“Are you certain?” the Eagle said.
Nicole nodded.
The room became dark immediately. Two seconds later, when Nicole turned around to face the light, the platform was flying over a vast ocean of deep green.
“Where are we?” she asked. “And where are we going?”
“We’re presently about thirty light-years away from your Sun,” the Eagle replied, “on the first oceanic planet colonized by the octospiders after the disappearance of the Precursors. We’re over the sea, obviously, about two hundred kilometers away from the most famous of the octospider cities.”
Nicole felt a surge of excitement as the platform zoomed across the sea. In the distance she could already see the vague outline of some buildings. For a moment she imagined that she was an adventurous space traveler arriving at this planet for the first time, eager to see the wonders of the’ fabulous cities that other interstellar travelers had described.
Nicole momentarily turned her attention to the ocean below her. “Why is this water so green?” she asked the Eagle.
“The top meter of this part of the ocean is a rich ecosystem of its own, dominated by a special genus of photosynthesizing plant whose varied species, all green in color, provide housing and food for as many as ten million separate creatures. Some of the individual plants cover more than a square kilometer of territory. The Precursors created this domain originally. The octospiders found it and improved upon it.”
When Nicole glanced up, the speeding platform had
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nearly reached the city. Hundreds of buildings of various shapes and sizes were spread out below them. Most of the octospider city’s buildings were built on the land, but some appeared to be floating on the water. The densest collection of these structures was along a narrow peninsula that extended slightly into the sea. At the end of that peninsula stood three huge green domes, very close together, that dominated the city skyline.
At the periphery of the city was a wide outer circle of eight smaller domes, each of which was connected by linear transportation features to the central domes. Each of these outer domes was a distinct and different color. Almost all of the buildings in the section of the city surrounding an outer dome had been painted with the same color. ,Out in the ocean, for example, the brilliant red dome had eight long, slender red spokes, representing other buildings, extending outward from it in a balanced geometrical pattern.
All the buildings of the city lay inside the circle defined by the eight colored domes. Nicole’s immediate favorite was a strange brown-colored structure floating on the water. It appeared to be almost as large as the huge central domes. From above, the rectangular building looked like twenty layers of a densely packed lattice, with material from birds* nests filling the open areas inside each of the hundreds of cells.
“What is that?” Nicole asked, pointing from the platform.
“These particular octospiders are very advanced in microbiology,” the Eagle replied. “That structure, which extends incidentally another ten meters deep into the ocean, contains over a thousand different habitats for species in the micrometer size range. What you’re looking at is essentially a supply station, containing the excess population for each of these tiny beings. Octospiders needing any of these creatures come to this building to requisition them.”
Nicole’s eyes feasted on the unusual architecture below her. In her mind’s eye she could see herself walking on the streets, looking around in amazement at a ttuiety of creatures far greater even than the menagerie she^had
encountered in me Emerald City. / want to go there, she said to herself- / want to see.
She asked the Eagle to move the platform directly over
| one of the large green domes. “Is the inside of this dome,”
Nicole asked, “similar to what was in the Emerald City?”
“Not really,” the Eagle replied. “The scale is altogether different. The octospider realm in Rama was a compressed microcosm. Functions which are normally separated on their planets by hundreds of kilometers of distance were forced, because of space limitations, to be located in more or less the same area. In the advanced colonies of the octospider genus, for example, the alternates do not have a community just outside the city gates—they live on an entirely different planet.”
Nicole smiled. A planet full of alternates, she thought. Now, that would be quite a sight.
“This particular city is the home for more than eighteen million octospiders, if we count all the different morphor logical variations,” the Eagle said. “It is also the administrative capital for this planet. Within the gates of the city live close to ten billion individual creatures, representing fifty thousand species. The extent of the city is roughly equivalent to Los Angeles or any of the great urban areas on your Earth.”
The Eagle continued to tell her facts and statistics about the octospider city beneath their platform. Nicole, however, was thinking about something else. “Did Archie live here?” she said, interrupting her alien companion’s encyclopedic monologue. “Or Dr. Blue, or any of the octospiders that we met?”
“No,” the Eagle replied. “In fact, they did not even come from this planet or star system. The octospiders in Rama came from what is known as a ‘frontier colony,’ one especially designed genetically for interaction with other intelligent life-forms.”
Nicole shook her head and smiled. Of course, she said to herself, / should have suspected that they were special.
She was growing tired. After another few minutes Nicole thanked the Eagle and said that she had seen enough
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of the octospider city. In an instant the domes, the brown lattice structure, and the deep green sea vanished. The Eagle returned the platform to the top of the large chamber.
Below Nicole the Milky Way was confined to a small space in the center of the room. “The universe is an ever-expanding sequence of neighborhoods and voids,” the Eagle was saying. “Look how empty it is around the Milky Way. Except for the two Magellanic Clouds, which really don’t qualify as galaxies, Andromeda is our nearest galactic neighbor. But it is very far away. The distance across the greatest dimension of the Milky Way is only one-twentieth of the distance to Andromeda.”
Nicole was not thinking about Andromeda. She was absorbed in delightful philosophical musings about life on different worlds, about cities, and about the likely range of creatures made from simple atoms who had evolved, with or without help from superior beings, into consciousness. She savored the moment, knowing that very soon there would be no more of the flights of imagination that had enriched her life so much.
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re spent so much time in that exhibit,” the Eagle said after he finished the scan, “that I think maybe we should revise our tour.”
They were sitting side by side in the car. “Is that your diplomatic way of telling me that my heart is failing more rapidly than you expected?” Nicole asked, forcing a smile.
“No, not really,” the Eagle said. “We really did spend almost twice as much time as I had planned. I hadn’t even considered the overflight of France, for example, or the visit to the octospider city.”
“That part was wonderful,” Nicole said. “I wish I could go there again, with Dr. Blue as my guide, and find out more about the way they live.”
“So you liked the octospider city better than the spectacular views of the stars?”
“I wouldn’t say that,” Nicole replied. “It was all fantastic. What I have seen already has reconfirmed that I chose the right place to . . .” She did not finish the
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sentence. “I realized while I was on the platform that death is not just the end of thinking and being aware,” she said, “it is also the end of feeling. I don’t know why that wasn’t obvious to me before.”
There was a short silence. “So, my friend,” Nicole said brightly, “where do we go from here?”
“I thought we’d go next to engineering, where you can see models of Nodes, Carriers, and other spacecraft, after which, if we still have enough time, I plan to lake you to the biology section. Some of your ex-utero grandchildren are living in that region, in one of our better Earthlike habitats. Nearby is another compound housing a community of those intriguing aquatic eels or snakes that we encountered once together at the Node. And there is a taxonomic display that compares and contrasts, physically, all the spacefarers that have been studied in this region.”
“It all sounds great,” Nicole said. She laughed suddenly. “The human brain is amazing. Guess what just popped into my mind? The first line of Andrew Marvell’s poem ‘To His Coy Mistress’: ‘Had we but world enough, and time, This coyness, lady, were no crime . . .’ Anyway, I was going to say that since we do not have forever, let’s go first to the Carrier display. I would like to see the spacecraft in which Patrick, Nai, Galileo, and the others will be living. After that, we’ll see how much time is left.”