systems within twelve and a half light-years of our home,” Richard explained, “including six binary systems and one triplet group, our nearest neighbors, the Centauris, over here. Note that the Centauris are the only stars inside the five-light-year sphere.”
Richard pointed at the three separate balls representing the Centauris. Each was a different size and color. The trio, attached to each other with tiny wires, were resting on top of the same vertical rod, just inside an open wire sphere centered at the Sun and marked with a large number 5.
“During my many days of solitude down here,” Richard continued, “I often found myself wondering why Rama is going in this particular direction. Do we have a specific destination? It would seem so, since our path has not varied since our initial acceleration. And if we are going to Tau Ceti, what will we find there? Another complex like the Node? Or will the same Node perhaps have moved during the intervening time?”
Richard stopped. Nicole had walked over to the edge of the model and was stretching her arms up to a pair of red stars at the end of a three-meter rod. “I assume you varied the length of these rods to demonstrate the full three-dimensional relationship of all these stars,” she said.
“Yes. That particular binary group you are touching, incidentally, is called Struve 2398,” Richard replied in his human catalog voice. “They have a very high declination and are slightly over ten light-years away from the Sun.”
Seeing the slight grimace on Nicole’s face, Richard laughed at himself and crossed the room to take her hand. “Come over here with me,” he said, “and I will show you something really interesting.”
They walked to the other side of the model and stood facing the Sun, halfway between the stars Sirius and Tau Ceti. “Wouldn’t it be fantastic if our Node really has moved,” Richard said excitedly, “and we will see it again, over here, on the opposite side of our solar system?”
Nicole laughed. “Of course,” she said, “but we have absolutely no evidence—”
“But we do have brains, and imaginations,” Richard interrupted. “And the Eagle did tell us that the entire Node was capable of moving. It just seems to me…” Richard stopped in midsentence and men changed the subject slightly. “Haven’t you ever asked yourself,” he said, “where our Rama spacecraft went, after we left the Node, during all those years that we were asleep? Suppose, for example, that the avians and the sessiles were picked up over here somewhere, around the Procyon binaries, perhaps, or maybe even over here, around Epsilon Eridani, which easily could have been on our trajectory. We know that there are planets around Eridani. At a significant fraction of the speed of light, Rama could have easily doubled back to the Sun—”
“Hold it, Richard,” Nicole said. “You’re way ahead of me on this subject. Why don’t we start at the beginning?” She sat down on the platform in the interior of the model, next to a red ball elevated only a few centimeters by a very short rod, and crossed her legs. “If I understand your hypothesis, our current voyage will end at Tau Ceti?”
Richard nodded. “The trajectory is too perfect for it to be a coincidence. We will reach Tau Ceti in another fifteen years or so, and I believe our experiment will be concluded.”
Nicole groaned. “I’m already old,” she said. “By then, if I’m even still alive, I’ll be as withered as a prune… Just out of curiosity, what do you think will happen to us after our ‘experiment is concluded,’ as you put it?”
“That’s where we need our imaginations. I suspect that we’ll be unloaded from Rama, but what happens to us next is completely unknown… I suppose our fate will be dependent in some way on what has been observed all this time.”
“So you definitely agree with me that the Eagle and his buddies back at the Node have been watching us?”
“Absolutely. They have made such a huge investment in this project. I’m certain they’re monitoring everything that’s going on here in Rama. I must admit I’m surprised that they have left us completely to our own devices and have never interfered in our affairs, but that must be their method.”
Nicole was silent for a few seconds. She played absent-mindedly with the red ball beside her, which Richard informed her represented the star Epsilon Indi. “The judge in me,” she said somberly, “fears what any reasonable extraterrestrial would conclude about us, based on our behavior in New Eden.”
Richard shrugged. “We’ve been no worse in Rama than we have been for centuries on Earth. Besides, I can’t accept that any truly advanced aliens would be making such subjective judgments. If this process of observing spacefarers has been going on for tens of thousands of years, as the Eagle suggested, then the Ramans must have developed quantitative metrics for assessing all aspects of the civilizations they encounter. They are almost certainly more interested in our exact natures, and what this means in some larger sense, than whether we are bad or good.”
“I suppose you’re right,” Nicole said wistfully. “But it’s depressing that we, as a species, behave so barbarically, even when we are fairly certain we’re being observed.” She paused and reflected. “So in your opinion our long interaction with the Ramans, beginning with that first spaceship over a hundred years ago, is almost over?”
“I think so,” Richard replied. “Somewhere in the future, possibly when we reach Tau Ceti, our part of this experiment will be concluded. My guess is that after all the data on the creatures currently inside Rama are entered in the Great Galactic Data Base, Rama will be emptied. Who knows, maybe soon thereafter this great cylindrical spacecraft will appear in another planetary system where a different spacefarer is living, and another cycle will begin.”
“And that brings us back to my earlier question, which you really did not answer. What will happen to us then?”
“Maybe we, or our offspring, will be sent on a slow journey back to the Earth. Or maybe we will be deemed expendable and terminated once all the data have been collected.”
“Neither of those outcomes is very appealing,” Nicole said. “And I must say that although I agree with you that we are heading for Tau Ceti, all the rest of your hypothesis strikes me as pure conjecture.”
Richard grinned. “I have learned a lot from you, Nicole. Everything else in my hypothesis is intuitive. It feels right to me, based on everything I have learned about the Ramans.”
“But wouldn’t it be more straightforward to imagine that the Ramans simply have waystations scattered throughout the galaxy, and that the two nearest to us are at Ships and Tau Ceti?”
“Yes,” Richard replied, “but my gut feel is that it’s unlikely. The Node was such an awesome engineering creation. If similar facilities exist every twenty or so light-years in the galaxy, there would be billions of them altogether… And remember, the Eagle definitely said the Node could move.”
Nicole acknowledged to herself that it was unlikely that a facility as astonishing as the Node had been duplicated billions of times in some great cosmic assembly process. Richard’s hypothesis did make some sense. But how sad, Nicole thought briefly, that our entry in the galactic data base will contain so much negative information.
“So where do the avians, sessiles, and our old friends the octospiders fit into your scenario?” Nicole asked a minute later. “Are they just part of the same experiment, with us? And if so, are you suggesting that there is also a colony of octos onboard and that we just haven’t met them yet?”
Richard nodded again. “That conclusion is inescapable. If the final phase of each experiment is observing a representative sample of the spacefarers under controlled conditions, it makes sense that the octos are here also.” He laughed nervously. ‘There may even be some of our same friends from Rama II on the spacecraft with us at this very moment.”
“What a lovely set of ideas to think about before sleeping,” Nicole said with a smile. “If you’re right, you and I have fifteen more years to spend on a spacecraft that’s inhabited not only by humans who want to capture and kill us, but also by huge, possibly intelligent arachnids whose nature we do not understand.”
“Remember,” Richard said with a grin, “I could be wrong.”
Nicole stood up and walked toward the door.
“Where are you going?” Richard asked.
“To my bed,” Nicole replied with a laugh. “I think I’m developing a headache. I can only contemplate the infinite for a finite period of time.”
6
