‘models’ predicted nausea and possibly headaches.”
“They were correct about the nausea,” Eponine said. “I threw up every three or four hours for a couple of days. At the end of that time, Dr. Blue, Archie, Ellie, and the other octospiders all gathered beside my bed to tell me that I was cured.”
“Whaaat?” said Richard, jumping to his feet again.
“Oh, Eponine,” Nicole said immediately, “I’m so happy for you.” She stood up and hugged her friend.
“And you believe this?” Richard said to Nicole. “You believe that the octospider doctors, who can’t possibly yet understand very well how the human body works, could accomplish in several days what your brilliant son-in- law and his staff at the hospital could not do in four years?”
“Why not, Richard?” Nicole said. “If it had been done by the Eagle at the Node, you would have accepted it immediately. Why can’t the octospiders be much more advanced than we are in biology? Look at everything we saw.”
“All right,” said Richard. He shook his head a few times and then turned to Eponine. “I’m sorry,” he said, “but it’s just difficult for me to… Congratulations. I too am delighted.” He embraced Eponine awkwardly.
While they had been talking, someone had noiselessly stacked fresh vegetables and water just outside their door. Nicole saw the materials for their feast when she went to use the bathroom.
“That must have been an astonishing experience,” she said to Eponine when she returned to where everyone else was sitting.
“That’s an understatement,” Eponine said. She smiled. “Even though I feel in my heart that I’m cured, I can’t wait to have it confirmed by you and Dr. Turner.”
Both Richard and Nicole were bone tired after their large dinner. Ellie told her parents that there was more to talk about, but that she could wait until after Richard and Nicole had slept.
“I wish I could remember more about my period with the octospiders before we reached the Node,” Richard said, when he and Nicole were lying together on the large bed their hosts had provided. “Then maybe I would understand better what I feel about the story that Ellie and Eponine told.”
“Do you still doubt that she’s cured?” Nicole asked.
“I don’t know,” Richard said. “But I will admit that I am rather puzzled by the difference in behavior between these octospiders and the ones who examined and tested me years before. I cannot believe that the octos in Rama II would ever have rescued me from a voracious plant.”
“Maybe octospiders are capable of widely varying behavior. That’s certainly true for human beings. In fact, it’s true for all higher-order mammals on Earth. Why should you expect all octospiders to be the same?”
“I know you’re going to say that I’m being xenophobic,” Richard said, “but it’s difficult for me to accept these ‘new’ octospiders. They seem too good to be true. As a biologist, what do you think is their payoff, to use your word, for being nice to us?”
“It’s a legitimate question, darling,” Nicole replied, “and I don’t know the answer. The idealist in me, however, wants to believe that we have encountered a species that behaves, most of the time, in a moral fashion because doing good is its own reward.”
Richard laughed. “I should have known you’d say something like that. It’s consistent with your comments about Sisyphus during that discussion we had in New Eden long ago.”
6
“You would find their language fascinating, Daddy,” Ellie was saying when Nicole finally awakened after sleeping for eleven hours. Richard and Ellie were already eating breakfast. “It’s extremely mathematical. They use sixty-four colors altogether, but only fifty-one are what we would call alphabetical. The other thirteen are clarifiers-they are used to specify tenses, or as counters, or even to identify comparatives and superlatives. Their language is really quite elegant.”
“I can’t imagine how a language can be elegant-your mother is the linguist in the family,” Richard said. “I managed to learn to read German, but my speaking skills were atrocious.”
“Good morning, everybody,” Nicole said, stretching in her bed. “What’s for breakfast?”
“Some new and different vegetables,” Ellie replied. “Or maybe they are fruits, for there’s really no equivalence in our world. Almost everything the octospiders eat is what we would probably call a plant, deriving its energy from light. Worms are about the only thing the octospiders eat regularly that does not get its primary energy from photons.”
“So all the plants in the fields that we passed are powered by a kind of photosynthesis?”
“Something similar,” Ellie replied, “if I understood properly what Archie told me. Very little is wasted in the octospider society. Those creatures that you and Daddy call ‘giant fireflies’ hover over each field for precisely scheduled periods of time each week or month. And all the water is managed as carefully as the photons.”
“Where’s Eponine?” Nicole asked while she surveyed the food laid out on the table in the middle of the room.
“She’s off packing her things,” Ellie said. “Besides, she thought that she really shouldn’t participate in this morning’s conversation.”
“Are we going to be shocked again, like last night?” Nicole asked lightly.
“Perhaps,” Ellie said slowly. “I really don’t know how you are going to react… Do you want to finish your breakfast before we start, or should I tell Archie we’re ready?”
“You mean the octospider is going to be part of the conversation and Eponine is not?” Richard asked.
“It was her choice,” Ellie said. “Besides, Archie, at least in his capacity as a representative of the octospiders, is far more involved in the subject matter than Eponine.”
Richard and Nicole looked at each other. “Do you have any idea at all what this is about?” Richard said.
Nicole shook her head. “But we might as well begin,” she said.
Archie spread out his tentacles on the floor so that his head was about the same height as those of the sitting humans. Ellie then informed her parents, and everyone laughed, that this time Archie would provide the “preamble.” Ellie translated, at times hesitantly, as Archie began with an apology to Richard for the way Richard had been treated by Archie’s “cousins” years previously. Archie explained that those octospiders, the ones the humans had encountered in Rama prior to arriving at the Node, were from a separate, splinter colony, only remotely related to the octospiders that were currently on board Rama. Archie emphasized that it was not until Rama came into their sphere of influence for the third time that the octospiders, as a species, concluded that the great cylindrical spacecraft were important.
A few of the survivors of that other octospider colony-a ‘Vastly inferior group,” according to Archie (this was one of the places where Ellie asked him to repeat what he was saying)-were still passengers on Rama when the spacecraft was intercepted, early in its trajectory, by the current octospider colony that had been specifically selected to represent their species. The splinter group survivors were removed from Rama, but all their records were preserved. Archie and the others in his colony learned the details of what had happened to Richard at that time and they now wished to make amends for that treatment.
“So all this preamble, in addition to being fascinating,” said Richard, “is an elaborate apology to me?”
Ellie nodded and Archie flashed the broad crimson followed by the brilliant aquamarine.
“May I ask a question before we continue?” Nicole said. She turned toward the octospider. “I assume, from what you told us, that you and your colony boarded Rama during the period that we were all asleep. Did you know we were there?”
Archie answered that the octospiders had presumed the humans were living inside the far northern habitat in Rama, but had not known for certain until the external seal of the human habitat was first broken. By that time, according to Archie, the octospider colony had already been in place for twelve human years.
“Archie insisted that he make this apology himself,” Ellie said, glancing at her father and then waiting for him to respond.
“Okay, I accept, I guess,” Richard replied. “Although I have no idea what the proper protocol should be…”
Archie asked Ellie to define “protocol.” Nicole laughed. “Richard,” she said, “sometimes you are so
