Arthur Clarke - Rama Revealed

Nai stopped folding clothes and put her hand on Nicole’s forearm. “That’s why I’m asking you for help,” she said. “In the alien hierarchy, the Eagle ranks even higher than Big Block. It’s obvious that the Eagle pays careful attention to what you say. Would you, please, for my sake, talk to him about Galileo?”

“It’s the right thing,” Nicole said to Ellie, taking her belongings from the closet. “I should have been in the other room from the beginning.”

“We talked about it before you came,” Ellie said. “But both Nai and Maria said it was all right for the girl to move back next door so that you could be here with Nikki and me.”

“Nevertheless…” Nicole said. She put her clothes on the table and looked at her daughter. “You know, Ellie, I’ve only been here a few days, but it strikes me as terribly peculiar how absorbed everyone is in the day-to-day trivia of life. And I’m not talking only about Nai and her concerns. The people with whom I have chatted in the cafeteria, or in the other common rooms, spend an astonishingly small percentage of their time discussing what’s really going on here. Only two people have asked me questions about the Eagle. And up at the observation deck last night, while a dozen of us were staring out at that staggering tetrahedron, nobody wanted to discuss who might have built it, and for? what purpose.”

Ellie laughed. “Everyone else has been here for a year already, Mother. They asked all those questions long ago, for many weeks, but they did not receive any satisfactory answers. It’s human nature, when we cannot answer an infinite question, to dismiss it until we have some new information.”

She picked up all her mother’s things. “Now, we have told everyone to leave you alone and let you take a nap today. Nobody should be coming in the room for the next two hours. Please, Mother, use this opportunity to rest. When Dr. Blue left last night, she told me that your heart was showing signs of fatigue, despite all the supplemental probes.”

“Mr. Kowalski was certainly not happy,” Nicole commented, “about having an octospider in our ray.”

“I explained it to him. So did Big Block. Don’t worry about it.”

“Thank you, Ellie,” Nicole said. She kissed her daughter on the cheek.

“Are you ready, Mother?” Ellie asked, coming in the door.

“I guess so,” Nicole answered. “Although I certainly feel foolish. Except for the game yesterday with you, Max, and Eponine, I haven’t played bridge for years.”

Ellie smiled. “It doesn’t matter how well you play, Mother. We talked about that last night.”

Max and Eponine were waiting in the hallway at the tram stop. ‘Today will be very interesting,” Max said after greeting Nicole. “I wonder how many others will show up.”

The Council had voted the night before to extend the boycott again for three additional days. Although Big Block had responded to the list of grievances and even persuaded the octospiders, who outnumbered the humans eight to one, to yield more time in the common areas for the exclusive use of the humans, the Council had felt that many of the responses were still not adequate.

There had also been a discussion at the Council Meeting about how to enforce the boycott. Some of the more vocal attendees at the meeting had wanted to establish punishments for those who ignored the boycott resolution. The meeting had concluded with an agreement that Council officers would “actively engage” those humans who continued to disregard the Council’s recommendations to avoid interactions with all other species.

The tram in the main corridor was nearly empty. A half dozen octospiders were in the first car, and three or four more octos plus a pair of iguanas were sitting in the second. Nicole and her friends were the only humans on board.

“Three weeks ago, before this latest round of tension began,” Ellie said, “we had twenty-three tables for our weekly bridge tournament. I thought we were making a lot of progress. We were averaging five or six new human attendees each week.”

“How in the world, Ellie,” Nicole asked as the tram stopped and another pair of octospiders boarded their car, “did you ever think up the idea for these bridge tournaments? When you first mentioned playing cards with the octospiders to me, I thought you were out of your mind.”

Ellie laughed. “In the beginning, soon after we had all settled here, I knew that it would take some kind of organized activity to encourage interaction. People were just not going to walk up to an octospider and begin a conversation, not even with a blockhead or me along as an interpreter. Games seemed like a pretty good way to stimulate mixing. That worked for a little while, but it quickly became obvious that there was no game at which the most proficient human could match any of the octospiders. Even with handicaps.”

“Late in the first month,” Max broke in, “I played chess with your buddy Dr. Blue. She gave me a rook and two pawn advantage to start the game, and still cleaned my plow. It was very demoralizing.”

“The final blow was our first Scrabble tournament,” Ellie continued. “All of the prizes went to the octospiders, even though all the words used were in English! That was when I realized that I had to come up with a game in which humans and octospiders did not play against each other.

“Bridge turned out to be perfect. Each pair consists of one human and one octospider. It is not necessary for the partners to talk to each other. I have prepared convention cards in both languages, and even the dullest human can learn in one session the octo numbers from one to seven and then- symbols for the four suits. It has worked fabulously well.”

Nicole shook her head. “I still think you are crazy,” she said with a smile. “Although I will acknowledge a touch of brilliance as well.”

There were only fourteen other people in the card room of the recreation complex at the time the bridge tournament was scheduled to start. Ellie adapted well, deciding to have two separate games, one for the “mixed pairs,” as she called them, and another contest solely for the octospiders.

Dr. Blue was Nicole’s partner. They agreed on a five-card major bidding approach, one of six codified by Ellie, and sat down at a table near the door. Because the seats for the octospiders were higher than those for the humans, Nicole and her partner were sitting eye to eye-or, more appropriately, eye to lens.

Nicole had never been an exceptional bridge player. She had learned to play originally as a student at the University of Tours, when her father, concerned that she did not have enough friends, had encouraged her to become involved in extracurricular activities. Nicole had also played some bridge in New Eden, where the game was the social rage during the first year after settlement. However, despite some natural flair for the game, Nicole had always thought that bridge consumed too much time and that there were too many other, more important things to do.

It was apparent to Nicole from the outset that Dr. Blue, as well as the other octospiders who came to the table with their human partners to play in the duplicate tournament, was a superb card player. On the second hand Dr. Blue played a “three no trump” contract that was exceedingly difficult, using finesses and a terminal squeeze like a human bridge professional.

“Well done,” Nicole said to her octospider partner after Dr. Blue made the contract plus one overtrick.

“It’s very simple once you know where all the cards are,” Dr. Blue answered in color.

It was fascinating to watch the octospiders handle the mechanics of the game. They removed the cards from the traveling boards with the two last joints of a solitary tentacle, aided by the cilia, of course, and then held their hands in front of their lenses with three tentacles, one on either side and a third one in the middle. To place a card on the table, an octospider used whichever tentacle was closest to the card in question, balancing it among the cilia during his descent.