“All right,” the Eagle said. “It will take a couple of seconds to set up, but we can do it.”
The flight began over the English Channel. The Eagle and Nicole had been sitting on the platform at the top of the dark room for approximately three seconds when there was an explosion of light beneath them. After Nicole’s eyes finally adjusted, she recognized the blue water underneath them and the shape of the Normandy coastline. Off in the distance the Seine emptied into the Channel.
She asked the Eagle to station the platform over the mouth of the Seine and then to move slowly toward Paris. The sight of the familiar geography evoked a strong emotional response in Nicole. She remembered clearly the days of her youth, when she had wandered carefree throughout this region with her beloved father.
The model below them was superb. It was even three-dimensional when the sizes of the geographical features and buildings below them were above the limits of resolution of the alien system. In Rouen, the famous church where Joan of Arc had temporarily recanted was half a centimeter tall and two centimeters long. Off in the direction of Paris, Nicole could see the familiar shape of the Arc de Triomphe rising from the surface of the model.
When they reached Paris, the platform hovered for a few seconds over the sixteenth arrondissement. Nicole’s eyes fell briefly upon a particular-building below her. The sight of that building, a modern convention center, brought back an especially poignant moment from her adolescence. To my precious daughter, Nicole, and all the young people of the world, I offer one simple insight, she heard her father’s voice say again. He was near the end of his speech accepting the Mary Renault Prize. In my life I have found two things of priceless worth: learning and loving. Nothing else-not fame, not power, not achievement for its own sake-can possibly have the same lasting value.
An image of her father filled Nicole’s mind. Thank you, Papa, she thought. Thank you for taking such good care of me after Mother died. Thank you for everything you taught me.”
A powerful, painful yearning brought a rush of tears to Nicole’s eyes. For an instant she was again a child, and she wanted desperately to talk to her father about her ^coming death. Slowly, deliberately, Nicole fought against the emotions that were threatening to overwhelm her. This is not what I wanted to feel right now, she said to herself with difficulty. I wanted to leave all this behind.
She turned her face away from the model of France below her.
“What is it?” the Eagle asked.
Nicole forced a smile. “I want to see something else,” she said. “Something spectacular… and new. How about an octospider city?”
“Are you certain?” the Eagle said.
Nicole nodded.
The room became dark immediately. Two seconds later, when Nicole turned around to face the light, the platform was flying over a vast ocean of deep green.
“Where are we?” she asked. “And where are we going?”
“We’re presently about thirty light-years away from your Sun,” the Eagle replied, “on the first oceanic planet colonized by the octospiders after the disappearance of the Precursors. We’re over the sea, obviously, about two hundred kilometers away from the most famous of the octospider cities.”
Nicole felt a surge of excitement as the platform zoomed across the sea. In the distance she could already see the vague outline of some buildings. For a moment she imagined that she was an adventurous space traveler arriving at this planet for the first time, eager to see the wonders of the’ fabulous cities that other interstellar travelers had described.
Nicole momentarily turned her attention to the ocean below her. “Why is this water so green?” she asked the Eagle.
“The top meter of this part of the ocean is a rich ecosystem of its own, dominated by a special genus of photosynthesizing plant whose varied species, all green in color, provide housing and food for as many as ten million separate creatures. Some of the individual plants cover more than a square kilometer of territory. The Precursors created this domain originally. The octospiders found it and improved upon it.”
When Nicole glanced up, the speeding platform had nearly reached the city. Hundreds of buildings of various shapes and sizes were spread out below them. Most of the octospider city’s buildings were built on the land, but some appeared to be floating on the water. The densest collection of these structures was along a narrow peninsula that extended slightly into the sea. At the end of that peninsula stood three huge green domes, very close together, that dominated the city skyline.
At the periphery of the city was a wide outer circle of eight smaller domes, each of which was connected by linear transportation features to the central domes. Each of these outer domes was a distinct and different color. Almost all of the buildings in the section of the city surrounding an outer dome had been painted with the same color.,Out in the ocean, for example, the brilliant red dome had eight long, slender red spokes, representing other buildings, extending outward from it in a balanced geometrical pattern.
All the buildings of the city lay inside the circle defined by the eight colored domes. Nicole’s immediate favorite was a strange brown-colored structure floating on the water. It appeared to be almost as large as the huge central domes. From above, the rectangular building looked like twenty layers of a densely packed lattice, with material from birds’ nests filling the open areas inside each of the hundreds of cells.
“What is that?” Nicole asked, pointing from the platform.
“These particular octospiders are very advanced in microbiology,” the Eagle replied. “That structure, which extends incidentally another ten meters deep into the ocean, contains over a thousand different habitats for species in the micrometer size range. What you’re looking at is essentially a supply station, containing the excess population for each of these tiny beings. Octospiders needing any of these creatures come to this building to requisition them.”
Nicole’s eyes feasted on the unusual architecture below her. In her mind’s eye she could see herself walking on the streets, looking around in amazement at a variety of creatures far greater even than the menagerie she had encountered in me Emerald City. I want to go there, she said to herself- I want to see.
She asked the Eagle to move the platform directly over one of the large green domes. “Is the inside of this dome,” Nicole asked, “similar to what was in the Emerald City?”
“Not really,” the Eagle replied. “The scale is altogether different. The octospider realm in Rama was a compressed microcosm. Functions which are normally separated on their planets by hundreds of kilometers of distance were forced, because of space limitations, to be located in more or less the same area. In the advanced colonies of the octospider genus, for example, the alternates do not have a community just outside the city gates- they live on an entirely different planet.”
Nicole smiled. A planet full of alternates, she thought. Now, that would be quite a sight.
“This particular city is the home for more than eighteen million octospiders, if we count all the different morph or logical variations,” the Eagle said. “It is also the administrative capital for this planet. Within the gates of the city live close to ten billion individual creatures, representing fifty thousand species. The extent of the city is roughly equivalent to Los Angeles or any of the great urban areas on your Earth.”
The Eagle continued to tell her facts and statistics about the octospider city beneath their platform. Nicole, however, was thinking about something else. “Did Archie live here?” she said, interrupting her alien companion’s encyclopedic monologue. “Or Dr. Blue, or any of the octospiders that we met?”
“No,” the Eagle replied. “In fact, they did not even come from this planet or star system. The octospiders in Rama came from what is known as a ‘frontier colony,’ one especially designed genetically for interaction with other intelligent life-forms.”
Nicole shook her head and smiled. Of course, she said to herself, I should have suspected that they were special.
She was growing tired. After another few minutes Nicole thanked the Eagle and said that she had seen enough of the octospider city. In an instant the domes, the brown lattice structure, and the deep green sea vanished. The Eagle returned the platform to the top of the large chamber.
Below Nicole the Milky Way was confined to a small space in the center of the room. “The universe is an ever-expanding sequence of neighborhoods and voids,” the Eagle was saying. “Look how empty it is around the Milky Way. Except for the two Magellanic Clouds, which really don’t qualify as galaxies, Andromeda is our nearest galactic neighbor. But it is very far away. The distance across the greatest dimension of the Milky Way is only one- twentieth of the distance to Andromeda.”
