“Your husband is a god to this species. None of them would be here if it were not for him. They know you from your images that were inside his memory.”
“How is that possible?” Nicole asked. “Richard died sixteen years ago.”
“But the record of his stay with them is carefully preserved in their collective memory,” the Eagle said. “Every myrmicat emerges from its manna melon with significant knowledge of the key components of its own culture and history. The embryonic process mat occurs inside the melon not only provides physical nourishment for the growing and developing being, but also passes critical information directly into the brain-or its equivalent, anyway-of the fledgling myrmicat.”
“Are you telling me,” Nicole said, “that these creatures begin their education before they are born? And that there is stored knowledge inside those manna melons I used to eat that is somehow implanted in the minds of the unborn myrmicats?”
“Exactly,” the Eagle replied. “I don’t see why you should be so astounded. Physically, these creatures are nowhere near as complex as your species. The embryonic development process for a human is vastly more subtle and complicated man theirs. Your newborns arrive in the world with a staggering array of physical attributes and capabilities. Your infants, however, are still dependent on other members of the species for both their survival and their education. The myrmicats are born ‘smarter’ and therefore more independent, but they have much less potential for total intellectual development.”
They both heard a shrill sound coming from a myrmicat fifty meters or so down the corridor. “It is calling us,” the Eagle said.
Nicole moved her wheelchair slowly forward and “Settled at a speed consistent with the Eagle’s walking pace. “Richard never told me that these creatures preserve information from generation to generation.”
“He didn’t know,” the Eagle said. “He did figure out their metamorphic cycle, and that the myrmicats passed information to the neural net or web or whatever the final manifestation should be called. But he didn’t even suspect that the most important elements of that collective information were also stored in the manna melons and passed to the next generation. Needless to say, it’s a very strong survival mechanism.”
Nicole was intrigued by what the Eagle was telling her. Imagine, she was thinking, (somehow human children could be born already knowing the essentials of our culture and history. Suppose something like the placenta contained, in compressed form, enough information. It sounds impossible, but it must not be. If at least one creature can do it, then eventually…
“How much data are passed through the manna melons to the newborns of the species?” Nicole asked as they drew near to the beckoning myrmicat.
“About one-thousandth of one percent of the information present in a fully mature specimen like the one in which Richard resided. The primary function of the final manifestation of the species is to manipulate, process, and compress the data into a package for inclusion in the manna melons. Just how this data management process works is something we have been studying.
“The neural net you will encounter in the next few minutes, incidentally,” the Eagle continued, “was originally just a small sliver of material, containing critical data compressed using what must be a brilliant algorithm. We have estimated that in that small cylinder Richard carried to New York years ago was an information content equivalent to the memory capacity of a hundred adult human brains.”
“Amazing,” Nicole said, shaking her head.
“That’s only the beginning,” the Eagle said. “Each of the four manna melons carried by Richard had its own special set of compressed data. They all germinated into myrmicats in the octospider zoo. The neural net now contains all those experiences as adventure.”
Nicole stopped her wheelchair. “Why didn’t you tell me all this earlier? I might have spent more time — “
“I doubt it,” the Eagle interrupted. “Your first priority was to reestablish your connections to your own species. I don’t think you were ready for this until now.”
“You have been manipulating me by controlling what I see and experience,” Nicole said without rancor.
“Perhaps,” the Eagle answered.
Nicole was surprisingly fearful when she finally encountered the neural net up close. The Eagle and she were together in a room not unlike the apartment Nicole shared in the human ray. A pair of myrmicats was sitting behind them, against the wall The sessile net or web occupied about fifteen percent of the room, back in the right corner. There was a gap in the center of the dense, soft white material that was just large enough for Nicole and her wheelchair. Nicole complied with the Eagle’s request to roll up her shirtsleeves and lift her dress above her knees.
“I suppose,” she then said with some trepidation, “that it expects me to drive into that space and that it will wrap its filaments around my body.”
“Yes,” said the Eagle. “And it has been told by one of the myrmicats to release you at your request. I will stay here the entire time, if that’s any comfort to you.”
“Richard,” Nicole said, still delaying her entrance, “told me that it took a long time for any real communication to develop.”
“That will not be a problem now,” responded the Eagle. “Certainly part of the information stored in the original sliver was data about methods that could be used to communicate efficiently with human beings.”
“All right, then,” Nicole said, passing her hand nervously through her hair, “here I go. Wish me luck.”
She drove into the gap in the cottony network and turned off the power in her wheelchair. In less than a minute the creature had surrounded her and Nicole could not even see
the outline of the Eagle across the room. Nicole tried to reassure herself as she felt first hundreds and then thousands of tiny threads attaching themselves to her arms, legs, neck, and head. As she expected, the density of threads was highest around her head. She recalled Richard’s description: The individual filaments were incredibly thin, but they must have had very sharp parts underneath. I didn’t even realize that they were inserted well inside the outer layers of my skin until I tried to pull one off.
Nicole stared at a particular clump of threads about a meter away from her face. As this ganglion eased slowly toward her, the other elements in the delicate mesh shifted position. A shiver ran down her spine. Her mind accepted, finally, that the net surrounding her was a living creature. It was only moments later that the images began.
She realized immediately that the sessile was reading from her memory. Pictures from earlier in her life flashed through Nicole’s mind at a fantastic rate, none lingering long enough even to provoke an emotion. There was no order to the images — a childhood memory from the woods behind her home in the Parisian suburb of Chilly-Mazarin would be followed by a picture of Maria laughing heartily at one of Max’s stories.
This is the data transfer stage, Nicole thought, remembering Richard’s analysis of the time he had spent inside the neural net. The creature is copying my memory into its own. At a very high rate. She wondered briefly what in the world the sessile would do with all the images from her memory. Then suddenly in her mind’s eye Nicole vividly saw Richard himself in a large chamber that had a vast, incomplete mural on its walls. The image became a full motion picture set in the chamber. The clarity of the individual frames was overwhelming. Nicole felt as if she were watching a color television set located somewhere inside her brain. She could even see the details of the mural. As Nicole watched, a myrmicat directed Richard’s attention to specific items in the wall paintings. Around the room a dozen other myrmicats were sketching or painting the unfinished sections of the mural.
The artwork was superb. It had all been created to give Richard information about what he could do to help the alien species survive. Part of the mural was a textbook about their biology, which explained in pictures the three manifestations of their species (manna melon, myrmicat, and sessile or neural net) and the relationships between diem. The images Nicole saw were so sharp that she felt she had been transported to the room where Richard had been. She was therefore startled when the internal film she was watching suddenly underwent a jump discontinuity and presented a picture of the last good-bye between Richard and his guide myrmicat.
Richard and the myrmicat were in a tunnel at the bottom of the brown cylinder. The motion picture lingered lovingly on every detail of this final farewell. The bearded Richard looked overburdened carrying the four heavy manna melons, two leathery avian eggs, and the cylinder of web material in the pack on his back. But even Nicole, seeing the determination in Richard’s eyes as he departed from the doomed myrmicat habitat, could understand why he was such a hero to their species. He risked his life, she reminded herself, to save them from extinction.
