“I think I’ll leave it as a surprise,” the Eagle said. “Your visitor will be here in a few minutes.”
Nicole put on lipstick and powder, brushed her gray hair, and straightened out and plucked her eyebrows. When she was finished, she cast a disapproving look in the mirror. “That’s about all I can do,” she said, as much to herself as to the Eagle.
A few minutes later the Eagle opened the door on the other side of the room and went outside. When he returned mere was an octospider with him. From across the room Nicole saw the royal blue color spill out of its boundaries. “Hello, Nicole. How are you feeling?” the octospider said.
“Dr. Blue!” Nicole yelled excitedly.
Dr. Blue held the monitoring device in front of Nicole. “I will be staying here with you until you are ready to be transferred,” the octospider physician said. ‘The Eagle has other duties at present.”
Bands of color raced across the tiny screen. “I don’t understand,” Nicole said, looking at the device upside down. “When the Eagle used that thing, the readout was all in squiggles and other funny symbols.”
“That’s their special-purpose technological language,” Dr. Blue said. “It’s incredibly efficient, much better than our colors. But of course I can’t read any of it. This device actually is polylingual. There’s even an English mode.”
“So what do you speak when you communicate with the Eagle and I’m not around?” Nicole asked.
“We both use colors,” Dr. Blue responded. “They run across his forehead from left to right.” “You’re kidding,” Nicole said, trying to picture the Eagle with colors on his forehead.
“Not at all,” the octospider answered. “The Eagle is amazing. He jabbers and shrieks with the avians, squeals and whistles with the myrmicats.”
Nicole had never seen the word “myrmicat” in the language of color before. When she asked about the word, Dr. Blue explained that six of the strange creatures were now living in the Grand Hotel and that another four were about to burst forth from germinating manna melons.
“Although all the octospiders and humans slept during the long voyage,” Dr. Blue said, “the manna melons were allowed to develop into myrmicats and then sessile material. They are already into their next generation.”
Dr. Blue replaced the device on the table. “So what’s the verdict for today, Doctor?” Nicole asked.
“You’re gaining strength,” Dr. Blue replied. “But you’re alive because of all the supplemental probes that have inserted. At some time you should consider—”
“— replacing my heart. I know,” said Nicole. “It may seem peculiar, but the idea does not appeal to me very much. I don’t know exactly why I’m against it. Maybe I haven’t yet seen what remains to live for. I know that if Richard were still alive…”
She stopped herself. For an instant Nicole imagined she was back in the viewing room, watching the slow-motion frames of the last seconds of Richard’s life. She had not thought about that moment since she awakened.
“Do you mind if I ask you something very personal?” Nicole said to Dr. Blue.
“Not at all,” the octospider said.
“We watched the deaths of Richard and Archie together,” Nicole said, “and I was so distraught that I could not function- Archie was murdered at the same time, and he was your lifelong partner. Yet you sat beside me and gave me comfort. Did you not feel any sense of loss or sadness at Archie’s death?”
Dr. Blue did not respond immediately. “All octospiders are trained from birth to control what you humans call emotions. The alternates, of course, are quite susceptible to feelings. But those of us who—”
“With all due respect,” Nicole interrupted softly, touching her octospider colleague, “I wasn’t asking you a clinical question, doctor to doctor. It was a question from one friend to another.”
A short burst of crimson, then another of blue, unrelated, slowly flowed around Dr. Blue’s head. “Yes, I felt a sense of loss,” Dr. Blue said. “But I knew it was coming. Either then or later. When Archie joined the war effort, his termination became certain. And besides, my duty at that moment was to help you.”
The door to the room opened and the Eagle entered. The alien was carrying a large box full of food, clothing, and miscellaneous equipment. He informed Nicole that he had brought her space suit and that she was going to venture out of her controlled environment in the very near future.
“Dr. Blue says that you can speak in color,” Nicole said playfully. “I want you to show me.”
“What do you want me to say?” the Eagle replied in orderly narrow color bands that started on the left side of his forehead and scrolled to the right.
“That’s enough,” Nicole said with a laugh. “You are truly amazing.”
Nicole stood on the floor of the gigantic factory and stared at the pyramid in front of her. Off to her right, less than a kilometer away, a group of special-purpose biots, including a pair of mammoth bulldozers, were building a tall mountain. “Why are you doing all this?” Nicole said into the tiny microphone inside her helmet.
“It’s part of the next cycle,” the Eagle replied. “We have determined that these particular constructions enhance the likelihood of obtaining what we want from the experiment.”
“So you already know something about the new space-farers?”
“I don’t know the answer to that,” the Eagle said. “I have no assignment associated with the future of Rama.”
“But you told us before,” Nicole said, not satisfied, “that no changes were made unless they were necessary.”
“I can’t help you,” the Eagle said. “Come, get in the rover. Dr. Blue wants to have a closer look at the mountain.”
The octospider looked peculiar in her space suit. In fact, Nicole had laughed out loud when she had first seen Dr. Blue with the glove-fitting white fabric covering her charcoal body and her eight tentacles. Dr. Blue also had a transparent helmet around her head, through which it was easy to read her colors.
“I was astonished,” Nicole said to Dr. Blue, who was sitting beside her as the open rover moved across the flat.terrain toward the mountain, “when we first came outside… No, that’s not a strong enough word. You and the Eagle had both told me that we were in the factory and that a was being prepared for another voyage, but I never expected all this.”
“The pyramid was built around you,” the Eagle interred from the driver’s seat in front of them, “while you sleeping. If we had not been able to build without disturbing your environment, it would have been necessary to awaken you much earlier.”
“Doesn’t this entire business just amaze you?” Nicole continued to face Dr. Blue. “Don’t you wonder what kind of beings conceived of this grand project in the first place? And also created artificial intelligence like the Eagle? It is almost impossible to imagine.”
“It’s not as difficult for us,” the octospider said. “Remember, we have known about superior beings from the beginning. We only exist as intelligent creatures because the Precursors altered our genes. We have never had a period in our history when we thought we were at the apex of life.”
“Nor will we, ever again,” mused Nicole. “Human history, whatever it turns out to be, has now been profoundly and irrevocably altered.”
“Maybe not,” the Eagle said from the front seat. “Our data base indicates that some species are not significantly impacted by contact with us. Our experiments are designed to allow for that possibility. Our contact occurs during a finite interval, with only a small percentage of the population. There is no continuous interaction unless the species under study takes overt action to create it. I doubt if life on Earth at this very moment is much different than it would have been if no Rama spacecraft had ever visited your solar system.”
Nicole leaned forward in her seat. “Do you know that for a fact?” she said. “Or are you just guessing?”
The Eagle’s answer was vague. “Certainly your history was changed by Rama’s appearance,�
� he said. “Many major events would not have occurred if there had not been any contact. But a hundred more years from now, or five hundred… How different will Earth be then from what it would have been?”
“But the human point of view must have changed,” Nicole argued. “Surely the knowledge that there exists in the universe, or at least existed in some earlier epoch, an intelligence advanced enough to build an interstellar robotic spacecraft larger than our greatest city cannot be cast aside as insignificant information. It creates a different perspective for the entire human experience. Religion, philosophy, even the fundamentals of biology must be revised in the presence—”
“I am glad to see,” the Eagle interrupted, “that at least some small measure of your optimism and idealism has survived all these years. Recall, however, that in New Eden the humans knew that they were living inside a domain especially constructed for them by extraterrestrials. And they were told, by you and others, that they were being continually observed. Even so, when it became apparent that the aliens, whoever they were, did not intend to interfere in the daily activities of the humans, the existence of those advanced beings became irrelevant.”
The rover arrived at the base of the mountain. “I wanted to come over here,” Dr. Blue said, “out of curiosity. We did not have any mountains, as you know, in our realm on Rama. And not many in my region of our home planet when I was a juvenile. I thought it would be nice to stand on the top.”
“I have commandeered one of the large bulldozers,” the Eagle said. “Our journey to the summit will only take ten minutes. You may be frightened in spots because of the steepness of the climb, but it is perfectly safe, as long as you wear your seat belts.”
Nicole was not too old to enjoy the spectacular climb. The bulldozer, as large as an office building, did not have very comfortable seats for passengers and some of the bumps were quite violent, but the vistas that opened up as the trio ascended were definitely worth the trouble.
The mountain was over a kilometer high and about ten kilometers around its approximately round circumference. Nicole could clearly see the pyramid in which she had been staying when the bulldozer was only a quarter of the way up the mountain. Farther away, in all directions, the horizon was dotted with isolated construction projects of Unknown purpose.
So now it all begins again, Nicole thought. This rebuilt Rama will soon enter another set of star systems. And what will it find? Who are the spacefarers who will next walk across this ground? Or climb this mountain?
The bulldozer halted on a plateau very near the summit and the three passengers disembarked. The view was breathtaking. As Nicole surveyed the scene, she recalled her wonder on that very first trip into Rama, when she had been riding down the chairlift and the vast alien world had stretched out in front of her. Thank you, she thought, addressing the Eagle in her mind, for keeping me alive. You were right. This experience alone and the memories it triggers are more than enough reason to continue.
Nicole turned around to face the rest of the mountain. She saw something small flying in and out of some bushy-looking growths, red in color, that were no more than twenty meters away. She walked over and captured one of the flying objects in her hand. It was the size and shape of a butterfly. Its wings were decorated with a variegated pattern without symmetry or any other design principle that Nicole could discern. She let one go and then captured another. The pattern on the second Raman butterfly was altogether different, but still rich in both color and decoration.
The Eagle and Dr. Blue walked up beside her. Nicole showed them what she was holding in her hand. “Flying biots,” the Eagle said without additional comment.
Nicole marveled again at the tiny creature. Something astonishing happens every day, she remembered Richard saying. And we are then always reminded of what a joy it is to be alive.
2
Nicole had barely finished her bath when the two biots entered the room. One was a crab and the other looked like a small truck. The crab used a combination of its powerful pincers and its formidable array of ancillary gadgetry to cut Nicole’s sleeping container into manageable pieces. The pieces were then stacked in the bed of the truck. On its way out of the room less than a minute later, the crab grabbed the white bathtub and all the remaining chairs and piled them on top of the stacks in the truck bed. It then put the table on its own back and disappeared from the empty room behind the truck biot.
Nicole straightened her dress. “I’ll never forget the first time I saw a crab biot,” she commented to her two companions. “It was on the huge screen in the Newton control center, years and years ago. We were all terrified.”
“So today’s the day,” Dr. Blue said in color several seconds later. “Are you ready to check into the Grand Hotel?”
“Probably not,” Nicole said with a smile. “From what you and the Eagle have said, I guess I have enjoyed my last moment of solitude.”
“Your family and friends are very excited about seeing you,” the Eagle said. “I visited them yesterday and told them you would be coming. You’ll stay with Max, Eponine, Ellie, Marius, and Nikki. Patrick, Nai, Benjy, Kepler, and Maria are next door. As I explained to you last week, Patrick and Nai have been treating Maria as their own daughter since shortly after everyone awakened. They know the whole story of how you rescued Maria during the bombing.”
“I don’t know if ‘rescued’ is exactly the correct word,” Nicole said, remembering clearly her last hours in the old Rama spacecraft. “I picked her up because there was no one to look after her. Anybody would have done the same thing.”
“You saved her life,” the Eagle said. “Not more than an hour after you left the zoo with the girl, three large bombs devastated her compound and the two adjacent sections. Maria certainly would have been killed if you hadn’t found her.”
“She is now a beautiful and intelligent young woman,” Dr. Blue said. “I met her once briefly several weeks ago. Ellie says Maria is incredibly energetic. According to Ellie, the girl is the first one awake in the morning and the last one in bed at night.”
Like Katie, Nicole couldn’t help but think. Who are you, Maria? she wondered. And why were you sent into my life at just that moment?
“Ellie also told me that Maria and Nikki are inseparable,” Dr. Blue continued. “They study together, eat together, and talk incessantly about everything. Nikki has told Maria all about you.”
“How is that possible?” Nicole said with a smile. “Nikki was not yet four years old the last time that I saw her. Human children don’t retain memories from that early.”
“They definitely do if they sleep through the next fifteen years,” the Eagle said. “Kepler and Galileo also have very clear recollections of their early days… But we can talk while we travel. It’s time for us to leave now.”
The Eagle helped Nicole and Dr. Blue put on their space suits. Then he picked up the suitcase of Nicole’s belongings. “I’ve put your medical bag in here with your clothes, as well as the cosmetics you’ve been using these last several days,” he said.
“My medical bag?” Nicole said. She laughed. “Goodness, I had almost forgotten. I had it with me, didn’t I, when I found Maria? Thank you.”
The trio walked out of the room, which was on the bottom floor of the large pyramid. A few minutes later they moved through the great arched entrance to the building. Outside, in the bright light of the factory, the rover was waiting for them. “It will take us about half an hour to reach the high-speed elevators,” the Eagle said. “Our shuttle is parked at the Dock, on the uppermost level.”
As the rover moved away, Nicole turned around and looked behind her. Beyond the pyramid was the tall mountain they had climbed three days before. “So you really have no idea why the butterfly biots are there?” Nicole said into the microphone in her space helmet.
“No,” said the Eagle. “My assignment covers only your cycle.”
Nicole continued to stare behind her. The rover passed a set of tall poles, ten or twelve alt
ogether, connected by wires at the top, middle, and bottom. All this will be pan of the new Rama, Nicole thought. Suddenly it occurred to her that she was about to leave the world of Rama for the very last time. A powerful feeling of sadness swept over her. This has been my home, she said to herself, and I am going away forever.
“Would it be possible,” Nicole said to the Eagle without turning around, “for me to see any of the other parts of Rama before we leave for good?”
“What for?” the Eagle asked.
“I’m not exactly certain,” Nicole answered. “Maybe just so I can linger for an extra hour in my memories.”
“The two bowls and the Southern Hemicylinder have already been completely remodeled. You would not recognize them. The Cylindrical Sea has been drained and removed. Even New York is in the process of being dismantled.”
“But it’s not completely destroyed yet, is it?” Nicole asked.
“No, not yet,” replied the Eagle.
“Then can we go there, please, just for a short while?”
Please indulge an old woman, Nicole thought. Even though she doesn’t understand why herself.
“All right,” the Eagle said, “but we’ll be delayed. New York is in another part of the factory.”
They were standing on a parapet near the top of one of the tall skyscrapers. Most of New York was gone, the buildings bulldozed into heaps by the awesome power of the large biots. What was left was twenty or thirty buildings around one plaza.
“There were three lairs underneath the city,” Nicole was explaining to Dr. Blue. “One for us, one for the avians, and a third occupied by your cousins. I was down inside the avian lair when Richard came to… rescue me…” She stopped. Nicole realized that she had told Dr. Blue the story before and that octospiders never forgot anything. “Do you mind?” she asked.
“Please continue,” the octospider said.
“During the whole time that we were here, none of us on this island knew that there were entrances to some of these buildings. Isn’t that amazing? Oh, how I wish that Richard were still alive and I could have seen his face when the Eagle opened the door to the octahedron. He would have been so shocked.
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