The discussion with the octospiders turned out to be so fascinating that I was indeed able temporarily to forget that my son’s handicap was beyond their medical magic. Dr. Blue’s colleagues showed me complex anatomical drawings of octospider insides, identifying all the major organs of their digestive sequence. The drawings were made on some kind of parchment or hide and were spread out across the large table. The octospiders explained to me, in their wonderful language of colors, absolutely everything that happens to food inside their body.
The most unusual feature of the octospider digestive process is the two large sacs, or buffers, at both ends of the system. Everything they eat goes directly into an intake buffer, where it can sit for as long as thirty days. The octospider’s body itself, based on the activity level of the individual, automatically determines the rate at which the food in the bottom of the sac is accessed, broken down chemically, and distributed to the cells for energy.
At the other end is a waste buffer, into which is discharged all the material that cannot be converted
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into useful energy by the octospider’s body. Every healthy octospider, I learned, has a small animal permanently living in this buffer. They showed me one of the tiny, centipedelike creatures that begins life as a minuscule egg deposited by its predecessor inside the host octospider. The “waster” is essentially omnivorous. It consumes ninety-nine percent of the waste deposited in the buffer during the two human months that it takes to grow to maturity. When the waster reaches adulthood, it deposits a pair of new eggs, only one of which will germinate, and then leaves forever the octospider in which it has been living.
The intake buffer is located just behind and below the mouth. The octospiders eat very rarely; however, they absolutely gorge themselves when they do have meals. We had a long discussion about their eating habits. Two of the facts that Dr. Blue told me were extremely surprising—first, that an empty octo intake buffer leads to immediate death, in less than a minute, and second, that a baby octospider must be taught to monitor the status of its food supply. Imagine! It does not know instinctively when it is hungry! When Dr. Blue saw the astonishment on my face, he laughed—a jumbled-up sequence of short color bursts—and then hastened to assure me that unexpected starvation is not a leading cause of death among the octospiders.
After my three-hour nap (I still cannot make it through the long octospider day without some sleep—of our group only Richard is capable of forgoing the nap on a regular basis), Dr. Blue informed me that, because of my keen interest in their digestive process, the octospiders had decided to show me a couple of other unusual characteristics of their biology.
I boarded a transport with the three octos, passed through one of the two gates out of our zone, and crossed the Emerald City. I suspect that this field trip was also planned to mitigate my disappointment#bout Benjy. Dr. Blue reminded me while we were traveling (it was hard for me to pay close attention to what he
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was saying—once we were outside our zone, there were all kinds of fascinating creatures beside our car and along the street, including many of the same species that I saw briefly during my first few moments in the Emerald City) that the octospiders were a polymorphic genus and that there were six separate adult manifestations of the particular octo species that had colonized our Rama spacecraft. “Remember,” he told me in color, “that one of the possible parameter variations is size.”
There is no way that I could have been prepared for what I saw about twenty minutes later. We descended from the transport outside a large warehouse. At each end of the windowless building were two mammoth, drooling octospiders, with heads at least ten meters in diameter, bodies that looked like small blimps, and long tentacles that were slate-gray instead of the usual black and gold. Dr. Blue informed me that this particular morph had one, and only one, function: to serve as a food repository for the colony.
“Each ‘replete’ [my translation of Dr. Blue’s colors] can store up to several hundred full buffers worth of food for a regular adult octospider,” Dr. Blue said. “Since our individual intake buffers hold thirty days worth of normal sustenance, forty-five on a reduced-energy diet, you can see what a vast storehouse a dozen of these repletes represent.”
As I watched, five octospiders approached one of their huge brothers and said something in color. Within seconds the creature leaned forward, bent its head down almost to the ground, and ejected a thick slurry from the enlarged mouth just below its milky lens. The five normal-sized octos gathered around the mound of slurry and fed themselves with their tentacles.
“We practice this several times every day, with every replete,” Dr. Blue said. “These morphs must have practice, for they are not very smart. You might have noticed that none of them spoke in color. They do not have any language transmission capability, and their
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mobility is extremely limited. Their genomes have been designed so that they can efficiently store food, preserve it for long periods of time, and regurgitate it to feed the colony upon request.”
I was still thinking about the huge repletes when our transport arrived at what 1 was told was an octospider school. I commented, while we were crossing the grounds, that the large facility seemed deserted. One of the other doctors said something about the colony not having had a “recent replenishment,” if I interpreted the colors correctly, but I never received a clear explanation of just what was meant by his remark.
At one end of the school facility, we entered a small building that had no furnishings. Inside were two adult octospiders and about twenty juveniles, maybe one-half the size of their larger companions. From the activity it was obvious that a repetitive drill of some kind was under way. I could not, however, follow the conversation between the juveniles and their teachers, both because the octospiders were using their full alphabet, including the ultraviolet and the infrared, and because the juvenile “talk” did not flow in the neat, regular bands that I have learned to read.
Dr. Blue explained that we were witnessing part of a “measuring class,” where the juveniles were being trained to perform assessments of their own health, including estimating the magnitude of food contained in their intake buffers. After Dr. Blue told me that “measuring” was an integral part of the early learning curriculum for their juveniles, I inquired about the irregularity of the juvenile colors. Dr. Blue informed me that these particular octos were very young, not much past “first color,” and were barely able to communicate distinct ideas.
After we returned to the conference room, I was asked a set of questions about human digestive systems. The questions were extremely sophisticated (we went through the Krebs citric acid cycle step by step, for example, and discussed other elements of human
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biochemistry that I could barely remember), and I was struck again by how much more the octospiders know about us than we know about them. As always, it was never necessary for me to repeat an answer.
What a day! It began with the pain of discovering that the octospiders were not going to be able to help Benjy. Later on I was reminded of how resilient the human psyche is when I was actually lifted out of my despondency by the stimulation of learning more about the octospiders. I remain astonished by the range of emotions we humans possess—and how very quickly we can change and adapt.
Eponine and I were talking last night about our life here in the Emerald City and how our unusual living conditions will affect the attitudes of the child she is carrying. At one point Ep shook her head and smiled. “You know what’s so amazing?” she said. “Here we are, an isolated human contingent living in an alien domain inside a gargantuan spacecraft hurtling toward an unknown destination. . . . Yet our days here are full of laughter, elation, sadness, and disappointment, just as they would be if we were still back on Earth.”
“This may look like a waffle,” Max said, “and it may feel like a waffle when you first put it in your mouth, but it damn sure doesn’t taste like a waffle.”
“Put more syrup on it,” Eponine said, laughing. “And pass the plate over here.”
Max handed the waffles across the table to his wife. “Shit, Frenchie,” he said, “these last few weeks you’ve been eating everything in sight. If I didn’t know better, I would think that you and that unborn child of ours both had one of those ‘intake buffers’ Nicole was telling us about.”