Rama Revealed(Rama IV)

RETURN TO THE NODE Chapter 5
It was early in the morning, I before most of the humans had awakened. Nicole had been out in the long hallway for half an hour experimenting with the controls on the arm of her wheelchair. She had been surprised that the chair could move so swiftly and quietly. As she raced past the series of conference rooms halfway down the kilometer-long corridor, Nicole wondered what kind of advanced technology was contained inside the sealed metal box beneath her chair. Richard would have loved this wheelchair, she thought. He probably would have tried to take it apart.

She passed a few humans out in the hallway, most shuffling along in an attempt at a morning exercise walk. Nicole laughed to herself as a pair of shufflers moved quickly out of her way. I must look very strange, she thought, a gray-haired old woman zooming down the hall in a wheelchair.

She turned around just after she drove by the small tram, which was carrying a handful of passengers toward the common areas for an early breakfast. Nicole continued to press the acceleration button on her chair until she was going faster than the tram. The people in the tram stared at her with astonishment as she passed them. Nicole waved and grinned. A few moments later, however, when a door a hundred meters in front of her opened abruptly and ,two women walked out into the corridor, Nicole realized that it was not safe for her to be driving so fast. She slowed down, still chuckling to herself at the thrill the speed had given her.

As she drew near to her own apartment, Nicole saw the Eagle standing at the end of the ray where it merged with the annulus encircling the starfish. She drove over beside him.

"You look like you're having fun," the Eagle said.

"I am," Nicole said with a laugh. 'This chair is a fantastic toy. It has almost made me forget about the pain in my hip."

The Eagle waved toward a lounge on the other side of the annulus. "Let's go over there, please," the alien said. "I would like to talk to you in private."

Nicole drove her chair across the main annulus until she reached the ramp leading to the lounge. The Eagle, who was walking behind her, motioned for her to continue. A dozen octospiders were sitting around the room. The Eagle and Nicole chose a spot off to the right, where they could be alone.

"The Carrier has almost finished its tasks over at the Node," the Eagle said. "Twelve hours from now it will make a short stop near this vehicle to pick up some more passengers. I will announce after lunch who will be moving to the Carrier."

The alien turned and looked directly at Nicole with his intense blue eyes. "Some of the humans may not be pleased with my announcement. After the decision was made to split your species into two separate groups, it was immediately apparent to me that it would be impossible to achieve a division that would not make some people unhappy. I would like some help from you in making this process as siftooth as possible."

Nicole studied the remarkable face and eyes of her alien companion. She thought she remembered seeing, once before, a similar look from the Eagle. Back at the Node, she recalled, when I was asked to do the video.

"What is it that you want me to do?" Nicole asked.

"We have decided to allow a degree of flexibility in this process. Although all the individuals on the list for transfer to the Carrier must accept their assignments, we will permit some of those who are assigned to the Node to request reconsideration. Since there will be no interaction between the two vehicles, in the case of strong emotional attachments, for example, we would not want to force - "

"Are you telling me," Nicole interrupted, "that this split may permanently break up families?"

"Yes, it may," the Eagle replied. "In a few instances, a husband or a wife has been assigned to the Carrier, while the spouse is on the list for the Node. Similarly, there are some cases where parents and their children will be separated."

"Jesus," exclaimed Nicole. "How in the world can you, or anyone, arbitrarily decide to separate a husband and a wife who have chosen to live together, and expect them to be happy? You'll be lucky if there is not a widespread revolt after you make your announcement."

The Eagle hesitated for a few seconds. "There was nothing arbitrary in our process," the alien said at length. "For months now we have been carefully studying voluminous data on every single creature currently living in the starfish. The records include complete information from all the years in Rama as well. Those who have been assigned to the Carrier do not, in one way or another, meet our necessary criteria for transfer to the Node."

"And what exactly are those criteria?" Nicole asked quickly.

"All I can tell you now is that the Node will feature an interspecies living environment. Those individuals who have limited adaptability have been assigned to the Carrier," the Eagle replied.

"It sounds to me," Nicole said after a few seconds, "as if some subset of the humans in the Grand Hotel has been rejected, for some reason, and not found 'acceptable' - " "If I understand your choice of words," the Eagle now interrupted, "you are inferring that this split divides the two groups on the basis of merit. That is not exactly the case. It is our belief that most of those in either group will,,in the long run, be happier in the environment to which they have been assigned."

"Even without their spouses or children?" Nicole said. She frowned. "Sometimes I wonder if you have really observed what motivates the human species. 'Emotional attachments,' to use your words, are usually the most essential component in any human's happiness."

"We know that," the Eagle said. "We had a special review of every single case where families will be broken apart by the split, and we made some accommodations as a result. In our judgment, the remaining family divisions, which are not as numerous as this discussion might suggest, are all supported by the observational data."

Nicole stared at the Eagle and shook her head vigorously. "Why was this split never mentioned before? Never once in all the discussions of the impending transfer did you ever even suggest that we were going to be divided into two groups."

"We hadn't decided ourselves until fairly recently. Recall that our intercession with the affairs on Rama took us into a contingency regime in our planning matrix. Once it became clear that some kind of split would be necessary, we didn't want to upset the status quo."

"Bullshit," Nicole said suddenly. "I don't believe that for a moment. You knew what you were going to do long ago. You just didn't want to listen to any objections."

Using the controls on the arm of her chair, Nicole turned around and faced away from her alien companion. "No," she said firmly, "I will not be your accomplice in this matter. And I am angry that you have compromised my integrity by not telling me the truth before now."

She pushed the acceleration button and started toward the main corridor.

"Is there nothing I can do to change your mind?" the Eagle said, following her.

Nicole stopped. "I can only imagine one scenario in which I would help you. Why don't you explain the differences between the two living environments and let each individual from each species decide for himself or herself?"

"I'm afraid we can't do that," the Eagle said.

"Then count me out," Nicole said, activating her wheel-chair again.

Nicole was in a foul mood by the time she reached the door to her apartment. She leaned forward in her chair and entered the combination sequence on the panel in the middle of the door.

"Hello, Mrs. Wakefield," Kepler said as Nicole entered the room. "Patrick and Mother are out looking for you. They were worried when they didn't find you in the hallway."

Nicole drove past the young man and into the room. Benjy came out of the bathroom with only a towel wrapped around him. "Hello, Mama," he said with a big smile. He noticed the look of displeasure on Nicole's face and hurried over beside her. "What's wrong?" he asked. "You haven't hurt yourself again... ?"

"No, Benjy," Nicole said. "I'm fine. I just had a disturbing conversation with the Eagle."

"What about?" Benjy said, taking her hand.

"I'll tell you later," Nicole said after a brief hesitation. "After you dry off and get dressed."

Benjy smiled and kissed his mother on the forehead before returning to the bathroom. The sinking feeling in her stomach that Nicole had experienced during her conversation with the Eagle now returned. Oh, my God, she thought suddenly. Not Benjy. Surely the Eagle was not trying to tell me that we are going to be separated from Benjy. She remembered the Eagle's comment about "limited capabilities" and started to panic. Not now. Please not now. Not after alt this time.

Nicole thought about a special moment from years earlier, when the family had been at the Node for the first time. She had been alone in her bedroom. Benjy had entered tentatively to find out if he was welcome to join the family on its trip back to the solar system. He had been immensely relieved to discover that he was not going to be separated from his mother. He has suffered enough already, Nicole said to herself, recalling Benjy's assignment to Avalon while she was in prison in New Eden. The Eagle must know that, if he has really studied all the data.

Despite her conscious attempts to remain calm, Nicole could not stifle the combination of fear and frustration that was rising inside her. I would have preferred to die in my sleep, she thought bitterly, fearing the worst. I cannot say good-bye to Benjy now. It will break his heart. And mine too.

The door to the apartment opened. Patrick and Nai entered, followed by the Eagle. "We found this friend of yours in the hallway, Mother," Patrick said, greeting her with a kiss. "He told us that the two of you had been having a conference. Nai and I were worried."

The Eagle walked over beside Nicole. 'There was another subject I wanted to talk to you about as well," the Eagle said. "Could you please join me outside for another couple of minutes?"

"I guess I have no choice," Nicole answered. "But I am not going to change my mind."

A full tram passed the Eagle and Nicole just as they exited from the apartment. "What is it?" Nicole asked impatiently.

"I wanted to inform you that all the different manifestations of the sessile species, as well as the remaining avians, will be in the group that is transferred to the Carrier this evening. If you still have any desire, as you indicated to me once during a conversation shortly after you first awakened here, to interact with the sessile and to experience what Richard described - "

"Tell me something else first," Nicole interflipted, grabbing the Eagle by the forearm with surprising strength.

"Will Benjy and I be separated by this split you're going to announce this afternoon?"

The -Eagle hesitated for several seconds. "No, you will not," he said eventually. "But I shouldn't be telling you any of the details."

Nicole heaved a sigh of relief. 'Thank you," she said simply, managing a smile.

There was a protracted silence. "The sessiles," the Eagle started again, "will not be available to you after - "

"Yes, yes," Nicole said. 'That's a great idea. Thank you very much. I would like to pay my respects to a sessile. After I eat breakfast, of course."

The smaller block robots were very much in evidence in the ray that housed the avians and the sessiles. The ray was divided into several separate regions by walls that ran from the floor to the ceiling. The blockheads policed the entrances and exits from these regions and were also stationed at each of the tram stops.

The avians and sessiles lived at the back of the ray,- in the last of the separate compounds. Both a blockhead and an avian were guarding the entrance when the Eagle and Nicole arrived. The Eagle jabbered and shrieked in response to a series of questions from the avian. After they entered the compound, a myrmicat approached them. It began to communicate with the Eagle in bursts of high-frequency sound that originated from the small circular orifice below its dark brown, milky oval eyes. Nicole marveled at the fidelity of the Eagle's whistling response. She also watched in fascination as the second pair of myrmicat eyes, attached to stalks raised ten to twelve centimeters above its forehead, continued to pivot and survey the surroundings. When the Eagle had finished his conversation with the myrmicat, the six-legged creature, who resembled a giant ant when standing still, raced down the hall with the speed and grace of a cat.

"They know who you are," the Eagle said. "They are delighted that you have come for a visit."

Nicole glanced up at her companion. "How do they know me?" she said. "I have only occasionally seen a few of them in the common areas, and I have never actually interacted."

"Your husband is a god to this species. None of them would be here if it were not for him. They know you from your images that were inside his memory."

"How is that possible?" Nicole asked. "Richard died sixteen years ago."

"But the record of his stay with them is carefully preserved in their collective memory," the Eagle said. "Every myrmicat emerges from its manna melon with significant knowledge of the key components of its own culture and history. The embryonic process mat occurs inside the melon not only provides physical nourishment for the growing and developing being, but also passes critical information directly into the brain-or its equivalent, anyway-of the fledgling myrmicat."

"Are you telling me," Nicole said, "that these creatures begin their education before they are born? And that there is stored knowledge inside those manna melons I used to eat that is somehow implanted in the minds of the unborn myrmicats?"

"Exactly," the Eagle replied. "I don't see why you should be so astounded. Physically, these creatures are nowhere near as complex as your species. The embryonic development process for a human is vastly more subtle and complicated man theirs. Your newborns arrive in the world with a staggering array of physical attributes and capabilities. Your infants, however, are still dependent on other members of the species for both their survival and their education. The myrmicats are born 'smarter' and therefore more independent, but they have much less potential for total intellectual development."

They both heard a shrill sound coming from a myrmicat fifty meters or so down the corridor. "It is calling us," the Eagle said.

Nicole moved her wheelchair slowly forward and "Settled at a speed consistent with the Eagle's walking pace. "Richard never told me that these creatures preserve information from generation to generation."

"He didn't know," the Eagle said. "He did figure out their metamorphic cycle, and that the myrmicats passed information to the neural net or web or whatever the final manifestation should be called. But he didn't even suspect that the most important elements of that collective information were also stored in the manna melons and passed to the next generation. Needless to say, it's a very strong survival mechanism."

i Nicole was intrigued by what the Eagle was telling her. Imagine, she was thinking, (I somehow human children could be born already knowing the essentials of our culture and history. Suppose something like the placenta contained, in compressed form, enough information. It sounds impossible, but it must not be. If at least one creature can do it, then eventually...

"How much data are passed through the manna melons to the newborns of the species?" Nicole asked as they drew near to the beckoning myrmicat.

"About one-thousandth of one percent of the information present in a fully mature specimen like the one in which Richard resided. The primary function of the final manifestation of the species is to manipulate, process, and compress the data into a package for inclusion in the manna melons. Just how this data management process works is something we have been studying.

"The neural net you will encounter in the next few minutes, incidentally," the Eagle continued, "was originally just a small sliver of material, containing critical data compressed using what must be a brilliant algorithm. We have estimated that in that small cylinder Richard carried to New York years ago was an information content equivalent to the memory capacity of a hundred adult human brains."

"Amazing," Nicole said, shaking her head.

"That's only the beginning," the Eagle said. "Each of the four manna melons carried by Richard had its own special set of compressed data. They all germinated into myrmicats in the octospider zoo. The neural net now contains all those expences as adventure."

Nicole stopped her wheelchair. "Why didn't you tell me all this earlier? I might have spent more time - "

"I doubt it," the Eagle interrupted. "Your first priority was to reestablish your connections to your own species. I don't think you were ready for this until now."

"You have been manipulating me by controlling what I see and experience," Nicole said without rancor.

"Perhaps," the Eagle answered.

Nicole was surprisingly fearful when she finally encountered the neural net up close. The Eagle and she were together in a room not unlike the apartment Nicole shared in the human ray. A pair of myrmicats was sitting behind them, against the wall The sessile net or web occupied about fifteen percent of the room, back in the right corner. There was a gap in the center of the dense, soft white material that was just large enough for Nicole and her wheelchair. Nicole complied with the Eagle's request to roll up her shirtsleeves and lift her dress above her knees.

"I suppose," she then said with some trepidation, "that it expects me to drive into that space and that it will wrap its filaments around my body."

"Yes," said the Eagle. "And it has been told by one of the myrmicats to release you at your request. I will stay here the entire time, if that's any comfort to you."

"Richard," Nicole said, still delaying her entrance, "told me that it took a long time for any real communication to develop."

"That will not be a problem now," responded the Eagle. "Certainly part of the information stored in the original sliver was data about methods that could be used to communicate efficiently with human beings."

"All right, then," Nicole said, passing her hand nervously through her hair, "here I go. Wish me luck."

She drove into the gap in the cottony network and turned off the power in her wheelchair. In less than a miftute the creature had surrounded her and Nicole could not even see

the outline of the Eagle across the room. Nicole tried to reassure herself as she felt first hundreds and then thousands of tiny threads attaching themselves to her arms, legs, neck, and head. As she expected, the density of threads was highest around her head. She recalled Richard's description: The individual filaments were incredibly thin, but they must have had very sharp parts underneath. I didn 't even realize that they were inserted well inside the outer layers of my skin until I tried to pull one off.

Nicole stared at a particular clump of threads about a meter away from her face. As this ganglion eased slowly toward her, the other elements in the delicate mesh shifted position. A shiver ran down her spine. Her mind accepted, finally, that the net surrounding her was a living creature. It was only moments later that the images began.

She realized immediately that the sessile was reading from her memory. Pictures from earlier in her life flashed through Nicole's mind at a fantastic rate, none lingering long enough even to provoke an emotion. There was no order to the images-a childhood memory from the woods behind her home in the Parisian suburb of Chilly-Mazarin would be followed by a picture of Maria laughing heartily at one of Max's stories.

This is the data transfer stage, Nicole thought, remembering Richard's analysis of the time he had spent inside the neural net. The creature is copying my memory into its own. At a very high rate. She wondered briefly what in the world the sessile would do with all the images from her memory. Then suddenly in her mind's eye Nicole vividly saw Richard himself in a large chamber that had a vast, incomplete mural on its walls. The image became a full motion picture set in the chamber. The clarity of the individual frames was overwhelming. Nicole felt as if she were watching a color television set located somewhere inside her brain. She could even see the details of the mural. As Nicole watched, a myrmicat directed Richard's attention to specific items in the wall paintings. Around the room a dozen other myrmicats were sketching or painting the ; unfinished sections of the mural.

The artwork was superb. It had all been created to give Richard information about what he could do to help the alien species survive. Part of the mural was a textbook about their biology, which explained in pictures the three manifestations of their species (manna melon, myrmicat, and sessile or neural net) and the relationships between diem. The images Nicole saw were so sharp that she felt she had been transported to the room where Richard had been. She was therefore startled when the internal film she was watching suddenly underwent a jump discontinuity and presented a picture of the last good-bye between Richard and his guide myrmicat.

Richard and the myrmicat were in a tunnel at the bottom of the brown cylinder. The motion picture lingered lovingly on every detail of this final farewell. The bearded Richard looked overburdened carrying the four heavy manna melons, two leathery avian eggs, and the cylinder of web material in the pack on his back. But even Nicole, seeing the determination in Richard's eyes as he departed from the doomed myrmicat habitat, could understand why he was such a hero to their species. He risked his life, she reminded herself, to save them from extinction.

More images flooded her mind, pictures from the octospider zoo recording events after the germination of the manna melons Richard had originally carried to New York. Despite their clarity, Nicole couldn't bring herself to concentrate on the images very closely. She was still thinking about Richard. Not since f awakened have I allowed myself to miss your company, Nicole said to herself, because I thought such behavior showed weakness. Now, seeing your face again so clearly and remembering how much we shared, I realize how ridiculous it is to force myself not to think about you.

A fleeting image of three human beings-a man, a woman, and a tiny baby-raced through Nicole's mind, catching her attention. Wait, Nicole almost screamed out loud. Back up. There was something that I wanted to see. The neural net did not read her message. It continued with the progression of pictures. Nicole suspended her thoughts about Richard and focused intently on the images appearing on the television inside her brain.

Less than a minute later she saw the trio again, walking with the octospider zookeeper past the front of the area housing the myrmicats. Maria was in her mother's arms. Her father, a dark and handsome man with gray at his temples, was dragging one of his legs as if it were broken. I have never seen that man before, Nicole thought. I would have remembered him.

There were no more images of Maria or her parents. The stream of pictures racing through Nicole's mind showed the transfer of the myrmicats to another venue, away from the zoo and the Emerald City, sometime before the bombing began. Nicole presumed that the last sequence of images she was shown took place during the time that all the humans and octospiders in Rama were asleep. Not long thereafter, Nicole thought, if I understand their life cycle correctly, the four myrmicats resulting from Richard's melons became net material. With all these memories intact.

The pictures in her mind became altogether different. Now Nicole was seeing some images of scenes that she believed were from the home planet of the sessiles, ones that Richard had once excitedly described to her.

Nicole had purposely positioned her right hand next to the control panel of her wheelchair when she had entered the web. When she now pressed the power button and then reverse, the slight motion of the chair immediately registered with the sessile. The images stopped instantly, and the threads of the creature were subsequently withdrawn.