mother?” Kepler asked.
Nai smiled. “Someone who predicts the future, or at least tries to,” she answered.
“Anyway, this soothsayer told the king that there was an ancient legend saying that a beautiful young Mons woman of noble birth would go north through the jungles to the valley of the Haripunchai and unite all the warring tribes of the region. This young woman, the soothsayer continued, would create a kingdom whose splendor would equal the Mons’, and she would be known in many lands for her outstanding leadership. The soothsayer told this story during a feast at the court, and Chamatevi was listening. When the story was completed, the young woman came forward to the king of the Mons and told him that she must be the woman in the legend.
“Despite her father’s opposition, Chamatevi accepted the king’s offer of money and provisions and elephants, even though there was only enough food to last the five months of trekking through the jungle to the land of the Haripunchai. She knew that if the tribes of the north did not accept her as their queen, she would be forced to sell herself as a slave. But never for a moment was Chamatevi afraid.
“Of course the legend was fulfilled, the valley tribes embraced her as then- queen, and she reigned for many years in what is known in Thai history as the Golden Age of the Haripunchai. When Chamatevi was very old, she carefully
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divided her kingdom into two equal parts, which she gave to her twin sons. She then retired to a Buddhist monastery to thank God for His love and protection. Chamatevi remained alert and healthy until she died at the age of ninety-nine.” For reasons she did not completely understand, Nai felt herself becoming very emotional while she was telling the story. When she was finished, Nai couid still see, in her mind’s eye, the wall panels in the temple in Lamphun that illustrated Chamatevi’s story. Nai had been so engrossed in her story that she had not even noticed that Patrick, Nicole, and Archie had all come into the schoolroom and were sitting on the floor behind the children.
“We have many similar stories,” Archie said a few minutes later, with Nicole translating, “which we also tell to our juveniles. Most of them are very, very old. Are they true? It doesn’t really matter to an octospider. The stories entertain, they instruct, and they inspire.”
“I’m sure the children would love to hear one of your stories,” Nai said to Archie. “In fact, all of us would.”
Archie did not say anything for almost a nillet. His lens fluid was very active, moving back and forth, as if he were carefully studying the human beings staring at him. At length the colored strips began to roll out of his slit and circumnavigate his gray head. “A long, long time ago,” he began, “on a faraway world blessed with bounteous resources and beauty beyond description, all the octospiders lived in a vast ocean. On the land there were many creatures, one of which, the . . .”
“I’m sorry,” Nicole said both to Archie and the others, “I don’t know how to translate the next color pattern.”
Archie used several new sentences to try to define the word in other terms. “Those that have gone before . . .” Nicole said to herself. “Oh, well, it’s probably not essential for the story that every word be exactly correct. I’ll simply call them the Precursors.
“On the land portions of this beautiful planet,” Nicole continued for Archie, “were many creatures, of whom” by far the most intelligent were the Precursors. They had built
vehicles that could fly into the air, they had explored all the neighboring planets and stars, they had even learned how to create life from simple chemicals, where there had been no life before. They had changed the nature of the land and of (he oceans with their incredible knowledge.
“It happened that the Precursors determined that the octospider species had enormous untapped potential, capabilities that had never been expressed during their many, many years of aquatic existence, and they began to show the octospiders how to develop and use their latent abilities. As the years passed, the octospider species, thanks to the Precursors, became the second most intelligent on the planet and evolved a very complicated and close relationship with the Precursors.
“During this time the Precursors helped the octospiders learn to live outside the water by taking oxygen directly from the air of the beautiful planet. Entire colonies of octos began to spend their whole lives on land. One day, after a major meeting between the chief optimizers of the Precursors and the octospiders, it was announced that alt octospiders would become land creatures and give up their colonies in the oceans.
“Down at great depths in the sea was one small colony of octospiders, no more than a thousand altogether, that was managed by a local optimizer who did not think the chief optimizers of the two species had come to a correct decision. This local optimizer resisted the announcement and, although he and his colony were ostracized t>y the others and did not share in the bounty offered by the Precursors, he and many generations that followed him continued to live their isolated, uncomplicated life on the bottom of the ocean.