3
The days passed very slowly.
Richard, Ellie, and Nikki were without a time reference at first, but they soon learned that octospiders had a wonderfully precise inner clock that is calibrated and enhanced during their juvenile education. After they converted Archie to using human time measurements (Richard used his oft-quoted “When in Rome…” to convince Archie to abandon, at least temporarily, his tens, wodens, fengs, and nillets), they discovered, by sneaking glances at their guard’s digital watch when he brought food and water, that Archie’s internal timing accuracy was better than ten seconds out of every twenty-four hours.
Nikki amused herself by constantly asking Archie the time. As a result, after repeated observation, Richard and even Nikki learned how to read Archie’s colors for time references and small numbers. In fact, as the days passed, the regular conversation in the basement significantly improved Richard’s overall comprehension of the octospider language. Although his skill in understanding the color strips was still not as advanced as Ellie’s, after a week Richard could comfortably converse with Archie without needing Ellie as an interpreter.
The humans slept on futons on the floor. Archie curled up behind them for the few hours each night that he slept. One or the other of the two Oriental men replenished their supplies once each day. Richard never failed to remind the guards that they were still waiting for their backpacks and for their audience with Nakamura.
After eight days the daily sponge baths in the washbasin adjoining the basement toilet were no longer satisfactory. Richard asked if they could have access to a shower and some soap. Several hours later a large laundry tub was carried down the stairs. Each of the humans bathed, although Nikki was at first surprisingly reluctant to be naked in front of Archie. Richard and Ellie felt enough better after bathing that they managed to share some optimism. “There’s no way he can keep our existence a secret forever,” Richard said. “Too many of the troops saw us… and it would not be possible for them not to say anything, no matter what Nakamura ordered.”
“I’m certain they will come for us soon,” Ellie added brightly.
By the end of their second week of imprisonment, however, their temporary optimism had waned. Richard and Ellie were beginning to lose hope. It didn’t help that Nikki had become a complete brat, announcing regularly that she was bored and complaining about not having anything to do. Archie began to tell Nikki stories to keep her occupied. His octospider “legends” (he had a long discussion with Ellie about the exact meaning of the word before he finally accepted the term) delighted the little girl.
It helped that Ellie’s translations rang with the resonant phrases the girl already associated with bedtime fairy tales. “Once upon a time, back in the days of the Precursors…” Archie would begin a story, and Nikki would squeal with anticipation.
“What did the Precursors look like, Archie?” the little girl asked after one such story.
“The legends never say,” Archie replied. “So I guess you can create whatever picture of them you want in your imagination.”
“Is that story true?” Nikki asked Archie on another occasion. “Would the octospiders really never have left their own planet if the Precursors had not taken them into space first?”
“So the legends indicate,” Archie replied. “They say that almost everything we knew until about fifty thousand years ago was taught to us originally by the Precursors.”
One night, after Nikki was asleep, Richard and Ellie asked Archie about the origin of the legends. “They have been around for tens of thousands of your years,” the octospider said. “The earliest documented records from our genus contain many of the stories I have shared with you these last few days. There are several different opinions about how factual the legends are. Dr. Blue believes that they are basically accurate and probably the work of some master storyteller-an alternate, of course-whose genius was not recognized in his or her lifetime.
“If the legends can be believed,” Archie said in answer to another of Richard’s questions, “many, many years ago we octospiders were simple seafaring creatures whose natural evolution had produced only minimal intelligence and awareness. It was the Precursors who discovered our potential by mapping our genetic structure, and they who altered us over many generations into what we had become when the Great Calamity occurred.”
“What exactly happened to the Precursors?” Ellie asked.
“There are many stories, some contradictory. Most or all of the Precursors living on the primary planet we shared with them were probably killed in the Calamity. Some of the legends suggest that their remote colonial outposts around nearby stars survived for several hundred years, but ultimately succumbed as well. One legend says that the Precursors continued to thrive in other, more favorable star systems and became the dominant form of intelligence in the galaxy. We do not know. All that is known for certain is that the land portion of our primary planet was uninhabitable for many, many years and that when the octospider civilization again ventured out of the water, none of the Precursors were alive.”
The group of four in the basement developed their own diurnal rhythm as the days stretched into weeks. Each morning, before Nikki and Ellie awakened, Archie and Richard would talk about a wide range of topics of mutual interest. By this time, Archie’s lip-reading was nearly flawless, and Richard’s comprehension of the octospider colors was good enough that the octospider was only rarely asked to repeat what he had said.
Many of the conversations were about science. Archie was especially fascinated by the history of science in the human species. He wanted to know what discoveries were made when, what prompted the key investigations or experiments in the first place, and what inaccurate or competing models explaining the phenomena were discarded as a result of each new understanding.
“So it was actually war that accelerated the development of both aeronautics and nuclear physics in your species,” Archie said one morning. “What an amazing concept!.. You cannot possibly appreciate,” the octospider added a few seconds later, “how staggering it is for me to experience, even vicariously, your incremental process of learning about nature. Our history is totally different. In the beginning our species was completely ignorant. Shortly thereafter a new kind of octospider was created, one that could not only think, but also observe the world and understand what it was seeing. Our mentors and creators, the Precursors, already had explanations for everything. Our task as a species was quite simple. We learned what we could from our teachers. Naturally, we did not have any concept of the trial and error that is involved in science. For that matter, we had no idea at all of how any component in a culture evolves. The brilliant engineering of the Precursors allowed us to skip hundreds of millions of years of evolution.
“Needless to say, we were woefully unprepared for taking care of ourselves after the Great Calamity occurred. According to the more historical of our legends, our primary intellectual activity for the next several hundred years was to accumulate and understand as much of the Precursor information as we could find and/or remember. In the meantime, with our benefactors no longer around to provide ethical guidelines, we regressed sociologically. We entered a long, long period in which it was questionable whether or not the new, intelligent octospiders created by the Precursors would indeed survive.”
Richard was overwhelmed by the idea of what he called a “derivative technological species.” “I had never imagined,” he told Archie one morning with his usual excitement of discovery, “that there might exist a spacefaring species that had never worked out on its own the laws of gravity and had never derived, in a long sequence of experiments, the essentials of physics, such as the characteristics of the electromagnetic spectrum. It is a mind- boggling thought. But now that I understand what you are telling me, it seems quite natural. If species A, who are advanced spacefarers, encounters species B, intelligent but somewhere lower on — the technological ladder, it is perfectly logical to assume that, after contact, species B would skip the rungs between.”
“Our case, of course,” Archie explained, “was even more unusual. The paradigm that you are describing is indeed quite natural and has happened, according to both our history and the legends, with great frequency. More spacefarers are derivative, to use your word, than naturally evolved. Take the avians and the sessiles, for example. Their symbiosis, which developed without any outside interference, had already existed in a star system not far from our home planet for thousands of years when they were first visited on an exploratory mission by the Precursors. The avians and sessiles would almost certainly never have developed a spacefaring capability of their own. However, after meeting the Precursors and seeing their first spacecraft, they asked for and received the technology necessary to achieve spaceflight.
“Our situation is generically different, and definitely much more derivative. If our legends are true, the
