Rama 4 – Rama Revealed by Arthur C. Clark

“Ummm,” Franz murmured as the warm lotion began to take effect. “That’s wonderful.”

Katie dusted his genitalia with the white powder and then mounted him very slowly. Franz was in ecstasy. Katie rocked back and forth in an easy rhythm for a few minutes. When she could tell that Franz was nearing a climax, she halted her motion temporarily and reached under him to insert the beads. She rocked two or three more times and then halted again.

“Don’t stop now,” Franz shouted.

“Repeat after me,” Katie said with a chuckle, moving slowly back and forth one more time. “I promise—”

“Anything,” Franz yelled, “just don’t stop again.”

“I promise,” she continued, “mat Katie Wakefield will see her father sometime in the next few days.”

Franz repeated the promise and Katie rewarded him. When she pulled the cord just after he started his climax, Franz screamed at the top of his lungs like an animal in the forest.

Ellie did not like her two interrogators. They were both dry, humorless individuals who treated her with complete disdain. “This isn’t going to work, gentlemen,” she said in an exasperated tone at one point during the first day of

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questioning, “if you insist on asking the same questions over and over. I understood that I was being asked to supply some information about the octospiders. Thus far the questions, which you are now repeating, have all been about my mother and my father.”

“Mrs. Turner,” the first man said, “the government is trying to gather all possible information about this case. Your mother and father have both been fugitives for many—”

“Look,” Ellie interrupted, “I have already told you that I know nothing whatsoever about how, when, or even why either of my parents left New Eden. Nor do I have any knowledge of whether they were helped to escape, in any way, by the octospiders. Now, unless you are prepared to change the line of questioning—”

“It is not you, young lady,” the second man said, his eyes flashing, “who decides what are appropriate questions in this inquiry. Perhaps you do not understand the seriousness of your situation. You will be granted freedom from prosecution—on a very serious charge, I might add—only if you cooperate totally with us.”

“Just what is the charge against me?” Ellie asked. “I’m curious. I have never been a criminal before.”

“You can be charged with first-degree treason,” the first man said. “Deliberately aiding and abetting the enemy during a period of declared hostilities.”

“That’s absurd,” Ellie replied, frightened nevertheless. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“Do you deny that during the period of time that you were staying with the aliens you freely gave them information about New Eden that could be useful during a war?”

“Of course I did,” Ellie said, laughing nervously. “I told them as much as I could about our colony. And they reciprocated. The octospiders shared all the same information with us.”

Both men scribbled furiously on their pads. How did they get like this? Ellie wondered. How can a laughing, curious child be transformed into such a grim and Hostile adult?

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“Look, gentlemen,” Ellie said when the next question was asked, “this is not going well for me. I would like to declare a recess and organize my thoughts. Maybe I’ll even make a few notes before we reconvene. I had envisioned an altogether different process, something much more relaxed.”

The two men agreed to the break. Ellie walked down the hallway to where a government sitter was staying with Nikki. “You can go now, Mrs. Adams,” Ellie said. “We’re taking time off for lunch.”

Nikki could read the worried look on Ellie’s face. “Are those men being mean to you, Mommy?” she asked.

At length Ellie smiled. “You could say that, Nikki,” she said. “You certainly could say that.”

Richard completed the last of his walking laps around the basement and headed for the washbasin in the corner of the room. He stopped first at the table for a quick drink of water. Archie remained motionless on the floor behind Richard’s mattress. “Good morning,” Richard said as he wiped his sweat with a washcloth. “Are you ready for some breakfast?”

“I’m not hungry,” the octospider replied in color.

“You have to eat something,” Richard said cheerfully. “I agree with you that the food is terrible, but you can’t survive on water alone.”

Archie did not move or say anything. For the last several days, ever since the supply of his stored barrican had been exhausted, the octospider had not been very good company. Richard had been unable to engage Archie in their usual stimulating conversation and had become concerned about the octospider’s health. Richard put some grain in a bowl, sprinkled water on it, and carried it “over to his friend. “Here,” he said gently, “try to eat a little.”

Archie lifted a pair of tentacles and took the bowl. As he began to eat, a bright orange burst came out of his slit and moved halfway down one of his other tentacles before fading away.

“What was that?” Richard asked.

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“An emotional expression,” Archie answered, his response accompanied by more irregular color bursts.

Richard smiled. “Okay,” he said, “but what kind of emotion?”

After a long pause, Archie’s colored strips were more regimented. “I guess you would call it depression,” the octospider said.

“Is that what happens when the barrican is gone?” Richard asked.

Archie did not reply. At length Richard returned to the table and prepared himself a big bowl of grain. Then he came back and sat beside Archie on the floor. “You might as well talk about it,” Richard said softly. “We have nothing else to do.”

From the motion in Archie’s lens Richard could tell that the octo was studying him carefully. Richard took several spoonfuls of his breakfast before Archie began to speak.

“In our society,” Archie said, “the young males and females who are undergoing sexual maturation are taken away from their everyday lives and placed in a highly appropriate environment _ with individuals who have been through the process before. They are encouraged to describe what they are feeling and are reassured that the new and complex emotions they are experiencing are completely normal. Now I understand why such a program of intense attention is necessary.”

Archie paused for a moment and Richard smiled sympathetically. “These last few days,” the octospider continued, “for the first time since I was a very young juvenile, my emotions have not accepted the domination of my mind. During optimizer training we learned how important it was, whenever a decision was to be made, to sift carefully through all the available evidence and remove all prejudice that might be due to personal emotional responses. With the intensity of the feelings I am having presently, it would be quite impossible to relegate them to a low priority.”

Richard laughed. “Please don’t misunderstand me, Archie—I’m not laughing at you—but you just desctibed, in a typical octospider phrase, what most humans feel all the

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time. Very few of us ever achieve the control of our ‘personal emotional responses’ that we would like. This may be the first time that you have ever been able to really understand us, if you know what I mean.”

“It’s terrible,” Archie said. “I am feeling both an acute sense of loss—I miss Dr. Blue and Jamie—and powerful anger toward Nakamura for holding us prisoner. I fear that my outrage will cause me to take some action that is nonoptimal.”

“But the emotions you are describing are not usually connected, at least in humans, with sexuality,” Richard said. “Does the barrican also act as some kind of tranquilizer, subduing all feelings?”

Archie finished his breakfast before responding. “You and I are very different creatures and, as I have mentioned before, it is dangerous to project from one species to another. I remember our initial discussions about humans at the optimizers’ meeting just after you had breached the integrity of your habitat. In the middle of the meeting, the Chief Optimizer stressed that we must not look at your species in our terms. We must observe carefully, she said, obtain data, and correlate it consistently, without coloring the data with our own experience.

“I suppose this ail amounts to a disclaimer, in some sense, of what 1 am about to tell you. Nevertheless, it is my personal opinion, based on my observations of humans, that sexual desire is the driving force behind all the strong emotions in your species. We octospiders undergo a step discontinuity at sexual maturation. We change from being completely sexless to sexual in a very short period of time. In humans the process is much slower and more subtle. Sexual hormones are present in varying quantities from early in your fetal development. I contend, and have told the Chief Optimizer this, that it is possible that all your uncontrollable emotions can be traced to these sexual hormones. A human without any sexuality might be capable of the same optimized thought as an octospider.”