Nicole thanked Dr. Blue profusely, as did Max and Eponine. Then the octospiders gathered up all the components, both biological and nonbiological, of their portable laboratory. When the octos had departed, Nicole crossed the room and took Eponine’s hand. “Es-tu heureuse?” she asked her friend.
“Absolument,” Eponine replied. “And relieved as well. I thought that something had gone wrong.”
“No,” Nicole said. “It was just a simple false alarm.”
Max crossed the room and gave Eponine a hug. He was beaming. Nicole withdrew slightly and watched the tender scene between her friends. She started to leave the house. “Wait a minute,” said Max. “Don’t you want to know what we’re going to name him?”
“Of course,” Nicole replied.
“Marius Clyde Puckett,” Max said proudly.
“Marius,” Eponine added, “because he was the waif Eponine’s dream lover in Les Miserables—I longed for a Marius during my long and lonely nights at the orphanage. And Clyde, after Max’s brother back in Arkansas.”
“It’s an excellent name,” Nicole said, smiling to herself as she turned to leave. “An excellent name,” she repeated.
Richard could not contain his excitement when he came home later that afternoon. “I have just spent two absolutely fascinating hours over in the conference room with Archie and the other octospiders,” lie said to Nicole in his loudest voice. “They showed me the entire apparatus they used with you and Eponine earlier today. Amazing. What incredible genius! No, wizardry is a better term—I’ve said it from the beginning, the damn octospiders are biological wizards.
“Just imagine. They have living creatures that are cameras, another set of microscopic bugs that read the
238
ARTHUR C. CLARKE AND GENTRY LEE
images and carefully store each individual pixel, a special genetic warping of themselves that controls the process, and a limited amount of electronics, where necessary, to perform the mundane data management tasks. How many thousands of years did it take for all this to occur? Who engineered it in the first place? It is absolutely mind-boggling!”
Nicole smiled at her husband. “Did you see Marius? What did you think?”
“I saw all the pictures from this afternoon,” Richard continued to shout. “Do you know how the midget morphs communicate with the image quadroids? They use a special • wavelength range in the far ultraviolet part of the spectrum. That’s right. Archie told me those little bugs and the midget octospiders actually have a common language. And that’s not all. Some of the morphs know as many as eight different microspecies languages. Even Archie himself can communicate with forty other species, fifteen using their basic octospider colors and the rest in a range of languages that includes signs, chemicals, and other parts of the electromagnetic spectrum.”
Richard stood still for a moment in the middle of the room. ‘This is incredible, Nicole, simply incredible.”
He was about to launch into another monologue when Nicole asked him how the regular octos and the midget morphs communicated. “I never saw any color patterns on the heads of the morphs today,” she said.
“All their conversation is in the ultraviolet,” Richard said, starting to pace again. Suddenly he turned and pointed at the center of his forehead. “Nicole,” he said, “that lens thing in the middle of their slit is a veritable telescope, able to receive information at practically any wavelength. It’s staggering. Somehow they have organized all these life-forms into a grand symbiotic system of complexity far beyond anything we could ever conceive of.”
Richard sat down on the couch next to Nicole. “Look,” he said, showing his arms to her, “I still have goose bumps. I am in absolute awe of these creatures. . . . Jesus, it’s a good thing they aren’t hostile.”
RAMA REVEALED
239
Nicole looked at her husband with a furrowed brow. “Why do you say that?”
“They could command an army of billions, maybe even trillions. I bet they even talk to their plants] You saw how quickly they scared off that thing in the forest. Imagine what it would be like if your enemy could control all the bacteria, even the viruses, and make them do their bidding. What a frightening concept!”
Nicole laughed. “Don’t you think you’re getting carried away? Just because they have genetically engineered a set of living cameras, it does not follow—”
“I know,” said Richard, jumping up from the couch. “But I can’t help thinking about the logical extension of what we have seen here today. Nicole, Archie admitted to me that the sole purpose of the midget morphs is to be able to deal with the world of the tiny. The midgets can see things as small as a micrometer—that’s one-thousandth of a millimeter. Now extend that idea another several orders of magnitude. Imagine a species whose morphs span four or five relationships similar to the one between the normal octos and the midgets. Communication with bacteria might not be impossible after all.”
“Richard,” Nicole said at this juncture, “don’t you have anything at all to say about the fact that Max and Eponine are going to have a son? And that the boy looks perfectly healthy?”
Richard stood silent for a few seconds. “It is wonderful,” he said a little sheepishly. “I guess I should go next door and congratulate them.”
“You can probably wait until after dinner,” Nicole said, glancing at one of the special watches Richard had made for them. The watch kept human time in an octospider frame of reference.
“Patrick, Ellie, Nikki, and Benjy have been over at Max and Eponine’s for the last hour,” Nicole continued, “ever since Dr. Blue stopped by with some parchment photographs of little Marius in die womb.” She smiled. “As you would say, they should be home in about a feng.”
3
icole finished brushing her teeth and gazed at her reflection in the mirror. Galileo was right, she thought. / am an old woman.
She began rubbing her face with her fingers, methodically massaging the wrinkles that seemed to be everywhere. She heard Benjy and the twins playing outside and then both Nai and Patrick calling them to school. / was not always old, she said to herself. There was a time when I too went to school.
Nicole closed her eyes, attempting to remember what she had looked like as a young girl. She was unable to conjure up a clear picture of herself as a child. Too many other pictures from the intervening years blurred and distorted Nicole’s image of herself as a schoolgirl.
At length she reopened her eyes and stared at the image in the mirror. In her mind she painted out all the bag$ and wrinkles on her face. She changed the color of her hair and eyebrows from gray to a deep black. Finally she managed to
RAMA REVEALED
241
see herself as a beautiful woman of twenty-one. Nicole felt a brief but intense yearning for those days of her youth. For we were young, and we knew that we would never die, she remembered.
Richard stuck his head around the corner. “Ellie and I will be working with Hercules in the study,” he said. “Why don’t you join us?”
“In a few minutes,” Nicole answered. While she touched up her hair, Nicole reflected on the daily patterns of the human clan in the Emerald City. They usually all gathered for breakfast in the Wakefields’ dining room. School ended before lunch. Then everyone except Richard napped, their accommodation to the eight-hour-longer day. Most afternoons Nicole and Ellie and Richard were with the octospi-ders, learning more about their hosts or sharing experiences from the planet Earth. The other four adults spent almost all their time with Benjy and the children in their enclave at the end of the cul-de-sac.
And where does all this take us? Nicole suddenly wondered. For how many years will we be the guests of the octospiders? And what will happen if and when Rama reaches its destination?
They were all questions for which Nicole had no answers. Even Richard had apparently stopped worrying about what was going on outside the Emerald City. He was completely absorbed by the octospiders and his translator project. Now he only asked Archie for celestial navigation data every two months or so. Each time Richard would report to the others, without editorial comment, that Rama was still headed in the general direction of the star Tan Ceti.
Like little Marius, Nicole thought, we are content here in our womb. As long as the outside world does not force itself upon us, we do not ask the overwhelming questions.
Nicole left the bathroom and walked down the hall to (he study. Richard was sitting on the floor between Hercules and Ellie. “The easy part is tracking the color pattern and having the sequence stored in the processor,” he was saying. “The hardest part of the translation is automatically converting that pattern into a recognizable English sentence.”
242
ARTHUR C. CLARKE AND GENTRY LEE
Richard faced Hercules and spoke very slowly. “Because your language is so mathematical, with every color having an acceptable angstrom range defined a priori, all the sensor has to do is identify the stream of colors and the widths of the bands. The entire information content has then been captured. Because the rules are so precise, it’s not even difficult to code a simple fault protection algorithm, for use with juveniles or careless speakers, in case any single color errs to the left or the right in the spectrum.