“Yes. That particular binary group you are touching, incidentally, is called Struve 2398,” Richard replied in his human catalog voice. “They have a very high declination and are slightly over ten light-years away from the Sun.”
Seeing the slight grimace on Nicole’s face, Richard laughed at himself and crossed the room to take her hand. “Come over here with me,” he said, “and I will show you something really interesting.”
They walked to the other side of the model and stood facing die Sun, halfway between the stars Sirius and Tau Ceti. “Wouldn’t it be fantastic if our Node really has moved,” Richard said excitedly, “and we will see it again, over here, on the opposite side of our solar system?”
Nicole laughed. “Of course,” she said, “but we have absolutely no evidence—”
“But we do have brains, and imaginations,” Richard interrupted. “And the Eagle did tell us that the entire Node was capable of moving. It just seems to me . . .” Richard stopped in midsentence and men changed the subject slightly. “Haven’t you ever asked yourself,” he said, “where our Rama spacecraft went, after we left the Node, during all those years that we were asleep? Suppose, for example, that the avians and the sessiles were picked up over here somewhere, around the Procyon binaries, perhaps, or maybe
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even over here, around Epsilon Eridani, which easily could have been on our trajectory. We know that there are planets around Eridani. At a significant fraction of the speed of light, Rama could have easily doubled back to the Sun—”
“Hold it, Richard,” Nicole said. “You’re way ahead of me on this subject. Why don’t we start at the beginning?” She sat down on the platform in the interior of the model, next to a red ball elevated only a few centimeters by a very short rod, and crossed her legs. “If I understand your hypothesis, our current voyage will end at Tau Ceti?”
Richard nodded. “The trajectory is too perfect for it to be a coincidence. We will reach Tau Ceti in another fifteen years or so, and I believe our experiment will be concluded.”
Nicole groaned. “I’m already old,” she said. “By then, if I’m even still alive, Til be as withered as a prune. . . . Just out of curiosity, what do you think will happen to us after our ‘experiment is concluded,’ as you put it?*’
“That’s where we need our imaginations. I suspect that we’ll be unloaded from Rama, but what happens to us next is completely unknown. … I suppose our fate will be dependent in some way on what has been observed all this time.”
“So you definitely agree with me that the Eagle and his buddies back at the Node have been watching us?”
“Absolutely. They have made such a huge investment in this project. I’m certain they’re monitoring everything that’s going on here in Rama. I must admit I’m surprised that they have left us completely to our own devices and have never interfered in our affairs, but that must be their method.”
Nicole was silent for a few seconds. She played absent-mindedly with the red ball beside her, which Richard informed her represented the star Epsilon Indi. “The judge in me,” she said somberly, “fears what any reasonable extraterrestrial would conclude about us, based on our behavior in New Eden.”
Richard shrugged. “We’ve been no worse in Rama than we have been for centuries on Earth. Besides, I can’t accept that any truly advanced aliens would be making such
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subjective judgments. If this process of observing spacefar-ers has been going on for tens of thousands of years, as the Eagle suggested, then the Ramans must have developed quantitative metrics for assessing all aspects of the civilizations they encounter. They are almost certainly more interested in our exact natures, and what this means in some larger sense, than whether we are bad or good.”
“I suppose you’re right,” Nicole said wistfully. “But it’s depressing that we, as a species, behave so barbarically, even when we are fairly certain we’re being observed.” She paused and reflected. “So in your opinion our long interaction with the Ramans, beginning with that first spaceship over a hundred years ago, is almost over?”
“I think so,” Richard replied. “Somewhere in the future, possibly when we reach Tau Ceti, our part of this experiment will be concluded. My guess is that after all the data on the creatures currently inside Rama are entered in the Great Galactic Data Base, Rama will be emptied. Who knows, maybe soon thereafter this great cylindrical spacecraft will appear in another planetary system where a different spacefarer is living, and another cycle will begin.”
“And that brings us back to my earlier question, which you really did not answer. What will happen to us then?”
“Maybe we, or our offspring, will be sent on a slow journey back to the Earth. Or maybe we will be deemed expendable and terminated once all the data have been collected.”
“Neither of those outcomes is very appealing,” Nicole said. “And I must say that although I agree with you that we are heading for Tau Ceti, all the rest of your hypothesis strikes me as pure conjecture.”
Richard grinned. “I have learned a lot from you, Nicole. Everything else in my hypothesis is intuitive. It feels right to me, based on everything I have learned about the Ramans.”
“But wouldn’t it be more straightforward to imagine that the Ramans simply have waystations scattered throughout the galaxy, and that the two nearest to us are at Ships and Tau Ceti?”
“Yes,” Richard replied, “but my gut feel is that it’s
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unlikely. The Node was such an awesome engineering creation. If similar facilities exist every twenty or so light-years in the galaxy, there would be billions of them altogether. . . . And remember, the Eagle definitely said the Node could move.”
Nicole acknowledged to herself that it was unlikely that a facility as astonishing as the Node had been duplicated billions of times in some great cosmic assembly process. Richard’s hypothesis did make some sense. But how sad, Nicole thought briefly, that our entry in the galactic data base will contain so much negative information.
“So where do the avians, sessiles, and our old friends the octospiders fit into your scenario?” Nicole asked a minute later. “Are they just part of the same experiment, with us? And if so, are you suggesting that there is also a colony of octos onboard and that we just haven’t met them yet?”
Richard nodded again. “That conclusion is inescapable. If the final phase of each experiment is observing a representative sample of the spacefarers under controlled conditions, it makes sense that the octos are here also.” He laughed nervously. ‘There may even be some of our same friends from Rama II on the spacecraft with us at this very moment.”
“What a lovely set of ideas to think about before sleeping,” Nicole said with a smile. “If you’re right, you and I have fifteen more years to spend on a spacecraft that’s inhabited not only by humans who want to capture and kill us, but also by huge, possibly intelligent arachnids whose nature we do not understand.”
“Remember,” Richard said with a grin, “I could be wrong.”
Nicole stood up and walked toward the door.
“Where are you going?” Richard asked.
‘To my bed,” Nicole replied with a laugh. “I think I’m developing a headache. I can only contemplate the infinite for a finite period of time.”
6
T:
I he next meaning when Nicole opened her eyes, Richard was standing over her holding two full backpacks. “We’re going to explore and look for octospiders,” he said excitedly, “behind the black screen. I’ve left enough food and water to last Tammy and Timmy for two days and I’ve programmed Joan and Eleanor to find us if there is an emergency.”
Nicole watched her husband closely while she was eating her breakfast. His eyes were full of energy and life. This is the Richard I remember the best, Nicole said to herself happily.
“I’ve been back here twice,” Richard said as soon as they had ducked under the raised screen. “But I’ve never reached the end of this first passageway.”
The screen had closed behind them, leaving Richard and Nicole in the dark. “There’s no problem with being trapped here on this side, is there?” Nicole asked while they both checked their flashlights.
“Not at all,” Richard replied. “The screen will not raise
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or lower more often than once every minute or so. But if anyone or anything is still in this general area a minute from now, the screen will automatically lift again.”
“Now, I should warn you before we start walking,” he continued a few seconds later, “this is a very long passageway. I have followed it before, for at least a kilometer, and I have never found anything. Not even a tumoff. And there is absolutely no fight. So the first part will be very boring—but it must eventually lead to something, for the biots bringing our supplies must be coming along this path.”