Rama Revealed

Nicole Wakefield escapes the imprisonment the last book left her facing, into a Rama where humans are no longer the only tenants that matter. Two other species share the ship: the octospiders, engineered into something like a working utopia, and the myrmicats, who communicate brain to brain.

The colony deteriorates as the humans prove less able than either of them to live alongside anything. When the fighting between the colonists and the octospiders becomes unsurvivable, Rama's own intelligence settles it by putting everyone to sleep.

The ship arrives at a vast tetrahedral Node near Tau Ceti, where the humans are sorted by how much they fear what is not human. Before she dies of old age, Nicole is given access to Raman technology, and an answer to the question the series opened with.

Book four and the last of the Rama series, written by Gentry Lee from Arthur C. Clarke's world.