Nicole shared with Richard for the first time all the drama of her forty-eight-hour affair with the Prince of Wales right after she had won her Olympic gold medal. She even admitted to Richard that she had yearned to marry Henry and that she had been completely devastated when she had realized that the prince had excluded Nicole as a candidate to be the queen of England primarily because of her skin color. Richard was fascinated by the story that Nicole told. But never once did he seem even the least bit threatened or jealous.
He has become more mature, Nicole was thinking several nights later, while her husband was finishing his nightly task of tucking the hatchlings into bed. "Darling," Nicole said when Richard joined her in their bedroom in the lair, "there's something that I want to tell you. I have been wailing for the right time…"
"Uh-oh." Richard feigned a frown. "This sounds serious… I hope it won't take long, for I had some plans of my own for us this evening."
He crossed the room and started to kiss her. "Please, Richard, not now," she said, pushing him away gently. "This is very important to me."
Richard backed up a couple of steps. "When I thought I was going to be executed," Nicole said slowly, "I realized that all my personal affairs were in order, except for two. There were still things that I wanted to say, both to you and to Katie. I even asked the policeman who explained the execution procedure to me if he would give me pen and paper so that I could write two final letters."
Nicole paused a moment, as if she were searching for exactly the right words. "During those terrifying days, I couldn't remember, Richard," she continued, "if I had ever told you, explicitly, how glad I was that we had been husband and wife… I also didn't want to die without…"
She paused a second time, glanced briefly around the room, and then looked directly into Richard's eyes again. "There was one more thing I wanted to accomplish with that last letter," Nicole said. "I believed at the time that it was necessary to make my life complete, so that I could depart from this world without any loose ends… Richard, I wanted to apologize for my insensitivity back when you and Michael and I … I made a mistake then by going to Michael's bed too soon when I feared…" Nicole took a deep breath. "I should have had more faith," she said. "Not that I would for a minute remove either Patrick or Benjy from the world, but I realize now that I surrendered too quickly to my loneliness. I wish…"
Richard touched his finger to her lips. "No apology is necessary, Nicole," he said softly. "I know that you have loved me well."
They settled into an easy rhythm in their simple existence. In the mornings they would walk around New York, usually arm in arm, exploring anew every comer of the island domain they had called home once before. Because it was always dark, the city looked different now. Only their flashlight beams illuminated the enigmatic skyscrapers whose details were indelibly imprinted in their memories.
Often they walked along the ramparts of the city, looking out at the waters of the Cylindrical Sea. One morning they spent several hours standing in one place, the very spot where they had entrusted their lives to the three avians years and years before. Together they recalled both their fear and their excitement at the moment when the great bird creatures had lifted them off the ground to carry them across the sea.
Every day after lunch Nicole, who had always needed more sleep than her husband, would take a short nap. Richard would use the keyboard to order more food or supplies from the Romans, or take the hatchlings topside for some exercise, or work on one of his myriad projects scattered around the lair. In the evening, after a leisurely dinner, they would lie together, side by side, and talk for hours before making love or just falling asleep. They talked about everything: the Eagle, the Ramans, the existence of God, the politics in New Eden, books of all kinds, and most of all, their children.
Although they could converse enthusiastically about Ellie, Patrick, Benjy, or even Simone, whom they had not seen for many years, it was difficult for Richard to talk about Katie for any length of time. He regularly castigated himself for not having been stricter with his favorite daughter during her childhood, and blamed her irresponsible behavior as an adult on his permissiveness. Nicole tried to console and reassure him, reminding Richard that their circumstances in Rama had been unusual and that, after all, nothing in his background had prepared him for the proper discipline required of a parent.
One afternoon when Nicole awakened from her nap, she could hear Richard mumbling to himself down the hall. Curious, she stood up quietly and walked down to the room that had once been Michael O'Toole's bedroom. Nicole stood at the door and watched Richard put the final touches on a large model that occupied most of the room.
"Voila," he said, turning around to acknowledge that he had heard Nicole's footsteps. "It won't win any aesthetic awards," Richard said with a grin, motioning in the direction of the model, "but it's a reasonable representation of our part of the universe, and it certainly has provided me with plenty of food for thought."
A flat rectangular platform covered most of the floor. Thin vertical rods of varying heights had been inserted at twenty locations around the platform. At the top end of each rod was at least one colored sphere, representing a star.
The vertical rod in the center of the model, which had a yellow sphere attached to its top, rose about a meter and a half off the platform. "This, of course," Richard said to Nicole, "is our Sun. And here we are—or I should say Rama is—over in this quadrant, about one-fourth of the way between the Sun and our closest similar star, Tau Ceti. Sirius, where we were when we stayed at the Node, is back over there…"
Nicole walked around in the model depicting the stellar neighborhood of the Sun. 'There are twenty star systems within twelve and a half light-years of our home," Richard explained, "including six binary systems and one triplet group, our nearest neighbors, the Centauris, over here. Note that the Centauris are the only stars inside the five-light-year sphere."
Richard pointed at the three separate balls representing the Centauris. Each was a different size and color. The trio, attached to each other with tiny wires, were resting on top of the same vertical rod, just inside an open wire sphere centered at the Sun and marked with a large number 5.
"During my many days of solitude down here," Richard continued, "I often found myself wondering why Rama is going in this particular direction. Do we have a specific destination? It would seem so, since our path has not varied since our initial acceleration. And if we are going to Tau Ceti, what will we find there? Another complex like the Node? Or will the same Node perhaps have moved during the intervening time?"
Richard stopped. Nicole had walked over to the edge of the model and was stretching her arms up to a pair of red stars at the end of a three-meter rod. "I assume you varied the length of these rods to demonstrate the full three-dimensional relationship of all these stars," she said.
"Yes. That particular binary group you are touching, incidentally, is called Struve 2398," Richard replied in his human catalog voice. "They have a very high declination and are slightly over ten light-years away from the Sun."
Seeing the slight grimace on Nicole's face, Richard laughed at himself and crossed the room to take her hand. "Come over here with me," he said, "and I will show you something really interesting."
They walked to the other side of the model and stood facing the Sun, halfway between the stars Sirius and Tau Ceti. "Wouldn't it be fantastic if our Node really has moved," Richard said excitedly, "and we will see it again, over here, on the opposite side of our solar system?"
Nicole laughed. "Of course," she said, "but we have absolutely no evidence—"
"But we do have brains, and imaginations," Richard interrupted. "And the Eagle did tell us that the entire Node was capable of moving. It just seems to me…" Richard stopped in midsentence and then changed the subject slightly. "Haven't you ever asked yourself," he said, "where our Rama spacecraft went, after we left the Node, during all those years that we were asleep? Suppose, for example, that the avi
ans and the sessiles were picked up over here somewhere, around the Procyon binaries, perhaps, or maybe even over here, around Epsilon Eridani, which easily could have been on our trajectory. We know that there are planets around Eridani. At a significant fraction of the speed of light, Rama could have easily doubled back to the Sun—"
"Hold it, Richard," Nicole said. "You're way ahead of me on this subject. Why don't we start at the beginning?" She sat down on the platform in the interior of the model, next to a red ball elevated only a few centimeters by a very short rod, and crossed her legs. "If I understand your hypothesis, our current voyage will end at Tau Ceti?"
Richard nodded. "The trajectory is too perfect for it to be a coincidence. We will reach Tau Ceti in another fifteen years or so, and I believe our experiment will be concluded."
Nicole groaned. "I'm already old," she said. "By then, if I'm even still alive, I'll be as withered as a prune… Just out of curiosity, what do you think will happen to us after our 'experiment is concluded,' as you put it?"
"That's where we need our imaginations. I suspect that we'll be unloaded from Rama, but what happens to us next is completely unknown… I suppose our fate will be dependent in some way on what has been observed all this time."
"So you definitely agree with me that the Eagle and his buddies back at the Node have been watching us?"
"Absolutely. They have made such a huge investment in this project. I'm certain they're monitoring everything that's going on here in Rama. I must admit I'm surprised that they have left us completely to our own devices and have never interfered in our affairs, but that must be their method."
Nicole was silent for a few seconds. She played absent-mindedly with the red ball beside her, which Richard informed her represented the star Epsilon Indi. "The judge in me," she said somberly, "fears what any reasonable extraterrestrial would conclude about us, based on our behavior in New Eden."
Richard shrugged. "We've been no worse in Rama than we have been for centuries on Earth. Besides, I can't accept that any truly advanced aliens would be making such subjective judgments. If this process of observing spacefarers has been going on for tens of thousands of years, as the Eagle suggested, then the Ramans must have developed quantitative metrics for assessing all aspects of the civilizations they encounter. They are almost certainly more interested in our exact natures, and what this means in some larger sense, than whether we are bad or good."
"I suppose you're right," Nicole said wistfully. "But it's depressing that we, as a species, behave so barbarically, even when we are fairly certain we're being observed." She paused and reflected. "So in your opinion our long interaction with the Ramans, beginning with that first spaceship over a hundred years ago, is almost over?"
"I think so," Richard replied. "Somewhere in the future, possibly when we reach Tau Ceti, our part of this experiment will be concluded. My guess is that after all the data on the creatures currently inside Rama are entered in the Great Galactic Data Base, Rama will be emptied. Who knows, maybe soon thereafter this great cylindrical spacecraft will appear in another planetary system where a different spacefarer is living, and another cycle will begin."
"And that brings us back to my earlier question, which you really did not answer. What will happen to us then?"
"Maybe we, or our offspring, will be sent on a slow journey back to the Earth. Or maybe we will be deemed expendable and terminated once all the data have been collected."
"Neither of those outcomes is very appealing," Nicole said. "And I must say that although I agree with you that we are heading for Tau Ceti, all the rest of your hypothesis strikes me as pure conjecture."
Richard grinned. "I have learned a lot from you, Nicole. Everything else in my hypothesis is intuitive. It feels right to me, based on everything I have learned about the Ramans."
"But wouldn't it be more straightforward to imagine that the Ramans simply have waystations scattered throughout the galaxy, and that the two nearest to us are at Sirius and Tau Ceti?"
"Yes," Richard replied, "but my gut feel is that it's unlikely. The Node was such an awesome engineering creation. If similar facilities exist every twenty or so light-years in the galaxy, there would be billions of them altogether… And remember, the Eagle definitely said the Node could move."
Nicole acknowledged to herself that it was unlikely that a facility as astonishing as the Node had been duplicated billions of times in some great cosmic assembly process. Richard's hypothesis did make some sense. But how sad, Nicole thought briefly, that our entry in the galactic data base will contain so much negative information.
"So where do the avians, sessiles, and our old friends the octospiders fit into your scenario?" Nicole asked a minute later. "Are they just part of the same experiment, with us? And if so, are you suggesting that there is also a colony of octos onboard and that we just haven't met them yet?"
Richard nodded again. "That conclusion is inescapable. If the final phase of each experiment is observing a representative sample of the spacefarers under controlled conditions, it makes sense that the octos are here also." He laughed nervously. 'There may even be some of our same friends from Rama II on the spacecraft with us at this very moment."
"What a lovely set of ideas to think about before sleeping," Nicole said with a smile. "If you're right, you and I have fifteen more years to spend on a spacecraft that's inhabited not only by humans who want to capture and kill us, but also by huge, possibly intelligent arachnids whose nature we do not understand."
"Remember," Richard said with a grin, "I could be wrong."
Nicole stood up and walked toward the door.
"Where are you going?" Richard asked.
'To my bed," Nicole replied with a laugh. "I think I'm developing a headache. I can only contemplate the infinite for a finite period of time."
6
The next morning when Nicole opened her eyes, Richard was standing over her holding two full backpacks. "We're going to explore and look for octospiders," he said excitedly, "behind the black screen. I've left enough food and water to last Tammy and Timmy for two days and I've programmed Joan and Eleanor to find us if there is an emergency."
Nicole watched her husband closely while she was eating her breakfast. His eyes were full of energy and life. This is the Richard I remember the best, Nicole said to herself happily.
"I've been back here twice," Richard said as soon as they had ducked under the raised screen. "But I've never reached the end of this first passageway."
The screen had closed behind them, leaving Richard and Nicole in the dark. "There's no problem with being trapped here on this side, is there?" Nicole asked while they both checked their flashlights.
"Not at all," Richard replied. "The screen will not raise or lower more often than once every minute or so. But if anyone or anything is still in this general area a minute from now, the screen will automatically lift again."
"Now, I should warn you before we start walking," he continued a few seconds later, "this is a very long passageway. I have followed it before, for at least a kilometer, and I have never found anything. Not even a turnoff. And there is absolutely no light. So the first part will be very boring—but it must eventually lead to something, for the biots bringing our supplies must be coming along this path."
Nicole took his hand in hers. "Just remember, Richard," she said easily. "We're not as young as we once were."
Richard shone his flashlight first on Nicole's hair, which was now completely gray, and then on his own gray beard. "We are a couple of old farts, aren't we?" he said gaily.
"Speak for yourself," Nicole rejoined, squeezing his hand.
The passageway was much longer than a kilometer. As Richard and Nicole trudged along, they talked mostly about his astonishing experiences in the second habitat. "I was absolutely terrified when the elevator door opened and I saw the myrmicats for the first time," Richard said.
He had already finished describing to Nicole his stay with the avians and had ju
st reached the point in his chronology where he had descended to the bottom of the cylinder. "I was literally frozen with fear. They were only three or four meters away. Both of them were staring at me. The creamy fluid in their huge oval lower eyes was moving from side to side, and the pairs of eyes up on the stalks were bending around to see me from another point of view." Richard shuddered. "I will never forget that moment."
"Now, let me make certain I have the biology straight," Nicole said a few minutes later, as they approached what appeared to be a branching in the underground corridor. "The myrmicats develop in the manna melons, live fairly short but highly active lives, and then die inside a sessile, where their entire life experiences, you theorize, are somehow added to the neural net's base of knowledge. The life cycle completes when new manna melons grow in the interior of the sessiles. These fledgling creatures are then harvested at the appropriate time by the active myrmicat population."
Richard nodded. "That may not be exactly right," he said, "but it must be close."
"So what we're missing is only the necessary set of conditions for the manna melons to begin the germination process?"
"I was hoping you would help me with that puzzle," Richard said. "After all, Doctor, you are the only one of us with any formal biological training."
The corridor became a Y, each of the two continuations making a forty-five-degree angle with the long, straight passageway from their lair. "Which way, Cosmonaut des Jardins?" Richard asked with a smile, shining his flashlight in both directions. Neither of the two tunnels had a single distinguishing characteristic.
"Let's go to the left first," Nicole said a few seconds later after Richard had created an outline map in his portable computer. The left pathway started to change after only a few hundred meters. The corridor widened into a descending ramp that wound around an extremely thick pole and dropped at least a hundred meters deeper into the shell of Rama. As they climbed down, Richard and Nicole could see lights below them. At the bottom, they encountered a long, wide canal with broad, flat banks. To their left, they saw a pair of crab biots scuttling away from them on the opposite side of the canal, as well as a bridge in the distance, beyond the biots. To their right, a barge was moving down the canal, carrying a full load of diverse but unknown objects, gray and black and white in color, to some ultimate destination in the underground world.
Rama: The Omnibus Page 125
