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 interrupted, 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 that 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 than 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."
Nicole was intrigued by what the Eagle was telling her. Imagine, she was thinking, if 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 experiences as well. I expect that you're in for quite an 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 minute 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 them. 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 I 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.
6
The next day, an hour before the beginning of the lunch period, a part of one wall in each starfish apartment transformed into a large television screen. The residents were then informed that an important announcement was forthcoming in thirty minutes.
"This is only the third time," Max told Nicole as they waited, "that we have had any kind of general transmission. The first was immediately after we arrived here and the second was when it was decided to segregate our living quarters."
"What's going to happen now?" Marius asked.
"I suspect we're going to find out the details of our move," Max answered. "At least that's the leading rumor."
At the appointed time, the Eagle's face appeared on the monitor. "Last year, when you were all awakened and moved from Rama," the Eagle said, simultaneously giving the same message in colored strips moving across his forehead, "we told you that this vehicle would not be your permanent home. We are now ready to transfer you to other locations, where your living conditions will be markedly better."
The Eagle paused a few seco
nds before continuing. "All of you will not be transferred to the same place. About one-third of the current starfish residents will move to the Carrier, that huge, flat spacecraft that has been stationed near the Node for most of the last week. During the next few hours, the Carrier will finish its business over at the Node and move in this direction. Those of you who are transferring to the Carrier will do so after dinner tonight.
"The rest of you will be moved to the Node in another three or four days. Nobody will be left here on the starfish. I would like to stress again that the accommodations in both places will be excellent and far superior to those in this vehicle."
The Eagle stopped for almost half a minute, as if he were allowing time for his audience to react to what he had already said. "When this meeting is over," the Eagle then said, "each of the apartment television screens will repeatedly cycle through the list of all creatures on board, ordered by apartment number, and display the transfer assignments. Reading the displays is very simple. If your name and/or identification code appears on the monitor in black letters against a white background, you will be transferred to the Carrier. If your name is written in white letters against a black background, you will remain here for the next few days and will eventually be moved over to the Node.
"For your information, on the Carrier each species will have its own self-contained living area. There will be no interspecies mixing, except of course for the required symbiotic arrangements. By contrast—"
'That ought to please the leaders of the Council," Max commented quickly. "They have been agitating for complete separation for months."
"—the living situation at the Node will involve regular interspecies communication and activity. We have attempted, in assigning individuals to the two locations, to place each of you in the environment best suited for his personality. Our selections were done carefully, based upon our observations both here at the starfish and during the years on Rama.
Rama: The Omnibus Page 170
