Sheik Aracknid

Sheik Aracknid is a Divisionist who accumulates a vast culture of identical replicas and presents their multiplication as a public ideal. His project turns the Divisionists’ defining practice into an extreme: while the movement imagines reproducing the self across many bodies, its members also fear that replicas may become uncontrollable and that one image could eventually monopolize the world. Aracknid’s confidence in his replicas’ beauty and permanence stands against the suspicion and violence that govern Divisionist society, and against Benway’s prediction that disease will end the culture he has built.

Identity and Divisionist Context

The Divisionists are described as occupying a moderate position among the political currents of Interzone, but their practice is radical in its consequences. They cut tiny pieces from their own bodies and cultivate exact replicas in embryo jelly. The process raises an unresolved question: whether the replicas are genuinely independent, or could develop distinct characteristics over time. The account doubts their independence, noting that replicas must periodically recharge with the Mother Cell, a dependence treated by Divisionists as an article of faith.

That dependence feeds a deep ambivalence. Divisionists fear a replica revolution, yet continue producing copies, sometimes claiming they need only a few more so they will not be lonely while travelling. They also advocate strict control over the reproduction of people they deem undesirable. Since each person ultimately regards replicas other than their own as undesirable, the supposed principle of control is inseparable from self-interest. Aracknid’s immense culture magnifies this contradiction: the ideal of reproducing oneself becomes a conspicuous challenge to everyone else’s security.

The Replica Culture

Aracknid is identified as a Caid and described as an albino, a product of a long line of recessive genes. His own appearance is presented in deliberately grotesque terms, in sharp contrast with the beauty he attributes to his replicas. He has accumulated 20,000 identical replicas, a number that gives his enterprise a scale beyond the furtive, small-scale production the surrounding society expects.

He boasts that his copies stand openly in the sun, without the surgery, dyes, and bleaching used by other citizens to disguise their replicas. In his account, they possess dazzling beauty of body, face, and soul, because he has made them in his own image. He frames their multiplication as a destiny: they are to increase geometrically and inherit the earth. The claim makes replication more than a private practice. Aracknid casts it as a public, expansive vision in which the image of one person becomes the inheritance of the world.

Suspicion and Social Conflict

Divisionist society has no reliable means of identifying a disguised replica. Although every Divisionist is said to have a method believed infallible, this uncertainty makes the community hysterically paranoid. Suspicion can be turned against anyone who expresses a liberal opinion, with replica status invoked as an accusation rather than established by proof.

The fear has wider consequences than suspicion alone. Barroom fights produce staggering casualties, and fear of replicas that may be blond and blue-eyed has depopulated whole regions. Citizens disguise copies through altered faces and bodies, while others attack replica cultures through black magic or seek to destroy the Mother Cell. In this climate, Aracknid’s openly displayed population is provocative by its very visibility: what he presents as beauty and freedom from concealment, the surrounding society can read as an unchecked threat.

The authorities have largely given up trying to control murder and unauthorized replica production. They still conduct pre-election raids, destroying extensive replica cultures in remote mountainous areas. The account does not say that Aracknid’s own culture is raided, but the raids establish the precariousness of any large-scale project of replication. His confidence rests in a society where production is simultaneously widespread, forbidden, and subject to arbitrary destruction.

Benway’s Intervention and the Project’s Fate

A professional witch is called in to make Sheik Aracknid’s replica cultures permanently sterile. Before the witch can act, Benway dismisses the effort as unnecessary and predicts that Frederick’s ataxia will clear out the replica nest. His response replaces the proposed supernatural intervention with a biological explanation and forecast. The evidence records Benway’s prediction, not its eventual fulfilment, and gives no further account of what happens to Aracknid or the 20,000 replicas.

The episode sharply reverses the terms of Aracknid’s boast. He imagines his replicas multiplying geometrically until they inherit the earth; Benway instead identifies disease as the force likely to end their culture. Aracknid’s project thus occupies an uneasy space between idealized self-reproduction and the vulnerabilities of a dependent, biologically produced population. The replicas’ apparent sameness promises permanence, but the culture’s future is presented as uncertain, exposed to both social suppression and bodily contingency.