am an old woman.
She began rubbing her face with her fingers, methodically massaging the wrinkles that seemed to be everywhere. She heard Benjy and the twins playing outside and then both Nai and Patrick calling them to school. I was not always old, she said to herself. There was a time when I too went to school.
Nicole closed her eyes, attempting to remember what she had looked like as a young girl. She was unable to conjure up a clear picture of herself as a child. Too many other pictures from the intervening years blurred and distorted Nicole’s image of herself as a schoolgirl.
At length she reopened her eyes and stared at the image in the mirror. In her mind she painted out all the bag$ and wrinkles on her face. She changed the color of her hair and eyebrows from gray to a deep black. Finally she managed to see herself as a beautiful woman of twenty-one. Nicole felt a brief but intense yearning for those days of her youth. For we were young, and we knew that we would never die, she remembered.
Richard stuck his head around the corner. “Ellie and I will be working with Hercules in the study,” he said. “Why don’t you join us?”
“In a few minutes,” Nicole answered. While she touched up her hair, Nicole reflected on the daily patterns of the human clan in the Emerald City. They usually all gathered for breakfast in the Wakefields’ dining room. School ended before lunch. Then everyone except Richard napped, their accommodation to the eight-hour-longer day. Most afternoons Nicole and Ellie and Richard were with the octospiders, learning more about their hosts or sharing experiences from the planet Earth. The other four adults spent almost all their time with Benjy and the children in their enclave at the end of the cul-de-sac.
And where does all this take us? Nicole suddenly wondered. For how many years will we be the guests of the octospiders? And what will happen if and when Rama reaches its destination?
They were all questions for which Nicole had no answers. Even Richard had apparently stopped worrying about what was going on outside the Emerald City. He was completely absorbed by the octospiders and his translator project. Now he only asked Archie for celestial navigation data every two months or so. Each time Richard would report to the others, without editorial comment, that Rama was still headed in the general direction of the star Tan Ceti.
Like little Marius, Nicole thought, we are content here in our womb. As long as the outside world does not force itself upon us, we do not ask the overwhelming questions.
Nicole left the bathroom and walked down the hall to (he study. Richard was sitting on the floor between Hercules and Ellie. “The easy part is tracking the color pattern and having the sequence stored in the processor,” he was saying. “The hardest part of the translation is automatically converting that pattern into a recognizable English sentence.”
Richard faced Hercules and spoke very slowly. “Because your language is so mathematical, with every color having an acceptable angstrom range defined a priori, all the sensor has to do is identify the stream of colors and the widths of the bands. The entire information content has then been captured. Because the rules are so precise, it’s not even difficult to code a simple fault protection algorithm, for use with juveniles or careless speakers, in case any single color errs to the left or the right in the spectrum.
“Changing what an octospider has said into our language, however, is a much more complex process. The dictionary for the translation is straightforward enough. Each word and the appropriate clarifiers can be readily identified. But it’s damn near impossible to make the next step, into sentences, without some human intervention.”
“That’s because the octospider language is fundamentally different from ours,” Ellie commented. “Everything is specified and quantified, to minimize the possibility of misunderstanding. There is no subtlety or nuance. Look how they use the pronouns ‘we,’ ‘they,’ and ‘you.’ The pronouns are always marked with numerical clarifiers, including ranges when there are uncertainties. An octospider never says ‘a few wodens’ or ‘several nillets’-always a number, or a numerical range, is used to specify the length of time more precisely.”
“From our point of view,” Hercules said in color, “there are two aspects to human language that are extremely difficult. One is the lack of precise specification, which leads to a massive vocabulary. The other is your use of indirectness to communicate. I still have trouble understanding Max because often what he says is not literally what he means.”
“I don’t know how to do this in your computer,” Nicole now said to Richard, “but somehow all the quantitative information contained in each octospider statement must be reflected by the translation. Almost every verb or adjective they use has a connected numerical clarifier. How, for example, did Ellie just translate “extremely difficult and ‘massive vocabulary’? What Hercules said, in octospider, was ‘difficult,’ with the number five used to clarify it, and ‘big vocabulary,’ with the number six as a clarifier for ‘big.’ All comparative clarifiers address the question of the strength of the adjective. Since their base number system is octal, the range for the comparatives is between one and seven. If Hercules had used a seven to clarify the word ‘difficult,’ Ellie would have translated the phrase as ‘impossibly difficult.’ If he had used a two as a clarifier in the same phrase, she might have said ‘slightly difficult.’“
“Mistakes in the strengths of the adjectives, although important,” Richard said as he fiddled absentmindedly with a small processor, “almost never lead to misunderstandings. Failure to interpret properly the verb clarifiers, however, is another issue altogether… as I have learned recently from my preliminary tests. Take the simple octospider verb ‘to go,’ which means, as you know, to move unaided, without a transport. The maroon-purple- lemon yellow strip, each color the same width, covers several dozen words in English, everything from ‘walk’ to ‘stroll,’ ‘saunter,’ ‘run,’ and even ‘sprint.’“
“That’s the same point I was just making,” Ellie said. “There is no translation without full interpretation of the clarifiers. For that particular verb, the octos use a double clarifier to address the issue of ‘how fast.’ In a sense, there are sixty-three different speeds at which they ‘go.’ To make matters even more complex, they may use a range clarifier as well, so their statement ‘Let’s go’ is subject to many, many possible translations.”
Richard grimaced and shook his head.
“What’s the matter, Father?” Ellie asked.
“I’m just disappointed,” he answered. “I had hoped to have a simplified version of the translator completed by now. But I made the assumption that the gist of what was being said could be determined without tracking all the clarifiers. To include all those short color strips will both increase the storage required and significantly slow down the translation. I may have trouble ever designing a translator that works in real time.”
“So what?” Hercules asked. “Why are you so concerned about this translator? Ellie and Nicole already understand our language very well.”
“Not really,” Nicole said. “Ellie is the only one of us who is truly fluent with your colors. I am still learning daily.”
“Although I originally began this project both as a challenge and as a means to force myself to become familiar with your language,” Richard replied to Hercules, “Nicole and I were talking last week about how important the translator has become. She says, and I agree with her, that our human clan here in the Emerald City is dividing into two groups. Ellie, Nicole, and I have made our life more interesting because of our increasing interactions with your species. The rest of the humans, including the children, remain essentially isolated. Eventually, if the others don’t have some way of communicating with you, they will become dissatisfied and/or unhappy. A good automatic translator is the key that will open up their lives here.”
The map was wrinkled and torn in a few places. Patrick helped Nai unroll it slowly and tack it to the wall of her dining room, which doubled as the schoolroom for the children.
“Nikki, do you remember what this is?” Nai asked.
“Of course, Mrs. Watanabe,” the little girl replied. “It’s our map of the Earth.”
“Benjy, can you show us where your parents and grandparents were born?”
“Not again,” Galileo muttered audibly to Kepler. “He’ll never get it right. He’s too dumb.”
“Galileo Watanabe.” The response was swift. “Go to your room and sit on your bed for fifteen minutes.”
“That’s all right, Nai,” Benjy said as he walked up to the map. “I’m used to it by now.”
Galileo, almost seven years old by human accounting, stopped at the door to see if his sentence would be reprieved. “What are you waiting for?” his mother scolded. “I said for you to go to your room.”
Benjy stood quietly in front of the map for about twenty seconds. “My mother,” he said at length, “was born here in France.” He backed away from the map briefly and located the United States on the opposite side of the
