The car began to move. Nicole noted to herself mat the Eagle had not said anything about the results of his scan. The fear came back, stronger now. “The grave’s a fine and private place,” she recalled. “But none, I think, do there embrace.”
They were together on the flat surface of the Carrier model. “This is a one sixty-fourth scale model,” the Eagle said, “so you have some sense of how large the Carrier really is.”
Nicole stared off into the distance from her wheelchair. “Goodness,” she said, “this plane must be ajjnost one kilometer long.”
“That’s a decent guess,” the Eagle said. “The top of the
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actual Carrier is roughly forty kilometers long and fifteen kilometers wide.”
“And each of these bubbles encloses a different environment?”
“Yes,” the Eagle said. “The atmosphere and other conditions are controlled by the equipment that is here on the surface, as well as the additional engineering systems down below in the main volume of the spacecraft. Each of the habitats has its own spin rate to create the proper gravity. Partitions are available to separate species, if necessary, inside one of the bubbles. The residents from the starfish have been placed in the same domain because they are Comfortable in more or less the same ambient conditions. However, they do not have any access to each other.”
They were moving down a path among the equipment emplacements and the bubbles. “Some of these habitats,” Nicole said, examining a small oval protrusion rising above the plane no more than five meters, “seem too small and confining to hold more than just a few individuals.”
‘There are some very small spacefarers,” the Eagle said. “One species, from a star system not too far from yours, is only about a millimeter in length. Their largest spacecraft are not even as big as this car.”
Nicole tried to imagine an intelligent group of ants, or aphids, working together to build a spacecraft. She smiled at her mental picture.
“And all these Carriers just travel from Node to Node?” she asked, changing the subject;
“Primarily,” the Eagle said. “When there are no longer any living creatures in a particular bubble, that habitat is reconditioned at one of the Nodes.”
“Like Rama,” Nicole said.
“In a way,” the Eagle said, “but with many significant differences. We are always intently studying whatever species are inside a Rama-class spacecraft. We try to place them in as realistic an environment as possible, so that we can observe them under ‘natural conditions.’ By contrast, we do not need any more data about the creatures assigned
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to the Carrier fleet. That’s why we don’t intercede in their affairs.”
“Except to preclude reproduction. By the way, in the structure of your ethics, is preventing reproduction somehow more humane, or whatever your equivalent word is, than terminating the creatures directly?”
“We think so,” the Eagle replied.
They had reached a location on the top of the Carrier model where a pathway branched off to the left back to the ramps and hallways of the Knowledge Module. “I think I’ve accomplished what I wanted here,” Nicole said. She hesitated for a moment. “But 1 do have a couple of other questions.”
“Go ahead,” the Eagle said.
“Assuming Saint Michael’s description of the purpose of Rama and the Node and everything else is correct, aren’t you yourself disturbing and changing the very process you’re observing? It seems to me that just by being here and interacting—”
“You’re right, of course,” the Eagle said. “Our presence here does slightly impact the course of evolution. It’s a situation analogous to the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle from physics. We cannot observe without influencing. Nevertheless, our interactions can be considered by the Prime Monitor and taken into account in the overall modeling of the process. And we do have rules that minimize the ways in which we perturb the natural evolution.”
“I wish that Richard could have been with me to hear Saint Michael’s explanation of everything,” Nicole said. “He would have been fascinated, and, I am sure, would have had some excellent questions.”
The Eagle did not reply. Nicole sighed. “So what’s next, Monsieur le Tour Director?” she said.
“Lunch,” said the Eagle. “There are a couple of sandwiches, some water, and a delicious piece of your favorite octospider fruit in the car.”
Nicole laughed and turned her wheelchair ftnto the pathway. “You think of everything,” she said.
“Richard didn’t believe in heaven,” Nicole said as the Eagle completed another scan. “But if he could have constructed his own perfect afterlife, it would definitely have included a place like this.”
The Eagle was studying the weird squiggles on the monitor in his hand. “I think it would be a good idea,” he said, looking up at Nicole, “to skip some of the tour . . . and go directly to the most important exhibits in the next domain.”
“That bad, huh?” Nicole said. She was not surprised. The occasional pain she had been feeling in her chest before the visits to France and the octospider city had now become continuous.
The fear was constant now as well. In between every word, every thought, she was acutely aware that her death was not very far away. So what are you afraid of? Nicole asked herself. How can nothingness be that bad? Still the fear persisted.
The Eagle explained that there was not enough time for an orientation to the second domain. They passed through the gates into the second of the concentric spheres and drove for about ten minutes. “The emphasis in this domain,” the Eagle said while driving, “is on the way everything changes in time. There is a separate section for every conceivable element in the galaxy that is affected by, or affects, the galaxy’s overall evolution. I thought you’d be especially interested in this first exhibit.”
The room was similar to the one where the Eagle and Nicole had first seen the Milky Way, except that it was considerably smaller. Again they boarded a moving platform that allowed them to move around in the dark room.
“What you are going to watch,” the Eagle said, “requires some explanation. It is essentially a time-lapse summary of the evolution of spacefaring civilizations in a galactic region containing your Sun and about ten million other star systems. This is approximately one ten-thousandth of the entire galaxy, but what you will see is representative of the galaxy as a whole.
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“You will not see any stars or planets or other physical structures in this display, although their locations are assumed in developing the model. What you will see, once we begin, are lights, each representing a star system in which a biological species has become a spacefarer by at least putting a spacecraft in orbit around its own planet. As long as the star system remains a living center for active spacefarers, the light in that particular location will stay
illuminated.
“I am going to start the display about ten billion years ago, soon after what has evolved into the current Milky Way Galaxy was initially formed. Since there was so much instability and rapid change at the beginning, no spacefarers emerged for a long time. Therefore, for the first five billion years or so, up until the formation of your solar system, I will run the display rapidly, at a rate of twenty million years per second. For reference purposes, the Earth will begin to accrete roughly four minutes into this process. I will stop the display at that time.”
They were togedier on the platform in the large chamber. The Eagle was standing and Nicole was sitting beside him in her wheelchair. The only light was a small one on the platform mat allowed the two of them to see each other. After staring around her at the total darkness for more than thirty seconds, Nicole broke the silence. “Did you start the process?” she asked. “Nothing’s happening.”
“Exactly,” the Eagle replied. “What we have observed, from watching other galaxies, some much older than the Milky Way, is that no life emerges until the galaxy settles down and develops stable zones. Life requires both a few steady stars in a relatively benign environment and stellar evolution, resulting in the creation of the critical elements on the periodic chart that are so important in all biochemical processes. If all the matter is subatomic particles and the simplest atoms, the likelihood of the origin of life of any kind, much less spacefaring life, is very very small. Not until large stars go through their complete life Cycles and manufacture the more complex elements like nitrogen,
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carbon, iron, and magnesium do the probabilities for the emergence of life become reasonable.”
Below them an occasional light flickered, but in the entire first four minutes, no more than a few hundred scattered lights appeared, and only one endured for longer than three seconds. “Now we have reached the time of the formation of the Earth and the solar system,” the Eagle said, preparing to activate the display again.