Rama Revealed

4

Less than a minute after the great firefly clusters in the Emerald City dome announced that another day had begun, little Nikki was in her grandparents’ room. “It’s light, Nonni,” she said. “They’ll be coming for us soon.”

Nicole rolled over and gave her granddaughter a hug. “We still have a couple of hours, Nikki,” she said to the excited girl. “Boobah is still sleeping… Why don’t you go back to your room and play with your toys while we take a shower?”

When the disappointed girl finally left, Richard was sitting up, rubbing his eyes. “Nikki has talked about nothing but this day for the last week,” Nicole said to him. “She is always in Benjy’s room, looking at the painting. Nikki and the twins have even given names to all those bizarre animals.”

Nicole reached unconsciously for the hairbrush beside the bed. “Why is it that small children have such difficulty understanding the concept of time? Even though Ellie has made her a calendar and has been counting off the days one by one, Nikki has asked me every morning if ‘today’s the day!”

“She’s just excited. Everybody is,” Richard said, rising from the bed. “I hope that we’re not all disappointed.”

“How could we be?” Nicole replied. “Dr. Blue says that we will see sights even more amazing than those you and I saw when we entered the city for the first time.”

“I guess the whole menagerie will be out in force,” Richard said. “By the way, do you understand what the octospiders are celebrating?”

“Sort of… I guess the closest equivalent holiday I know about would be the American Thanksgiving. The octos call this ‘Bounty Day.” They set aside a day to celebrate the quality of their life… At least that’s the way Dr. Blue explained it to me.”

Richard started to go to the shower but stuck his head back in the room. “Do you think they invited us to participate today because you told them about our family discussion at breakfast two weeks ago?”

“You mean when Patrick and Max said they wished they could return to New Eden?”

Richard nodded.

“Yes, I do,” Nicole answered. “I think the octospiders had convinced themselves that we were all completely content here. Having us attend their celebration is part of their attempt to integrate us more into their society.”

“I wish I had all the damn translators finished,” Richard said. “As it is, I only have two… and they’re not completely checked out. Should I give the second one to Max?”

“That would be a good idea,” Nicole said, crowding her husband in the doorway.

“What are you doing?” Richard said.

“I’m joining you in the shower,” Nicole answered with a laugh, “unless, of course, you’re too old to have company.”

a” Jamie came over from next door to tell them that the transport was ready. He was the youngest of their three octospider neighbors (Hercules lived by himself just on the other side of the plaza), and the humans had had the least contact with him. Jamie’s “guardians,” Archie and Dr. Blue, explained that Jamie was very much involved with his studies and was approaching a major milestone in his life. Although at first glance Jamie looked almost exactly like the three adult octospiders the clan saw regularly, he was a little smaller than the older octos and the gold stripes in his tentacles were slightly brighter.

The humans had briefly been in a quandary about what to wear for the octospider celebration, but they had soon realized that their clothing was of absolutely no significance. None of the alien species in the Emerald City wore any coverings, a fact that the octospiders had often commented upon. When Richard had once suggested, only partly in jest, that perhaps the humans too should dispense with clothing while they were in the Emerald City—”When in Rome…” he had said-the group had quickly understood how fundamental clothing was to human psychological comfort. “I could not be naked, even among you, my closest friends, without being extremely self-conscious,” Eponine had said, summarizing all their feelings.

The motley contingent of eleven humans and their four octospider colleagues traipsed down the street to the plaza. The very pregnant Eponine was at the back of the group, walking slowly and keeping one hand on her stomach. The women had all chosen to dress up a little-Nai was even wearing her colorful Thai silk dress with the blue and green flowers-but the men and children, except for Max (who had on the outrageous Hawaiian shirt he saved for special occasions), were in the T-shirts and jeans that had been their regular costume since the first day they had arrived at the Emerald City.

At least all their clothes were clean. In the beginning, finding a way to do the laundry had been an acute problem for the humans. However, once they had explained their difficulty to Archie, it was only a few days before he introduced them to the drornos, insect-sized beings that automatically cleaned their clothes.

The group boarded the transport at the plaza. Just before the gate marking the end of their zone, the transport stopped and two octospiders they had never seen before climbed into the car. Richard practiced using his translator during the ensuing conversation between Dr. Blue and the newcomers. Ellie read her father’s monitor over his shoulder and congratulated him on the accuracy of the translation. The fidelity of the translation was fairly good, but the speed, at least at the normal octospider conversation rate, was much too slow. One sentence would be translated while three were “spoken,” causing Richard to reset the system regularly. He couldn’t, of course, glean much from a conversation in which he missed two out of three sentences.

Once on the other side of the gate, the view from the transport was a mosaic of strange shapes and bright colors. Nikki’s eyes stayed open at their widest levels as she, Benjy, and the twins, with much shouting, identified most of the animals from the octospider painting. The broad streets were full of traffic. There were not only many transports, which moved in both directions on rails like a city trolley, but also pedestrians of all species and sizes, creatures riding wheeled vehicles like unicycles and bicycles, and an occasional mixed group of beings on an ostrichsaur.

Max, who had never once been outside the human zone since his arrival, punctuated his observations with “shits,” “damns,” and some of the other words Eponine had requested that he remove from his vocabulary before the birth of their child. Max did not start to worry about Eponine’s safety until, at the first transport stop after the gate, some strange new creatures crowded onto their car. Four of the newcomers headed immediately in Eponine’s direction to examine the special seat the octospiders had installed in the transport because of her advanced pregnancy. Max stood protectively beside her, holding on to one of the vertical rails that were scattered throughout the ten-meter length of the car.

A pair of the new passengers were what the children called “striped crabs,” eight-legged red-and-yellow creatures about Nikki’s size, with round bodies covered with a hard shell and fearsome-looking claws. Both of them began immediately rubbing their antennae against one of Eponine’s bare legs below her dress. They were only being curious, but the combination of the peculiar sensation and the bizarre appearance of the aliens caused Eponine to recoil from fright. Archie, who was standing on the other side of Eponine, reached down quickly with a tentacle and pushed the aliens gently away. One of the striped crabs then reared up on its back four legs, its claws snapping the air in front of Eponine’s face, and apparently said something threatening with its rapidly vibrating antennae. An instant later Archie extended two tentacles, lifted the hostile striped crab off the floor of the transport, and deposited the creature on the street outside.

The scene dramatically altered the mood of all the humans. As Ellie translated Archie’s explanation of what had occurred for Max and Eponine, the Watanabe twins huddled up close to Nai, and Nikki stretched out her arms for her grandfather to pick her up.

“That species is not very intelligent,” Archie told his human friends, “and we have had difficulty engineering out its aggressive tendencies. The particular creature that I threw off the bus has been a troublemaker before. The optimizer responsible for the species had already marked it-you may have noticed-with the two small green dots at the rear of the carapace. This latest transgression will certainly result in termination.”

When Ellie finished with the translation, the humans methodically inspected the other aliens on the transport, checking for any more green dots. Relieved that all the other creatures on board were safe, the adults relaxed a little.

“What did that thing say?” Richard asked Archie as the transport approached another stop.

“It was a standard threat response,” Archie replied, “typical of animals with constrained intelligence capability. Its antenna patterns conveyed a crude message, with very little real information content.”

“Shit,” said Max.

The transport continued down the avenue for eight or ten more nillets, stopping twice to receive additional passengers, including half a dozen octospiders and about twenty other creatures representing five different species. Four of the royal blue animals, the ones with the hemispherical tops that looked like they contained undulating brains, squatted right opposite Richard, who was still holding Nikki. Their collective assortment of eight knotted antennae extended upward toward Nikki’s feet and became intertwined, as if they were communicating. When the human girl moved her feet slightly, the antennae were quickly retracted back into the strange mass that formed the bulk of the bodies of the alien creatures.

By this time it was very crowded in the transport. An animal the humans had never seen before, which Max later described accurately as a Polish sausage with a long nose and six short legs, raised itself up on one of the vertical bars and grabbed Nai’s small purse with its two front paws. Jamie interceded before any damage was done to either the purse or Nai, but a few seconds later Galileo kicked the sausage hard, causing it to lose its grip on the bar. The boy explained that he had thought the sausage was preparing for another grab at the purse. The creature backed away into another section of the transport, its solitary eye fixed warily on Galileo.

“You’d better be careful,” Max said with a grin, tousling the boy’s hair. “Or the octos will place two green dots on your behind.”

The avenue was lined with one- and two-story buildings, almost all painted with geometric patterns in brilliant colors. Garlands and wreaths of brightly colored flowers and leaves festooned the doorways and the roofs. On one long wall, which Hercules told Nai was the back of the main hospital, a huge rectangular mural, four meters high and twenty meters long, depicted the octospider physicians ministering to their own injured, as well as helping many of the other creatures that lived in the Emerald City.

The transport slowed slightly and began to ascend a ramp. The ramp led to a bridge hundreds of meters long that spanned a wide river or canal that contained boats, frolicking octospiders, and other unknown marine creatures. Archie explained that they were entering the heart of the Emerald City, where all the main ceremonies took place and the “most important” optimizers lived and worked. “Over there,” he said, pointing at an octagonal building about thirty meters tall, “is our library and information center.”

In response to Richard’s question, Archie said that the canal, or moat, completely encircled the “administrative center.” “Except on special occasions like today, or for some official purpose approved by the optimizers,” Archie said, “only octospiders are allowed access to this area.”

The transport parked in a large, flat plain beside an oval structure that looked like a stadium, or perhaps an outdoor auditorium. Nai told Patrick, after they descended from the car, that she had felt more claustrophobic during the last part of the ride than at any time since she had been on the Kyoto subway at rush hour during her trip to meet Kenji’s family.

“At least in Japan,” Patrick said with a brief shudder, “you were surrounded by other human beings… Here it was so weird. I felt as if I were being scrutinized by all of them. I had to close my eyes or I would have gone crazy.”

As they disembarked and began moving toward the stadium, the humans walked in a group, surrounded by their four octospider friends and the other two octos who had boarded the transport before it had left the human zone. These six octospiders protected Nicole and the others from the teeming hordes of living creatures swarming in all directions. Eponine started feeling faint, as much from the combination of sights and smells as from the walking, so Archie stopped their procession about every fifty meters. Eventually they entered one of the gates and the octospiders led the humans to their assigned section.

There was only one seat in the section that had been reserved for the humans. In fact, Eponine may have had the only seat in the stadium. Looking around the upper deck of the arena with Richard’s binoculars, Max and Patrick saw many beings leaning against, or holding on to, the sturdy vertical poles scattered throughout the terraced bleachers, but nowhere else could they find any seats.

Benjy was intrigued by the cloth bags that Archie and a few of the other octospiders were carrying. The off-white bags, all of which were identical, were about the size of a woman’s purse. They hung at what might be called octospider hip level, attached over the head with a simple strap. Never before had any of the humans seen an octo with an accessory. Benjy had noticed the bags immediately and had asked Archie about them while they had been standing together at the plaza. Benjy had assumed that Archie had not understood his question at that time, and Benjy had in fact forgotten it himself until they reached the stadium and he saw the other similar bags.

Archie was uncharacteristically vague in his explanation of the purpose of the bag. Nicole had to ask the octospider to repeat his colors before she told Benjy what had been said. “Archie says it’s equipment he might need to protect us in an emergency.”

“What kind of equipment?” Benjy asked, but Archie had already moved several meters away and was talking with an octospider in an adjacent section.

The humans were separated from the other species both by two strips of taut metal rope around the tops and bottoms of the vertical poles on the outside of their enclave, and by their octospider protectors (or “guards,” as Max called them), who stationed themselves in the empty area between the different species. Beside the humans on the right was a group of several hundred of the aliens with the six flexible arms, the same creatures who had built the staircase under the rainbow dome. On the left and below the human clan, on the other side of a large empty area, were as many as a thousand brown, chunky, iguanalike animals with long, tapered tails and protruding teeth. The iguanas were the size of domestic cats.

What was immediately obvious was that the entire stadium was rigidly segregated. Each species was sitting with its own kind. What’s more, except for the “guards,” there were no octospiders on the upper deck. All fifteen thousand of the octos (Richard’s estimate) who were present as spectators were sitting in the lower deck.

“There are several reasons for the segregation,” Archie explained, with Ellie translating for everyone else. “First, what the Chief Optimizer says is going to be broadcast in thirty or forty languages simultaneously. If you look carefully, you’ll see that each special section has an apparatus-here’s yours, for example, what Richard calls a speaker-that presents what’s being said in the language of that species. We have been working with the Chief Optimizer’s text for days, preparing the proper translations. Since all the octos, including the various morphs, can understand our standard language of color, they’re all down on the lower deck, where there is no special translation equipment.

“Let me show you what I’m talking about. Look over there.” Archie extended a tentacle. “Do you see that group of striped crabs? See the two large vertical wires on that table at the front of their section? When the Chief Optimizer starts to speak, those wires will activate and present what is being said in their antenna language.”

Far below them, over the top of what would have been a sunken field in an Earth stadium, a vast cover with colored stripes was suspended from stanchions attached to the bottom sections of the lower deck.

“Can you read what it says?” Ellie asked her. father.

“What?” said Richard, still stunned by the magnitude of the spectacle.

“There’s a message on the cover,” Ellie said, pointing downward. “Read the colors.”

“So there is.” Richard read very slowly. “Bounty means food, water, energy, information, balance, and… What’s the last word?”

“I would translate it as ‘diversity,’” Ellie said.

“What does the message mean?” Eponine asked.

“I guess we’re going to find out.”

A few minutes later, after Archie had told the humans that another reason for the species segregation was to confirm the octospiders’ census statistics, the field cover was rolled up on two long, thick poles by two pairs of giant black animals. The pairs started on opposite sides of the middle of the arena and then moved toward the ends of the stadium, wrapping the cover around their poles to unveil the entire field.

Simultaneously, an additional cluster of fireflies descended from far above the stadium so that all the spectators could clearly see not only the abundance of fruits, vegetables, and grains stacked in hundreds of piles on both ends of the field, but also the two collections of diverse beings that were in separate regions on the floor of the arena, on either side of its middle. The first group of aliens was walking around in a large circle on a normal dirt surface. They were attached to each other by some kind of rope. Next to them was a large pool of water, in which another thirty or forty species, also connected to each other, were swimming in a second large circle.

In the absolute center of the field was a raised platform, empty except for some scattered black boxes, with ramps descending in the direction of me two adjacent regions. As everyone watched, four octospiders broke from the circle in the swimming pool and climbed the ramp onto the platform. Another four octospiders left the group walking on the dirt surface and joined their colleagues. One of these eight octos then stood up on a box in the middle of the platform and began to speak in color.

“We have gathered here today…” The voice from the speaker startled the humans. Little Nikki began to cry. At first it was extremely difficult for them to understand what they were hearing, for each syllable was stressed exactly the same and, although carefully pronounced, the sounds were not quite right, as if they were made by someone who had never heard a human speak. Richard was flabbergasted. He immediately abandoned his attempt to use his own real-time translator and bent down to study the octospider device.

Ellie borrowed Richard’s binoculars so that she could follow the colors more readily. Even though she had to guess at some of the words because of the strip pieces outside her visible range, it was easier for her to watch than to concentrate fully on what was coming out of the octospider audio equipment.

Eventually the adults tuned their ears somewhat to the cadence and pronunciation of the alien voice and caught most of what was being said. The octospider Chief Optimizer indicated that all was well in their bountiful realm and that the continued success of their complex and diverse society was reflected in the variety of foods found on the field. “None of this bounty,” the speaker said, “could have been produced without strong interspecies cooperation.”

Later in his brief message the Chief Optimizer handed out kudos for exceptional performance. Several specific species were singled out-for example, production of the honeylike substance had apparently been outstanding, for a dozen hovering fireflies spotlighted the snout-nosed beetle section for a few moments. About three fengs into the speech, the humans grew tired of the strain of listening to the strange voice and stopped following the speech altogether. The group was therefore surprised when the fireflies appeared over their heads and they were introduced to the alien multitudes. Thousands of strange eyes were aimed in their direction for half a nillet.

“What did he say about us?” Max asked Ellie, who had continued to translate the colors. Max had been talking to Eponine during the most recent part of the Chief Optimizer’s speech.

“Just that we were new in the domain and that they were still learning about our capabilities. Then there were some numbers that must have been some way of describing us. I didn’t understand that part.”

After another two species were briefly introduced, the Chief Optimizer started summarizing the main points of his speech. “Mommy, Mommy.” Nikki’s terrified scream suddenly overpowered the alien voice. Somehow, while the adult humans were absorbed with the speech and the spectacle surrounding them, Nikki had climbed over the lower barrier around their section and entered the open space separating them from the iguana creatures. The octospider Hercules, who had been patrolling that area, had apparently not noticed her either, for he was unaware that one of the iguanas had stuck its head in the gap between the two metal ropes around its section and grabbed Nikki’s dress with its sharp teeth.

The terror in the child’s voice momentarily paralyzed everyone but Benjy. He acted instantly, leaping over the barrier, rushing to Nikki’s aid, and smashing the iguana creature in the head with all his strength. The startled alien let go of Nikki’s dress. Pandemonium ensued. Nikki raced back to her mother’s arms, but before Hercules and Archie could reach Benjy, the enraged alien had forced itself through the gap and jumped upon Benjy’s back. He screamed from the intense pain of the iguana’s teeth in his shoulder and began to flail about, trying to shake the creature off. A few seconds later the creature dropped to the ground, completely unconscious. Two green spots were clearly visible where the creature’s tail joined the rest of its body.

The entire incident had occurred in less than a minute. The speech had not been interrupted. Except in the immediate surrounding sections, there had been no notice of the event. But Nikki was hopelessly frightened, Benjy was seriously injured, and Eponine had started having a contraction. Below them, the angry iguanas were straining against their metal ropes, disregarding the threats of the ten octospiders who had now moved into the space between the two species.

Archie told the humans that it was time for them to leave. There was no argument. Archie escorted them out of the stadium in a hurry, with Ellie carrying her sobbing daughter and Nicole frantically rubbing antiseptic taken from her medical bag into Benjy’s wound.

Richard rose up on his elbows when Nicole came into the bedroom. “Is he all right?” Richard asked.

“I believe so,” Nicole said with a heavy sigh. “I’m still worried that there may be poisonous chemicals in that creature’s saliva. Dr. Blue has been very helpful. He has explained to me that the iguanas have no toxic venom, but he agrees we must watch out for some kind of allergic reaction in Benjy. The next day or two will tell us whether or not we have a problem.”

“And the pain? Has it subsided?”

“Benjy refuses to complain. I think that he is actually quite proud of himself-as well he should be-and doesn’t want to say anything that would detract from his moment as the hero of the family.”

“What about Eponine?” Richard said after a brief silence. “Is she still having contractions?”

“No, they’ve stopped temporarily. But if she delivers in the next day or so, Marius will not be the first baby whose birth was induced by adrenaline.”

Nicole started to undress. “Ellie’s taking it the hardest. She says that she is a terrible mother and that she will never forgive herself for not keeping a closer eye on Nikki. A few minutes ago she even sounded like Max and Patrick. She was wondering aloud if maybe we should all go back to New Eden and take our chances with Nakamura. ‘For the children’s sake,’ she said.”

Nicole finished undressing and climbed into bed. She kissed Richard lightly and put her hands behind her head. “Richard,” she said, “there is a very serious issue here. Do you think the octospiders would even permit us to return to New Eden?”

“No,” he said after a pause. “At least not all of us.”

“I’m afraid I agree with you,” Nicole said. “But I don’t want to say so to the others. Maybe I should bring the question up with Archie again.”

“He’ll try to evade it, as he did the first time.”

They lay together holding hands for several minutes. “What are you thinking about, darling?” Nicole asked when she noticed that Richard’s eyes were still open.

“Today,” he said. “Everything that happened today. I’m going back over it in my mind, scene by incredible scene. Now that I’m old and my memory isn’t as good as it once was, I try to use refresh techniques.”

Nicole laughed. “You’re impossible,” she said. “But I love you anyway.”