“I said I was guessing,” Richard responded with a laugh. “I was only trying to make the point- that it looks too complex to be a place to purify water.”
The guide lights above them were urging them to the sourn. The second bank of narrow tanks also contained nothing but water; however, when they reached the third set of rectangular tanks and cylindrical poles, Richard and Nicole discovered that the water was full of tiny fuzzy balls
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of many colors. Richard rolled up his sleeve and stuck his hand into the water, pulling out several hundred of the objects.
‘Those are eggs,” Nicole said firmly. “I know that fact with the same certainty that you knew those little gadgets on the insides of the tank wall were electronic components.”
Richard laughed again. “Look,” he said, putting his mound of little objects in front of Nicole’s eyes, “there are really only five different kinds, if you study them closely.”
“Five different kinds of what!” Nicole asked. Richard shook his head and shrugged as he replaced the eggs in the tank.
The egglike things filled the entire length of the third set of tanks. By the time Richard and Nicole were approaching the fourth row of cylinders and another set of tanks, which were several more hundred meters to the south, both of them were growing tired. “If we don’t see anything new here,” she said, “how about lunch?”
“You’re on,” he answered.
But they could discern something new already when they were still fifty meters away from the fourth row of tanks. A square robot vehicle, perhaps thirty centimeters in length and width and another ten centimeters high, was moving swiftly back and forth between the cylindrical poles. “I knew those were tracks for some kind of vehicle,” Nicole said, kidding Richard,
Richard was too fascinated to respond. In addition to the scurrying robot, which made a full cycle across the array from east to west every three minutes or so, there were several more wonders to observe. Each of the individual tanks here was further subdivided into two long pieces by a mesh fence parallel to the walls that was only slightly higher than the water level. On one side of the mesh was an absolute swarm of tiny swimming creatures in five different colors. On the other side, gleaming circles, resembling sand dollars, were scattered the complete length of the tank. The fence was positioned so that three-fourths of the tank volume was available to the gleaming circles, giving them
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far more room to maneuver than the densely packed swimmers.
Richard and Nicole bent over to study the activity. The sand dollars were moving in all directions. Because the water was teeming with so many creatures and so much activity, it took several minutes for Richard and Nicole to perceive the common pattern. At irregular intervals each of the sand dollars would propel itself over to the mesh fence using the whiplike cilia underneath its flat body and then, while anchored to the fence, would use another pair of cilia to capture a tiny swimmer and pull it through one of the holes in the mesh. While the sand dollar was against the fence, its light would dim. If it stayed long enough and caught several of the swimmers to eat, then its gleam would fade altogether.
“Watch what happens now when it leaves the fence,” Richard said to Nicole, pointing out one specific sand dollar just underneath them. “As it swims along with its companions, its light will be slowly replenished.”
Richard hurried back to the nearest cylindrical pole and bent down on his knees on the ground. He dug into the soil with one of the tools from his pack. “There’s much more to this system underground,” he said excitedly. “I bet this entire array is part of a gigantic power generator.”
He took three large, measured steps to the south, noted his position carefully, and leaned over the tank to count the sand dollars in the region between the cylindrical pole and him. It was a difficult count because of the constant motion of the gleaming circles.
“Roughly three hundred of them in three meters of tank length, making approximately twenty-five thousand per complete tank, or two hundred thousand in a complete row,” Richard said.
“Are you assuming, then,” Nicole asked, “that these cylindrical poles are some sort of storage system? Like batteries?”
“Probably,” said Richard. “What a fabulous idea! Find a living creature that generates electricity internally. Force it
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to give up its accumulated charge in order to eat. What could be better?”
“And that robot vehicle, moving back and forth between the poles, what is its purpose?”
“I would guess it’s a monitor of some kind,” Richard replied.
Richard and Nicole ate their lunch and then finished their inspection of the putative power plant. Altogether there were eight columns and eight rows in the array, for a total of sixty-four tanks. Only twenty were active at the time. “Plenty of excess capacity,” Richard commented. “Their engineers clearly understand the concepts of growth and margin.”
The giant fireflies now headed due east, along what appeared to be some kind of major highway. Twice Richard and Nicole encountered small herds of the large antlike creatures going in the opposite direction, but there were no interactions. “Are those creatures intelligent enough to operate without supervision?” Nicole asked Richard. “Or are we just not being allowed to see whatever beings give them instructions?”
‘That’s an interesting question,” Richard said. “Remember how quickly the octospider came over to the ant thing when it was struck by the ball? Perhaps they have some limited intelligence, but cannot function well in new or unknown environments.”
“Like some people we have known,” Nicole said with a laugh.
Their long march to the east ended when their two guiding lights hovered over a large dirt field just off the road. The field was empty except for what looked at a distance like forty football goalposts covered with ivy, arranged in five rows of eight posts each.
“Will you check the guidebook, please?” Richard said. “It’s easier to understand what we’re seeing if we read about it first.”
Nicole smiled. “We really are being given some kind of
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tour, aren’t we? Why do you suppose our hosts want us to see all this?”
Richard was silent for a moment. “I’m fairly certain that it’s the octospiders who are the lords of all this territory,” he said finally, “or at least they are the dominant species in a complicated hierarchy. Whoever it was that picked us personally for this tour must believe that informing us about their capabilities will make future interactions easier.”
“But if it really is the octospiders,” Nicole said, “why didn’t they simply kidnap all of us as they did Ellie and Eponine?”
“I don’t know,” Richard replied. “Maybe their sense of morality is far more complicated than we have imagined.”
Both of the giant fireflies were dancing in the air over the collection of ivy-covered goalposts. “I think our tour guides are becoming impatient,” Nicole said.
If Richard and Nicole had not been so fatigued from their two days of arduous hiking, and if they had not already seen so many fabulous sights in this alien world that existed in the Southern Hemicylinder of Rama, they would have been both captivated and overwhelmed by the complex symbiosis they discovered in the next several hours.
What was all over the goalposts was not ivy at all. What appeared to be individual leaves from a distance were in reality little cone-shaped nests, made of thousands of tiny creatures that resembled aphids. The creatures were glued together to form the nest by the sweet, sticky, honeylike substance the humans had enjoyed eating under the dome. The alien aphids manufactured large quantities of the substance as part of their normal activity.
During the time that Richard and Nicole were watching, convoys of snout-nosed beetles, who lived in mounds several meters high surrounding the entire enclave, burst from their homes every forty minutes or so and crawled all over the posts, harvesting the excess goo from the nests. The beetle creatures, which were about ten centimeters long when empty, swelled to three or four times their normal size before completing their harvest cycle and regurgitating the
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contents of their swollen bodies in sunken vats at the base of the posts.
Richard and Nicole did not talk much while they were watching the activity. The overall biological system displayed in front of them was both intricate and wonderful— another example of the astonishing advancements in symbiosis that had been made by their hosts. “I bet,” said a weary Richard as he and Nicole prepared to sleep not far from one of the beetle mounds, “that if we wait long enough, some beast of burden will show up to lift the vats of this honey, or whatever it is, out of the ground and then carry them to another site.”