by Arthur C.
"Do you think the avian cover opens in the same way?" Nicole asked, after Richard had very carefully searched the environs and found a flat plate on one of the buildings that looked decidedly out of place. Pressing hard against the plate had caused the cover to open.
"Probably," he answered. "Well have to go back and check."
"Then these places are not very secure," Nicole said. The two of them walked back onto the street and knelt down to look in the hole. A broad, steep ramp descended from beside them and disappeared into the darkness below. They could only see about ten meters into the hole.
"It looks like one of those ancient parking lots," Richard remarked. "Back when everybody had automobiles." He stepped on the ramp. "It even feels like concrete."
Nicole watched as her companion moved slowly down the ramp. When Richard's head was below the ground level, he turned and spoke to her. "Aren't you coming?" he asked. He had switched on his flashlight beam and had illuminated a small landing another few meters below.
"Richard," Nicole said from above. "I think we should discuss this. I don't want to be stuck—"
"Ah-ha!" Richard exclaimed. As soon as his foot hit the first landing, some lights around him automatically lit the next phase of the descent. "The ramp doubles back," he shouted, "and continues down. Looks just the same." He turned and disappeared from Nicole's field of view.
"Richard," Nicole now yelled, a little exasperated, "will you please stop for a minute? We must talk about what we're doing."
A few seconds later Richard's smiling face reappeared. The two cosmonauts discussed their options. Nicole insisted that she was going to stay outside, in New York, even if Richard was going to continue with his exploration. At least that way, she argued, she could guarantee that they would not be stranded in the hole.
While she was talking, Richard was standing on the first landing and surveying the area around him. The walls were made of the same material Nicole had found in the avian lair. Small strip lights, looking not unlike normal fluorescent lights on Earth, ran along the wall to illuminate the path.
"Move away just a second, will you?" Richard shouted in the middle of their conversation.
At first puzzled, Nicole backed away from the entrance to the rectangular hole. "Farther," she heard Richard yell. Nicole walked over and stood against one of the surrounding buildings.
"Is this far enough?" she had just finished shouting when the covering on the hole began to close. Nicole ran forward and tried to stop the motion of the cover, but it was much too heavy. "Richard," she cried as the hole disappeared beneath her.
Nicole pounded on the cover and remembered her own feelings of frustration when she had been locked in the avian lair. She quickly ran back over to the building and pressed the embedded flat panel. Nothing happened. Almost a minute passed. Nicole became anxious. She ran back into the street and called for her colleague.
"I'm right here, under the cover," he answered, bringing Nicole considerable relief. "I found another plate near the first landing and pressed it. I think it toggles the cover closed or open, but it may have a timing delay constraint. Give me a few minutes. Don't you try to open the cover. And don't stand too near it."
Nicole backed away and waited. Richard had been correct. Several minutes later the cover opened and he emerged from the hole with a big grin on his face. "See," he said, "I told you not to worry… Now what's for lunch?"
As they descended the ramp, Nicole heard the familiar sound of running water. In a little room about twenty meters behind the landing, they found the identical piping and cistern that had been in the avian lair. Richard and Nicole both filled their flasks with the fresh, delicious water.
Outside the room there were no horizontal tunnels leading off in both directions, only another descending ramp dropping five more meters beneath the floor. Richard's flashlight beam crawled slowly across the dark walls near the water room. "Look here, Nicole," he said, pointing at what was a very subtle variation in building material. "See, it arches around to the other side."
She followed his beam as it inscribed a long circular arc on the wall. "It looks as if there were at least two phases of construction."
"Exactly," he replied. "Maybe there were horizontal tunnels here as well, at least in the beginning, and they were sealed off later." Neither of them said anything else as they continued their descent. Back and forth went the identical ramps. Whenever Richard and Nicole touched a new landing, the next descending ramp was illuminated.
They were fifty meters underneath the surface when the ceilings above them opened up and the ramps terminated in a large cavern. The circular floor of the cave was about twenty-five meters in diameter. There were four dark tunnels, five meters in height and equally spaced at ninety degrees around the circle, that exited from the cavern.
"Eenie, Meenie, Mynie, Moe," Richard said.
"I'll take Moe," Nicole said. She headed toward one of the tunnels. When she was within a few meters of the entrance, the lights in the near portion of the tunnel switched on.
This time it was Richard's turn to be hesitant. He stared cautiously into the tunnel and made some quick entries into his computer. "Does it look to you as if this tunnel curves slightly to the right? See, there at the end of the lights?"
Nicole nodded. She looked over Richard's shoulder to see what he was doing. "I'm making a map," he said in response to her curiosity. "Theseus had string and Hansel and Gretel had bread. We have them both beat. Aren't computers wonderful?"
She smiled. "So what's your guess?" Nicole said while they were walking along in the near part of the tunnel. "Will it be a Minotaur or a gingerbread house with a wicked witch?"
We should be so lucky, Nicole thought. Her fear was increasing as they penetrated deeper and deeper into the tunnel. She recalled that awful moment of terror in the pit when she had first seen the avian hovering over her with its beak and talons extending in her direction. An icy chill ran down her spine. There it is again, she said to herself, that feeling that something terrible is going to happen.
She stopped. "Richard," she said, "I don't like this. We should turn back—"
They both heard the noise at the same time. It was definitely behind them, back in the vicinity of the circular cavern they had just left. It sounded like hard brushes dragging against metal.
Richard and Nicole huddled together. "That's the same sound," he whispered, "that I heard the first night in Rama, when we were at the walls of New York."
The tunnel behind them curved slightly to the left. When they looked back in that direction, the lights were off at the limit of their vision. The second time they heard the sound, however, some lights came on in the far distance almost simultaneously, indicating something was near the entrance to their tunnel.
Nicole bolted. She must have covered the next two hundred meters in thirty seconds, despite her Bight suit and backpack. She stopped and waited for Richard. Neither of them heard the sound again and no new lights were illuminated in the distant reaches of the tunnel.
"I'm sorry," Nicole said when Richard finally arrived. "I panicked. I think I've been in this alien wonderland too long."
"Jesus," Richard responded with a disapproving frown. I've never seen anybody run that fast." His frown changed into a smile. "Don't feel bad, Nikki," he said. "I was scared shitless too. But I was frozen in place."
Nicole continued taking deep breaths and stared at Richard. "What did you call me?" she asked, somewhat belligerently.
"Nikki," he replied. "I thought it was time for me to have my own special name for you. Don't you like it?"
Nicole was speechless for ten full seconds. Her mind was millions of kilometers and fifteen years away, in a hotel suite in Los Angeles, her body experiencing wave after wave of pleasure. "That was remarkable, Nikki, truly wonderful," the prince had said several minutes later. She had told Henry on that night fifteen years before not to call her Nikki, that it sounded like a name for a buxom showgirl or a tart.
&nbs
p; Richard was snapping his fingers in front of her face. "Hello, hello. Anybody home?"
Nicole smiled. "Sure, Richard," she replied. "Nikki's just fine—as long as you don't use it all the time."
They continued to walk slowly along the tunnel. "So where did you go back there?" Richard asked.
Somewhere I can never tell you about, Nicole mused. Because each of us is the sum of all we have ever experienced. Only the very young have a clean slate. The rest of us must live forever with everything we have ever been. She slid her arm through Richard's. And must have the good sense to know when to keep it private.
The tunnel seemed endless. Richard and Nicole had almost decided to turn around when they came to a dark entryway off to their right. With no hesitation they both walked inside. The lights came on immediately. Inside the room, on the big wall to the left of them, were twenty-five flat rectangular objects, arranged in five orderly rows with five columns each. The opposite wall was empty. Within seconds after their entrance, the two cosmonauts heard a high-frequency squeaky sound coming from the ceiling. They tensed briefly, but relaxed as the squeaking continued and there were no new surprises.
They held hands and walked to one end of the long narrow room. The objects on the wall were photographs, most of them recognizable as having been taken somewhere inside Rama. The great octahedron near the central plaza was featured in several of the photos. The remaining pictures were a balance between scenes of the buildings of New York and wide-angle shots of panoramas around the interior of Rama.
Three of the photographs were particularly fascinating to Richard. They depicted sleek, aerodynamically curved boats plying the Cylindrical Sea; in one of the photographs a great wave was about to crash over the top of a large boat. "Now there's what we need," Richard said to Nicole excitedly. "If we could find one of them, our troubles would be over."
The squeaking above them continued with very little modulation. A spotlight moved from picture to picture at moments when there was a pause in the squeak. Nicole and Richard easily concluded that they were in a museum on some kind of tour, but there was nothing else they could know for certain. Nicole sat down against a side wall. "I'm having a lot of trouble with all this," she said. "I feel totally out of control."
Richard sat down beside her. "Me too," he said, nodding. "And I just arrived in New York. So I can imagine what all this is doing to you."
They were silent for a moment. "You know what bothers me the most?" Nicole said, trying to give some expression to the helplessness she was feeling. "It's how very little I understood and appreciated my own ignorance. Before I came on this voyage, I thought I knew the general dimensions of the relationship between my own knowledge and the knowledge of mankind. But what is staggering about this mission is how very small the entire range of human knowledge might be compared to what could be known. Just think, the sum of everything all human beings know or have ever known might be nothing more than an infinitesimal fraction of the Encyclopedia Galactica—"
"It is really frightening," Richard interrupted enthusiastically. "And thrilling at the same time… Sometimes when I'm in a bookstore or a library, I am overwhelmed by all the things that I do not know. Then I am seized by a powerful desire to read all the boob, one by one. Imagine what it would be like to be in the true library, one that combined the knowledge of all the species in the universe… The very thought makes me woozy."
Nicole turned to him and slapped his leg. "All right, Richard," she said jokingly, changing the mood, "now that we have reaffirmed how incredibly stupid we are, what's our plan? I figure we have already covered about a kilometer in this tunnel. Where do we go from here?"
"I propose we walk another fifteen minutes in the same direction. In my experience tunnels always lead someplace. If we don't find anything, we'll turn around."
He helped Nicole up and gave her a small hug. "All right, Nikki," he said with a wink. "Half a league onward."
Nicole frowned and shook her head. "Twice is enough for one day," she said, extending her hand toward Richard.
46
THE BETTER PART OF VALOR
The huge circular hole below them extended into the darkness. Only the top five meters of the shaft were lit. Metal spikes, about a meter long, protruded from the wall, each separated from its neighbors by the same distance.
"This is definitely the destination of the tunnels," Richard muttered to himself. He was having some difficulty integrating this huge, cylindrical hole with its walls of spikes into his overall conception of Rama. He and Nicole had walked around the perimeter twice. They had even backtracked several hundred meters down the other, adjacent tunnel, concluding from its slight curvature to the right that it had probably originated at the same cavern as the tunnel they had followed earlier.
"Well," Richard said at length, shrugging his shoulders, "here we go," He put his right foot on one of the spikes to test its ability to hold his weight. It was firm. He moved his left leg down to another of the spikes and descended one more level with his right leg. "The spacing is nearly perfect," he said, glancing back at Nicole. "It shouldn't be a difficult climb."
"Richard Wakefield," Nicole said from the rim of the hole, "are you trying to tell me that you intend to climb down into that chasm? And that you expect me to follow?"
"I don't expect anything of you," he replied. "But I can't see turning back now. What's our alternative? Should we go back down the tunnel to the ramps and exit? For what? To see if anyone has found us yet? You saw the photographs of the boats. Maybe they're right here at the bottom. Maybe there's even a secret river that runs underground into the Cylindrical Sea."
"Maybe," Nicole said, starting to descend slowly now that Richard's progress had triggered another bank of lights below them, "one of those things that made the bizarre noise is waiting for us down at the bottom."
"I'll find out," Richard said. "Hallooo, down there. We two human-type beings are coming down." He waved and momentarily lost his balance.
"Don't be a show-off," Nicole said, coming down beside him. She paused to catch her breath and look around. Her two feet were resting on spikes and she was holding tightly to two others with her hands. I must be insane, she said to herself, just look at this place. It's easy to imagine a hundred gruesome deaths. Richard had dropped down to another pair of spikes. And look at him. Is he totally immune to fear? Or just reckless? He actually seems to be enjoying all this.
The third bank of lights illuminated a lattice on the opposite wall below them. It was hanging among all the spikes and, from a distance in the dim light, looked startlingly like a smaller version of the object that had been attached to the two skyscrapers in New York. Richard hurried around the cylinder to examine the lattice. "Come over here," he shouted at Nicole. "I think it's the same damn material."
The lattice was anchored to the wall by small bolts. At Richard's insistence, Nicole cut off a piece and handed it to him. He stretched it and watched it regain its shape. He studied its internal structure. "It is the same stuff," he said. His brow knitted into furrows. "But what the hell does it mean?"
Nicole stood beside him and idly shone her flashlight into the depths below them. She was about to suggest that they climb out and head for more familiar terrain when she thought she saw a reflection from a floor about twenty meters below. "I'm going to make you a proposition," Nicole said to Richard. "While you're studying that lattice cord, I'll drop down another several meters. We may be near the bottom of this bizarre well of spikes, or whatever it is. If not, then we'll abandon this place."
"All right," Richard said absentmindedly. He was already involved in his examination of the lattice cord using the microscope he had taken from his backpack.
Nicole nimbly descended to the floor. "I guess you'd better come down," she called to Richard. "There are two more tunnels, one large and one small. Plus another hole in the center—" He was beside her immediately. He had climbed down as soon as he had seen the lower platform illuminated by lights.
Running out of each of the two tunnels, and penetrating half a ledge-width into the ring, were two small parallel strips of unknown material that were fastened to the floor. The strips were very close together in the smaller tunnel and more widely spaced in the other. Richard was sitting on his knees examining the strips in front of the large tunnel when he heard a distant rumble. "Listen," he said to Nicole, as the two of them instinctively backed away from the entrance.
The rumbling increased and changed into a whining sound, as if something were moving swiftly through the air. Far off in the tunnel, which ran straight as an arrow, Richard and Nicole could see some lights switch on. They tensed. They didn't need to wait long for an explanation. A vehicle that resembled a hovering subway burst into view and sped toward them, stopping suddenly with its front edge just over the farthest extension of the strips on the floor.
Richard and Nicole had recoiled as the vehicle had hurtled toward them. Both were dangerously close to the edge of the ring. For several seconds they stood in silence, each staring at the aerodynamic shape hovering in front of them. Then they looked at each other and laughed simultaneously. "Okay," Nicole said nervously, "I get it. We've crossed into some new dimension. In this one it's just a little difficult to find the subway station. . . . This is so totally absurd. We climb down a spiked barrel and end up in a Metro station… I don't know about you, Richard, but I've had enough. I'll take a few normal avians and manna melon any day of the week…"
