by Arthur C.
"Yes, I am," Ellie said in a clear voice. "Except that I wasn't kidnapped in the truest sense of the word. The octospiders wanted to establish communications with us and had been unable to do so. I was taken because they believed that I had the capacity to learn their language."
"That thing talks!" another soldier said with disbelief.
Until that moment Archie, as planned, had been silent. The troops all stared dumbfounded as colors began pouring out of the right side of his slit and circumnavigating his head. "Archie says greetings," Ellie translated. "He asks each of you to understand that neither he nor any member of his species wishes you any harm. Archie also wants me to inform you that he can read lips and will be happy to answer any questions you might have."
"Is this for real?" a soldier said.
Meanwhile, a frustrated Captain Pioggi was standing off to the side, providing an eyewitness account by radio to the colonel in New York. "Yes, sir," he was saying, "colors on its head … all different colors, sir, red, blue, yellow … like rectangles, moving rectangles, they go around its head, and then more of them follow… What's that, sir?… The woman, the doctor's wife, sir… She apparently knows what the colors mean… No, sir, there aren't any colored letters, just the colored strips…
"Right now, sir, the alien is talking to the soldiery… No, sir, they are not using colors… According to the woman, sir, the octospider can read lips… like a hearing impaired person, sir … same technique I guess… Anyway, it then answers in color and the doctor's wife translates…
"No weapons of any kind, sir… Plenty of toys, clothes, weird-looking objects prisoner Wakefield says are electronic components… Toys, sir, I said toys … the little girl had a lot of toys in her backpack… No, we don't have a scanner up here… Right, sir… Do you have any idea how long we might be waiting, sir?"
By the time Captain Pioggi finally received orders to send the prisoners to New York in one of the helicopters, Archie had thoroughly impressed all the soldiers at the camp. The octospider had begun the demonstration of his prodigious mental abilities by multiplying five- and six-place numbers in his head.
"Now, how do we know that the octospider thing is really coming up with the right answer?" one of the younger soldiers had asked. "All it does is show a string of colors."
"My man," Richard had replied with a laugh, "didn't you just verify on the lieutenant's calculator that the number my daughter gave was correct? Do you think she computed the product in her head?"
"Oh, yeah," the youth said. "I see what you mean."
What really overwhelmed the soldiers was Archie's phenomenal memory. At Richard's urging, one of the troops listed a sequence of several hundred numbers on a sheet of paper and then read the sequence to Archie, a single number at a time. The octospider repeated them back through Ellie, without any errors. Some of the soldiers thought that there had been a trick involved, that maybe Richard was flashing coded signals to Archie. However, when Archie duplicated his feat under carefully controlled conditions, all the doubters were convinced.
The atmosphere in the camp was relaxed and amiable by the time the orders were received to transport the prisoners to New York. The first part of their plan had succeeded beyond their wildest imaginings. Nevertheless, Richard was nervous as they climbed on board the helicopter to cross a portion of the Cylindrical Sea.
They only stayed in New York for about an hour. Armed guards met the prisoners at the helicopter pad in the western plaza, confiscated their backpacks over Richard's and Nikki's loud protests, and marched them to the Port. Richard carried Nikki in his arms. He barely had time to admire his favorite skyscrapers looming overhead in the dark.
The yacht that carried them across the northern half of the Cylindrical Sea was similar to the pleasure boats that Nakamura and his cronies used on Lake Shakespeare. At no time during the crossing did any of the guards speak to them. "Boobah," Nikki whispered to Richard after several of her questions had gone unheeded, "don't these men know how to talk?" She giggled.
A rover was waiting for them on a dock that had been recently constructed to support the new activities in New York and the Southern Hemicylinder. At considerable effort and expense, the humans had cut an opening through the southern barrier wall in-an area adjacent to the avian/sessile habitat and had built a large docking facility.
Richard wondered at first why he and his companions had not been flown directly back to New Eden in the helicopter. After a few quick mental calculations, however, he correctly concluded that because of the enormous height of the barrier wall, which extended well up into the region where the artificial gravity caused by the spinning Rama spacecraft began to drop substantially, as well as the probable lack of skilled pilots, there was an upper limit placed on the altitude at which the hastily built helicopters were allowed to fly. That means, Richard was thinking as he boarded the rover, that the humans must move all their equipment and personnel either through this dock or by means of the moat and tunnel underneath the second habitat.
Their rover was driven by a Garcia biot. In front and behind them were two other rovers, both with armed humans. They sped across the darkness to the Central Plain. Richard sat in the front seat beside the driver, with Archie, Ellie, and Nikki in the back. Richard had turned around in his seat and was reminding Archie of the five kinds of biots in New Eden when the Garcia interrupted him. "The prisoner Wakefield is to face forward and remain silent," the biot said.
"Isn't that just a little bit ridiculous?" Richard said lightly.
The Garcia pulled its right arm off the steering wheel and struck Richard hard in the face with the back of its hand. "Face forward and remain silent," the biot repeated, as Richard recoiled from the force of the slap.
Nikki started crying after the sudden display of violence. Ellie tried both to quiet and to comfort her. "I don't like the driver, Mommy," the little girl said. "I really don't."
It was night inside New Eden after they were ushered through the checkpoint at the entrance to the habitat. Archie and the three humans were placed into an open electric car driven by another Garcia biot. Richard noticed immediately that it was almost as cold in New Eden as it had been in Rama. The car bounced down the road, which was in an acute state of disrepair, and turned north at what had once been the train station for the village of Positano. Fifteen or twenty people were huddled around campfires on the concrete areas surrounding the old station, and another three or four were stretched out and sleeping underneath cardboard boxes and old clothing.
"What are those people doing, Mommy?" Nikki asked. Ellie did not answer because the Garcia turned around quickly with a hostile stare.
The neon lights of Vegas could already be seen in front of them when the car took a sharp left turn onto a residential lane in a wooded section that had once been part of Sherwood Forest. The car came to an abrupt halt in front of a large, rambling ranch house. Two Oriental men, armed with both pistols and daggers, approached the car. They gestured for the passengers to climb out of the car and then dismissed the biot. "Come with us," said one of the men.
Archie and his human companions entered the house and were taken down a long flight of stairs into a basement with no windows. "There is food and water on the table," the second man said. He turned and started to climb the stairs.
"Wait a minute," Richard said. "Our backpacks … we need to have our backpacks."
"They will be returned," the man said impatiently, "as soon as all the contents have been carefully checked."
"And when do we see Nakamura?" Richard inquired.
The man shrugged. His face was expressionless. He walked quickly up the stairs.
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 c
onvince 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 Precursors were already spacefarers when we octospiders were still totally insentient. At that epoch we were not even capable of conceiving of the idea of a planet, much less of the space surrounding it. Our fate was decided by the advanced beings with whom we shared our world. The Precursors recognized the potential in our genetic structure. Using their engineering skills, they improved us, gave us minds, shared their information with us, and created an advanced culture where none would probably have ever existed."
A deep bonding developed between Richard and Archie as a result of the regular early morning conversations. Unencumbered by any distractions, the two were able to share their fundamental love for knowledge. Each expanded the understanding of the other, thereby enriching their mutual appreciation for the wonders of the universe.
Nikki almost always woke up before Ellie. Soon after the girl had finished her breakfast, the group entered the second segment of their daily schedule. Although Nikki occasionally played games with Archie, she spent most of what might be called her morning in informal classes. She had three teachers. With Ellie, Nikki read a little, and did elementary addition and subtraction. She talked to her grandfather about science and nature, and had lessons with Archie on morals and ethics. She also learned the octospider alphabet and a few simple phrases. Nikki was very quick with the language of color, a fact that the others attributed both to her altered genes and to her natural intelligence.
