by Arthur C.
"Skyscrapers built by ghosts, octospiders, centipede biots," Robert grumbled. "What a lovely place!"
"In my opinion it's a hell of a lot better than living under that tyrant Nakamura," Richard said. "At least here we're free and can make our own decisions."
"Wakefield," Max Puckett shouted from the back of the line. "What would happen if we didn't move out of the way of one of those centipede biots?"
"I don't know for sure, Max," Richard replied. "But it would probably go over or around you just as if you were an inanimate object."
It was Nicole's turn to be the tour guide when they arrived at the lair. She personally showed each person his or her quarters. There was one room for Max and Eponine, another for Ellie and Robert, and a room divided by a partition for Patrick and Nai. The large nursery had been subdivided to provide space and privacy for Benjy, the three children, and the two avians. Richard and Nicole had also decided to use the small area adjacent to their bedroom as a common dining room for the entire group.
While the adults unpacked the meager belongings they had loaded into backpacks, the children had their first experience with Tammy and Timmy. The avians did not know what to make of the little humans, especially Galileo, who insisted on pulling or tweaking anything he could touch. After about an hour of such treatment, Timmy scratched Galileo lightly with one of his talons as a warning, and the boy raised an incredible din.
"I just don't understand it," Richard said to Nai in apology. "The avians are really very gentle creatures."
"I do understand," Nai replied. "Galileo was almost certainly up to some mischief." She sighed. "It's amazing, you know. You raise two children exactly the same way, and they turn out so differently. Kepler is so good he's almost an angel—I can hardly teach him to defend himself. And Galileo pays almost no attention to anything I tell him."
When everyone had finished unpacking, Nicole completed the tour, including the two bathrooms, the corridors, the suspension tanks where the family had stayed during the period of high acceleration between the Earth and the Node, and finally the White Room, with the black screen and keyboard, which was also Richard and Nicole's bedroom. Richard demonstrated how the black screen worked by requesting, and receiving about an hour later, some new and simple toys for the children. He also gave Robert and Max each a copy of a short command dictionary that would allow them to use the keyboard.
The children were all asleep soon after dinner. The adults gathered in the White Room. Max asked questions about the octospiders. In the course of describing their adventures behind the black screen, Nicole mentioned her heart irregularities. Robert insisted on examining her right away.
Ellie helped Robert with the examination. Robert had brought as much practical medical equipment as he could fit in his backpack, including all the miniaturized instruments and monitors necessary to do a full electrocardiogram, or EKG. The results were not good, but not as bad as Nicole had privately feared. Before bedtime Robert informed the rest of the family that the years had definitely taken their toll on Nicole's heart, but that he didn't think she would require surgery in the immediate future. Robert advised Nicole to take it easy, even though he knew that his mother-in-law would probably ignore his prescription.
When everyone was asleep, Richard and Nicole moved the furniture to make room for their mats. They lay side by side, holding hands. "Are you happy?" Richard asked.
"Yes," Nicole answered, "very. It's really wonderful to have all the children here." She leaned over and gave Richard a kiss. "I am also exhausted, husband of mine, but I'm not about to go to sleep without first thanking you for arranging all of this."
"They're my children too, you know," he said.
"Yes, darling," Nicole said, lying down on her back again. "But I know that you would never have done all this if it weren't for me. You would have been content to stay here with the hatchlings, all your gadgets, and the extraterrestrial mysteries."
"Maybe," Richard said. "But I also am delighted to have everyone in our lair… By the way, did you have a chance to talk to Patrick about Katie?"
"Only briefly," Nicole replied. She sighed. "I could tell from his eyes that he is still very worried about her."
"Aren't we all?" Richard said softly. They lay in silence for a couple of minutes before Richard propped himself up on an elbow. "I want you to know," he said, "that I think our granddaughter is absolutely precious."
"So do I," Nicole replied with a laugh, "but there's not a chance that we could be considered unbiased on the subject."
"Hey, does having Nikki with us mean that I can no longer call you Nikki, not even at special moments?"
Nicole turned her head to look at Richard. He was grinning. She had seen that particular expression on his face many times before. "Go to sleep," Nicole said with another short laugh. "I'm too emotionally exhausted for anything else tonight."
In the beginning time passed very quickly. There was so much to do, so much fascinating territory to explore. Even though it was perpetually dark in the mysterious city above them, the family made regular excursions into New York. Virtually every place on the island had a special story that Richard or Nicole could tell. "It was here," Nicole said one afternoon, shining her flashlight at the huge lattice that hung suspended between two skyscrapers like a spider web, "that I rescued the trapped avian, who subsequently invited me into its lair."
"Down there," she said on another occasion, when they were in the large barn with its peculiar pits and spheres, "I was trapped for many days and thought I was going to die."
The extended family developed a set of rules to keep the children from getting into trouble. The rules were not needed for little Nikki, who hardly ever wandered far from her mother and doting grandfather, but the boys Kepler and Galileo were difficult to constrain. The Watanabe twins seemed to possess infinite energy. Once they were found bouncing on the hammocks in the suspension tanks, as if the hammocks were trampolines. Another time Galileo and Kepler "borrowed" the family flashlights and went topside, without adult supervision, to explore New York. It was ten nervous hours before the boys were located in the maze of alleys and streets on the far side of the island.
The avians practiced flying almost every day. The children delighted in accompanying their birdlike friends to the plazas, where there was more room for Tammy and Timmy to display their developing skills. Richard always took Nikki to watch the avians fly. In fact, he took his granddaughter with him everywhere he went. From time to time Nikki would walk, but mostly Richard carried her in a comfortable papooselike contraption that he affixed to his back. The unlikely pair were inseparable. Richard became Nikki's main teacher as well. Very early he announced to everyone that his granddaughter was a mathematical genius.
At night he would regale Nicole with Nikki's latest exploits. "Do you know what she did today?" he would say, usually when he and Nicole were alone in bed.
"No, dear," was Nicole's standard reply; she knew very well that neither she nor Richard would sleep until he told her.
"I asked her how many black balls she would have if she already had three and I gave her two more." Here there was a dramatic pause. "And do you know what she answered?" Another dramatic pause. "Five! She said five. And this little girl just had her second birthday last week."
Nicole was thrilled by Richard's interest in Nikki. For both the little girl and the aging man, it was a perfect match. As a parent, Richard had never been able to overcome both his own repressed emotional problems and his acute sense of responsibility, so this was the first time in his life that he had experienced the joy of truly innocent love. Nikki's father, Robert, on the other hand, was a great doctor, but he was not a very warm person and he did not fully appreciate the purposeless time periods that parents must spend with their children.
Patrick and Nicole had several long talks about Katie, all of which left Nicole feeling extremely depressed. Patrick did not hide from his mother the fact that Katie was deeply involved in all of Nakamura's
machinations, that she drank often and too much, and that she had been sexually promiscuous. He did not tell Nicole that Katie was managing Nakamura's prostitution business, or that he suspected his sister had become a drug addict.
10
Their near perfect existence in New York continued until early one morning, when Richard and Nikki were topside together along the northern ramparts of the island. Actually it was the little girl who first saw the silhouettes of the ships in the dim Raman light. She pointed out across the dark water. "Look, Boobah," she said, "Nikki sees something."
Richard's weakened eyes could not detect anything in the darkness, and his flashlight beam did not travel far enough to reach whatever it was that Nikki was seeing. Richard pulled out the powerful binoculars that he always carried with him and confirmed that there were indeed two vessels in the middle of the Cylindrical Sea. Richard placed Nikki in the carrier on his back and hurried home to the lair.
The rest of the family was just waking up and had difficulty initially understanding why Richard was so alarmed. "But who else could it be in a boat?" he said. "Especially on the northern side. It has to be an exploration party sent by Nakamura."
A family council was held over breakfast. Everyone agreed that they were facing a serious crisis. When Patrick confessed that he had seen Katie on the day of the escape, primarily because he had wanted to tell his sister good-bye, and that he had made a few unusual comments which had caused Katie to start asking questions, Nicole and the others became silent.
"I didn't say anything specific," Patrick said apologetically, "but it was still a dumb thing to do. Katie is very smart. After we all disappeared, she must have put all the pieces together."
"But what do we do now?" Robert Turner voiced everyone's apprehension. "Katie knows New York very well—she was almost a teenager when she left here—and she can lead Nakamura's men directly to this lair. We'll be sitting ducks for them down here."
"Is there any other place we can go?" Max asked.
"Not really," Richard replied. "The old avian lair is empty, but I don't know how we would feed ourselves down there. The octospider lair was also vacant when I visited it several months ago, but I haven't been inside their domain again since Nicole arrived in New York. We must assume, of course, based on what happened when Nicole and I went exploring, that our friends with the black and gold tentacles are still around. Even if they aren't living in their old lair anymore, we would still have the same problem of obtaining food if we were to move over there."
"What about the area behind the screen, Uncle Richard?" Patrick asked. "You said that's where our food is manufactured. Maybe we could find a couple of rooms there."
"I'm not very optimistic," Richard said after a short pause, "but your suggestion is probably our only reasonable option at this point."
The family decided that Richard, Max, and Patrick would reconnoiter the region behind the black screen, both to find out exactly where the human food was being produced and to determine if another suitable living area existed. Robert, Benjy, the women, and the children would stay in the lair. Their assignment was to start developing the procedures for a rapid evacuation of their living quarters, in case such action ever became necessary.
Before going, Richard finished testing a new radio system that he had designed in his spare time. It was strong enough that the explorers and the rest of the family would be able to remain in radio contact during the entire time that they were separated. The existence of the radio link made it easier for Richard and Nicole to convince Max Puckett to leave his rifle in the lair.
The three men had no difficulty following the map in Richard's computer and reaching the boiler room that Richard and Nicole had visited on their previous exploration. Max and Patrick both stared in wonder at the twelve huge boilers, the vast area of neatly arranged raw materials, and the many varieties of biots scurrying about. The factory was active. In fact, every single one of the boilers was involved in some kind of manufacturing process.
"All right," Richard said into his radio to Nicole back in the lair. "We're here and we're ready. Place the dinner order and we'll see what happens."
Less than a minute later one of the boilers closest to the three men terminated whatever it was doing. Meanwhile, not far from the hut behind the boilers, three biots that looked like boxcars with hands moved out into the arrays of raw material, quickly picking up small quantities of many different items. These three biots next converged on the inactive boiler system near Richard, Max, and Patrick, where they emptied their containers onto the conveyor belt entering the boiler. Immediately the men heard the boiler surge into active operation. A long, skinny biot, resembling three crickets tied together in a row, each with a bowl-shaped carapace, crawled up on the conveyor belt system when the short manufacturing process was almost finished. Moments later, the boiler stopped again and the processed material came out on the conveyor belt. The segmented cricket biot deployed a scoop from its rear end, placed all the human food upon its backs, and scampered quickly away.
"Well, I'll be goddamned," Max said, watching the cricket biot disappear down the corridor behind the hut. Before any of the men could say anything else, another set of boxcars with hands loaded the conveyor belts with thick, long rods, and in less than a minute the boiler that had made their food was operating for another purpose.
"What a fantastic system," Richard exclaimed. "It must have a complex interrupt process, with food orders at the top of the priority queue. I can't believe—"
"Hold on just a damn minute," Max interrupted, "and repeat what you just said in normal English."
"We have automatic translation subroutines back at the lair—I designed them originally when we were here years ago," Richard said excitedly. "When Nicole entered chicken, potatoes, and spinach into her own computer, a listing of keyboard commands which represent the complex chemicals in those particular foods was printed on her output buffer. After I signaled that we were ready, she typed that string of commands on the keyboard. They were immediately received here and what we saw was the response. At the time, all the processing systems were active; however, the Raman equivalent of a computer here in this factory recognized that the incoming request was for food, and made it the highest priority."
"Are you saying, Uncle Richard," Patrick said, "that the controlling computer here shut down that operating boiler so that it could make our food?"
"Yes, indeed," said Richard.
Max had moved some distance away and was staring at the other boilers in the huge factory. Richard and Patrick walked over beside him.
"When I was a little boy, about eight or nine," Max said, "my father and I went on our first overnight camping trip, up in the Ozarks several hours from our farm. It was a magnificent night and the sky was full of stars. I remember lying on my back on my sleeping bag and staring at all those tiny twinkling lights in the sky. That night I had a big, big thought for an Arkansas farm boy. I wondered how many alien children, out there somewhere in the universe, were looking up at the stars at exactly that moment and realizing, for the first time, how very small their tiny domain was in the overall scheme of the cosmos."
Max turned around and smiled at his two friends. "That's one of the reasons I remained a farmer," he said with a laugh. "With my chickens and pigs, I was always important. I brought them their food. It was a major event when ole Max showed up at their pen…"
He paused for a moment. Neither Richard nor Patrick said anything. "I think that deep down I always wanted to be an astronomer," Max continued, "to see if I could understand the mysteries of the universe. But every time I thought about billions of years and trillions of kilometers, I became depressed. I couldn't stand the feeling of complete and total insignificance that came over me. It was as if a voice inside my head was saying, over and over, 'Puckett, you aren't shit. You are absolutely zero.'"
"But knowing that insignificance, especially being able to measure it, makes us humans very special," Richard said quietly
.
"Now we're talking philosophy," Max replied, "and I'm completely out of my element. I'm comfortable with farm animals, tequila, and even wild midwestern thunderstorms. All this," Max said, waving his arms at the boilers and the factory, "scares the shit out of me. If I had known, when I signed up for that Martian colony, that I would meet machines that are smarter than people—"
"Richard, Richard," they all heard Nicole's anxious voice on the radio. "We have an emergency. Ellie has just returned from the northern shore. Four large boats are about to land. Ellie says she's positive she spotted a police uniform on one of the men. Also, she has reported some kind of large rainbow in the south. Can you get back here in a few minutes?"
"No we can't," Richard answered. "We're still down in the room with the boilers. We must be at least three and a half kilometers away. Did Ellie say how many people might be on each boat?"
"I would guess about ten or twelve, Dad," Ellie replied. "I didn't stay around to count them. But the boats were not the only unusual thing I saw while I was topside. During my run back to the lair, the southern sky lit up with wild bursts of color that eventually became a giant rainbow. It's near where you told us the Big Horn should be."
Ten seconds later Richard shouted into the radio. "Listen to me, Nicole, Ellie, all of you. Evacuate our lair immediately. Take the children, the hatchlings, the melons, the sessile material, the two rifles, all the food, and as many personal belongings as you can comfortably carry. Leave our stuff alone—we have enough on our backs to survive in an emergency. Go directly to the octospider lair and wait for us in that large room that was a photo gallery years ago. Nakamura's troops will come to our lair first. When they don't find us, if Katie's with them, they may go to the octospider lair as well, but I don't believe they will go into the tunnels there."
