parades and speeches-the usual stuff about how all the Chakri kings since the first Rama had prepared the Thai people for their important role in the world-but what I remember most clearly was riding around the city at night in the back of an electric pickup with my cousin Oni and her friends. Everywhere we went we threw a bucket of water on somebody- and they threw one on us. We laughed and laughed.”
“Why was everyone throwing water?” Patrick asked.
“I’ve forgotten now,” Nai said with a shrug. “It had something to do with the ceremony. But the experience itself, the shared laughter, and even what it felt like to have my clothes absolutely soaked, and suddenly to be hit by another burst of water-all that I can recall in detail.”
They were again silent as Nai reached up to take the map off the wall. “So I guess Kepler and Galileo will not consider themselves to be Earthlings either,” she mused. She rolled up the map very carefully. “Maybe even studying the geography and history of the Earth is a waste of time.”
“I don’t think so,” Patrick said. “What else are the children going to study? And besides, all of us need to understand where we came from.”
Three young faces peered into the living room from the atrium. “Is it lunchtime yet?” asked Galileo.
“Almost,” Nai replied. “Go wash up first… one at a time,” she said, as the young feet pounded down the hallway.
Nai turned around abruptly and caught Patrick staring at her in an unusual way. She smiled. “I’m glad you spend the mornings with us,” she said.
Nai extended both her arms and took Patrick’s hands in hers. “You have been a big help to me with Benjy and the children these last two months,” she said, her eyes meeting his. “And it would be foolish of me not to acknowledge that I have not felt nearly as lonely since you began coming over here every morning.”
Patrick made an awkward step toward Nai, but she held his hands firmly in place. “Not yet,” she said gently. “It’s still too early.”
4
Less than a minute after the great firefly clusters in the Emerald City dome announced that another day had begun, little Nikki was in her grandparents’ room. “It’s light, Nonni,” she said. “They’ll be coming for us soon.”
Nicole rolled over and gave her granddaughter a hug. “We still have a couple of hours, Nikki,” she said to the excited girl. “Boobah is still sleeping… Why don’t you go back to your room and play with your toys while we take a shower?”
When the disappointed girl finally left, Richard was sitting up, rubbing his eyes. “Nikki has talked about nothing but this day for the last week,” Nicole said to him. “She is always in Benjy’s room, looking at the painting. Nikki and the twins have even given names to all those bizarre animals.”
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 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!”
“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 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.
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
