Rama Revealed

5

Max was agitated. “I, for one, do not want to stay in this place one minute longer than necessary. I no longer trust them. Look, Richard, you know damn well I’m right. Did you see how fast Archie took that tube thing out of his bag when the alien iguana jumped on Benjy’s back? And he didn’t hesitate a second to use it. That was all I heard, and presto, that lizard was either dead or paralyzed. He would have done the same thing to one of us if we had misbehaved.”

“Max, I think you’re overreacting,” Richard said.

“Am I? And is it another overreaction that the entire scene yesterday reinforced in my mind just how powerless we are?”

“Max,” Nicole interrupted, “don’t you think this is a discussion that we should have at another time, when we’re not so emotional?”

“No,” Max replied emphatically. “I do not. I want to have it now, this morning. That’s why I asked Nai to feed the children breakfast in her house.”

“But surely you’re not suggesting that we should leave at this moment, when Eponine is due any minute,” Nicole said.

“Of course not,” Max said. “But I think we should get our butts out of here as soon as she is able to travel. Jesus, Nicole, what kind of life can we have here anyway? Nikki and the twins are now scared shitless. I bet they won’t be willing to leave our zone again for weeks, maybe not ever. And that doesn’t even address the bigger question of why the octospiders have brought us here in the first place. Did you see all those creatures in that stadium yesterday? Didn’t you get the impression that all of them work for the octospiders in one way or another? Isn’t it likely that we too will soon be occupying some niche in their system?”

Ellie spoke for the first time since the conversation started. “I have always trusted the octospiders,” she said. “I still do. I do not believe they have some kind of diabolical plot to integrate us into their overall scheme in a way that is unacceptable to us. But I did learn something yesterday, or I should say I relearned something. As a mother, it is my responsibility to provide for my daughter an environment in which she can flourish and have a chance to be happy. I no longer think that’s possible here in the Emerald City.”

Nicole looked at Ellie with surprise. “So you would like to leave too?” she said.

“Yes, Mother.”

Nicole glanced around the table. She could tell from Eponine’s and Patrick’s expressions that they agreed with Max and Ellie. “Does anyone know how Nai feels about this subject?” she inquired.

Patrick blushed slightly when Max and Eponine looked at him, as if he were expected to answer. “We talked about it last night,” he said at length. “Nai has been convinced, for some time, that the children have too narrow a life isolated here in our own zone. But she is also worried, especially after what happened yesterday, that there are significant dangers to the children if we try to live freely in the octospider society.”

“I guess that settles it,” Nicole said with a shrug. “I will talk to Archie about our leaving at the first opportunity.”

Nai was a good storyteller. The children loved the school days when she would dispense with the planned activities and simply tell them stories instead. She had been telling the children both Greek and Chinese myths, in fact, the first day that Hercules had appeared to observe them. The children had given the octospider his name after he had helped Nai move the furniture in the room into a different configuration.

Most of the stories that Nai told had a hero. Since even Nikki still had some memory of the human biots in New Eden, the children were more interested in stories about Albert Einstein, Abraham Lincoln, and Benita Garcia than they were in historic or mythical characters with whom they had had no personal involvement.

On the morning after Bounty Day, Nai explained how, during the last phases of the Great Chaos, Benita Garcia used her considerable fame to help the millions of poor people in Mexico. Nikki, who had inherited the compassion of her mother and grandmother, was moved by the story of Benita’s courageous defiance of the Mexican oligarchy and the American multinational corporations. The little girl proclaimed that Benita Garcia was her hero.

“Heroine,” the always precise Kepler corrected. “And what about you, Mother?” the boy said a few seconds later. “Did you have a hero or heroine when you were a little girl?”

Despite the fact that she was in an alien city on an extraterrestrial spacecraft at an unbelievable distance away from her hometown of Lamphun in Thailand, for an extraordinary fifteen or twenty seconds Nai’s memory transported her back to her childhood, and she saw herself clearly, in a simple cotton dress, walking barefoot into the Buddhist temple to pay homage to Queen Chamatevi. Nai could also see the monks in their saffron robes, and she believed that for a moment she could even smell the joss in the viharn in front of the temple’s principal Buddha.

“Yes,” she said, quite moved by the power of her flashback, “I did have a heroine… Queen Chamatevi of the Haripunchai.”

“Who was she, Mrs. Watanabe?” Nikki said. “Was she like Benita Garcia?”

“Not exactly,” Nai began. “Chamatevi was a beautiful young woman who lived in the Mons kingdom in the south of Indochina over a thousand years ago. Her family was rich and closely connected to the king of the Mons. But Chamatevi, who was exceedingly well educated for a woman of that time, longed to do something different and unusual. Once upon a time, when Chamatevi was nineteen or twenty years old, a soothsayer visited—”

“What’s a soothsayer, Mother?” Kepler asked.

Nai smiled. “Someone who predicts the future, or at least tries to,” she answered.

“Anyway, this soothsayer told the king that there was an ancient legend saying that a beautiful young Mons woman of noble birth would go north through the jungles to the valley of the Haripunchai and unite all the warring tribes of the region. This young woman, the soothsayer continued, would create a kingdom whose splendor would equal the Mons’, and she would be known in many lands for her outstanding leadership. The soothsayer told this story during a feast at the court, and Chamatevi was listening. When the story was completed, the young woman came forward to the king of the Mons and told him that she must be the woman in the legend.

“Despite her father’s opposition, Chamatevi accepted the king’s offer of money and provisions and elephants, even though there was only enough food to last the five months of trekking through the jungle to the land of the Haripunchai. She knew that if the tribes of the north did not accept her as their queen, she would be forced to sell herself as a slave. But never for a moment was Chamatevi afraid.

“Of course the legend was fulfilled, the valley tribes embraced her as then- queen, and she reigned for many years in what is known in Thai history as the Golden Age of the Haripunchai. When Chamatevi was very old, she carefully divided her kingdom into two equal parts, which she gave to her twin sons. She then retired to a Buddhist monastery to thank God for His love and protection. Chamatevi remained alert and healthy until she died at the age of ninety-nine.” For reasons she did not completely understand, Nai felt herself becoming very emotional while she was telling the story. When she was finished, Nai could still see, in her mind’s eye, the wall panels in the temple in Lamphun that illustrated Chamatevi’s story. Nai had been so engrossed in her story that she had not even noticed that Patrick, Nicole, and Archie had all come into the schoolroom and were sitting on the floor behind the children.

“We have many similar stories,” Archie said a few minutes later, with Nicole translating, “which we also tell to our juveniles. Most of them are very, very old. Are they true? It doesn’t really matter to an octospider. The stories entertain, they instruct, and they inspire.”

“I’m sure the children would love to hear one of your stories,” Nai said to Archie. “In fact, all of us would.”

Archie did not say anything for almost a nillet. His lens fluid was very active, moving back and forth, as if he were carefully studying the human beings staring at him. At length the colored strips began to roll out of his slit and circumnavigate his gray head. “A long, long time ago,” he began, “on a faraway world blessed with bounteous resources and beauty beyond description, all the octospiders lived in a vast ocean. On the land there were many creatures, one of which, the…”

“I’m sorry,” Nicole said both to Archie and the others, “I don’t know how to translate the next color pattern.”

Archie used several new sentences to try to define the word in other terms. “Those that have gone before…” Nicole said to herself. “Oh, well, it’s probably not essential for the story that every word be exactly correct. I’ll simply call them the Precursors.

“On the land portions of this beautiful planet,” Nicole continued for Archie, “were many creatures, of whom” by far the most intelligent were the Precursors. They had built vehicles that could fly into the air, they had explored all the neighboring planets and stars, they had even learned how to create life from simple chemicals, where there had been no life before. They had changed the nature of the land and of (he oceans with their incredible knowledge.

“It happened that the Precursors determined that the octospider species had enormous untapped potential, capabilities that had never been expressed during their many, many years of aquatic existence, and they began to show the octospiders how to develop and use their latent abilities. As the years passed, the octospider species, thanks to the Precursors, became the second most intelligent on the planet and evolved a very complicated and close relationship with the Precursors.

“During this time the Precursors helped the octospiders learn to live outside the water by taking oxygen directly from the air of the beautiful planet. Entire colonies of octos began to spend their whole lives on land. One day, after a major meeting between the chief optimizers of the Precursors and the octospiders, it was announced that alt octospiders would become land creatures and give up their colonies in the oceans.

“Down at great depths in the sea was one small colony of octospiders, no more than a thousand altogether, that was managed by a local optimizer who did not think the chief optimizers of the two species had come to a correct decision. This local optimizer resisted the announcement and, although he and his colony were ostracized by the others and did not share in the bounty offered by the Precursors, he and many generations that followed him continued to live their isolated, uncomplicated life on the bottom of the ocean.

“It happened that a great calamity struck the planet, and it became impossible to survive on the land. Many millions of creatures died and only those octospiders who could live comfortably in the water survived the thousands of years that the planet was laid waste.

“When eventually the planet recovered and a few of the ocean octospiders ventured out on land, they found none of their kindred-and none of the Precursors either. That local optimizer who had lived thousands of years before had been visionary. Without his action, every single octospider might have perished. And that’s why, even today, smart octospiders retain their capability to live either on land or in water.”

Nicole had recognized, early in the story, that Archie was sharing with them something altogether different from anything he had ever told them before. Was it because of their conversation that morning, when she had told Archie that they wanted to return to New Eden soon after the Puckett child was born? She wasn’t certain. But she did know that the legend Archie had related told them things about the octospiders that the humans could never have figured out in any other way.

“That was truly marvelous,” Nicole said, touching Archie lightly. “I don’t know if the children enjoyed it—”

“I thought it was neat,” Kepler said. “I didn’t know you guys could breathe water.”

“Just like an unborn baby,” Nai was saying, when an excited Max Puckett raced through the door.

“Come quickly, Nicole,” Max said. ‘The contractions are only four minutes apart.”

As Nicole rose, she turned to Archie. “Please tell Dr. Blue to bring the image engineer and the quadroid system. And hurry!”

It was amazing to watch a birth from the outside and inside simultaneously. Nicole was giving directions to both Eponine and the octospider image engineer through Dr. Blue. “Breathe-you must breathe through your contractions,” she would shout at Eponine. “Move them closer, lower in the birth canal, with a little more light,” she would say to Dr. Blue.

Richard was absolutely fascinated. He stood out of the way, over to one side of the bedroom, his eyes darting back and forth from the pictures on the wall to the two octospiders and their equipment. What was being shown in the images was delayed an entire contraction from what was happening on the bed. At the end of each contraction, Dr.

Blue would hand Nicole a small round patch, which Nicole would stick on the inside of Eponine’s upper thigh. Within seconds the tiny quadroids that had been inside Eponine for the last contraction would race to the patch, and the new ones would then scramble up the birth canal. After a twenty-or thirty-second delay for data processing, another set of pictures would appear on the wall.

Max was driving everybody crazy. When he heard Eponine scream or moan, as she occasionally did near the peak of each contraction, he would rush over to her side and grab her hand. “She’s in terrible pain,” he would say to Nicole. “You must do something to help her.”

Between contractions, when at Nicole’s suggestion Eponine would stand up beside the bed to let the artificial gravity help with the birthing process, Max was even worse. The image of his unborn son wedged tightly in the birth canal, struggling with discomfort from the pressure of the previous contraction, would send him into a tirade. “Oh, my God, look, look,” Max said after a particularly severe contraction. “His head is squashed. Oh, fuck. There’s not enough room. He’s not going to make it.”

Nicole made a couple of major decisions a few minutes before Marius Clyde Puckett entered the universe. First, she concluded that the baby boy was not going to be born without some help. It would be necessary, she decided, for her to perform an episiotomy to mitigate the pain and tearing of the actual birth. Nicole also concluded that Max should be removed from the bedroom before he became hysterical and/or did something that might interfere with the birthing process.

Ellie sterilized the scalpel at Nicole’s request. Max looked at the scalpel with wild eyes. “What are you going to do with that?” he asked Nicole.

“Max,” Nicole said calmly as Eponine felt the advent of another contraction, “I love you dearly, but I want you to leave the room. Please. What I am about to do will make it easier for Marius to be born, but it won’t look pretty.”

Max didn’t move. Patrick, who was standing in the doorway, put a hand on his friend’s shoulder as Eponine began to moan again. The baby’s head was clearly pressing against the vaginal opening. Nicole began to cut. Eponine screamed in pain. “No,” a frantic Max cried at the first sight of blood. “No… Oh, shit… oh, shit.”

“Now… leave now,” Nicole yelled imperiously as she concluded the episiotomy. Ellie was swabbing up the blood as fast as she could. Patrick turned Max around, gave him a hug, and led him into the living room.

Nicole checked the picture on the wall as soon as it was available. Little Marius was in perfect position. What a fantastic technology, she thought fleetingly. I would change birthing altogether.

She had no more time to reflect. Another contraction was beginning. Nicole reached up and took Eponine’s hand. “This could be it,” she said. “I want you to push with all your might. All the way through the whole contraction.” Nicole told Dr. Blue that no more images would be needed.

“Push,” Nicole and Ellie yelled together.

The baby crowned. They could see swatches of light brown hair.

“Again,” Nicole said. “Push again.”

“I can’t,” Eponine wailed.

“Yes, you can… Push.”

Eponine arched her back, took a deep breath, and moments later baby Marius squirted into Nicole’s hands. Ellie was ready with the scissors to cut the umbilical cord. The boy cried naturally, without needing to be incited. Max rushed into the room.

“Your son has arrived,” Nicole said. She finished wiping off the excess fluid, tied off the umbilical, and- handed the baby to the proud father.

“Oh my… oh my… What do I do now?” said the flustered but beaming Max, who was holding the child as if Marius were as fragile as glass and as precious as diamonds.

“You could kiss him,” Nicole said with a smile. “That would be a good start.”

Max lowered his head and kissed Marius very gently. “And you might bring him over to meet his mother,” Eponine said.

Tears of joy were streaming down the new mother’s cheeks when she looked at her baby boy close up for the first time. Nicole helped Max lay the child across Eponine’s chest. “Oh, Frenchie,” Max then said, squeezing Eponine’s hand, “how I love you… how very much I love you.”

Marius, who had been crying steadily since moments after his birth, quieted down in his new position on his mother’s chest. Eponine reached down with the hand that Max was not holding and tenderly caressed her new son. Suddenly Max’s eyes exploded with tears. ‘Thank you, honey,” he said to Eponine. “Thank you, Nicole. Thanks, Ellie.”

Max thanked everybody in the room multiple times, including the two octospiders. For the next five minutes Max was also a veritable hugging machine. Not even the octospiders escaped from his grateful embraces.