“Probably not,” Archie replied. “But they could be. And if tonight were to turn into some kind of a fiasco because of something that one of you did, I’m not certain . . .” In a very unusual action for an octospider, Archie did not finish his sentence.
“Are you telling us,” Nicole now said, “that our request to return to New Eden is somehow tied up in all this?”
“Our mutual relationship,” Archie said, “has reached a cusp. By sharing a critical portion of our Matriculation process with you, we are attempting to attain a new level of understanding. In that sense, the answer to your question is yes.”
They spent almost half a tert, two human hours, in the conference room. Archie began by explaining what the entire Matriculation activity was all about. Jamie and his
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compatriots, the octospider told them, had finished their adolescence and were about to make the transition to adulthood. As juveniles, their lives had been mostly controlled, and they had not been allowed to make any decisions of great significance. At the end of the Matriculation, Jamie and the other young octos would make a single monumental decision, one mat would fundamentally alter the rest of their lives. It was the purpose of the Matriculation, and even much of the final year prior to the transition, to provide the adolescent octospiders with information that would help them make that important decision.
“Tonight,” Archie said, “the juveniles will all be taken, as a group, over to the Alternate Domain to see a .. .”
Neither Ellie nor Nicole could figure out at first how to translate into English what the young octospiders were going to see. Eventually, after some discussion between them and several sentences of clarification from Dr. Blue and Archie, the women decided that the best interpretation for what Archie had said in color was “morality play.”
For the next several minutes the conversation digressed as Dr. Blue and Archie explained, in response to questions from the humans, that the Alternate Domain was a specific section of the octospider realm that was not under the dome. “South of the Emerald City,” Archie said, “there is another settlement with a decidedly different life-style from ours. About two thousand octospiders live in the Alternate Domain at the present time, along with another three thousand or four thousand other creatures representing a dozen different species. Their lives are chaotic and unstructured. The alternate octospiders have no dome over their heads to protect them, no assigned tasks, no planned entertainment, no access to the information in the library, no roads or homes except those they collectively build for themselves, and a life expectancy about one-tenth that of the average octospider in the Emerald City.”
Ellie thought about how the Avalon area had been created by Nakamura to deal with the problems that the colonists in New Eden wanted to forget. She thouglit that perhaps the Alternate Domain was a similar settlement.
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“Why,” she asked, “have so many of your kindred—over ten percent, if my math is accurate—been forced to live outside the dome?”
“No normal octospider has been forced to live in the Alternate Domain,” Dr. Blue said. “They are living there because of a personal choice.”
“But whyT all three humans said, almost in unison.
Dr. Blue went over to the corner and retrieved a few of the charts. The two octospiders used the diagrams extensively during the long discussion that followed. First they explained that hundreds of generations earlier their biologists had correctly identified the connection between sexuality in their species and many other behavioral characteristics, including personal ambition, aggression, territoriality, and aging, to name the most important. This discovery had been made during a period of octospider history when the transition to Optimization was first occurring. But despite the supposedly universal acceptance of a theoretically better structure for octospider society, the transition was severely impeded by regular outbreaks of warfare, tribal dissension, and other mayhem. The octo biologists at the time speculated that only a sexless society, or one in which only a small fraction of the population was sexual, would be able to abide by the principles of Optimization, in which the desires of the individual were subordinated to the welfare of the colony as a whole.
A seemingly endless succession of conflicts convinced all of the forward-looking octospiders of the period that Optimization was only a foolish dream unless some method or technique could be found to combat the individualism that inevitably blocked acceptance of the new order But what could be done? It was several more generations before a brilliant discovery was made. Research found that special chemicals in a sugarcane-like product called barrican actually slowed down sexual maturation in the octospiders. Within several hundred years the octo genetic engineers had succeeded in designing and producing a variation of this barrican which, if ingested regularly, stopped the advent of sexual maturity altogether.
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Test cases and test colonies succeeded beyond the wildest dreams of both the biologists and the progressive political scientists. Sexually immature octos were more responsive to the group concepts of Optimization. In addition, aging was also somehow retarded in those octos who ate barrican. Aging, the octospider scientists then learned very quickly, was tied to the same internal clock mechanism as puberty, and in fact the enzymes causing the cells not to replenish properly in older octospiders did not even activate until a specified time period after sexual maturity.
• Octospider society underwent rapid changes, Archie and Dr. Blue both asserted, after these colossal discoveries. Optimization took a firm hold everywhere. Octospider social scientists began to envision a society in which the individual octos would be nearly immortal, dying only from accidents or the sudden failure of a major and critical organ. Sexless octospiders populated all the colonies and, as the biologists had predicted, personal ambition and aggression became almost nonexistent.
“All this history took place many generations -ago,” Archie said, “and is primarily background information to help you understand what the Matriculation is all about. Without going into the complex intervening history, Dr. Blue will summarize where we are today in our particular colony.”
“Every octospider that you have encountered so far,” Dr. Blue said, “except for the midget morphs and the repletes, both of whom are permanently sexless, is a creature whose sexual maturity has been retarded by the barrican. Many years ago, before a rogue biologist showed how a different kind of sexuality could be genetically engineered into our species, only an octospider queen could produce offspring.
“Among the normal adult octospider population there were two sexes, but the only significant differentiation between them was that one of the two had the ability, if mature, to fertilize a queen. Sexual adults copulated for pleasure, but because there was no issue from this contact, the distinctions between the sexes were blurred. In* fact, long-term bonding in the colony was more frequent among
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members of the same sex, because of similar feelings and common points of view.
“Now the situation is vastly more complicated. In our octospider species, thanks to the genetic engineering genius of our predecessors, an adult female octo is capable of producing, as the result of a sexual union with a mature male octospider, a single, infertile juvenile of limited life expectancy and somewhat reduced capability. You have not yet seen one of these morphs because all of them live, by decree, in the Alternate Domain.”
Dr. Blue paused and Archie continued. “Right after Matriculation, each juvenile citizen of our colony decides whether he or she wishes to become sexually mature. If the answer is no, then the octo places his or her sexuality in trust with the optimizers and the colony as a whole. That’s what Dr. Blue, who is a female, and I each did long ago. Under octospider law, it is only immediately after Matriculation that an individual can make his or her own sexual choice without any consequences. The optimizers are not lenient toward those who decide to undergo a sexual metamorphosis, without explicit colony permission, after their careers have been carefully structured and planned.”
Again Dr. Blue spoke. “As we have presented it tonight, it might seem unlikely that a juvenile octospider would ever make the decision for early sexual maturity. However, in the interest of fairness we should point out that there are compelling reasons, at least in the minds of some young octospiders, for choosing to become alternates. First and foremost, a female octo knows that her chances of ever bearing offspring are significantly diminished if she chooses to remain nonsexual after Matriculation. Our history suggests that only in an emergency will a large number of these females ever be called upon to produce juvenile octospiders. In general, the reduced capability and infertility of this kind of offspring makes them less desirable, from the point of view of the colony as a whole, unless of course more octos are needed to support the infrastructure of the society.