“No, I didn’t,” Carlo said, laughing heartily. He was already fascinated. “But I do now. Come. Join us. You can add to what your cousin Roberto says.”
She loved the way he kept staring at her. It was as if he were appraising her, as if she were a fine painting or a jeweled necklace, his eyes missing nothing as they roamed unabashedly over her figure. And his easy laughter spurred her on. Francesca’s comments became increasingly outrageous and bawdy.
“You see that poor girl on the demon’s back?” she said while they were gazing at the bewildering range of genius exhibited by Signorelli’s frescoes inside the San Brizio chapel. “She looks like she’s humping the demon in the butt, right? You know who she is? Her face and naked body are portraits of Signorelli’s girlfriend. While he was slaving in here day after day, she became bored and decided to diddle a duke or two on the side. Luca was really pissed, So he fixed her. He condemned her to ride a demon in perpetuity.”
When he stopped laughing, Carlo asked Francesca if she thought the woman’s punishment was fair. “Of course not!” the fourteen-year-old replied, “it’s just another example of the male chauvinism of the fifteenth century. The men could screw anybody they wanted and were called virile; but let a woman try to satisfy herself—”
“Francesca!” Roberto interrupted. “Really. This is too much. Your mother would kill you if she heard what you are saying—”
“My mother is irrelevant at this moment. I’m talking about a double standard that still exists today. Look at…”
Carlo Bianchi could hardly believe his good fortune. A rich clothes designer from Milano, one who had established an international reputation by the time he was thirty, he had just happened to decide, on a whim, to hire a car to take him to Rome instead of going on the usual high-speed train. His sister, Monica, had always told him about the beauty of II Duomo in Orvieto. It had been another last-minute decision to stop. And now. My, my. The girl was such a splendid morsel.
He invited Francesca to dinner when the tour was over. But when they reached the entrance to the fanciest restaurant in Orvieto, the young woman balked. Carlo understood. He took her to a store and bought her an expensive new dress with matching shoes and accessories. He was astonished by how beautiful she was. And only fourteen!
Francesca had never before drunk really fine wine. She drank it as if it were water. Each dish was so delicious that she positively squealed. Carlo was enchanted with his woman-child. He loved the way she let her cigarette dangle from the corner of her lips. It was so unspoiled, so perfectly gauche.
When the meal was over it was dark. Francesca walked with him back to the limousine parked in front of II Duomo. As they went down a narrow alley, she leaned over and playfully bit his ear. He spontaneously pulled her to him and was rewarded with an explosive kiss. The surge in his loins overwhelmed him.
Francesca had felt it too. She did not hesitate a second when Carlo suggested they go for a ride in the car. By the time the limousine had reached the outskirts of Orvieto, she was sitting astride him in the backseat. Thirty minutes later, when they finished making love the second time, Carlo could not bear the thought of parting with this incredible girl. He asked Francesca if she would like to accompany him to Rome.
“Andiamo,” she replied with a smile.
So we went to Rome and then Capri, Francesca remembered. Paris for a week. In Milano you had me live with Monica and Luigi. For appearances. Men are always so worried about appearances.
Francesca’s long reverie was broken when she thought she heard footsteps in the distance. She cautiously stood up in the dark and listened. It was hard for her to hear anything over her own breathing. Then she heard the sound again, off to the left. Her ears told her the sound was out on the ice. A burst of fear flooded her with an image of bizarre creatures attacking their camp from across the ice. She listened again very carefully, but heard nothing.
Francesca turned back toward the camp. ! loved –you, Carlo, she said to herself, if I ever loved any man. Even after you began to share me with your friends. More long-buried pain came to the surface and Francesca fought it with hard anger. Until you started hitting me. That ruined everything. You proved that you were a real bastard.
Francesca very deliberately pushed aside the memories. Now, where were we? she thought as she approached her hut. Ah yes. The issue was Nicole des Jardins. How much does she really know? And what are we going to do about it?
32
NEW YORK EXPLORER
The tiny bell on his wristwatch awakened Dr. Takagishi from a deep sleep. For a few moments he was disoriented, unable to remember where he was. He sat up on his cot and rubbed his eyes. At length he recalled that he was inside Rama and that the alarm had been set to wake him up after five hours of sleep.
He dressed in the dark. When he was finished he picked up a large bag and fumbled around inside for several seconds. Satisfied with its contents, he threw the strap over his shoulder and walked to the door of his hut. Dr. Takagishi peered out cautiously. He could not see lights in any of the other huts. He took a deep breath and tiptoed out the door.
The world’s leading authority on Rama walked out of the camp in the direction of the Cylindrical Sea. When he reached the shore, he climbed slowly down to the icy surface on the stairs cut into the fifty-meter cliff. Takagishi sat on the bottom rung, hidden against the base of the cliff. He removed some special cleats from his bag and attached them to the bottom of his shoes. Before walking out on the ice, the scientist calibrated his personal navigator so that he would be able to keep a constant heading once he left the shoreline.
When he was about two hundred meters away from the shore, Dr. Takagishi reached in his pocket to pull out his portable weather monitor. It dropped on the ice, making a short clacking sound in the quiet night. Takagishi picked it up a few seconds later. The monitor told him that the temperature was minus two degrees Centigrade and that a soft wind was blowing across the ice at eight kilometers per hour.
Takagishi inhaled deeply and was astonished by a peculiar but familiar odor. Puzzled, he inhaled again, this time concentrating on the smell, There was no doubt about it — it was cigarette smoke! He hurriedly extinguished his flashlight and stood motionless on the ice. His mind raced into overdrive, searching for an explanation. Franceses Sabatini was the only cosmonaut who smoked. Had she somehow followed him when he left the camp? Had she seen his light when he checked his weather monitor?
He listened for noises but heard nothing in the Raman night. Still he waited. When the cigarette smell had been gone for several minutes, Dr. Takagishi continued his trek across the ice, stopping every four or five steps to ensure that he was not being followed. Eventually he convinced himself that Francesca was not behind him. However, the cautious Takagishi did not turn on his flashlight again until he had walked more than a kilometer and had become worried that he might have drifted off course.
Altogether it took him forty-five minutes to reach the opposite edge of the sea and the island city of New York. When he was a hundred meters from the shore, the Japanese scientist took a larger flashlight from his bag and switched on its powerful beam. The ghostly silhouettes of the skyscrapers sent an exhilarating chill down his spine. At last he was here! At last he could seek the answers to his lifetime of questions unencumbered by someone else’s arbitrary schedule.
Dr. Takagishi knew exactly where he wanted to go in New York. Each of the three circular sections of the Raman city was further subdivided into three angular portions, like a pie divided into slices. At the center of each of the three main sections was a central core, or plaza, around which the rest of the buildings and streets were arranged. As a boy in Kyoto, after reading everything he could find about the first Raman expedition, Takagishi had wondered what it would be like to stand in the center of one of those alien plazas and stare upward at buildings created by beings from another star.
Takagishi felt certain not only that the secrets of Rama could be under
stood by studying New York, but also that its three plazas were the most likely locations for clues to the mysterious purpose of the interstellar vehicle.
The map of New York drawn by the earlier Raman explorers was as firmly etched in Takagishi’s mind as the map of Kyoto, where he was born and raised. But that first Raman expedition had had only a limited time to survey New York. Of the nine functional units, only one had been mapped in detail; the prior cosmonauts had simply assumed, on the basis of limited observations, that all the other units were identical.
As Takagishi’s brisk pace carried him deeper and deeper into the foreboding quiet of one part of the central section, some subtle differences between this particular segment of Rama and the one studied by Norton’s crew (they had surveyed an adjacent slice) began to emerge. The layout of the major streets in the two units was the same; however, as Dr. Takagishi drew closer to the plaza, the smaller streets broke into a slightly different pattern from the one that had been reported by the first explorers. The scientist in Takagishi forced him to stop often and note all the variations on his pocket computer.
He entered the region immediately surrounding the plaza, where the streets ran in concentric circles. He crossed three avenues and found himself standing opposite a huge octahedron, about a hundred meters tall, with a mirrored exterior. His powerful flashlight beam reflected off its surface and then bounced from building to building around him. Dr. Takagishi walked slowly around the octahedron, searching for an entrance, but he did not find one.
On the other side of the eight-sided structure, in the center of the plaza, was a broad circular space without tall buildings. Shigeru Takagishi moved deliberately around the entire perimeter of the circle, studying the surrounding buildings as he walked. He gained no new insights about the purpose of the structures. When he turned inward at regular intervals to survey the plaza area itself, he saw nothing unusual or particularly noteworthy. Nevertheless, he did enter into his computer the location of the many short, nondescript metallic boxes that divided the plaza into partitions.
When he was again in front of the octahedron, Dr. Takagishi reached into his bag and pulled out a thin hexagonal plate densely covered with electronics. He deployed the scientific apparatus in the plaza, three or four meters away from the octahedron, and then spent ten minutes verifying with his transceiver that all the scientific instruments were properly working. When the Japanese scientist had completed checking the payload, he quickly left the plaza area and headed for the Cylindrical Sea.
Takagishi was in the middle of the second concentric avenue when he heard a short but loud popping noise behind him in the plaza. He turned around but didn’t move. A few seconds later he heard a different sound. This one Takagishi recognized from his first sortie, both the dragging of the metal brushes and the embedded high-frequency singing. He shone his flashlight in the direction of the plaza. The sound stopped. He switched off his flashlight and stood quietly in the middle of the avenue.
Several minutes later the brush dragging began again. Takagishi moved stealthily across the two avenues and started around the octahedron in the direction of the noise. When he was almost to the plaza, a beep, beep from his bag broke his concentration. By the time he turned off the alarm, which was indicating that the scientific package he had just deployed in the plaza had already malfunctioned, there was total quiet in New York. Again Dr. Takagishi waited, but this time the sound did not recur.
He took a deep breath to calm himself and summoned all his courage. Somehow his curiosity won out over his fear and Dr. Takagishi “returned to the plaza opposite the octahedron to find out what had happened to the scientific payload. His first surprise was that the hexagonal package had vanished from the spot where he had left it. Where could it have gone? Who or what could have taken it?
Takagishi knew that he was on the verge of a scientific discovery of overwhelming importance. He was also terrified. Fighting a powerful desire to flee, he shone his large flashlight around the plaza, hoping to find an explanation for the disappearance of the science station. The beam reflected off a small piece of metal some thirty to forty meters closer to the center of the plaza. Takagishi realized immediately that the reflection was coming from the instrument package. He hurried over to it.
He bent down on his knees and examined the electronics. There was no damage that was obvious. He had just pulled out his transceiver to begin a methodical check of all the science instruments when he noticed a ropelike object about fifteen centimeters in diameter at the edge of the flashlight beam illuminating the science package. Dr. Takagishi picked up his light and walked over to the object. It was striped, black and gold, and stretched off into the distance for twelve meters or so, disappearing behind an odd metal shed about three meters tall. He felt the thick rope. It was soft and fuzzy on the top. When he tried to turn it over to feel the bottom, the object began to move. Takagishi dropped it immediately and watched it slither slowly away from him toward the shed. The motion was accompanied by the sound of brushes dragging against metal.
Dr. Takagishi could hear the sound of his own heartbeat. Again he fought the urge to run away. He remembered his dawn meditations as a college student in the garden of his Zen master. He would not be afraid. He ordered his feet to march in the direction of the shed.
The black and gold rope disappeared. There was silence in the plaza. Takagishi approached the shed with his light beam on the ground at the spot where the thick rope had last been visible. He came around the corner and thrust the beam into the shed. He could not believe what he saw. A mass of black and gold tentacles writhed underneath the light.
A high-frequency whine suddenly exploded in his ears. Dr. Takagishi looked over his left shoulder and was thunderstruck. His eyes bugged out of his head. His scream was lost as the noise intensified and three of the tentacles reached out to touch him. The walls of his heart gave way and he slumped, already dead, into the grasp of the amazing creature.
33
MISSING PERSON
“Admiral Heilmann.”
“Yes, General O’Toole.”
“Are you by yourself?”
“Certainly. I just woke up a few minutes ago. My meeting with Dr. Brown is not for another hour. Why are you calling so early?”
“While you were sleeping I received a coded top secret message from COG military headquarters. It’s about Trinity. They wanted to know the status.”
“What do you mean, General?”
“Is this line secure, Admiral? Have you turned off the automatic recorder?”
“Now I have.”
“They asked two questions. Did Borzov die without telling anyone his RQ? Does anyone else on the crew know about Trinity?” “You know the answers to both questions.”
“I wanted to be certain that you hadn’t talked to Dr. Brown. They insisted that I check with you before encoding my answer. What do you think this is all about?”
“I don’t know, Michael. Maybe somebody down on Earth is getting nervous. Wilson’s death probably scared them.”
“It certainly scared me. But not to the point that I would think about Trinity. I wonder if they know something that we don’t.”
“Well, I guess we’ll find out soon enough. All the ISA officials have been insisting that we should evacuate Rama at the first available opportunity. They didn’t even like our decision to rest the crew for several hours first. This time I don’t think they will change their minds.”
“Admiral, do you remember that hypothetical discussion we had with General Borzov during the cruise, about the conditions under which we would activate Trinity?”
“Vaguely. Why?”
“Do you still disagree with his insistence that we must know why the Trinity contingency is being called for? You said at the time that if the Earth thought great danger was imminent, you didn’t personally need to understand the rationale.”
“I’m afraid I’m not following you, General. Why are you asking me these q
uestions?”
“I would like your permission, Otto, when I encode the response to COG military headquarters, to find out why they are asking about the status of Trinity at this particular time. If we are in danger, we have a right to know.”
“You may request additional information, Michael, but I would bet that their inquiry is strictly routine.”
Janos Tabori awakened while it was still dark inside Rama. As he pulled on his flight suit, he made a mental list of the activities that would be required to transport the crab biot to the Newton. If the order to leave Rama was confirmed, they would be departing soon after dawn. Janos consulted the formal evacuation procedure stored on his pocket computer and updated it by adding the new tasks associated with the biot.
He checked his watch. Dawn was only fifteen minutes away, assuming of course that the Rama diurnal cycle was regular. Janos laughed to himself. Rama had produced so many surprises already that there was no certainty the lights would return on schedule. If they did, however, Janos wanted to watch the Raman “sunrise.” He could eat his breakfast after dawn.
A hundred meters from his hut the caged crab biot was immobile, as it had been since it was hoisted away from its companions the previous day. Janos shone his flashlight through the tough, transparent cage wall and checked to see if there were any signs that the biot might have moved during the night. Having established that the biot had not changed position, Janos walked away from the Beta campsite in the direction of the sea.
As he waited for the burst of light, he found himself thinking about the very end of his conversation with Nicole the night before. There was something not quite right about her offhand revelation of the possible cause of General Borzov’s pain on the night he died. Janos remembered vividly the healthy appendix; there was no doubt that the primary diagnosis had been incorrect. But why had Nicole not talked to him about the backup drug diagnosis? Especially if she was conducting an investigation into the issue…
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