Both Richard and Nicole were bone tired after their large dinner. Ellie told her parents that there was more to talk about, but that she could wait until after Richard and Nicole had slept.
“I wish I could remember more about my period with the octospiders before we reached the Node,” Richard said, when he and Nicole were lying together on the large bed their hosts had provided. “Then maybe I would understand better what I feel about the story that ElHe and Eponine told.”
“Do you still doubt that she’s cured?” Nicole asked.
“I don’t know,” Richard said. “But I will admit that I am rather puzzled by the difference in behavior between these octospiders and the ones who examined and tested me years before. I cannot believe that the octos in Rama II would ever have rescued me from a voracious plant.”
“Maybe octospiders are capable of widely varying behavior. That’s certainly true for human beings. In fact, it’s true for all higher-order mammals on Earth. Why should you expect all octospiders to be the same?”
“I know you’re going to say that I’m being xenophobic,” Richard said, “but it’s difficult for me to accept thesb ‘new’ octospiders. They seem too good to be true. As a biologist,
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what do you think is their payoff, to use your word, for being nice to us?”
“It’s a legitimate question, darling,” Nicole replied, “and I don’t know the answer. The idealist in me, however, wants to believe that we have encountered a species that behaves, most of the time, in a moral fashion because doing good is its own reward.”
Richard laughed. “I should have known you’d say something like that. It’s consistent with your comments about Sisyphus during that discussion we had in New Eden long ago.”
6
V;
ou would find their language fascinating, Daddy,” Ellie was saying when Nicole finally awakened after sleeping for eleven hours. Richard and Ellie were already eating breakfast. “It’s extremely mathematical. They use sixty-four colors altogether, but only fifty-one are what we would call alphabetical. The other thirteen are clarifiers—they are used to specify tenses, or as counters, or even to identify comparatives and superlatives. Their language is really quite elegant.”
“I can’t imagine how a language can be elegant—your mother is the linguist in the family,” Richard said. “I managed to learn to read German, but my speaking skills were atrocious.”
“Good morning, everybody,” Nicole said, stretching in her bed. “What’s for breakfast?”
“Some new and different vegetables,” Ellie replied. “Or maybe they are fruits, for there’s really no equivalence in our world. Almost everything the octospiders eat is what we
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would probably call a plant, deriving its energy from light. Worms are about the only thing the octospiders eat regularly that does not get its primary energy from photons.”
“So all the plants in the fields that we passed are powered by a kind of photosynthesis?”
“Something similar,” Ellie replied, “if I understood properly what Archie told me. Very little is wasted in the octospider society. Those creatures that you and Daddy call ‘giant fireflies’ hover over each field for precisely scheduled periods of time each week or month. And all the water is managed as carefully as the photons.”
“Where’s Eponine?” Nicole asked while she surveyed the food laid out on the table in the middle of the room.
“She’s off packing her things,” Ellie said. “Besides, she thought that she really shouldn’t participate in this mom-ing’s conversation.”
“Are we going to be shocked again, like last night?” Nicole asked lightly.
“Perhaps,” Ellie said slowly. “I really don’t know how you are going to react. … Do you want to finish your breakfast before we start, or should I tell Archie we’re ready?”
“You mean the octospider is going to be part of the conversation and Eponine is not?” Richard asked.
“It was her choice,” Ellie said. “Besides, Archie, at least in his capacity as a representative of the octospiders, is far more involved in the subject matter than Eponine.”
Richard and Nicole looked at each other. “Do you have any idea at all what this is about?” Richard said.
Nicole shook her head. “But we might as well begin,” she said.
Archie spread out his tentacles on die floor so that his head was about the same height as those of the sitting humans. Ellie then informed her parents, and everyone laughed, that this time Archie would provide the “preamble.” Ellie translated, at times hesitantly, as Archie began with an apology to Richard for the way Richard had been treated by Archie’s “cousins” years previously. Archie explained that those octospiders, die ones die humans had encountered in Rama prior to arriving at the Node, were
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from a separate, splinter colony, only remotely related to the octospiders that were currently on board Rama. Archie emphasized that it was not until Rama came into their sphere of influence for the third time that the octospiders, as a species, concluded that the great cylindrical spacecraft were important.
A few of the survivors of that other octospider colony—a ‘Vastly inferior group,” according to Archie (this was one of the places where Ellie asked him to repeat what he was saying)—were still passengers on Rama when the spacecraft was intercepted, early in its trajectory, by the current octospider colony that had been specifically selected to represent their species. The splinter group survivors were removed from Rama, but all their records were preserved. Archie and the others in his colony learned the details of what had happened to Richard at that time and they now wished to make amends for that treatment.
“So all this preamble, in addition to being fascinating,” said Richard, “is an elaborate apology to me?”
Ellie nodded and Archie flashed the broad crimson followed by the brilliant aquamarine.
“May I ask a question before we continue?” Nicole said. She turned toward the octospider. “I assume, from what you told us, that you and your colony boarded Rama during the period that we were all asleep. Did you know we were there?”
Archie answered that the octospiders had presumed the humans were living inside the far northern habitat in Rama, but had not known for certain until the external seal of the human habitat was first broken. By that time, according to Archie, the octospider colony had already been in place for twelve human years.
“Archie insisted that he make this apology himself,” Ellie said, glancing at her father and then waiting for him to respond.
“Okay, I accept, I guess,” Richard replied. “Although I have no idea what the proper protocol should be. …”
Archie asked Ellie to define “protocol.” Nicole laughed. “Richard,” she said, “sometimes you are so stiff.”
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“Anyway,” Ellie said again, “in the interest of time, I will tell you everything else myself. According to Archie, the records from the splinter colony show that they conducted a number of experiments on you, most of which are outlawed in those octospider colonies Archie refers to as ‘highly developed.’ One experiment, Daddy, as you have often suggested, involved inserting into your brain a series of specialized microbes to void all your memory of the time period you stayed with the octospiders. I have reported to Archie and the others that the memory experiment was mostly but not completely successful.
“The most complex experiment they conducted on your body was an attempt to alter your sperm. The splinter colony of octospiders knew no more about where Rama was going than our family did. They thought that perhaps the humans and octospiders on board would be coexisting for centuries, maybe even eons, and the octospiders determined that it was absolutely essential for the two species to communicate.
“What they attempted to do was to change the chromosomes in your sperm so that your offspring would have both expanded language capability and greater visual resolution of colors. In short, they tried to engineer me genetically— for I was the only child born to you and Mother after your long odyssey—so that I would be able to communicate with them without undue difficulty. To accomplish this, they introduced a set of special creatures into your body.”
Ellie stopped. Both Richard and Nicole were staring at her as if they were in shock.
“So you are some kind of hybrid?” Richard asked finally.
“Maybe a little,” said Ellie, laughing to defuse the tension. “If I understand correctly, only a few thousand of the three billion kilobases that define my genome have been altered. . . . And speaking of that, Archie and the octospiders would like to invalidate, for their scientific research, that I am indeed the result of an altered sperm. They would like blood and other cell samples from both of you, so that they can conclude unequivocally that I could not have come from a ‘normal’ union of the two of you. Then they would know for certain that my facility with their language was indeed ‘engineered’ and not just incredible good luck.”