Rama Revealed(Rama IV)

THE EMERALD CITY Chapter 2

Nicole was dreaming. She was also dancing to an African rhythm around a campfire in an Ivory Coast grove. Omeh was leading the dance. He was dressed in the green robe he had been wearing when he had come to visit her in Rome a few days before the launch of the Newton. All of her human friends in the Emerald City, plus their four closest octospider acquaintances, were also dancing in the circle around the campfire. Kepler and Galileo were fighting. Ellie and Nikki were holding hands. Hercules the octospider was dressed in a bright purple African costume. Eponine was very pregnant and heavy on her feet. Nicole heard her name being called from outside the circle. Was it Katie? Her heart raced as she strained to recognize the voice.

"Nicole," Eponine said beside her bed. "I'm having contractions."

Nicole sat up and shook the dream from her head. "How often?" she asked automatically.

"They're irregular," Eponine replied. "I'll have a couple about five minutes apart, and then nothing for half an hour."

"Most likely they're Braxton Hicks contractions," Nicole said to her friend after she put on her robe. "You're still five weeks short of full term."

"What's a Braxton Hicks contraction?" Eponine asked.

"Fake labor, essentially. It's as if your body is practicing. Come lie down on the couch, and I'll take a look."

Max was waiting in the living room with Eponine after Nicole finished washing her hands. "Is she going to have the baby?" he asked.

"Someday," Nicole said, smiling at the nervous father. "But probably not now." She began putting slight pressure on Eponine's midsection, trying to locate the baby. 'Tell me when the next contraction begins," she said.

Meanwhile, Max paced fitfully around the room. "I would absolutely kill for a cigarette right now," he mumbled.

When Eponine had another contraction, Nicole noticed that there was some slight pressure on the undilated cervix. She was worried because she wasn't absolutely certain where the baby was. "I'm sorry, Ep," Nicole said after another contraction six minutes later. "I think this is all Braxton Hicks, but I could be wrong. I've never dealt with a pregnancy at this stage before without some kind of monitoring equipment to help me."

"Some women do have babies this early, don't they?" Eponine asked.

"Yes. But it's rare. Only about one percent of first-time mothers deliver more than four weeks before their due date. And it's almost always due to some kind of complication. Or heredity. Do you know by any chance if you or any of your siblings were premature?"

Eponine shook her head. "I never knew anything at all about my natural family," she said.

Nicole told Eponine to dress and return to her home. "Keep a record of your contractions. What is especially important is the interval between them. If they start occurring regularly, every four minutes or so without significant gaps, then come and get me again."

"Might there be a problem?" Max whispered to Nicole while Eponine was dressing.

"Unlikely, Max, but there is always that possibility."

"What do you think about asking our friends the biological wizards for some help?" Max asked. "Please forgive me if I am offending you, it's just - "

"I'm ahead of you, Max," Nicole said. "I had already decided to consult with Dr. Blue in the morning."

Max was nervous long before Dr. Blue started to open what Max called the "bug jar." "Hold on, Doc," Max said, gently putting his hands on the tentacle holding the jar. "Would you mind explaining to me just what you're doing before you let those creatures out?"

Eponine was lying down on the sofa in the Puckett living room. She was naked, but mostly covered by a pair of sheets provided by the octospiders. Nicole had been holding Eponine's hand during most of the several minutes that the three octospiders had been setting up the portable laboratory. Now Nicole walked over beside Max so that she could translate what Dr. Blue was saying.

"Dr. Blue is not an expert in this field," Nicole interpreted. "He says that one of the other two octospiders will have to explain the details of the process."

After a short conversation among the three octospiders, Dr. Blue moved aside and another alien stood directly in front of Nicole and Max. Dr. Blue then informed Nicole that this particular octo, whom he called the "image engineer," had only recently started learning the simpler octospider dialect used to communicate with humans. "He might be a little difficult to understand," Dr. Blue told her.

"The tiny beings in the jar," Nicole said several seconds later as the colors began streaming around the engineer's head, "are called... image quadroids, I guess would be a satisfactory translation. Anyway, they are living miniature cameras that will crawl inside Eponine and take pictures of the baby. Each quadroid has the capability of... several million photographic picture elements that can be allocated to as many as five hundred and twelve images per octosfcider nillet. They can even create a moving picture if you choose."

She hesitated and turned to Max. "I'm simplifying all this, if that's all right. It's highly technical, and all in their octal mathematics. The engineer was explaining there at the end all the different ways in which the user can specify pictures-Richard would have absolutely loved it."

"Remind me again how long a nillet is?" Max said.

"About twenty-eight seconds," Nicole replied. "Richard named all the time terms. The nillet is the shortest unit in octospider time: Eight nillets in a feng, eight fengs in a woden, eight wodens in a tert, and eight terts in an octospider day. Richard calculates their day at thirty-two hours, fourteen minutes, and a little more than six seconds."

"I'm glad somebody understands all this," Max said quietly.

Nicole faced the image engineer again and the conversation continued. "Each image quadroid," she translated slowly, "enters the specified target area, takes its pictures, and then returns to me image processor-that's the gray box over against the wall-where it 'dumps' its images, receives its reward, and returns to the queue."

"What?" said Max. "What kind of reward?"

"Later, Max," Nicole said. She was struggling to understand a sentence that she had already asked the octospider to repeat. Nicole was silent for a few seconds before she shook her head and turned to Dr. Blue. "I'm sorry," she said, "but I still don't understand that last sentence."

The two octospiders had a rapid exchange in their natural dialect and then the image engineer faced Nicole again. "Okay," she said at length, "I think I've got it now... Max, the gray box is some kind of a programmable data manager, both storing the data in living cells and preparing the outputs from the quadroids for projection on the wall, or wherever we want to see the image, according to the protocol selected - "

"I have an idea," Max interrupted. "This is all way beyond me. If you're satisfied that this contraption is not going to hurt Ep in any way, why don't we get on with it?"

Dr. Blue understood what Max said. At a signal from Nicole, he and the other octospiders walked outside the Puckett home and retrieved what looked like a covered drawer from the parked transport. "In this container," Dr. Blue said to Nicole, "are a group of twenty or thirty of the smallest members of our species, morphs whose primary function is to communicate directly with the quadroids and the other tiny creatures that make this system work. The morphs will actually manage the procedure."

"Well, I'll be goddamned," said Max when the drawer opened and the tiny octospiders, only a couple of centimeters tall, scampered into the middle of the room. "Those..." Max stammered excitedly, "are what Eponine and I saw back in the blue maze, in the lair on the other side of the Cylindrical Sea."

"The midget morphs," Dr. Blue explained, "take our directions and then organize the entire process. It is they who will actually program the gray box. Now all we need to start is a few specifications on what kind of images you want and where you want to see them."

The large colored picture on the wall in the Puckett living room showed a perfectly formed, handsome boy fetus filling almost all of his mother's womb. Max and Eponine had been celebrating for an hour, ever since they had first been able to distinguish that their unborn child was indeed a boy. As the afternoon had progressed and Nicole had learned better how to specify what she wanted to see, the quality of the pictures had improved markedly. Now, the twice-life-size image on the wall was stunning for its clarity.

"Can I watch him kick one more time?" Eponine asked.

The image engineer said something to the lead midget morph and in less than a nillet there was a replay of young master Puckett kicking upward against his mother's tummy.

"Look at the strength of those legs," Max exclaimed. He was more relaxed now. After he had recovered from the shock of the initial images, Max had become concerned about all the "paraphre-nalia" surrounding his son in the womb. Nicole had calmed the first-time father by identifying the umbilical cord and the placenta and then assuring Max that everything was normal.

"So I'm not going to deliver my son anytime soon?" Eponine asked when the replay of the movie was over.

"No," Nicole answered. "My guess is you have five or six more weeks. Often first babies are a little late. You may still have some of those intermittent contractions between now and the birth, but don't worry about them."

Nicole thanked Dr. Blue profusely, as did Max and Eponine. Then the octospiders gathered up all the components, both biological and nonbiological, of their portable laboratory. When the octos had departed, Nicole crossed the room and took Eponine's hand. "Es-tu heureuse?" she asked her friend.

"Absolument," Eponine replied. "And relieved as well. I thought that something had gone wrong."

"No," Nicole said. "It was just a simple false alarm."

Max crossed the room and gave Eponine a hug. He was beaming. Nicole withdrew slightly and watched the tender scene between her friends. She started to leave the house. "Wait a minute," said Max. "Don't you want to know what we're going to name him?"

"Of course," Nicole replied.

"Marius Clyde Puckett," Max said proudly.

"Marius," Eponine added, "because he was the waif Eponine's dream lover in Les Miserables-I longed for a Marius during my long and lonely nights at the orphanage. And Clyde, after Max's brother back in Arkansas."

"It's an excellent name," Nicole said, smiling to herself as she turned to leave. "An excellent name," she repeated.

Richard could not contain his excitement when he came home later that afternoon. "I have just spent two absolutely fascinating hours over in the conference room with Archie and the other octospiders," lie said to Nicole in his loudest voice. "They showed me the entire apparatus they used with you and Eponine earlier today. Amazing. What incredible genius! No, wizardry is a better term-I've said it from the beginning, the damn octospiders are biological wizards.

"Just imagine. They have living creatures that are cameras, another set of microscopic bugs that read the images and carefully store each individual pixel, a special genetic warping of themselves that controls the process, and a limited amount of electronics, where necessary, to perform the mundane data management tasks. How many thousands of years did it take for all this to occur? Who engineered it in the first place? It is absolutely mind-boggling!"

Nicole smiled at her husband. "Did you see Marius? What did you think?"

"I saw all the pictures from this afternoon," Richard continued to shout. "Do you know how the midget morphs communicate with the image quadroids? They use a special • wavelength range in the far ultraviolet part of the spectrum. That's right. Archie told me those little bugs and the midget octospiders actually have a common language. And that's not all. Some of the morphs know as many as eight different microspecies languages. Even Archie himself can communicate with forty other species, fifteen using their basic octospider colors and the rest in a range of languages that includes signs, chemicals, and other parts of the electromagnetic spectrum."

Richard stood still for a moment in the middle of the room. 'This is incredible, Nicole, simply incredible."

He was about to launch into another monologue when Nicole asked him how the regular octos and the midget morphs communicated. "I never saw any color patterns on the heads of the morphs today," she said.

"All their conversation is in the ultraviolet," Richard said, starting to pace again. Suddenly he turned and pointed at the center of his forehead. "Nicole," he said, "that lens thing in the middle of their slit is a veritable telescope, able to receive information at practically any wavelength. It's staggering. Somehow they have organized all these life-forms into a grand symbiotic system of complexity far beyond anything we could ever conceive of."

Richard sat down on the couch next to Nicole. "Look," he said, showing his arms to her, "I still have goose bumps. I am in absolute awe of these creatures... Jesus, it's a good thing they aren't hostile."

Nicole looked at her husband with a furrowed brow. "Why do you say that?"

"They could command an army of billions, maybe even trillions. I bet they even talk to their plants] You saw how quickly they scared off that thing in the forest. Imagine what it would be like if your enemy could control all the bacteria, even the viruses, and make them do their bidding. What a frightening concept!"

Nicole laughed. "Don't you think you're getting carried away? Just because they have genetically engineered a set of living cameras, it does not follow - "

"I know," said Richard, jumping up from the couch. "But I can't help thinking about the logical extension of what we have seen here today. Nicole, Archie admitted to me that the sole purpose of the midget morphs is to be able to deal with the world of the tiny. The midgets can see things as small as a micrometer-that's one-thousandth of a millimeter. Now extend that idea another several orders of magnitude. Imagine a species whose morphs span four or five relationships similar to the one between the normal octos and the midgets. Communication with bacteria might not be impossible after all."

"Richard," Nicole said at this juncture, "don't you have anything at all to say about the fact that Max and Eponine are going to have a son? And that the boy looks perfectly healthy?"

Richard stood silent for a few seconds. "It is wonderful," he said a little sheepishly. "I guess I should go next door and congratulate them."

"You can probably wait until after dinner," Nicole said, glancing at one of the special watches Richard had made for them. The watch kept human time in an octospider frame of reference.

"Patrick, Ellie, Nikki, and Benjy have been over at Max and Eponine's for the last hour," Nicole continued, "ever since Dr. Blue stopped by with some parchment photographs of little Marius in die womb." She smiled. "As you would say, they should be home in about a feng."