After what seemed like a long wait, the great doors at the left end of the far walkway opened and the massive queen lumbered in. She was huge, at least six meters tall, with a gigantic swollen body above her eight long tentacles. She stopped on the platform and said something to the audience. Bright colors spilled in profusion all over her body, creating a vivid spectacle. Nicole could not understand what the queen was saying because she could not follow the exact sequence of colors pouring out of the slit.
The queen slowly turned toward the wall, extended her tentacles, and began the laborious process of pulling herself up onto the spikes. Throughout the climb, disordered bursts of color decorated her .body. Nicole assumed these were emotional expressions of some kind, perhaps pain and fatigue. Looking around her, Nicole noticed that the octospi-ders in the audience were all silent, their heads dark and devoid of color.
When the queen had finally positioned herself in the center of the wall, she wrapped all eight tentacles around the spikes and exposed her cream-colored underbelly. While she had been working in the hospital, Nicole had become quite familiar with octospider anatomy, but she had never imagined that the soft tissue underneath their bellies could be distended so much. As Nicole watched, the queen began rocking slightly, moving forward and backward, gently bouncing off the rock wall with each motion. The emotional color display continued. The colors reached their peak intensity when a geyser of greenish black fluid spewed forth from the queen’s underside, followed immediately by an immense outpouring of white objects of different sizes contained in a thick, viscous fluid.
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Nicole was stupefied. Below her, a dozen or so octospi-ders on either side of the pool were hurriedly brushing into the water the eggs and fluid that had landed on the walkways. Another eight octos were pouring the unknown contents of huge containers into the pool. The water was now teeming with octospider blood, eggs, and the high-viscosity fluid that was ejected along with the eggs. In less than a minute the entire slurry in the pool moved under the arch to the right.
The queen had not yet changed position. Once the pool below them was clear running water again, all lenses turned to watch the queen. Nicole was staggered by how much the octospider had already shrunk. She estimated that the queen must have lost half her body weight in the fraction of a second it took the egg mass and accompanying fluids to pour forth from her body. The queen was bleeding still, and two normal-sized octospiders had climbed up the wall to minister to her. At this point Dr. Blue tapped Nicole on the shoulder, indicating it was time to leave.
Sitting by herself in one of the small rooms in the octospider hospital, Nicole played the egg rush scene over and over in her mind. She had not expected that the event would affect her so emotionally. Nicole had only half watched while Dr. Blue explained to her, after they had returned to the hospital, that the containers emptied into the slurry were full of tiny animals that would seek out and kill specific embryos. In that way the octospiders controlled, she said, the exact composition of the next generation, including the number of queens, repletes, midget morphs, and all the other variations.
The mother in Nicole was struggling to understand what it would feel like to be an octospider queen during an egg rush. In some undefinable way, Nicole felt deeply connected to that mammoth creature that had crawled up onto the spikes. During the instant of the egg rush, Nicole’s loins had contracted, and she had recalled bom the pain and the exhilaration of her own six births. What is there about the
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birth process, she wondered briefly, that unites all creatures who have ever experienced it?
Nicole was overwhelmed by a desire to communicate with the queen octospider, to know what that other intelligent mother had been thinking and feeling just prior to and during the egg rush. Had the queen, amid the pain and wonder of the moment, felt an epiphanic serenity, a vision of her own offspring and their offspring continuing into the unforeseen future, the miraculous cycle of life? Had there been a deep and ineffable peace in the seconds just after the rush, a peace unlike any the creature had ever known at any time other than immediately after birth?
Nicole knew that the imaginary conversation she was having with the queen could never take place. Again she closed her eyes, attempting to reconstruct the exact bursts of color she had seen on the queen’s body immediately before and after the event. Had those surges of color told the other octospiders what the queen was feeling? Were they somehow able, Nicole wondered, with their rich language of color, to communicate complex feelings like ecstasy better than humans, with their, limited language of words?
There were no answers. Nicole realized that there were tasks waiting for her outside the room, in the octospider hospital, but she was not ready for her solitude to end. She did not want the strong emotions she was feeling to be diminished by the demands of everyday life.
Nicole had also begun to experience a profound loneliness. She did not at first connect her loneliness directly to the egg rush. Nicole was, however, quite aware that she was having a strong desire to talk to a close friend, preferably Richard. She wanted to share with someone what she had seen and felt in the Queen’s Domain. In her isolation Nicole suddenly remembered a few lines from a relevant poem by Benita Garcia, She opened her portable computer and, after a short search, found the entire poem.
In moments of deep doubt or intense pain, When I am overpowered by my life, I search around me everywhere I can
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For kindred souls who know what I know not, For those who have the strength to mitigate What makes me tremble, weep, and often brood. They tell me that I cannot live my way Where all my feelings rule my conscious mind. I must control myself before the act, Or else accept what I have long endured, The brutal days of feeling lost and blind.
There have been times, not many but a few, When someone has possessed the soothing balm, Providing surcease for my angst or pain. But age has taught me now one simple rule. Inside myself I must the screams contain, Whatever devils must be wrestled there. The lessons learned will not be lost again. We walk alone upon our final trip. No hand can help us on [hat day of death, ft’s best we learn, while time is still our friend, To trust ourselves, and save our precious breath.
Nicole read the words several times. Then, realizing that she was completely exhausted, she put her head down on the only table in the room and fell asleep.
Dr. Blue tapped gently on Nicole’s shoulder with one of her tentacles. Nicole stirred and opened her eyes. “You’ve been asleep for almost two hours,” the octospider said. “They have been expecting you over at the administrative center.”
“What’s going on?” Nicole asked, rubbing her eyes. “Why is anyone waiting for me?”
“Nakamura has made a major speech in New Eden. The Chief Optimizer wants to discuss it with you.”
Nicole jumped up quickly and then reached out to touch the desk. In a few seconds her dizziness was gone. “Thank you again, Dr. Blue, for everything,” she said. “I’ll be on my way in another minute.”
7
I really don’t think Nikki should I be allowed to watch the speech,” Robert said. “It wili certainly scare her.”
“What Nakamura says will affect her life as much as it will ours,” Ellie replied. “If she wants to watch, I think we should let her. After all, Robert, she has lived with the octospiders.”
“But she can’t possibly understand what any of this really means,” Robert argued. “She’s not even four years old yet.”
The issue remained unresolved until a few minutes before the New Eden dictator was scheduled to appear on television. At that time Nikki approached her mother in the living room. “I’m not going to watch,” the little girl said with astonishing insight, “because I don’t want you and Daddy to fight.”
One of the rooms in Nakamura’s palace had been converted into a television studio. It was from this ^tudio that the tyrant usually addressed the citizens of New Eden. His last speech had been three months earlier, when he had
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announced that troops were going to be deployed in the Southern Hemicylinder to confront the “alien menace.” Although the government-controlled newspapers and television had regularly been featuring news items from the front, many of them fabricating the “intense resistance” being offered by the octospiders, this would be Nakamura’s first public comment on the progress and direction of the war in the south.