Rama Revealed(Rama IV)

RETURN TO THE NODE Chapter 1
The dreams came before the light. They were disconnected dreams, random images sometimes expanding into short, unified sets without apparent purpose or direction. Colors and geometric patterns were the earliest dreams she remembered. Nicole could not recall when they had started. At some point she had thought for the first time, I am Nicole. I must still be alive, but that had been long ago. Since then she had seen, in her mind's eye, entire scenes, including the faces of other people. Some she had recognized. That's Omeh, she had said to herself. That's my father. She had felt sadness as she had awakened more each time. Richard had been in her last several dreams. And Katie. They're both dead, Nicole had remembered. They died before I went to sleep.

When she opened her eyes, she could still see nothing.

The darkness was complete. Slowly Nicole became more aware of her surroundings. She dropped her hands beside her and felt the soft texture of the foam with her fingers. She turned over on her side with very little effort. I must be weightless, Nicole thought, her mind beginning to function after years of being dormant. But where am I? she asked herself before falling asleep again.

The next time she awakened, Nicole could see a solitary light source at the other end of the closed container in which she was lying. She wiggled her feet free of the white foam and held them up in front of the light. They were both covered with clear slippers. She stretched out to see if she could touch the light source with her toes, but it was too far away.

Nicole put her hands in front of her eyes. The light was so dim that she could not see any details, only a dark outline that silhouetted all the fingers. There was not enough room in the container for her to sit up, but she could manage to reach the top with one hand, if she propped herself up with the other. Nicole pressed her fingers against the soft foam. Behind the foam was a hard surface, wood or possibly even metal.

The slight activity wore her out. She was breathing rapidly and her heart rate had increased. Her mind became more alert. Nicole remembered clearly the last moments before she had gone to sleep in Rama. The Eagle came, she thought, just after I found that baby girl in the Alternate Domain. So where am I now? And how long have I slept?

She heard a gentle knocking on the container and lay back down in the foam. Someone has come. My questions will be answered soon. The lid of the container was slowly raised. Nicole shielded her eyes from the light. She saw the Eagle's face and heard his voice.

The two of them were sitting together in a large room. Everything was white. The walls, the ceiling, the small round table in front of them, even the chairs, the cup, the bowl, and the spoon were white. Nicole took another sip of the warm soup. It tasted like chicken broth. Over to her left the white container in which she had been lying rested against the wall. There were no other objects in Uje room.

"...About sixteen years altogether-traveler's time, of course," the Eagle was saying. Traveler's time, Nicole thought. That's the same term that Richard used. "... We did not retard your aging nearly as efficiently as before. Our preparations were somewhat hurried."

Despite the weightlessness, it seemed to Nicole that every physical act was a monumental effort. Her muscles had been inactive for too long. The Eagle had helped her shuffle the few steps between the container and the table. Her hands had trembled some while she had drunk the water and eaten the soup.

"So am I about eighty?" she now asked the Eagle in a halting voice, one that she barely recognized.

"More or less," the alien replied. "It would be impossible to give you a meaningful age."

Nicole stared across the table at her companion. The Eagle looked just the same as always. The powder-blue eyes on either side of his protruding gray beak had lost none of their mystical intensity. The feathers on the top of his head were still pure white, contrasting sharply with the dark gray feathers of his face, neck, and back. The four fingers on each hand, creamy white and featherless, were as smooth as a child's.

Nicole studied her own hands for the first time. They were wrinkled and discolored from age spots. She turned them over and from somewhere in her memory she heard a laugh. Phthisic, Richard was saying. Isn't that a great word? It means more withered than 'withered.'... I wonder if I'll ever have a chance to use it... The memory faded. My hands are phthisic, Nicole thought.

"Don't you ever age?" she asked the Eagle.

"No," he replied. "At least not in the sense that you use the word. I am regularly maintained and subsystems that are exhibiting performance degradation are replaced."

"So you never die either?"

He hesitated for a moment. "That's not completely accurate," the Eagle said. "Like all members of my group, I was created for a specific purpose. If there is no longer a need for me to exist and I cannot be readily programmed to 'accomplish some new, necessary function, then I will be unpowered."

Nicole started to laugh but caught herself. "I'm sorry," she said, "I know it's not funny... but your choice of words struck me as peculiar. 'Unpowered' is such a - "

"It's also the correct word," the Eagle said. "Inside me are several tiny power sources, as well as a sophisticated power distribution system. All the power elements are essentially modular and therefore transferable from one of us to another. If I am no longer needed, the elements can be removed and used in another being."

"Like an organ transplant," Nicole said, finishing her water.

"Somewhat," the Eagle replied. "Which brings me to another issue... During your long sleep, your heart actually stopped beating twice, the second time just after we arrived here in the Tau Ceti system. We have managed to keep you alive with drugs and mechanical stimulation, but your heart is now extremely weak. If you want to have an active life for any appreciable additional period, you will need to consider replacing your heart."

"Is that why you left me in there"-Nicole pointed at the container-"for so long?" she asked.

"Partially," said the Eagle. He had already explained to Nicole that most of the others from Rama had awakened much earlier, some as long as a year ago, and that they were living in crowded conditions in another venue not very far away. "But we were also concerned about how comfortable you might be over in the converted starfish. We refurbished that spacecraft in a hurry, so there are not many amenities. We were also concerned because you are by far our oldest human survivor."

That's right, Nicole said to herself. The octospider attack wiped out everyone over forty or so. I am the only old person left.

The Eagle had stopped talking for a moment. When Nicole looked at the alien again, his mesmerizing eyes seemed to be expressing an emotion. "Besides, you are special to us. You have played a key role in this endqavor."

Is it possible, Nicole thought suddenly, still staring at the Eagle's fascinating eyes, that this electronic creature actu-

ally has feelings? Could Richard have been right when he insisted that there are no aspects of our humanity that could not be eventually duplicated by engineering?

"We waited as long as we could to wake you," the Eagle continued, "to minimize the length of time that you would have to spend in less than ideal conditions. Now, however, we are preparing to enter another phase of our operations. As you can see, this room was emptied, except for you, long ago. In another eight to ten days we will begin dismantling the walls. By then you should have recuperated enough."

Nicole asked again about her family and friends. "As I told you before," the Eagle said, everyone survived the long sleep. However, the adjustment to living in what your friend Max calls the Grand Hotel has not been easy for anybody. All of those who were with you in the Emerald City, plus the girl Maria and Ellie's husband, Robert, were originally assigned to two large rooms, side by side, in one section of the starfish. Everyone was told that the living arrangements were only temporary, and that eventually they would be transferred to better quarters. Nevertheless, Robert and Galileo were not able to adapt successfully to the unusual conditions in the Grand Hotel."

"What happened to them?" Nicole asked with alarm. "They were both transferred, for sociological reasons, to another, more highly regulated area of the spacecraft. Robert was moved first. He went into a severe depression shortly after he awakened from the long sleep and was never able to break out of it. Unfortunately, he died about four months ago. Galileo is all right physically, although his antisocial behavior has continued."

Nicole felt a deep sorrow upon hearing the news of Robert's death. She was sad for Nikki, who had never really i had a chance to know her father, and for her daughter Ellie... Nicole had hoped that the marriage... She shook her head. Nicole admitted to herself that she had never really understood Robert. He was so complex, she thought. Talented, dedicated, yet surprisingly dysjunctional on a personal level.

"I guess," she commented to the Eagle, "that the energy I expended to save Katie and Robert from the octospider agents was wasted effort."

"Not really," the Eagle replied simply. "It was impojtant to you at the time."

Nicole smiled and thought how wise the Eagle was in his understanding of humans. She stifled a yawn.

"Let me help you back to bed," he said. "You've been up long enough for the first time."

Nicole was very pleased with herself. She had finally managed a full lap around the perimeter of the room without stopping.

"Bravo," the Eagle said, coming up beside her. "You are making fabulous progress. We never thought that you would walk so well in such a short period of time."

"I definitely need some water now," she said, smiling. 'This old body is sweating furiously."

The Eagle retrieved a glass of water from the table. When she was finished drinking, Nicole turned to her alien friend. "Now are you going to keep your part of the bargain?" she said. "Do you have a mirror and a change of clothes in that suitcase over there?"

"Yes, I do," the Eagle answered. "And I even brought the cosmetics you requested. But first I want to examine you to see how your heart responded to the exercise." He held a small black device in front of her and watched some markings appear on the tiny screen. 'That's good," he said. "No, that's excellent... No irregularities at all. Just an indication that your heart is working very hard, which would be expected in a human your age."

"May I see that?" Nicole asked, pointing at the monitoring device. The Eagle handed it to her. "I suppose," she said, "that this thing is receiving signals from inside my body... but what exactly are all those squiggles and strange symbols on the screen?"

"You have over a thousand tiny probes inside your body, more than half in the cardiac region. They not only measure the critical performance of your heart and other organs, but also regulate such important parameters as blood flow and oxygen allocation. Some of the probes even supplement the normal biological functions. What you are seeing on the screen is summary data from the time interval when you were exercising. It has been compressed and telemetered by the processor inside you."

Nicole frowned. "Maybe I shouldn't have asked. Somehow the idea of all that electronic junk inside me is not very comforting."

"The probes are not really electronic," the Eagle said, "at least not in the way you humans use the word. And they are entirely necessary at this point in your life. If they weren't there, you wouldn't survive even one day."

Nicole stared at the Eagle. "Why didn't you just let me die?" she asked. "Do you have some purpose for me yet that justifies all this effort? Some function I must still perform?"

"Perhaps," the Eagle said. "But perhaps we thought you might like to see your family and friends one more time."

"I find it difficult to believe," Nicole said, "that my desires play any significant role in your hierarchy of values."

The Eagle did not respond. He walked over to the suitcase, which was sitting on the floor beside the table, and returned with a mirror, a damp cloth, a simple blue dress, and a cosmetics bag. Nicole slipped out of the white nightgown she had been wearing, wiped herself all over with the cloth, and put on the dress. She took a deep breath as the Eagle handed her the mirror. "I'm not certain I'm ready for this," she said with a wan smile.

Nicole would not have recognized the face in the mirror if she had not mentally prepared herself first. Her face looked to her like a crazy quilt of bags and wrinkles. All her hair, including her eyebrows and eyelashes, was now either white or gray. Nicole's first impulse was to cry, but she gamely fought back the tears.

She searched the features in the mirror, guided by her memory, for vestiges of the lovely young woman she had been. Here and there she could see the outlines of what was once considered to be a beautiful face, but the eye had to know where to look. Her heart ached as Nicole suddenly remembered a simple incident years earlier, when she was a teenager walking along a country road with her father'near her home in Beauvois. An old woman using a cane had been coming toward them and Nicole had asked her father if they could cross over the road to avoid her.

"Why?" her father had asked.

"Because I don't want to see her up close," Nicole had said. "She is old and ugly. She makes me shiver."

"You too will be old someday," her father had answered, refusing to cross the road.

I am old and ugly, Nicole thought. I even make myself shiver. She handed the mirror back to the Eagle. "You warned me," she said wistfully. "Maybe I should have listened."

"Of course you're shocked," the Eagle said. "You have not seen yourself for sixteen years. Most humans have a difficult time with the aging process even if they follow it day by day." He extended the cosmetics bag in her direction.

"No, thank you," Nicole said despondently, refusing the bag. "It's a hopeless situation. Not even Michelangelo could do anything with this face."

"Suit yourself," the Eagle said. "But I thought you might want to use the cosmetics before your visitor arrives."

"A visitor!" Nicole said, with both alarm and excitement. "I'm going to have a visitor? Who is it?" She reached out for the mirror and the cosmetics.

"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 tong 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 *pagfe had both told me that we were in the factory and that a was being prepared for another voyage, but I never pected 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 beei) 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 interstellayobotic spacecraft larger than our greatest city cannot be cast aside as insignificant information. It creates a different perspec-

tive 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 mey 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 mought. 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.