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 “paraphernalia” 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 non-biological, 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 name of 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 hi
s 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 the womb.” She smiled. “As you would say, they should be home in about a feng.”
3
Nicole finished brushing her teeth and gazed at her reflection in the mirror. Galileo was right, she thought. I am an old woman.
She began rubbing her face with her fingers, methodically massaging the wrinkles that seemed to be everywhere. She heard Benjy and the twins playing outside and then both Nai and Patrick calling them to school. I was not always old, she said to herself. There was a time when I too went to school.
Nicole closed her eyes, attempting to remember what she had looked like as a young girl. She was unable to conjure up a clear picture of herself as a child. Too many other pictures from the intervening years blurred and distorted Nicole’s image of herself as a schoolgirl.
At length she reopened her eyes and stared at the image in the mirror. In her mind she painted out all the bag$ and wrinkles on her face. She changed the color of her hair and eyebrows from gray to a deep black. Finally she managed to see herself as a beautiful woman of twenty-one. Nicole felt a brief but intense yearning for those days of her youth. For we were young, and we knew that we would never die, she remembered.
Richard stuck his head around the corner. “Ellie and I will be working with Hercules in the study,” he said. “Why don’t you join us?”
“In a few minutes,” Nicole answered. While she touched up her hair, Nicole reflected on the daily patterns of the human clan in the Emerald City. They usually all gathered for breakfast in the Wakefields’ dining room. School ended before lunch. Then everyone except Richard napped, their accommodation to the eight-hour-longer day. Most afternoons Nicole and Ellie and Richard were with the octospiders, learning more about their hosts or sharing experiences from the planet Earth. The other four adults spent almost all their time with Benjy and the children in their enclave at the end of the cul-de-sac.
And where does all this take us? Nicole suddenly wondered. For how many years will we be the guests of the octospiders? And what will happen if and when Rama reaches its destination?
They were all questions for which Nicole had no answers. Even Richard had apparently stopped worrying about what was going on outside the Emerald City. He was completely absorbed by the octospiders and his translator project. Now he only asked Archie for celestial navigation data every two months or so. Each time Richard would report to the others, without editorial comment, that Rama was still headed in the general direction of the star Tan Ceti.
Like little Marius, Nicole thought, we are content here in our womb. As long as the outside world does not force itself upon us, we do not ask the overwhelming questions.
Nicole left the bathroom and walked down the hall to (he study. Richard was sitting on the floor between Hercules and Ellie. “The easy part is tracking the color pattern and having the sequence stored in the processor,” he was saying. “The hardest part of the translation is automatically converting that pattern into a recognizable English sentence.”
Richard faced Hercules and spoke very slowly. “Because your language is so mathematical, with every color having an acceptable angstrom range defined a priori, all the sensor has to do is identify the stream of colors and the widths of the bands. The entire information content has then been captured. Because the rules are so precise, it’s not even difficult to code a simple fault protection algorithm, for use with juveniles or careless speakers, in case any single color errs to the left or the right in the spectrum.
“Changing what an octospider has said into our language, however, is a much more complex process. The dictionary for the translation is straightforward enough. Each word and the appropriate clarifiers can be readily identified. But it’s damn near impossible to make the next step, into sentences, without some human intervention.”
“That’s because the octospider language is fundamentally different from ours,” Ellie commented. “Everything is specified and quantified, to minimize the possibility of misunderstanding. There is no subtlety or nuance. Look how they use the pronouns ‘we,’ ‘they,’ and ‘you.’ The pronouns are always marked with numerical clarifiers, including ranges when there are uncertainties. An octospider never says ‘a few wodens’ or ‘several nillets’-always a number, or a numerical range, is used to specify the length of time more precisely.”
“From our point of view,” Hercules said in color, “there are two aspects to human language that are extremely difficult. One is the lack of precise specification, which leads to a massive vocabulary. The other is your use of indirectness to communicate. I still have trouble understanding Max because often what he says is not literally what he means.”
“I don’t know how to do this in your computer,” Nicole now said to Richard, “but somehow all the quantitative information contained in each octospider statement must be reflected by the translation. Almost every verb or adjective they use has a connected numerical clarifier. How, for example, did Ellie just translate “extremely difficult and ‘massive vocabulary’? What Hercules said, in octospider, was ‘difficult,’ with the number five used to clarify it, and ‘big vocabulary,’ with the number six as a clarifier for ‘big.’ All comparative clarifiers address the question of the strength of the adjective. Since their base number system is octal, the range for the comparatives is between one and seven. If Hercules had used a seven to clarify the word ‘difficult,’ Ellie would have translated the phrase as ‘impossibly difficult.’ If he had used a two as a clarifier in the same phrase, she might have said ‘slightly difficult.’“
“Mistakes in the strengths of the adjectives, although important,” Richard said as he fiddled absentmindedly with a small processor, “almost never lead to misunderstandings. Failure to interpret properly the verb clarifiers, however, is another issue altogether… as I have learned recently from my preliminary tests. Take the simple octospider verb ‘to go,’ which means, as you know, to move unaided, without a transport. The maroon-purple-lemon yellow strip, each color the same width, covers several dozen words in English, everything from ‘walk’ to ‘stro
ll,’ ‘saunter,’ ‘run,’ and even ‘sprint.’“
“That’s the same point I was just making,” Ellie said. “There is no translation without full interpretation of the clarifiers. For that particular verb, the octos use a double clarifier to address the issue of ‘how fast.’ In a sense, there are sixty-three different speeds at which they ‘go.’ To make matters even more complex, they may use a range clarifier as well, so their statement ‘Let’s go’ is subject to many, many possible translations.”
Richard grimaced and shook his head.
“What’s the matter, Father?” Ellie asked.
“I’m just disappointed,” he answered. “I had hoped to have a simplified version of the translator completed by now. But I made the assumption that the gist of what was being said could be determined without tracking all the clarifiers. To include all those short color strips will both increase the storage required and significantly slow down the translation. I may have trouble ever designing a translator that works in real time.”
“So what?” Hercules asked. “Why are you so concerned about this translator? Ellie and Nicole already understand our language very well.”
“Not really,” Nicole said. “Ellie is the only one of us who is truly fluent with your colors. I am still learning daily.”
“Although I originally began this project both as a challenge and as a means to force myself to become familiar with your language,” Richard replied to Hercules, “Nicole and I were talking last week about how important the translator has become. She says, and I agree with her, that our human clan here in the Emerald City is dividing into two groups. Ellie, Nicole, and I have made our life more interesting because of our increasing interactions with your species. The rest of the humans, including the children, remain essentially isolated. Eventually, if the others don’t have some way of communicating with you, they will become dissatisfied and/or unhappy. A good automatic translator is the key that will open up their lives here.”
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