“Is that story true?” Nikki asked Archie on another occasion. “Would the octospiders really never have left their own planet if the Precursors had not taken them into space first?”
“So the legends indicate,” Archie replied. “They say that almost everything we knew until about fifty thousand years ago was taught to us originally by the Precursors.”
One night, after Nikki was asleep, Richard and Ellie asked Archie about the origin of the legends. “They have been around for tens of thousands of your years,” the octospider said. “The earliest documented records from our genus contain many of the stories I have shared with you these last few days. There are several different opinions about how factual the legends are. Dr. Blue believes that they are basically accurate and probably the work of some master storyteller—an alternate, of course—whose genius was not recognized in his or her lifetime.
“If the legends can be believed,” Archie said in answer to another of Richard’s questions, “many, many years ago we octospiders were simple seafaring creatures whose natural evolution had produced only minimal intelligence and awareness. It was the Precursors who discovered our potential by mapping our genetic structure, and they who altered us over many generations into what we had become when the Great Calamity occurred.”
“What exactly happened to the Precursors?” Ellie asked.
“There are many stories, some contradictory. Most or all of the Precursors living on the primary planet we shared with them were probably killed in the Calamity. Some of the legends suggest that their remote colonial outposts around nearby stars survived for several hundred years, but ultimately succumbed as well. One legend says that the Precursors continued to thrive in other, more favorable star systems and became the dominant form of intelligence in
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the galaxy. We do not know. All that is known for certain is that the land portion of our primary planet was uninhabitable for many, many years and that when the octospider civilization again ventured out of the water, none of the Precursors were alive.”
The group of four in the basement developed their own diurnal rhythm as the days stretched into weeks. Each morning, before Nikki and Ellie awakened, Archie and Richard would talk about a wide range of topics of mutual interest. By this time, Archie’s lip-reading was nearly flawless, and Richard’s comprehension of the octospider colors was good enough that the octospider was only rarely asked to repeat what he had said.
Many of the conversations were about science. Archie was especially fascinated by the history of science in the human species. He wanted to know what discoveries were made when, what prompted the key investigations or experiments in the first place, and what inaccurate or competing models explaining the phenomena were discarded as a result of each new understanding.
“So it was actually war that accelerated the development of both aeronautics and nuclear physics in your species,” Archie said one morning. “What an amazing concept! . . . You cannot possibly appreciate,” the octospider added a few seconds later, “how staggering it is for me to experience, even vicariously, your incremental process of learning about nature. Our history is totally different. In the beginning our species was completely ignorant. Shortly thereafter a new kind of octospider was created, one that could not only think, but also observe the world and understand what it was seeing.^ Our mentors and creators, the Precursors, already had explanations for everything. Our task as a species was quite simple. We learned what we could from our teachers. Naturally, we did not have any concept of the trial and error that is involved in science. For that matter, we had no idea at all of how any component in a culture evolves. The brilliant engineering of the Precursors allowed us to skip hundreds of millions of years of evolution.
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“Needless to say, we were woefully unprepared for taking care of ourselves after the Great Calamity occurred. According to the more historical of our legends, our primary intellectual activity for the next several hundred years was to accumulate and understand as much of the Precursor information as we could find and/or remember. In the meantime, with our benefactors no longer around to provide ethical guidelines, we regressed sociologically. We entered a long, long period in which it was questionable whether or not the new, intelligent octospiders created by the Precursors would indeed survive.”
Richard was overwhelmed by the idea of what he called a “derivative technological species.” “I had never imagined,” he told Archie one morning with his usual excitement of discovery, “that there might exist a spacefaring species that had never worked out on its own the laws of gravity and had never derived, in a long sequence of experiments, the essentials of physics, such as the characteristics of the electromagnetic spectrum. It is a mind-boggling thought. But now that I understand what you are telling me, it seems quite natural. If species A, who are advanced spacefarers, encounters species B, intelligent but somewhere lower on -the technological ladder, it is perfectly logical to assume that, after contact, species B would skip the rungs between.”
“Our case, of course,” Archie explained, “was even more unusual. The paradigm that you are describing is indeed quite natural and has happened, according to both our history and die legends, with great frequency. More spacefarers are derivative, to use your word, than naturally evolved. Take the avians and the sessiles, for example. Their symbiosis, which developed without any outside interference, had already existed in a star system not far from our home planet for thousands of years when they were first visited on an exploratory mission by the Precursors. The avians and sessiles would almost certainly never have developed a spacefaring capability of their own. However, after meeting the Precursors and seeing their first spacecraft, they asked for and received the technology necessary to achieve spacefiight.
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“Our situation is generically different, and definitely much more derivative. If our legends are true, the Precursors were already spacefarers when we octospiders were still totally insentient. At that epoch we were not even capable of conceiving of the idea of a planet, much less of the space surrounding it. Our fate was decided by the advanced beings with whom we shared our world. The Precursors recognized the potential in our genetic structure. Using their engineering skills, they improved us, gave us minds, shared their information with us, and created an advanced culture where none would probably have ever existed.” .
A deep bonding developed between Richard and Archie as a result of the regular early morning conversations. Unencumbered by any distractions, the two were able to share their fundamental love for knowledge. Each expanded the understanding of the other, thereby enriching their mutual appreciation for the wonders of the universe.
Nikki almost always woke up before Ellie. Soon after the girl had finished her breakfast, the group entered the second segment of their daily schedule. Although Nikki occasionally played games with Archie, she spent most of what might be called her morning in informal classes. She had three teachers. With Ellie, Nikki read a little, and did elementary addition and subtraction. She talked to her grandfather about science and nature, and had lessons with Archie on morals and ethics. She also learned the octospider alphabet and a few simple phrases. Nikki was very quick with the language of color, a fact that the others attributed both to her altered genes and to her natural intelligence.
“Our juveniles spend a significant amount of their schooling time discussing and interpreting case studies that raise critical moral problems,” Archie told Richard and Ellie one morning during a discussion of education. “Real-life situations are chosen as examples—although the actual facts may be slightly altered to sharpen the issues—and the young octospiders are asked to assess the acceptability of various possible responses. They do this in open discussion.”
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“Is this to expose the juveniles at an early age to the concept of optimization?” Richard asked.
“Not really,” Archie replied. “What we are trying to do is to prepare the young for the real task of living, which involves regular interaction with others, with many behavioral choices. Each juvenile is strongly encouraged to use the case studies to develop his or her own value system. Our species believes that knowledge does not exist in a vacuum. Only when knowledge is an integral part of a way of living does it achieve any real significance.”
Archie’s case studies presented Nikki with simple but elegant ethical problems. The basic issues of lying, fairness, prejudice, and selfishness were all covered in the first eight lessons. The girl’s responses to the situations often drew upon examples from her own life.
“Galileo will always say or do whatever he thinks will allow him to have his own way,” Nikki remarked during one lesson. ‘To him, what he wants is more important than anything else. Kepler is different. He never makes me cry.”