“But why are you leaving so early?” Nicole asked.
“Because there’s so much to see, I guess. Anyway, give me a kiss. He’ll be here in a few minutes.”
Nicole kissed Richard dutifully and closed her eyes again.
The Embryo Bank was a large rectangular building located far to the south of the Emerald City, very close to where the Central Plain ended. Less than a kilometer from where the bank had been built, a set of three staircases, each with tens of thousands of individual steps, ascended the south polar bowl. Above the Embryo Bank, in the near darkness of Rama, loomed the imposing, buttressed structures of the Big Horn and its six sharply pointed acolytes, each larger than any single engineering construction on the planet Earth.
Richard and Archie had mounted an ostrichsaur on the outskirts of the Emerald City. Together with an escort and a trio of fireflies, they had passed through the Alternate Domain in only a matter of minutes. Out. in the southern reaches of the octospider realm there were very few buildings. Despite the occasional fields of grain, most of the territory through which diey traveled on their southerly trek reminded Richard, even in the dim light, of the Northern
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Hemicylinder in Rama II, before the two habitats had been built.
Richard and his octospider friend entered the Embryo Bank through a pair of extra-thick doors that took them directly into a targe conference room. There Richard was introduced to several other octospiders, who were obviously expecting his visit. Richard used his translator and the octos read his lips, although he had to speak slowly and distinctly because they were not nearly as skilled in the human language as Archie.
After some brief formalities, one of the octospiders led the pair to a series of control panels housing the equivalent of keyboards made from octo color strips. “We have almost ten million embryos stored here,” the lead octospider said in her introduction, “representing over a hundred thousand distinct species and three times that many hybrids. Their natural life spans range in duration from half a tert to several million days, or about ten thousand of your human years. Their adult sizes range from a fraction of a nanometer to behemoths nearly as large as this building. Each embryo is stored in what are believed to be near-optimal conditions for its preservation. In fact, however, only about a thousand distinct environments, combinations of temperature, pressure, and ambient chemicals, are needed to span the range of required conditions.
“This building also houses an immense data management and monitoring system. This system automatically tracks the conditions in each of the distinct environments and monitors the early development of the several thousand embryos that are always in active germination. The system has some automatic fault detection and correction, a dual-parameter warning structure, and also drives the displays which can exhibit status and/or catalog information, both on the walls here or in any of the research areas on the upper floors.”
Richard’s brain went into overdrive as he began to understand more clearly the purpose of the Embryo Bank. What a fantastic concept, he thought. The octospiders store
here all the seeds of other plant and animal species that might ever he needed for any purpose.
“. . . Testing is continuous,” the lead octospider was saying, “both to ensure the integrity of the storage and preservation systems and to provide specimens for the genetic engineering activities. At any given time approximately two hundred octospider biologists are actively engaged in genetic experiments here. The goal of these many experiments is to produce altered life-forms that will improve the efficiency of our society—”
“Can you show me an example,” Richard interrupted, “of such a genetic experiment?”
“Certainly,” the octospider replied. She shuffled over to the control panel and used three of her tentacles to press a sequence of colored buttons. “I believe you are familiar with one of our primary methods of power generation,” she said, as a video appeared on the wall. ‘The basic principle is quite simple, as you know. The circular marine creatures generate and store electric charge in their bodies. We capture this charge along a wire mesh, against which the animals must press to reach their food supply. Although this system is quite satisfactory, our engineers have pointed out that it could be improved substantially if the behavior of the creature could be altered somewhat.
“Look at this fast-motion close-up of half a dozen of the marine creatures that generate the power. Notice that during this brief motion picture each of the animals will go through three or four charge-discharge cycles. What feature of these cycles would be of primary interest to a system engineer?”
Richard watched the video carefully. The sand dollars are dim after their discharge, he thought, hut regain their full glow in a comparatively short period of time.
“Assuming that the glow is a measure of the stored charge,” Richard said, suddenly wondering if he was undergoing some kind of a test, “the system could be made more efficient by increasing the feeding frequency.”
“Exactly,” the lead octospider responded. Archie flashed a quick message to the host octo that was completed before Richard had even had a chance to aim the telescope on his
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translator. Meanwhile, a different picture appeared on the wall. “Here are three genetic variants of the circular marine creature that are currently under test and evaluation. The leading replacement candidate is the one on the left. This prototype eats roughly twice as frequently as the component currently being used; however, the prototype has a metabolic imbalance that increases significantly its susceptibility to communicable diseases. All factors are being weighed in the current evaluation.”
Richard was taken from one demonstration to another. Archie accompanied him at all times, but at each venue a different set of octospider specialists joined them for the prepared minilecture and the group discussion that always followed. One of the presentations was focused on the relationships between the Embryo Bank, the large zoo that occupied considerable territory in the Alternate Domain, and die barrier forest that formed a complete annulus around Rama, slightly less than a kilometer north of the Emerald City. “All living species in our realm,” the presenter said, “are either in active symbiosis, temporary observation in an isolated domain—in the zoo, the forest, or, in your specific case, in the Emerald City itself—or undergoing experimentation here at the Embryo Bank.”
After a long walk down many corridors, Richard and Archie attended a meeting of half a dozen octospiders evaluating a recommendation to replace an entire symbiotic chain of four different species. The chain was responsible for the production of a gelatin that cured a specific octospider lens malady. Richard listened with fascination as the test parameters of the proposed new symbiosis—resources consumed, reproduction rates, octospider interactions required, fault coefficients, and behavior predictability—were compared with the existing system. The outcome of the meeting was that in one of the three manufacturing “zones,” the new symbiosis would be installed for several hundred operational days, after which time the decision would ag^in be reviewed.
In the middle of the workday Archie and Richard were
scheduled to be alone for half a tert. At Richard’s request, they packed their lunches and drinks, remounted the ostrich-saur, commandeered a pair of fireflies, and wandered out into the cold and dark of the Central Plain. When he eventually dismounted, Richard walked around with his arms outstretched and gazed up into the vastness of Rama.
“Who among you,” Richard asked Archie, “worries about, or even tries to figure out, the significance of all this?” He waved his arms in a circular motion.
The octospider replied that he didn’t understand the question. “Yes, you did, you sly thing,” Richard said, smiling. “Except that this time period was obviously set aside by your optimizers for a different kind of conversation between us. What I want to discuss, Archie, is not in which specific engineering department in your Embryo Bank I would like to work so that I can make my ‘contribution’ that will justify the ‘resources’ necessary to sustain me … what I want to talk to you about is what is really going on here? Why are we—humans, sessiles, avians, and you with all your menagerie—on this huge, mysterious spacecraft bound for the star we humans call Tau Ceti?”
Archie did not respond for almost thirty seconds. “Members of our genus were told while they were at the Node, just as you were, that some higher intelligence is cataloging life-forms in the galaxy, with a special emphasis on spacefarers. We assembled a typical colony, as requested, and established it inside this Rama vehicle so that the required detailed observations of our species could take place.”
“So you octospiders don’t know anything more about who or what is behind this grand scheme than we humans do?”