“My son told me that Maria had encouraged him, at least initially, and that they had dropped to the floor while kissing. She was still enthusiastically participating, according to Galileo, until he started pulling down her pants. That was when the struggle began.”
Nai tried to calm herself. “The rest of the story, no matter who tells it, is not very pleasant… Galileo admits that he hit Maria several times after she started screaming and that he held her down and continued to pull off her pants. He had locked the door. Benjy broke it down with his shoulder and threw himself at Galileo with all his force. Because of the noise and the property damage, Big Block was there, as well as many onlookers.”
There were more tears in Nai’s eyes. “It must have been horrible,” Nicole said.
“That night my life was shattered,” Nai said. “Everyone condemned Galileo. When Big Block put him on probation and returned Galileo to the family unit, Max, Patrick, and even Kepler, his own brother, thought the punishment was too light. And if I ever hinted that maybe, just maybe, beautiful little Maria might have been partially responsible for what occurred, I was told by everybody that I was ‘unbalanced’ and ‘blind to the facts.’
“Maria played “her part perfectly,” Nai continued, with undisguised acrimony in her voice. “She admitted later that she had willingly kissed Galileo-they had kissed twice before, she said-but insisted that she had started saying no before he pulled her down on the floor. Maria wept for an hour immediately after the incident. She could barely talk. All the men tried to comfort her, including Patrick. They were all convinced before she even said anything that Maria was blameless.”
Soft bells sounded, indicating that the washing cycle was complete. Nai rose slowly, walked over to the machines, and put the clothes in a pair of dryers.
“We all agreed that Maria should move next door with Max, Eponine, and Ellie,” Nai began again. “I thought that time would heal the wounds. I was wrong. Galileo was ostracized by everyone in the family, except for me. Kepler would not even speak to his brother. Patrick was civil, but distant. Galileo withdrew deeper into his shell, stopped attending classes altogether, and spent most of his waking hours by himself in the weight room.
“About five months ago I approached Maria and basically begged her to help Galileo. It was humiliating, Nicole,” Nai said, tears entering her eyes again. “There I was, an adult woman, pleading for favors from a teenage girl. I had first asked Patrick, Eponine, and then Ellie, each in turn, if they would talk to Maria for me. Only Ellie had made an effort to intercede, and she informed me, after her attempt, that the appeal would have to come directly from me.
“Maria finally agreed to talk to Galileo,” Nai said bitterly, “but only after forcing me to listen to a harangue about how she still felt ‘violated’ by Galileo’s attack. She also stipulated both that a sincere, written apology from Galileo should precede the meeting and that I should be personally present during their discussion to preclude any unpleasantness.”
Nai shook her head. “Now, I ask you, Nicole,” she said, “how in the world could a sixteen-year-old girl who has been awake for only two years in her entire life have possibly become so sophisticated? Somebody-and my guess is Max and Eponine-had been counseling her on how to behave. Maria wanted to humiliate me and to make Galileo suffer as much as possible. She certainly succeeded.”
“I know it seems unlikely,” Nicole said, “but I have met people with incredible natural gifts who know intuitively at a very early age how to deal with any possible situation. Maria may be one of them.”
Nai ignored her comment. ‘The meeting went very well. Galileo cooperated. Maria accepted the apology that he wrote for her. For the next few weeks she seemed to go out of her way to include Galileo in whatever the young people were doing. But he was still a stranger in their group, an outsider. I could see it. And I suspect that he could too.
“Then one day in the cafeteria, while the five of them were sitting together-the rest of us had eaten early and had already returned to our rooms-a pair of iguanas sat down at the other end of their table. According to Kepler, the iguanas were purposely repulsive. They lowered their heads into their bowls, noisily sucking up those wriggling worms they love so much, and then stared at the girls, especially Maria, with their beady yellow eyes. Nikki made some comment about not being hungry anymore and Maria agreed with her.
“At that point Galileo rose from his seat, took a couple of steps toward the iguanas, and said “Shoo, go away,’ or something similar. When they didn’t move, he took another step in their direction. One of the iguanas jumped at him.
Galileo grabbed that first iguana by the neck and shook it ferociously. It died of a broken neck. The second iguana also attacked, seizing Galileo’s forearm with its powerful teeth. Before the blockheads arrived to break up the fracas, Galileo had beaten the iguana to death against the top of the table.”
Nai seemed surprisingly calm as she finished the story. ‘They took Galileo away. Three hours later Big Block came to our rooms and informed us that Galileo would be permanently detained in another part of the spacecraft. When I asked why, the super blockhead told me the same thing that he has told me every time since when I have asked the question: ‘We have determined that your son’s behavior is not acceptable.’“
Another sequence of short bells announced that the drying cycle was complete. Nicole helped Nai fold the clothes on the long table. “I’m allowed to see him only two hours each day,” Nai said. “Although Galileo is too proud to complain, I can tell that he is suffering. The Council has listed Galileo as one of the five human beings being ‘retained’ without proper justification, but I do not know if their grievances are being seriously heard by the blockheads.”
Nai stopped folding clothes and put her hand on Nicole’s forearm. “That’s why I’m asking you for help,” she said. “In the alien hierarchy, the Eagle ranks even higher than Big Block. It’s obvious that the Eagle pays careful attention to what you say. Would you, please, for my sake, talk to him about Galileo?”
“It’s the right thing,” Nicole said to Ellie, taking her belongings from the closet. “I should have been in the other room from the beginning.”
“We talked about it before you came,” Ellie said. “But both Nai and Maria said it was all right for the girl to move back next door so that you could be here with Nikki and me.”
“Nevertheless…” Nicole said. She put her clothes on the table and looked at her daughter. “You know, Ellie, I’ve only been here a few days, but it strikes me as terribly peculiar how absorbed everyone is in the day-to-day trivia of life. And I’m not talking only about Nai and her concerns. The people with whom I have chatted in the cafeteria, or in the other common rooms, spend an astonishingly small percentage of their time discussing what’s really going on here. Only two people have asked me questions about the Eagle. And up at the observation deck last night, while a dozen of us were staring out at that staggering tetrahedron, nobody wanted to discuss who might have built it, and for? what purpose.”
Ellie laughed. “Everyone else has been here for a year already, Mother. They asked all those questions long ago, for many weeks, but they did not receive any satisfactory answers. It’s human nature, when we cannot answer an infinite question, to dismiss it until we have some new information.”
She picked up all her mother’s things. “Now, we have told everyone to leave you alone and let you take a nap today. Nobody should be coming in the room for the next two hours. Please, Mother, use this opportunity to rest. When Dr. Blue left last night, she told me that your heart was showing signs of fatigue, despite all the supplemental probes.”
“Mr. Kowalski was certainly not happy,” Nicole commented, “about having an octospider in our ray.”
“I explained it to him. So did Big Block. Don’t worry about it.”
“Thank you, Ellie,” Nicole said. She kissed her daughter on the cheek.
4
“Are you ready, Mother?” Ell
ie asked, coming in the door.
“I guess so,” Nicole answered. “Although I certainly feel foolish. Except for the game yesterday with you, Max, and Eponine, I haven’t played bridge for years.”
Ellie smiled. “It doesn’t matter how well you play, Mother. We talked about that last night.”
Max and Eponine were waiting in the hallway at the tram stop. ‘Today will be very interesting,” Max said after greeting Nicole. “I wonder how many others will show up.”
The Council had voted the night before to extend the boycott again for three additional days. Although Big Block had responded to the list of grievances and even persuaded the octospiders, who outnumbered the humans eight to one, to yield more time in the common areas for the exclusive use of the humans, the Council had felt that many of the responses were still not adequate.
There had also been a discussion at the Council Meeting about how to enforce the boycott. Some of the more vocal attendees at the meeting had wanted to establish punishments for those who ignored the boycott resolution. The meeting had concluded with an agreement that Council officers would “actively engage” those humans who continued to disregard the Council’s recommendations to avoid interactions with all other species.
The tram in the main corridor was nearly empty. A half dozen octospiders were in the first car, and three or four more octos plus a pair of iguanas were sitting in the second. Nicole and her friends were the only humans on board.
“Three weeks ago, before this latest round of tension began,” Ellie said, “we had twenty-three tables for our weekly bridge tournament. I thought we were making a lot of progress. We were averaging five or six new human attendees each week.”
“How in the world, Ellie,” Nicole asked as the tram stopped and another pair of octospiders boarded their car, “did you ever think up the idea for these bridge tournaments? When you first mentioned playing cards with the octospiders to me, I thought you were out of your mind.”
Ellie laughed. “In the beginning, soon after we had all settled here, I knew that it would take some kind of organized activity to encourage interaction. People were just not going to walk up to an octospider and begin a conversation, not even with a blockhead or me along as an interpreter. Games seemed like a pretty good way to stimulate mixing. That worked for a little while, but it quickly became obvious that there was no game at which the most proficient human could match any of the octospiders. Even with handicaps.”
“Late in the first month,” Max broke in, “I played chess with your buddy Dr. Blue. She gave me a rook and two pawn advantage to start the game, and still cleaned my plow. It was very demoralizing.”
“The final blow was our first Scrabble tournament,” Ellie continued. “All of the prizes went to the octospiders, even though all the words used were in English! That was when I realized that I had to come up with a game in which humans and octospiders did not play against each other.
“Bridge turned out to be perfect. Each pair consists of one human and one octospider. It is not necessary for the partners to talk to each other. I have prepared convention cards in both languages, and even the dullest human can learn in one session the octo numbers from one to seven and then- symbols for the four suits. It has worked fabulously well.”
Nicole shook her head. “I still think you are crazy,” she said with a smile. “Although I will acknowledge a touch of brilliance as well.”
There were only fourteen other people in the card room of the recreation complex at the time the bridge tournament was scheduled to start. Ellie adapted well, deciding to have two separate games, one for the “mixed pairs,” as she called them, and another contest solely for the octospiders.
Dr. Blue was Nicole’s partner. They agreed on a five-card major bidding approach, one of six codified by Ellie, and sat down at a table near the door. Because the seats for the octospiders were higher than those for the humans, Nicole and her partner were sitting eye to eye-or, more appropriately, eye to lens.
Nicole had never been an exceptional bridge player. She had learned to play originally as a student at the University of Tours, when her father, concerned that she did not have enough friends, had encouraged her to become involved in extracurricular activities. Nicole had also played some bridge in New Eden, where the game was the social rage during the first year after settlement. However, despite some natural flair for the game, Nicole had always thought that bridge consumed too much time and that there were too many other, more important things to do.
It was apparent to Nicole from the outset that Dr. Blue, as well as the other octospiders who came to the table with their human partners to play in the duplicate tournament, was a superb card player. On the second hand Dr. Blue played a “three no trump” contract that was exceedingly difficult, using finesses and a terminal squeeze like a human bridge professional.
“Well done,” Nicole said to her octospider partner after Dr. Blue made the contract plus one overtrick.
“It’s very simple once you know where all the cards are,” Dr. Blue answered in color.
It was fascinating to watch the octospiders handle the mechanics of the game. They removed the cards from the traveling boards with the two last joints of a solitary tentacle, aided by the cilia, of course, and then held their hands in front of their lenses with three tentacles, one on either side and a third one in the middle. To place a card on the table, an octospider used whichever tentacle was closest to the card in question, balancing it among the cilia during his descent.
Nicole and Dr. Blue engaged in their usual lively conversation between hands. Dr. Blue had just told Nicole that the new Chief Optimizer had been puzzled by the latest action from the Council, when the door to the card room opened and in walked three humans, followed by Big Block.and one of the smaller blockheads.
The woman in the lead, whom Nicole recognized as Emily Bronson, the president of the Council, glanced around the room and then headed for Nicole’s table. A move had just been called, and Nicole and Dr. Blue had been joined by the octospider Milky and her partner, a pleasant-looking middle-aged woman named Margaret.
“Why, Margaret Young, I’m astonished to see you here,” Emily Bronson said. “You must not have heard that the Council extended the boycott last night.”
The two men who had entered the room with Ms. Bronson, one of whom was Garland of the swimming pool incident, had followed her over to Nicole’s table. All three of them were standing over Margaret.
“Emily… I’m sorry,” Margaret replied with her eyes downcast. “But you know how I love bridge.”
“There’s a lot more than games at stake here,” Ms. Bronson said.
Ellie had risen from a nearby table and now made an appeal to Big Block to stop the disruption. But Emily Bronson was too quick. “All of you,” she said in a loud voice, “are showing your disloyalty by being here. If you leave now, the Council will not hold it against you. If you stay, however, after having been warned—”
Big Block now intervened and informed Ms. Bronson that she and her friends were indeed disrupting the game. As the trio turned to leave, more than half of the humans rose from their chairs to follow.
“This is preposterous,” a voice with astonishing clarity and power said. Nicole was standing iii her place, leaning on the table with one hand. “Sit back down,” she said in the same tone. “Do not allow yourself to be bullied by a hatemonger.”
All the bridge players returned to their seats. “Shut up, old woman,” Emily Bronson said in anger from across the room. ‘This is none of your concern.” Big Block escorted her and her companions out the door.
“You don’t have any idea, do you, Mrs. Wakefield, what any of the objects are?”
“Your guess is as good as mine, Maria,” Nicole answered. ‘They probably had special meaning, in some way, for your mother. I thought at the time that the silver cylinder implanted under your mother’s skin was some kind of zoo identifier, but since none of the zookeeping staff survived the bombing and very
few of the records remain, it’s unlikely that we will ever be able to verify my hypothesis.”
“What’s a ‘hypothesis’?” the girl asked.
“It’s a tentative assumption or explanation for what’s happened, when there’s really not sufficient evidence to come to any definite answers,” Nicole said. “By the way, I must say that your English is quite impressive.”
“Thank you, Mrs. Wakefield.”
They were sitting together in the communal lounge just off the observation deck. Nicole and Maria were both drinking fruit juice. Although Nicole had been in the Grand Hotel for a week already, this was the first time she had had a private moment with the girl she had found amid the octospider zoo ruins sixteen years earlier.
“Was my mother really pretty?” Maria asked.
“She was striking, I remember that,” Nicole sai8, “even though I couldn’t see her very well in the dim light. She
appeared to have your same coloring, maybe a little lighter, and was of medium build. I would have guessed she was thirty-five years old or maybe slightly less.”
“And there were no signs of my father?” Maria asked.
“None that I saw,” Nicole said. “Of course, under the circumstances I did not make a very thorough search. It’s possible that he might have been wandering somewhere in the Alternate Domain looking for help. The fence that enclosed your compound had been flattened in the bombing. I worried, when we woke up the next morning, mat your father might have been looking for you, but I later convinced myself, based on what I had seen in your shelter, that you and your mother lived alone.”
“So is it your hypothesis that my father had already died?” Maria said.
“Very good,” Nicole replied. “No, not necessarily. I wouldn’t be that specific. It just did not look as if anyone else had lived there in your enclosure for some time.”
Maria took a drink of her juice and there was a momentary silence at the table. “You told me the other night, Mrs. Wakefield,” the girl said, “when we were talking with Max and Eponine, that you presumed my mother, or maybe both my parents, had been kidnapped much earlier by the octospiders, from a place called Avalon. I didn’t understand completely what you were saying.”
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