Rama Revealed(Rama IV)

RETURN TO THE NODE Chapter 4
Are you ready, Mother?" Ellie asked, coming in the door.

"I guess so," Nicole answered. "Although I certainly feel foolish. Except for the game yesterday with you, Max, and Eponine, I haven't played bridge for years."

Ellie smiled. "It doesn't matter how well you play, Mother. We talked about that last night."

Max and Eponine were waiting in the hallway at the tram stop. 'Today will be very interesting," Max said after greeting Nicole. "I wonder how many others will show up."

The Council had voted the night before to extend the boycott again for three additional days. Although Big Block had responded to the list of grievances and even persuaded the octospiders, who outnumbered the humans eight to one, to yield more time in the common areas for the exclusive use of the humans, the Council had felt that many of the responses were still not adequate.

There had also been a discussion at the Council'Weting about how to enforce the boycott. Some of the more vocal attendees at the meeting had wanted to establish punishments for those who ignored the boycott resolution. The meeting had concluded with an agreement that Council officers would "actively engage" those humans who continued to disregard the Council's recommendations to avoid interactions with all other species.

The tram in the main corridor was nearly empty. A half dozen octospiders were in the first car, and three or four more octos plus a pair of iguanas were sitting in the second. Nicole and her friends were the only humans on board.

"Three weeks ago, before this latest round of tension began," Ellie said, "we had twenty-three tables for our weekly bridge tournament. I thought we were making a lot of progress. We were averaging five or six new human attendees each week."

"How in the world, Ellie," Nicole asked as the tram stopped and another pair of octospiders boarded their car, "did you ever think up the idea for these bridge tournaments? When you first mentioned playing cards with the octospiders to me, I thought you were out of your mind."

Ellie laughed. "In the beginning, soon after we had all settled here, I knew that it would take some kind of organized activity to encourage interaction. People were just not going to walk up to an octospider and begin a conversation, not even with a blockhead or me along as an interpreter. Games seemed like a pretty good way to stimulate mixing. That worked for a little while, but it quickly became obvious that there was no game at which the most proficient human could match any of the octospiders. Even with handicaps."

"Late in the first month," Max broke in, "I played chess with your buddy Dr. Blue. She gave me a rook and two pawn advantage to start the game, and still cleaned my plow. It was very demoralizing."

"The final blow was our first Scrabble tournament," Ellie continued. "All of the prizes went to the octospiders, even though all the words used were in English! That was when I realized that IJiad to come up with a game in which humans and octospiders did not play against each other.

"Bridge turned out to be perfect. Each pair consists of one human and one octospider. It is not necessary for the partners to talk to each other. I have prepared convention cards in both languages, and even the dullest human can learn in one session the octo numbers from one to seven and then- symbols for the four suits. It has worked fabulously well."

Nicole shook her head. "I still think you are crazy," she said with a smile. "Although I will acknowledge a touch of brilliance as well."

There were only fourteen other people in die card room of the recreation complex at the time the bridge tournament was scheduled to start. Ellie adapted well, deciding to have two separate games, one for the "mixed pairs," as she called them, and another contest solely for the octospiders.

Dr. Blue was Nicole's partner. They agreed on a five-card major bidding approach, one of six codified by Ellie, and sat down at a table near the door. Because the seats for the octospiders were higher dian those for the humans, Nicole and her partner were sitting eye to eye-or, more appropriately, eye to lens.

Nicole had never been an exceptional bridge player. She had learned to play originally as a student at the University of Tours, when her father, concerned that she did not have enough friends, had encouraged her to become involved in extracurricular activities. Nicole had also played some bridge in New Eden, where the game was the social rage during the first year after settlement. However, despite some natural flair for the game, Nicole had always thought that bridge consumed too much time and that there were too many other, more important things to do.

It was apparent to Nicole from the outset that Dr. Blue, as well as the other octospiders who came to the table with their human partners to play in die duplicate tournament, was a superb card player. On the second hand Dr. Blue played a "three no trump" contract that was exceedingly difficult, using finesses and a terminal squeeze like a human bridge professional.

"Well done," Nicole said to her octospider partn%r after Dr. Blue made the contract plus one overtrick.

"It's very simple once you know where all the cards are," Dr. Blue answered in color.

It was fascinating to watch the octospiders handle the mechanics of the game. They removed the cards from the traveling boards with the two last joints of a solitary tentacle, aided by the cilia, of course, and then held their hands in front of their lenses with three tentacles, one on either side and a third one in the middle. To place a card on the table, an octospider used whichever tentacle was closest to the card in question, balancing it among the cilia during iis descent.

Nicole and Dr. Blue engaged in their usual lively conversation between hands. Dr. Blue had just told Nicole that the new Chief Optimizer had been puzzled by the latest action from the Council, when the door to the card room opened and in walked three humans, followed by Big Block .and one of the smaller blockheads.

The woman in the lead, whom Nicole recognized as Emily Bronson, the president of the Council, glanced around the room and then headed for Nicole's table. A move had just been called, and Nicole and Dr. Blue had been joined by the octospider Milky and her partner, a pleasant-looking middle-aged woman named Margaret.

"Why, Margaret Young, I'm astonished to see you here," Emily Bronson said. "You must not have heard that the Council extended the boycott last night."

The two men who had entered the room with Ms. Bronson, one of whom was Garland of the swimming pool incident, had followed her over to Nicole's table. All three of them were standing over Margaret.

"Emily... I'm sorry," Margaret replied with her eyes downcast. "But you know how I love bridge."

"There's a lot more than games at stake here," Ms. Bronson said.

Ellie had risen from a nearby table and now made an appeal to Big Block to stop the disruption. But Emily Bronson was too quick. "All of you," she said in a loud voice, "are showing your disloyalty by being here. If you leave now, the Council will not hold it against you. If you stay, however, after having been warned - "

Big Block now intervened and informed Ms. Bronson that she and her friends were indeed disrupting the game. As the trio turned to leave, more than half of the humans rose from their chairs to follow.

"This is preposterous," a voice with astonishing clarity and power said. Nicole was standing iii her place, leaning on the table with one hand. "Sit back down," she said in the same tone. "Do not allow yourself to be bullied by a hatemonger."

All the bridge players returned to their seats. "Shut up, old woman," Emily Bronson said in anger from across the room. 'This is none of your concern." Big Block escorted her and her companions out the door.

"You don't have any idea, do you, Mrs. Wakefield, what any of the objects are?"

"Your guess is as good as mine, Maria," Nicole answered. 'They probably had special meaning, in some way, for your mother. I thought at the time that the silver cylinder implanted under your mother's skin was some kind of zoo identifier, but since none of the zookeeping staff survived the bombing and very few of the records remain, it's unlikely that we will ever be able to verify my hypothesis."

"What's a 'hypothesis'?" the girl asked.

"It's a tentative assumption or explanation for what's happened, when there's really not sufficient evidence to come to any definite answers," Nicole said. "By the way, I must say that your English is quite impressive."

"Thank you, Mrs. Wakefield."

They were sitting together in the communal lounge just off the observation deck. Nicole and Maria were both drinking fruit juice. Although Nicole had been in the Grand Hotel for a week already, this was the first time she had had a private moment with the girl she had found amid the octospider zoo ruins sixteen years earlier.

"Was my mother really pretty?" Maria asked.

"She was striking, I remember that," Nicole sai8, "even though I couldn't see her very well in the dim light. She

appeared to have your same coloring, maybe a little lighter, and was of medium build. I would have guessed she was thirty-five years old or maybe slightly less."

"And there were no signs of my father?" Maria asked.

"None that I saw," Nicole said. "Of course, under die circumstances I did not make a very thorough search. It's possible that he might have been wandering somewhere in the Alternate Domain looking for help. The fence that enclosed your compound had been flattened in the bombing. I worried, when we woke up the next morning, mat your 'father might have been looking for you, but I later convinced myself, based on what I had seen in your shelter, that you and your mother lived alone."

"So is it your hypothesis that my father had already died?" Maria said.

"Very good," Nicole replied. "No, not necessarily. I wouldn't be that specific. It just did not look as if anyone else had lived there in your enclosure for some time."

Maria took a drink of her juice and there was a momentary silence at the table. "You told me the other night, Mrs. Wakefield," the girl said, "when we were talking with Max and Eponine, that you presumed my mother, or maybe both my parents, had been kidnapped much earlier by the octospiders, from a place called Avalon. I didn't understand completely what you were saying."

Nicole smiled at Maria. "I appreciate your politeness, Maria," she said. "But you're certainly part of the family- you can call me Nicole." Her mind drifted back to New Eden-it seemed so long ago-and then Nicole realized that the girl was waiting for an answer to her comment.

"Avalon was a settlement outside of New Eden," Nicole said, "in the dark and cold of the Central Plain. It was originally created by the government of the colony to quarantine those people who had a deadly virus called RV-41. After Avalon was built, the dictator of New Eden, a man named Nakamura, convinced the Senate that Avalon was also a perfect place for other 'abnormal' humans, including those who protested against the government and those who were mentally ill or retarded."

"It doesn't sound tike a very nice place," Maria commented.

Benjy was therefor over a year, Nicole was thinking. He never talks about it. She began feeling guilty about not having spent enough private time with Benjy since she had awakened. But he has never once complained. '

Again Nicole had to force herself to pay attention to her conversation with Maria. We old people have drifting thoughts, she said to herself. Because so many things we see and hear remind us of memories.

"I have done some checking already," Nicole said. "Unfortunately, all the administrative personnel from Ava-lon died in the war. I have described your mother to a few of the people who spent considerable time in Avalon, but none of them remember her."

"Do you think she was a mental patient?" Maria asked.

"That's possible," Nicole replied. "We may never know for certain. Your necklace, incidentally, is our best clue to your mother's identity. She was clearly a devotee of the order of the Catholic church started by Saint Michael of Siena. There are some other Michaelites on board, Ellie says. I intend to talk with them when I have the time."

Nicole stopped and turned toward the observation deck, where a commotion had started. A few humans and a large group of octospiders were pointing out the window and gesticulating wildly. A couple of people raced off toward the main corridor, presumably to bring back others to observe whatever it was they were seeing.

Nicole and Maria left their table, walked up the steps to the deck, and looked out the large window. In the distance, beyond the tetrahedron of lights, a huge, flat-topped spacecraft that resembled an aircraft carrier was approaching the Node. Nicole and Maria watched for several minutes without speaking as the new spacecraft loomed larger and larger.

"What is it?" Maria asked.

"I have no idea," Nicole answered.

The observation deck filled rapidly. The doors were constantly opening as more humans, octospiders, iguanas, and even a pair of avians came into the room. The crowd began to press against Nicole and Maria.

The flat-topped vehicle was extremely long, longer even than the transportation corridors connecting the spheres of the Node. Several dozen big transparent "bubbles" were scattered around its surface. The carrier stopped near one of the spherical vertices of the Node and extended a long transparent tube that fit neatly into the side of the sphere.

The deck was in turmoil. All kinds of creatures were pushing, pressing to move closer to the window. A pair of iguanas leaped upward against the window in the weightlessness and were quickly joined by ten to twenty humans. Nicole began to feel claustrophobic and tried to move out of the way. There was no room through the mob. Nicole was pushed in all directions. She lost contact with Maria. A strong wave caught Nicole from the side and smacked her against the wall. Nicole felt a sharp pain in her left hip upon impact. In the ensuing melee, she might have been trampled and injured even more except that Big Block and the blockheads swept into the mob and restored order.

Nicole was badly shaken when Big Block reached her. The pain in her hip was unbearable. She could not walk.

"It's just part of being old," the Eagle said. "You must be more careful." He and Nicole were alone in her apartment. The others were eating breakfast.

"I do not like being fragile," Nicole said. "Nor do I like not doing things because I'm afraid of injuring myself."

"Your hip will heal," the Eagle said. "But it will take a while. You're lucky it's only badly bruised and not broken. At your age a broken hip can make a human a permanent invalid."

"Thanks for the words of reassurance," Nicole said. She took a small sip of her coffee. She was lying on her mat with her head lifted up slightly by several pillows. "But enough about me. Let's move on to more important things. What is that flat spacecraft all about?"

"The other humans have already started calling it the Carrier," the Eagle said. "That's a very appropriate name."

There was a short silence. "Come on, come on," Nicole said in a cranky voice, "don't play coy with me. I'm lying here doped up and still in pain. It shouldn't be necessary for me to drag the information out of you."

"This phase of the operation will soon be over," the alien said. "Some of you will be transferred to the Carrier, and the rest of you will move over to the Node."

"And what happens then?" Nicole asked. "And how is it decided who goes where?"

"I can't tell you that yet," the Eagle said. "But I will tell you that you will be going to the Node-although if you tell anyone else what I have just shared with you, I will not in the future give you any more advance information. We want the transition to be orderly."

"You always want things to be orderly... Ouch," Nicole said as she changed positions slightly. "And I must say you have not given me very significant information."

"You know more than anyone else."

"Big deal," Nicole grumped, taking another sip of coffee. "By the way, do you have any fancy doctors over there in the Node who can wave a magic wand over this bruise and make it go away?"

"No," said the Eagle, "but we can give you a new hip if you like. Or a pseudo-hip, as I guess you would call it."

Nicole shook her head. She winced as she jostled her hip while putting her coffee cup on the floor. "Being old is shit," she said.

"I'm sorry," the Eagle said. He started to leave. "I'll look in on you whenever I can."

"Before you go," Nicole said, "I have one other item of business. Nai wanted me to ask you to intercede on Galileo's behalf. She would like him returned to the family."

"It's irrelevant now," the Eagle said as he was leaving. "You'll all be out of here in four or five days. Good-bye, Nicole. Don't try to walk-use the wheelchair I brought you. Your hip won't heal unless you keep your weight off of it."