gate, some strange new creatures crowded onto their car. Four of the newcomers headed immediately in Eponine’s direction to examine the special seat the octospiders had installed in the transport because of her advanced pregnancy. Max stood protectively beside her, holding on to one of the vertical rails that were scattered throughout the ten-meter length of the car.
A pair of the new passengers were what the children called “striped crabs,” eight-legged red-and-yellow creatures about Nikki’s size, with round bodies covered with a hard shell and fearsome-looking claws. Both of them began immediately rubbing their antennae against one of Eponine’s bare legs below her dress. They were only being curious, but the combination of the peculiar sensation and the bizarre appearance of the aliens caused Eponine to recoil from fright. Archie, who was standing on the other side of Eponine, reached down quickly with a tentacle and pushed the aliens gently away. One of the striped crabs then reared up on its back four legs, its claws snapping the air in front of Eponine’s face, and apparently said something threatening with its rapidly vibrating antennae. An instant later Archie extended two tentacles, lifted the hostile striped crab off the floor of the transport, and deposited the creature on the street outside.
The scene dramatically altered the mood of all the humans. As Ellie translated Archie’s explanation of what had occurred for Max and Eponine, the Watanabe twins huddled up close to Nai, and Nikki stretched out her arms for her grandfather to pick her up.
“That species is not very intelligent,” Archie told his human friends, “and we have had difficulty engineering out its aggressive tendencies. The particular creature that I threw off the bus has been a troublemaker before. The optimizer responsible for the species had already marked it-you may have noticed-with the two small green dots at the rear of the carapace. This latest transgression will certainly result in termination.”
When Ellie finished with the translation, the humans methodically inspected the other aliens on the transport, checking for any more green dots. Relieved that all the other creatures on board were safe, the adults relaxed a little.
“What did that thing say?” Richard asked Archie as the transport approached another stop.
“It was a standard threat response,” Archie replied, “typical of animals with constrained intelligence capability. Its antenna patterns conveyed a crude message, with very little real information content.”
“Shit,” said Max.
The transport continued down the avenue for eight or ten more nillets, stopping twice to receive additional passengers, including half a dozen octospiders and about twenty other creatures representing five different species. Four of the royal blue animals, the ones with the hemispherical tops that looked like they contained undulating brains, squatted right opposite Richard, who was still holding Nikki. Their collective assortment of eight knotted antennae extended upward toward Nikki’s feet and became intertwined, as if they were communicating. When the human girl moved her feet slightly, the antennae were quickly retracted back into the strange mass that formed the bulk of the bodies of the alien creatures.
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 many of the other creatures that lived in the Emerald City.
The transport slowed slightly and began to ascend a 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. I 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 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 octospider 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 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
