Nicole was exhausted after her bout with fear. Within minutes after her flying visitors departed, she was curled up and asleep in the comer of the pit.
She slept soundly for several hours. She was awakened by a loud noise, a crack that resounded through the barn like the report of a gun. She woke up quickly, but heard no more unexplained sounds. Her body reminded her that she was hungry and thirsty. She pulled out what was left of her food. Should I make two tiny meals out of this? she asked herself wearily, or should I eat it alt now and accept whatever comes?
With a deep sigh, Nicole decided to finish off her food and water with one last meal. She was thinking that the two combined might give her enough sustenance that she could temporarily forget about food. She was wrong. While Nicole was drinking the last sip of water from her water flask, her mind was bombarded with images of the bottled spring water that she and her family always had on the table at Beauvois.
There was another loud crack in the distance after Nicole had finished her meal. She stopped to listen, but again there was silence. Her thoughts were dominated by escape ideas, all of them using the avians in some way to help her out of the pit. She was angry with herself for not having tried to communicate with them while she had the chance. Nicole laughed to herself. Of course, they might have decided to eat me. But who’s to say starving to death is to be preferred over being eaten?
Nicole was certain that the avians would come back. Perhaps her certainty was reinforced by the hopelessness of her situation, but nevertheless she started making plans for what she would do when they did return. Hello, she imagined herself saying. She would stand up with an outstretched palm and walk forcefully to the center of the pit, right under the hovering creature. Nicole would then use a special set of gestures to communicate her plight: Pointing repeatedly first at herself and then the pit would indicate that she couldn’t escape; waving at both the avians and the barn roof would ask them for their help.
Two loud sharp noises brought Nicole back to reality. After a brief pause she heard still another crack. Nicole searched through the “Environments” chapter in her computerized Atlas of Rama and then laughed at herself for not having recognized immediately what was occurring. The loud reports were the sound of the ice breaking up as the Cylindrical Sea melted from the bottom. Rama was still inside the orbit of Venus (although the last midcourse maneuver had placed it onto a trajectory whose distance from the sun was now increasing again), and the solar input had finally brought the temperature inside Rama to above the freezing point of water.
The Atlas warned of fierce windstorms, hurricanes that would be created by the atmospheric thermal instabilities following the melting of the sea. Nicole walked to the center of the pit. “Come on, you birds, or whatever you are,” she yelled. “Come get me now and let me have a chance to escape.”
But the avians did not come back. Nicole sat awake in the corner for ten hours, slowly growing weaker as the frequency of the loud reports reached a peak and then gradually diminished. The wind began to blow. At first it was just a breeze, but it became a gale by the time the cracks from the ice breaking up had stopped. Nicole was completely discouraged. When she fell asleep again she told herself that she would probably not be awake more than one or two more times.
The winds pummeled New York as the hurricane raged for hours. Nicole huddled lifelessly in a corner. She listened to the howling wind and remembered sitting in a ski chalet during a blizzard in Colorado. She tried to remember the pleasures of skiing but she could not. Her hunger and fatigue had weakened her imagination as well. Nicole sat very still, her mind devoid of thoughts except for wondering occasionally what it would feel like to die.
She couldn’t remember falling asleep, but then she couldn’t remember waking up either. She was very weak. Her mind was telling her that something had blown into her hole. It was dark again. Nicole crawled from her end of the pit toward the end with the jumbled metal. She did not switch on her flashlight. She bumped into something and started, then she felt it with her hands. The object was big, as large as a basketball. It had a smooth exterior and was oval in shape.
Nicole became more alert. She found her flashlight in her flight suit and illuminated the object. It was off-white and shaped like an egg. She examined it thoroughly. When she pressed on it hard, it gave some under the pressure. Can I eat it? her mind asked, her hunger so severe that she had no worries about what it might do to her.
Nicole pulled out her knife and was able to cut it with difficulty. She feverishly chopped off a chunk and forced it into her mouth. It was tasteless. Nicole spat it out and started to cry. She kicked the object angrily and it rolled over. She thought she heard something. Nicole reached out and pushed it hard, rolling it over again. Yes, she said to herself, yes. That was a sloshing sound.
It was slow cutting through the outside with her knife. After several minutes Nicole retrieved her medical equipment and started working on the object with her power scalpel. Whatever it was, the object was made of three separate and distinct layers. The covering was tough, like the skin of a football, and relatively difficult to manipulate. The second layer was a soft, moist, royal blue compound the consistency of a melon. Inside, in the center, were several quarts of a greenish liquid. Trembling with anticipation, Nicole stuck a cupped hand into the incision and pulled the liquid to her lips. It had an odd, medicinal taste, but it was refreshing. She drank two hurried swallows and then her years of medical training interceded.
Fighting against her desire to drink more, Nicole inserted the probe from her mass spectrometer into the liquid to analyze its chemical constituents. She was in such a hurry that she made a mistake with the first specimen and had to repeat the process. When the results of the analysis were displayed on the tiny modular monitor that could be affixed to any of her instruments, Nicole began to weep with joy. The liquid would not poison her. On the contrary, it was rich in proteins and minerals in the kinds of chemical combinations that the body could process.
“All right, all right!” Nicole shouted out loud. She stood up quickly and nearly fainted. More cautious now, she sat back down on her knees and began the feast of her life. She drank the liquid and ate the moist meat until she was absolutely stuffed. Then she fell into a deep, satisfied sleep.
Nicole’s primary concern when she awakened was to determine the quantity of “manna melon,” as she called it, that was available to her. She had been a glutton, and knew it, but that was in the past. What she needed to do now was to husband the manna melon until she could somehow enlist the aid of the avians.
Nicole measured the melon carefully. Its gross weight had originally been almost ten kilograms, but only a little over eight remained. Her approximate assessment indicated that the inedible outer portion comprised roughly two kilograms, leaving her six kilograms of nourishment split roughly evenly between the liquid and the royal blue meat. Let’s see, she was thinking, three liquid kilograms makes…
Nicole’s thought processes were interrupted as the lights came on again. Yessirree, she said to herself, checking her wristwatch, right on time, with the same secular drift She looked up from her watch and saw the egg-shaped object for the first time in the full light. Her recognition was immediate. Oh my God, Nicole thought as she walked over and traced with her fingers the brown lines wriggling on the creamy-white surface. I had almost forgotten. She reached into her flight suit and pulled out the polished stone that Omeh had given her on New Year’s Eve in Rome. She stared at it and then glanced over at the oval object in the pit. Oh my God, Nicole repeated.
She replaced the stone in her pocket and removed the small green vial, “Ronata will know the time to drink,” she heard her great-grandfather say again. Nicole sat down in the comer and emptied the vial in one gulp.
39
WATERS OF WISDOM
Immediately Nicole’s vision began to blur. She closed her eyes for a second.
When she opened them again she was blinded by a riot o
f bright colors, streaming by her in geometrical patterns as if she were moving very fast. In the center of her sight, way off in the distance, a black dot emerged from the background amid a brilliant set of alternating red and yellow forms. Nicole concentrated on the dot as it continued to grow. It rushed toward her and expanded to fill her vision. She saw a man, an old black man, running across the African savanna on a perfect starry night. Nicole clearly saw his face as he turned to climb a mountain of rocks. The man looked like Omeh but also, somewhat strangely, like her mother.
He raced up the rock mountain with amazing agility. At the top he stood in silhouette, his arms outspread, and stared into the sky at the crescent moon on the horizon. Nicole heard the sound of a firing rocket engine and turned to her left. She watched a small spacecraft descend to the surface of the moon. Two men in space suits started down a ladder. She heard Neil Armstrong say “That’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.”
Buzz Aldrin joined Armstrong on the lunar surface and they both pointed off to their right. They were staring at an old black man standing on a nearby lunar scarp. He smiled. His teeth were very white.
His face loomed ever larger in Nicole’s vision as the lunar landscape behind him began to fade. He started to chant slowly, in Senoufo, but at first Nicole could not comprehend what he was saying. All of a sudden she realized that he was talking to her and that she could understand every word. “I am one of your ancestors from long ago,” he said. “As a boy I went out to meditate the night that people landed on the moon. Because I was thirsty, I drank deeply the waters from the Lake of Wisdom. I flew first to the moon, where I talked with the astronauts, and then to other worlds. I met The Great Ones. They told me you would come to bring the story of Minowe to the stars.”
As Nicole watched, the old man’s head began to grow. His teeth became vicious, long, his eyes yellow. He transformed into a tiger and leapt for her throat. Nicole screamed as she felt the teeth upon her neck. She prepared to die. But the tiger became limp, an arrow was buried deep in its side. Nicole heard a noise and looked up. Her mother, wearing a magnificent flowing red robe and carrying a golden bow, was running gracefully toward a gilded chariot parked in the middle of the air. “Mother wait,” Nicole shouted.
The figure turned. “You were seduced,” her mother said. “You must be more careful. Only three times can I save you. Beware of what you cannot see but know is there.” Anawi climbed into the chariot and took the reins. “You must not die. I love you, Nicole.” The winged red horses arched higher and higher until Nicole could no longer see them.
The color pattern returned to her vision. Nicole heard music now, first far off in the distance, then much closer. It was synthetic, like the sound of crystal bells. Beautiful, haunting, ethereal. There was loud applause. Nicole was sitting in the front row at a concert with her father. On the stage an Oriental man with hair down to the floor, his eyes fixed in a gaze of rapture, stood next to three odd-shaped instruments. The sound was all around her. Itmade her want to cry.
“Come on,” her father said. “We must go,” As Nicole was watching her father turned into a sparrow. He smiled at her. She flapped her own sparrow wings and they were airborne together, leaving the concert behind. The music faded. The air rushed by them. Nicole could see the lovely Loire Valley and a glimpse of their villa at Beauvois. She was content to be going home. But her sparrow father descended instead at Chinon, farther down the Loire. The two sparrows landed in a tree on the castle grounds.
Beneath them, standing in the crisp December air, Henry Plantagenet and Eleanor of Aquitaine were arguing about the succession to the throne of England. Eleanor walked over under the tree and noticed the sparrows. “Why hello, Nicole!” she said, “I didn’t know you were there!” Queen Eleanor reached up and stroked the sparrow’s underbelly. Nicole thrilled to the softness of her touch. “Remember, Nicole,” she said, “destiny is more important than love of any kind. You can endure anything if you are certain of your destiny.”
Nicole smelled fire and sensed they were needed somewhere else. She and her father ascended, turning north toward Normandy. The fire smell grew stronger. They heard a cry for help and urgently flapped their wings.
In Rouen a plain girl with lights in her eyes looked up at them as they approached. The fire below had reached her feet, the first smell of burning flesh was in the air. The girl lowered her eyes in prayer as a makeshift cross was held above her head by a priest. “Blessed Jesus!” she said, tears running down her cheeks.
“We’ll save you, Joan,” Nicole shouted as she and her father dropped into the crowded square. Joan embraced them as they untied her from the stake. The fire exploded around them and everything went black. In the next instant Nicole was flying again, but this time as a great white heron. She was alone, inside Rama, flying high over the city of New York. She banked to avoid one of the avians, who regarded her with shock.
Nicole could see everything in New York in incredible detail. It was as if she had multispectral eyes with a wide-range of lenses. She could spot movement in four different places. Close to the barn, a centipede biot was trudging slowly toward the south end of the building. From the vicinity of each of the three central plazas, heat was emanating from underground sources, causing colored patterns in her infrared vision. Nicole circled down toward the barn and landed safely in her pit.
40
ALIEN INVITATION
I must be prepared for rescue, Nicole said to herself. She had finished filling her flask with the greenish liquid from the center of the manna melon. After carefully sectioning the moist melon flesh and putting the pieces in her old food container packets, Nicole sat back down in her usual corner.
Whew! she thought, returning to the wild mental excursion she had taken after drinking the contents of the vial. What in the world was that all about? Nicole recalled her vision during the Poro, when she was still a child, and the brief conversation about it that she had had with Orneh three years later when Nicole had returned to Nidougou for the funeral of her mother.
“Where did Ronata go?” Omeh had asked one evening when the old man and the girl had been alone together.
She had known immediately what he was asking. “I became a big white bird,” she bad answered. “I flew beyond the Moon and Sun to the great void.”
“Ah,” he had said, “Omeh thought so.”
And why didn’t you ask him then what had happened to you? the scientist in the adult Nicole asked her former ten-year-old self. Then maybe some of this would make sense. But somehow Nicole knew that the vision was beyond analysis, that it existed in a realm as yet unfathomed by the deductive processes that made science so powerful. She thought instead about her mother, about how beautiful she had been in her long flowing red robes. Anawi had saved her from the tiger. Thank you, Mother, Nicole thought. She wished that she had talked longer with her.
It was a weird sound, like dozens of unshod baby feet on a linoleum floor, and it was definitely coming in her direction. Nicole didn’t have much time to wonder. Seconds later the head and antennae of a centipede biot appeared at the edge of her pit and, without slowing down in any way, proceeded directly down the wall at the opposite end.
Altogether the biot was four meters long. It clambered down the wall without difficulty, placing each of its sixty legs directly against the smooth surface and holding on by some kind of suction. Nicole put on her backpack and watched for her opportunity. She was not that surprised by the appearance of the biot. After what she had seen in her vision, she was certain that she was going to be rescued by some means.
The centipede biot consisted of fifteen attached, jointed segments, each with four legs, and an insectlike head with a bizarre array of sensors, two of which were long and thin and resembled antennae. The jumbled pile of metal at the other end of the pit was apparently its spare parts. While Nicole was watching, the biot replaced three of its legs, the carapace for one of its segments, and two knobby protruberances o
n the side of its head. The entire process took no more than five minutes. When it was finished, the biot started again up the wall.
Nicole jumped on the centipede biot’s back when three-fourths of its body was heading upward. The sudden extra weight was too much. The biot lost its grasp and fell, along with Nicole, back into the pit. Moments later it tried again to scale the wall. This time Nicole waited until the entire length of the centipede was heading up the wall, hoping that the strength of the extra segments would make the difference. It was to no avail. The biot and Nicole collapsed into a heap.
One of its front legs had been severely injured during the second fall, so the biot made the necessary repairs before trying to ascend the wall a third time. Nicole, meanwhile, pulled all her strongest suture material out of her medical pack and tied one end of a long octuple thickness around the three back sections of the biot. In the other end of the suture thread she made a loop. After she first put on gloves to protect her hands and then fashioned a waistband to keep the thread from cutting, Nicole tied the loop around her waist.
This could be a disaster, Nicole realized as she imagined all the possible outcomes of her scheme. Ifthe thread does not hold, I could fall. The second time I might not be so lucky.
Rama II r-2 Page 31
