when she noticed that Richard’s eyes were still open.
“Today,” he said. “Everything that happened today. I’m going back over it in my mind, scene by incredible scene. Now that I’m old and my memory isn’t as good as it once was, I try to use refresh techniques.”
Nicole laughed. “You’re impossible,” she said. “But I love you anyway.”
5
Max was agitated. “I, for one, do not want to stay in this place one minute longer than necessary. I no longer trust them. Look, Richard, you know damn well I’m right. Did you see how fast Archie took that tube thing out of his bag when the alien iguana jumped on Benjy’s back? And he didn’t hesitate a second to use it. That was all I heard, and presto, that lizard was either dead or paralyzed. He would have done the same thing to one of us if we had misbehaved.”
“Max, I think you’re overreacting,” Richard said.
“Am I? And is it another overreaction that the entire scene yesterday reinforced in my mind just how powerless we are?”
“Max,” Nicole interrupted, “don’t you think this is a discussion that we should have at another time, when we’re not so emotional?”
“No,” Max replied emphatically. “I do not. I want to have it now, this morning. That’s why I asked Nai to feed the children breakfast in her house.”
“But surely you’re not suggesting that we should leave at this moment, when Eponine is due any minute,” Nicole said.
“Of course not,” Max said. “But I think we should get our butts out of here as soon as she is able to travel. Jesus, Nicole, what kind of life can we have here anyway? Nikki and the twins are now scared shitless. I bet they won’t be willing to leave our zone again for weeks, maybe not ever. And that doesn’t even address the bigger question of why the octospiders have brought us here in the first place. Did you see all those creatures in that stadium yesterday? Didn’t you get the impression that all of them work for the octospiders in one way or another? Isn’t it likely that we too will soon be occupying some niche in their system?”
Ellie spoke for the first time since the conversation started. “I have always trusted the octospiders,” she said. “I still do. I do not believe they have some kind of diabolical plot to integrate us into their overall scheme in a way that is unacceptable to us. But I did learn something yesterday, or I should say I relearned something. As a mother, it is my responsibility to provide for my daughter an environment in which she can flourish and have a chance to be happy. I no longer think that’s possible here in the Emerald City.”
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.”
“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.
“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 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 could 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
