“Is that what happens when the barrican is gone?” Richard asked.
Archie did not reply. At length Richard returned to the table and prepared himself a big bowl of grain. Then he came back and sat beside Archie on the floor. “You might as well talk about it,” Richard said softly. “We have nothing else to do.”
From the motion in Archie’s lens Richard could tell that the octo was studying him carefully. Richard took several spoonfuls of his breakfast before Archie began to speak.
“In our society,” Archie said, “the young males and females who are undergoing sexual maturation are taken away from their everyday lives and placed in a highly appropriate environment with individuals who have been through the process before. They are encouraged to describe what they are feeling and are reassured that the new and complex emotions they are experiencing are completely normal. Now I understand why such a program of intense attention is necessary.”
Archie paused for a moment and Richard smiled sympathetically. “These last few days,” the octospider continued, “for the first time since I was a very young juvenile, my emotions have not accepted the domination of my mind. During optimizer training we learned how important it was, whenever a decision was to be made, to sift carefully through all the available evidence and remove all prejudice that might be due to personal emotional responses. With the intensity of the feelings I am having presently, it would be quite impossible to relegate them to a low priority.”
Richard laughed. “Please don’t misunderstand me, Archie-I’m not laughing at you-but you just described, in a typical octospider phrase, what most humans feel all the time. Very few of us ever achieve the control of our ‘personal emotional responses’ that we would like. This may be the first time that you have ever been able to really understand us, if you know what I mean.”
“It’s terrible,” Archie said. “I am feeling both an acute sense of loss-I miss Dr. Blue and Jamie-and powerful anger toward Nakamura for holding us prisoner. I fear that my outrage will cause me to take some action that is non-optimal.”
“But the emotions you are describing are not usually connected, at least in humans, with sexuality,” Richard said. “Does the barrican also act as some kind of tranquilizer, subduing all feelings?”
Archie finished his breakfast before responding. “You and I are very different creatures and, as I have mentioned before, it is dangerous to project from one species to another. I remember our initial discussions about humans at the optimizers’ meeting just after you had breached the integrity of your habitat. In the middle of the meeting, the Chief Optimizer stressed that we must not look at your species in our terms. We must observe carefully, she said, obtain data, and correlate it consistently, without coloring the data with our own experience.
“I suppose this ail amounts to a disclaimer, in some sense, of what I am about to tell you. Nevertheless, it is my personal opinion, based on my observations of humans, that sexual desire is the driving force behind all the strong emotions in your species. We octospiders undergo a step discontinuity at sexual maturation. We change from being completely sexless to sexual in a very short period of time. In humans the process is much slower and more subtle. Sexual hormones are present in varying quantities from early in your fetal development. I contend, and have told the Chief Optimizer this, that it is possible that all your uncontrollable emotions can be traced to these sexual hormones. A human without any sexuality might be capable of the same optimized thought as an octospider.”
“What an interesting idea!” Richard said excitedly, standing up and beginning to pace. “So are you suggesting that even such things as a child’s unwillingness to share a toy, for example, might be linked in some way to our sexuality?”
“Perhaps,” Archie replied. “Maybe Galileo is practicing the possessiveness of his adult sexuality when he refuses to share one of his toys with Kepler. Certainly the human child’s devotion to the parent of the opposite sex is a precursor of adult attitudes.”
Archie stopped, for Richard had turned his back and had increased his pacing. “I’m sorry,” he said, returning a few moments later and again sitting on the floor beside the octospider. “Something occurred to me just now, something I thought about briefly earlier this morning when we were talking about controlling our emotions. Do you remember an earlier conversation in which you dismissed the concept of a personal God as an ‘evolutionary aberration’ necessary for all developing species as a temporary bridge during transition from the first awareness phase to the Information Era? Have the recent changes in you altered in any way your attitude about God?”
A broad burst of multicolored strips, which Richard recognized as laughter, spilled over most of the octospider’s upper body. “You humans,” Archie said, “are absolutely preoccupied with this notion of God. Even those like you, Richard, who profess not to believe, still spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about or discussing the subject. As I explained to you months ago, we octospiders value information foremost, as we were taught by the Precursors. There is no verifiable information available about any God, especially not one who is involved in any way with the daily affairs of the universe—”
“You didn’t exactly understand my question,” Richard interrupted, “or maybe I didn’t phrase it precisely enough. What I want to know is, in your new, more emotional state, can you understand why other intelligent beings might create a personal God as a device to give them comfort and also to explain all those things that they cannot comprehend?”
Archie laughed again with bursts of color. “You’re very clever, Richard,” the octospider said. “You want me to confirm what you think, namely that God also is an emotional concept, born out of a yearning not unlike sexual desire. Therefore God too is derived from sexual hormones. I cannot go that far. I do not have enough information. But I can say, based on the turmoil inside me these last few days, that I now understand this word ‘yearning’ which was meaningless to me before.”
Archie seemed like his old self this morning. Richard smiled. He was pleased. Their exchanges had been like this daily before Archie’s buffer had become empty of barrican. “It would be great, wouldn’t it,” Richard said suddenly, “if we could still talk with all our friends back in the Emerald City?”
Archie knew what Richard was suggesting. The two of them had been careful never to mention the quadroids or even to hint that the octospiders had an intelligence-gathering system. They did not want to alert Nakamura and their guards. Now, as Richard watched silently, bands of color streamed around Archie’s head. Although the octospider was no longer using the derivative language that had been developed for communication with the humans, Richard was able to understand the gist of the transmission.
After formally greeting the Chief Optimizer and apologizing for the lack of success of their mission, Archie sent two personal messages, a short one to Jamie and a longer one to Dr. Blue. During the transmission to his life partner Dr. Blue, variegated bursts of color broke out of the measured pattern of Archie’s message. Richard, who had grown to know his basement companion well in their two months together, was both fascinated and touched by this beautiful display of uninhibited emotion.
When Archie was finished, Richard came over and put a hand on the octospider’s back. “Do you feel better now?” he asked.
“In some ways,” Archie replied. “But I also feel worse at the same time. I am more aware now than I was before that I may never see Dr. Blue or Jamie again.”
“Sometimes I imagine what I would say to Nicole,” Richard interrupted, “if I could talk to her on the telephone.” He spoke his words very correctly, exaggerating the movements of his mouth. “I miss you very much, Nicole,” he said, “and I love you with all my heart.”
Richard did not have very vivid dreams. Therefore, external sounds were not likely to be incorporated into an ongoing dream. When he heard what he thought was a shuffling of feet above him in the middle of the night, he awakened quickly.
Archie was sleeping. Richard looked around and realized that the night light in the toilet area was extinguished. Alarmed, he awakened his octospider companion.
“What is it?” Archie asked in color.
“I heard something unusual upstairs,” Richard whispered.
There was a sound of the door to the basement stairs opening slowly. Richard heard a soft footstep, then another, on the top of the stairs. He strained his eyes, but Richard could see nothing in the near darkness.
“It’s a woman and a policeman,” Archie said, his lens picking up the infrared heat of the intruders. “They have stopped for the moment on the third step.”
We ‘re going to be killed, Richard thought. A powerful fear swept through him and he drew closer to Archie.
