From across the room Nicole saw the royal blue color
•* spill out of its boundaries. “Hello, Nicole. How are you ; feeling?” the octospider said.
“Dr. Blue!” Nicole yelled excitedly.
Dr. Blue held the monitoring device in front of Nicole. > “I will be staying here with you until you are ready to be . transferred,” the octospider physician said. ‘The Eagle has ; other duties at present.”
Bands of color raced across the tiny screen. “I don’t ;; understand,” Nicole said, looking at the device upside down. “When the Eagle used that thing, the readout was all , in squiggles and other funny symbols.”
– “That’s their special-purpose technological language,” :;-• Dr. Blue said. “It’s incredibly efficient, much better than our _, colors. But of course I can’t read any of it. This device
* actually is polylingual. There’s even an English mode.”
“So what do you speak when you communicate with the ;Eagle and I’m not around?” Nicole asked.
“We both use colors,” Dr. Blue responded. “They run .-;’; across his forehead from left to right.” J. “You’re kidding,” Nicole said, trying to picture the ,V Eagle with colors on his forehead.
~ “Not at all,” the octospider answered. “The Eagle is ; amazing. He jabbers and shrieks with the avians, squeals .;, ‘and whistles with the myrmicats.”
> Nicole had never seen the word “myrmicat” in the
; language of color before. When she asked about the word,
Dr. Blue explained that six of the strange creatures were
now living in the Grand Hotel and that another four were
. about to burst forth from germinating manna melons.
: “Although all the octospiders and humans slept during the
Vtong voyage,” Dr. Blue said, “the manna melons were
£• allowed to develop into myrmicats and then sessile material.
They are already into their next generation.” :.£:’•{ Dr. Blue replaced the device on the table. “So what’s the || verdict for today, Doctor?” Nicole asked.
“You’re gaining strength,” Dr. Blue replied. “But you’re alive because of all the supplemental probes that have :n inserted. At some time you should consider—”
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“—replacing my heart. I know,” said Nicole. “It may seem peculiar, but the idea does not appeal to me very much. I don’t know exactly why I’m against it. Maybe I haven’t yet seen what remains to live for. I know that if Richard were still alive . . .”
She stopped herself. For an instant Nicole imagined she was back in the viewing room, watching the slow-motion frames of the last seconds of Richard’s life. She had not thought about that moment since she awakened.
“Do you mind if I ask you something very personal?” Nicole said to Dr. Blue.
“Not at all,” the octospider said.
“We watched the deaths of Richard and Archie together,” Nicole said, “and I was so distraught that I could not function- Archie was murdered at the same time, and he was your lifelong partner. Yet you sat beside me and gave me comfort. Did you not feel any sense of loss or sadness at Archie’s death?”
Dr. Blue did not respond immediately. “All octospiders are trained from birth to control what you humans call emotions. The alternates, of course, are quite susceptible to feelings. But those of us who—”
“With all due respect,” Nicole interrupted softly, touching her octospider colleague, “I wasn’t asking you a clinical question, doctor to doctor. It was a question from one friend to another.”
A short burst of crimson, then another of blue, unrelated, slowly flowed around Dr. Blue’s head. “Yes, I felt a sense of loss,” Dr. Blue said. “But I knew it was coming. Either then or later. When Archie joined the war effort, his termination became certain. And besides, my duty at that moment was to help you.”
The door to the room opened and the Eagle entered. The alien was carrying a large box full of food, clothing, and miscellaneous equipment. He informed Nicole that he had brought her space suit and that she was going to venture out of her controlled environment in the very near future.
“Dr. Blue says that you can speak in color,” Nicole said playfully. “I want you to show me.”
“What do you want me to say?” the Eagle replied in orderly narrow color bands that started on the left side of his forehead and scrolled to the right.
“That’s enough,” Nicole said with a laugh. “You are truly amazing.”
Nicole stood on the floor of the gigantic factory and stared at the pyramid in front of her. Off to her right, less than a kilometer away, a group of special-purpose biots, including a pair of mammoth bulldozers, were building a tall mountain. “Why are you doing all this?” Nicole said into the tiny microphone inside her helmet.
“It’s part of the next cycle,” the Eagle replied. “We have determined that these particular constructions enhance the likelihood of obtaining what we want from the experiment.”
“So you already know something about the new space-farers?”
“I don’t know the answer to that,” the Eagle said. “I have no assignment associated with the future of Rama.”
“But you told us before,” Nicole said, not satisfied, “that no changes were made unless they were necessary.”
“I can’t help you,” the Eagle said. “Come, get in the rover. Dr. Blue wants to have a closer look at the mountain.”
The octospider looked peculiar in her space suit. In fact, Nicole had laughed out loud when she had first seen Dr. Blue with the glove-fitting white fabric covering her charcoal body and her eight tentacles. Dr. Blue also had a transparent helmet around her head, through which it was easy to read her colors.
“I was astonished,” Nicole said to Dr. Blue, who was sitting beside her as the open rover moved across the flat .terrain toward the mountain, “when we first came outside. . . . No, that’s not a strong enough word. You and the *pagfe had both told me that we were in the factory and that a was being prepared for another voyage, but I never pected all this.”
“The pyramid was built around you,” the Eagle interred from the driver’s seat in front of them, “while you sleeping. If we had not been able to build without
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disturbing your environment, it would have beei) necessary to awaken you much earlier.”
“Doesn’t this entire business just amaze you?” Nicole continued to face Dr. Blue. “Don’t you wonder what kind of beings conceived of this grand project in the first place? And also created artificial intelligence like the Eagle? It is almost impossible to imagine.”
“It’s not as difficult for us,” the octospider said. “Remember, we have known about superior beings from the beginning. We only exist as intelligent creatures because the Precursors altered our genes. We have never had a period in our history when we thought we were at the apex of life.”
“Nor will we, ever again,” mused Nicole. “Human history, whatever it turns out to be, has now been profoundly and irrevocably altered.”
“Maybe not,” the Eagle said from the front seat. “Our data base indicates that some species are not significantly impacted by contact with us. Our experiments are designed to allow for that possibility. Our contact occurs during a finite interval, with only a small percentage of the population. There is no continuous interaction unless the species under study takes overt action to create it. I doubt if life on Earth at this very moment is much different than it would have been if no Rama spacecraft had ever visited your solar system.”
Nicole leaned forward in her seat. “Do you know that for a fact?” she said. “Or are you just guessing?”
The Eagle’s answer was vague. “Certainly your history was changed by Rama’s appearance,” he said. “Many major events would not have occurred if there had not been any contact. But a hundred more years from now, or five hundred. . . . How different will Earth be then from what it would have been?”
“But the human point of view must have changed,” Nicole argued. “Surely the knowledge that there exists in the universe, or at least existed in some earlier epoch, an intelligence advanced enough to build an interstellayobotic spacecraft larger than our greatest city cannot be cast aside as insignificant information. It creates a different perspec-
tive for the entire human experience. Religion, philosophy, even the fundamentals of biology must be revised in the presence—”
“I am glad to see,” the Eagle interrupted, “that at least some small measure of your optimism and idealism has survived all these years. Recall, however, that in New Eden the humans knew that mey were living inside a domain especially constructed for them by extraterrestrials. And they were told, by you and others, that they were being continually observed. Even so, when it became apparent that the aliens, whoever they were, did not intend to interfere in the daily activities of the humans, the existence of those advanced beings became irrelevant.”