Rama Revealed(Rama IV)

RETURN TO THE NODE Chapter 12
We spent so much time in that exhibit," the Eagle said after he finished the scan, "that I think maybe we should revise our tour."

They were sitting side by side in the car. "Is that your diplomatic way of telling me that my heart is failing more rapidly than you expected?" Nicole asked, forcing a smile.

"No, not really," the Eagle said. "We really did spend almost twice as much time as I had planned. I hadn't even considered the overflight of France, for example, or the visit to the octospider city."

"That part was wonderful," Nicole said. "I wish I could go there again, with Dr. Blue as my guide, and find out more about the way they live."

"So you liked the octospider city better than the spectacular views of the stars?"

"I wouldn't say that," Nicole replied. "It was all fantastic. What I have seen already has reconfirmed that I chose the right place to..." She did not finish the sentence. "I realized while I was on the platform that death is not just the end of thinking and being aware," she said, "it is also the end of feeling. I don't know why that wasn't obvious to me before."

There was a short silence. "So, my friend," Nicole said brightly, "where do we go from here?"

"I thought we'd go next to engineering, where you can see models of Nodes, Carriers, and other spacecraft, after which, if we still have enough time, I plan to lake you to the biology section. Some of your ex-utero grandchildren are living in that region, in one of our better Earthlike habitats. Nearby is another compound housing a community of those intriguing aquatic eels or snakes that we encountered once together at the Node. And there is a taxonomic display that compares and contrasts, physically, all the spacefarers that have been studied in this region."

"It all sounds great," Nicole said. She laughed suddenly. "The human brain is amazing. Guess what just popped into my mind? The first line of Andrew Marvell's poem 'To His Coy Mistress': 'Had we but world enough, and time, This coyness, lady, were no crime...' Anyway, I was going to say that since we do not have forever, let's go first to the Carrier display. I would like to see the spacecraft in which Patrick, Nai, Galileo, and the others will be living. After that, we'll see how much time is left."

The car began to move. Nicole noted to herself mat the Eagle had not said anything about the results of his scan. The fear came back, stronger now. "The grave's a fine and private place," she recalled. "But none, I think, do there embrace."

They were together on the flat surface of the Carrier model. "This is a one sixty-fourth scale model," the Eagle said, "so you have some sense of how large the Carrier really is."

Nicole stared off into the distance from her wheelchair. "Goodness," she said, "this plane must be ajjnost one kilometer long."

"That's a decent guess," the Eagle said. "The top of the actual Carrier is roughly forty kilometers long and fifteen kilometers wide."

"And each of these bubbles encloses a different environment?"

"Yes," the Eagle said. "The atmosphere and other conditions are controlled by the equipment that is here on the surface, as well as the additional engineering systems down below in the main volume of the spacecraft. Each of the habitats has its own spin rate to create the proper gravity. Partitions are available to separate species, if necessary, inside one of the bubbles. The residents from the starfish have been placed in the same domain because they are Comfortable in more or less the same ambient conditions. However, they do not have any access to each other."

They were moving down a path among the equipment emplacements and the bubbles. "Some of these habitats," Nicole said, examining a small oval protrusion rising above the plane no more than five meters, "seem too small and confining to hold more than just a few individuals."

"There are some very small spacefarers," the Eagle said. "One species, from a star system not too far from yours, is only about a millimeter in length. Their largest spacecraft are not even as big as this car."

Nicole tried to imagine an intelligent group of ants, or aphids, working together to build a spacecraft. She smiled at her mental picture.

"And all these Carriers just travel from Node to Node?" she asked, changing the subject;

"Primarily," the Eagle said. "When there are no longer any living creatures in a particular bubble, that habitat is reconditioned at one of the Nodes."

"Like Rama," Nicole said.

"In a way," the Eagle said, "but with many significant differences. We are always intently studying whatever species are inside a Rama-class spacecraft. We try to place them in as realistic an environment as possible, so that we can observe them under 'natural conditions.' By contrast, we do not need any more data about the creatures assigned to the Carrier fleet. That's why we don't intercede in their affairs."

"Except to preclude reproduction. By the way, in the structure of your ethics, is preventing reproduction somehow more humane, or whatever your equivalent word is, than terminating the creatures directly?"

"We think so," the Eagle replied.

They had reached a location on the top of the Carrier model where a pathway branched off to the left back to the ramps and hallways of the Knowledge Module. "I think I've accomplished what I wanted here," Nicole said. She hesitated for a moment. "But I do have a couple of other questions."

"Go ahead," the Eagle said.

"Assuming Saint Michael's description of the purpose of Rama and the Node and everything else is correct, aren't you yourself disturbing and changing the very process you're observing? It seems to me that just by being here and interacting - "

"You're right, of course," the Eagle said. "Our presence here does slightly impact the course of evolution. It's a situation analogous to the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle from physics. We cannot observe without influencing. Nevertheless, our interactions can be considered by the Prime Monitor and taken into account in the overall modeling of the process. And we do have rules that minimize the ways in which we perturb the natural evolution."

"I wish that Richard could have been with me to hear Saint Michael's explanation of everything," Nicole said. "He would have been fascinated, and, I am sure, would have had some excellent questions."

The Eagle did not reply. Nicole sighed. "So what's next, Monsieur le Tour Director?" she said.

"Lunch," said the Eagle. "There are a couple of sandwiches, some water, and a delicious piece of your favorite octospider fruit in the car."

Nicole laughed and turned her wheelchair ftnto the pathway. "You think of everything," she said.

"Richard didn't believe in heaven," Nicole said as the Eagle completed another scan. "But if he could have constructed his own perfect afterlife, it would definitely have included a place like this."

The Eagle was studying the weird squiggles on the monitor in his hand. "I think it would be a good idea," he said, looking up at Nicole, "to skip some of the tour... and go directly to the most important exhibits in the next domain."

"That bad, huh?" Nicole said. She was not surprised. The occasional pain she had been feeling in her chest before the visits to France and the octospider city had now become continuous.

The fear was constant now as well. In between every word, every thought, she was acutely aware that her death was not very far away. So what are you afraid of? Nicole asked herself. How can nothingness be that bad? Still the fear persisted.

The Eagle explained that there was not enough time for an orientation to the second domain. They passed through the gates into the second of the concentric spheres and drove for about ten minutes. "The emphasis in this domain," the Eagle said while driving, "is on the way everything changes in time. There is a separate section for every conceivable element in the galaxy that is affected by, or affects, the galaxy's overall evolution. I thought you'd be especially interested in this first exhibit."

The room was similar to the one where the Eagle and Nicole had first seen the Milky Way, except that it was considerably smaller. Again they boarded a moving platform that allowed them to move around in the dark room.

"What you are going to watch," the Eagle said, "requires some explanation. It is essentially a time-lapse summary of the evolution of spacefaring civilizations in a galactic region containing your Sun and about ten million other star systems. This is approximately one ten-thousandth of the entire galaxy, but what you will see is representative of the galaxy as a whole.

"You will not see any stars or planets or other physical structures in this display, although their locations are assumed in developing the model. What you will see, once we begin, are lights, each representing a star system in which a biological species has become a spacefarer by at least putting a spacecraft in orbit around its own planet. As long as the star system remains a living center for active spacefarers, the light in that particular location will stay illuminated.

"I am going to start the display about ten billion years ago, soon after what has evolved into the current Milky Way Galaxy was initially formed. Since there was so much instability and rapid change at the beginning, no spacefarers emerged for a long time. Therefore, for the first five billion years or so, up until the formation of your solar system, I will run the display rapidly, at a rate of twenty million years per second. For reference purposes, the Earth will begin to accrete roughly four minutes into this process. I will stop the display at that time."

They were togedier on the platform in the large chamber. The Eagle was standing and Nicole was sitting beside him in her wheelchair. The only light was a small one on the platform mat allowed the two of them to see each other. After staring around her at the total darkness for more than thirty seconds, Nicole broke the silence. "Did you start the process?" she asked. "Nothing's happening."

"Exactly," the Eagle replied. "What we have observed, from watching other galaxies, some much older than the Milky Way, is that no life emerges until the galaxy settles down and develops stable zones. Life requires both a few steady stars in a relatively benign environment and stellar evolution, resulting in the creation of the critical elements on the periodic chart that are so important in all biochemical processes. If all the matter is subatomic particles and the simplest atoms, the likelihood of the origin of life of any kind, much less spacefaring life, is very very small. Not until large stars go through their complete life Cycles and manufacture the more complex elements like nitrogen, carbon, iron, and magnesium do the probabilities for the emergence of life become reasonable."

Below them an occasional light flickered, but in the entire first four minutes, no more than a few hundred scattered lights appeared, and only one endured for longer than three seconds. "Now we have reached the time of the formation of the Earth and the solar system," the Eagle said, preparing to activate the display again.

"Wait a moment, please," Nicole said. "I want to make certain I understand. Did you just show me that for the first half of galactic history, when there was no Earth and no Sun, comparatively few spacefarers evolved in the region around where the Sun would eventually form?... And that of those spacefarers, almost all of them had a species life span of less than twenty million years, and only one managed to survive for as long as sixty million years?"

"Very good," the Eagle said. "Now I am going to add another parameter to the display. If a spacefarer has succeeded in traveling outside his own star system and has established a permanent presence in another-which you humans have of course not yet done-then the display acknowledges that expansion by illuminating the other star system as well, with the same color light. Therefore we can follow the spread of a specific spacefaring species. I am also now going to change the rate of the display by a factor of two, to ten million years per second."

Only half a minute into the next period, a red light came on over in one corner of the room. Six to eight seconds later, it was surrounded by hundreds of other red lights. Together they shone with such intensity that the rest of the room, with its occasional solitary or pair of lights, seemed dark and uninteresting by comparison. The field of red lights then abruptly vanished in a fraction of a second. First the inner core of the red pattern went dark, leaving small groups of lights scattered at the edges of what had once been a gigantic region. A blink of the eye later and all the red lights were gone.

Nicole's mind was operating at peak speed as she watched the lights flashing around her. That must be an interesting story, she thought, reflecting on the red lights. Imagine a civilization spread out over a region containing hundreds of stars. Then suddenly, pffi, that species is gone. The lesson is inescapable. For everything there is a beginning and an end. Immortality exists only as a concept, not as a reality.

She glanced around the room. A general recurring pattern was developing as more and more regions hosted an occasional passing light, indicating the emergence and disappearance of another spacefaring civilization. Because even those beings that spread out and colonized adjoining star systems lived for such a brief time, only rarely did they come into proximity with a companion spacefaring civilization.

There has been intelligence, and spacefaring, in our part of the galaxy since before there was an Earth, Nicole thought, but very few of these advanced creatures have ever had the thrill of sustained contact with their peers...So loneliness too is one of the underlying principles of the universe-at least of this universe.

Eight minutes later the Eagle again froze the display. "We have now reached a point in time ten million years before the present," he said. "On the Earth, the dinosaurs have long since disappeared, destroyed by their inability to adapt to the climate changes caused by the impact of a great asteroid. Their disappearance, however, has allowed the mammals to flourish, and one of those mammalian evolutionary lines is starting to show the rudiments of intelligence."

The Eagle stopped. Nicole was looking up at him with an intense, almost pained expression on her face. "What's the matter?" the alien asked.

"Will our particular universe end in harmony?" Nicole asked. "Or will we be one of those data points that helps God define the region He is seeking by being outside the desired set?"

"What prompts you to ask that question right now?" the Eagle said.

"This whole display," Nicole answered, waving with her hand, "is an amazing catalyst. My mind has dozens of questions." She smiled. "But since I don't have time to ask them all, I thought I would ask the most important one first.

"Just look at what has happened here," she continued, "even now, after ten billion years of evolution, the lights are widely scattered. And none of the groupings that exist have become permanent or widespread, even in this relatively small portion of the galaxy. Surely if our universe is going to end in harmony, sooner or later lights indicating space-farers and intelligence should be illuminated at almost every star system in every galaxy. Or have I misinterpreted what Saint Michael meant by harmony?"

"I don't think so," the Eagle said.

"Where is our solar system'in this current display?" Nicole now asked.

"Right there," the Eagle said, using his light beam pointer.

Nicole glanced first at the area around the Earth and then quickly surveyed the rest of the room. "So ten million years ago, there were about sixty spacefaring species living among our closest ten thousand stellar neighborhoods. And one of these species, if I understand that cluster of dark green lights, originated not too far from us and had spread to include twenty or thirty star systems altogether."

"That's correct," said the Eagle. "Should I run the display forward again, at a slower rate?" ,

"In a little while," Nicole said. "I want to appreciate this particular configuration first. Up until now everything has been happening in this display faster than I could possibly absorb it."

She stared at the group of green lights. Its outer edge was no more than fifteen light-years from where the Eagle had marked the solar system. Nicole motioned for the Eagle to start the display again and he told her the rate would now be only two hundred thousand years a second.

The green lights moved closer and closer to the Earth and then they suddenly disappeared. "Stop," yelled Nicole.

The Eagle halted the display. He looked at Nicole with a quizzical expression.

"What happened to those guys?" Nicole said.

"I told you about them a couple of days ago," the Eagle said. "They genetically engineered themselves out of existence."

They almost reached the Earth, Nicole thought. And how different all history would have been if they had. They would have recognized immediately the intellectual potential of the protohumans in Africa and would doubtless have done to them what the Precursors did to the octospiders. Then we...

In her mind's eye, Nicole suddenly had an image of Saint Michael, calmly explaining the purpose of the universe in front of the fireplace in Michael and Simone's study.

"Could I see the beginning?" Nicole asked the Eagle.

"The beginning of what?" he replied.

"The beginning of everything," Nicole said eagerly. "The instant when this universe began and the entire process of evolution was set in motion." She waved her hand toward the model below them.

"We can do that," the Eagle said after a brief pause.

"We have no knowledge about anything before this universe was created," the Eagle said a moment later as Nicole and he stood together on the platform in total darkness. "We do assume, however, that some kind of energy existed before the instant of creation, for we have been told that the matter of this universe resulted from a transformation of energy."

Nicole looked around her. "Darkness everywhere," she said, almost to herself. "And somewhere in that darkness-if the word 'somewhere' even has any meaning-there was energy. And a Creator. Or might the energy have been part of the Creator?"

"We don't know," the Eagle said after another short pause. "What we do know is that the fate of every single element in the universe was determined in that initial instant. The way in which that energy was transformed into matter defined eighty billion years of history."

As the Eagle spoke, a blinding light filled the room.

Nicole turned away from the source and covered her eyes. "Here," said the Eagle, reaching into his pouch. He handed Nicole a special pair of glasses.

"Why did you make the simulation so bright?" Nicole asked after adjusting her glasses.

"To indicate, at least in some measure, what those initial moments were like. Look," he said, pointing below them, "I have stopped the model at 10"40 seconds after the creation instant. The universe has existed for only an infinitesimal length of time, yet already it is rich in physical structure. This incredible amount of light is all coming from that tiny chunk of cosmic broth below us. All that 'stuff' forming the early universe is completely alien to anything we could recognize or understand. There are no atoms, no molecules. The density of the quarks, leptons, and their friends is so great that a pinch of me 'stuff' no larger than a hydrogen atom would weigh more than a large cluster of galaxies in our era."

"Just out of curiosity," Nicole said, "where are you and I at this moment?"

The Eagle hesitated. "Nowhere would be the best answer," he said eventually. "For illustrative purposes we are outside the model of the universe. But we could be in another dimension. The mathematics of the early universe do not work unless there were initially more than four dimensions. Of course everything in space-time that- will later become our universe is contained in that small volume producing the awesome light. The temperature over there, incidentally, if the model were a true representation, would be ten trillion times hotter than the hottest star that will eventually evolve.

"Our model here has also distorted the concepts of size and distance," the Eagle continued after a brief pause. "In a moment I will start the simulation of the early universe again, and we will be overpowered as that compact blob of radiation explodes outward at an astonishing rate. While the simulation of what the cosmologists call the Inflation Era is occurring, the assumed size of this room will also be increasing rapidly. If we did not change the scale, you would be unable now to see the structure of the universe at 10"40 seconds without a fantastic microscope."

Nicole stared below her at the source of light. "So that minuscule warped globule of hot, heavy stuff was the seed of everything? From that tiny stew of subatomic particles came die great galaxies you showed me in the other domain? It doesn't seem possible."

"Not just those galaxies," the Eagle said. "The potential for everything in the cosmos is stored in that peculiar superheated soup."

The small globule suddenly began to expand at an enormous rate. Nicole had the feeling that the outside of the globule was going to touch her face at any moment. Millions of bizarre structures formed and disappeared in front of her eyes. Nicole watched in fascination as the material seemed to change its nature several times, moving through transitional states as peculiar and foreign as the earlier superheated globule.

"I have ran time forward in the model," the Eagle said several seconds later. "What you see out there now, approximately one million years after creation, would be recognizable to any dedicated student of physics. Some simple atoms have formed-three kinds of hydrogen, two of helium, for example. Lithium is the heaviest known atom that is plentiful. The density of the universe is now roughly equivalent to the air on Earth, and the temperature has fallen to a comparatively comfortable one hundred million degrees, or twenty orders of magnitude less than it was at the time of the hot globule."

He activated the platform and guided it among the lights and clumps and filaments. "If we were really smart," the Eagle said, "we would be able to look at all this early matter and predict which 'lumps' would eventually become galactic clusters. It was at about this time that the first Prime Monitor appeared, the only intruder into this otherwise natural evolution process. No monitoring could have been done earlier, because the process is so sensitive. Any kind of observation during the first second of creation, ftr example, would have completely distorted the resultant evolution."

The Eagle pointed at a tiny metallic sphere in the center of several huge agglomerations of matter. "That first Prime Monitor," he said, "was sent by the Creator, from another dimension of the early universe, into our evolving space-time system. Its purpose was to observe what was occurring and to create, as necessary, with its own intelligence, the other observing systems that would together gather all the pertinent information on the overall process."

"So the Sun, the Earth, and every human being," Nicole said slowly, "resulted from the unpredictable natural evolution of this cosmos. The Node, Rama, and even you and Saint Michael were produced from a directed development designed originally by that first Prime Monitor."

She paused, glancing around her, and then turned to the Eagle. "You could have been predicted shortly after the moment of creation. I, and even the existence of humanity, came from a process so mathematically perverse that we could not even have been predicted a hundred million years ago, which is only one percent of the time since the beginning of the universe."

Nicole shook her head and then waved her hand. "All right," she said, "that's enough. I'm overloaded with the infiniteI'

The great room became dark again except for the small lights on the floor of the platform. "What is it?" the Eagle said, seeing a look of distress on Nicole's face.

"I'm not certain," she said. "I feel a kind of sadness, as if I had experienced a deep personal loss. If I have-understood all this, then humans are far more special than you, or even Rama. The odds are very much against any creatures even nearly like us ever arising again, either in this universe or any other. We are one of the fluke products of chaos. You, or at least something like you, probably existed in all those other universes the Creator is supposedly observing."

There was a momentary silence. "I guess I had imagined," Nicole continued, "after listening to Saint Michael, that there would be human voices in that harmony God was seeking. Now I realize dial it is only on die planet Earth, in diis particular universe, that our songs - "

Nicole felt a sharp burst of pain in her chest. It remained intense. She struggled to breathe, convinced for several moments that die end was coming immediately.

The Eagle said nothing, but watched her carefully. When Nicole finally caught her breath, she spoke in short, broken clauses. "You told me... at lunch... a personal place... where I could see family and friends..."

They talked briefly in the car while the pain was momentarily bearable. Both die Eagle and Nicole knew, widiout either of diem saying anything, that the next attack would be the last.

They entered another of die exhibit areas in die Knowledge Module. This room was a perfect circle, with a space in a small floor section in the middle where the Eagle could stand next to Nicole's wheelchair. They crossed to their central location and watched as humanlike figures began to replay events from Nicole's adult life in each of the six separate theater settings that closely surrounded them.

The verisimilitude of the replays was astonishing. Not only did all Nicole's family and friends look exactly as they had at the time that die events had taken place, but all the sets were perfect reconstructions as well. In one of die scenes Katie was water-skiing boldly near the shore of Lake Shakespeare, laughing and waving with the reckless abandon that was her trademark. In another Nicole watched a re-creation of the party the little troupe on Rama II had held to celebrate the one thousandth anniversary of the death of Eleanor of Aquitaine. Seeing Simone at age four and Katie at two, and both Richard and herself when they were still young and vigorous, brought tears to Nicole's eyes.

It has been an astonishing life, Nicole thought. She rolled her wheelchair into the scene from Rama fl and the action stopped. Nicole leaned over and picked up the robot TB that Richard had created to amuse die little girls. It felt properly weighted in her hands.

"How in the world did you do this?". Nicole asked.

"Advanced technology," die Eagle replied. "I couldn't explain it to you."

"And if I went over there, where Katie is skiing, would the water feel wet to my touch?"

"Absolutely."

Nicole rolled out of the scene holding the pseudo-robot in her hands. When she was gone, anodier TB materialized and the scene continued. I had forgotten, Richard, Nicole said to herself, all your brilliant little creations.

Her heart granted her a few more minutes to enjoy the vignettes taken from her life. Nicole thrilled again to the moment of Simone's birth, relived her first night of love with Richard not long after he found her in New York, and experienced for a second time the fantastic array of sights and creatures that had greeted Richard and her when the gates of me Emerald City had first opened to mem.

"Can you replay any event from my life that I might want?" Nicole asked, feeling a sudden constriction in her chest.

"As long as it happened after you arrived at Rama and I can find it in the archives," the Eagle replied.

Nicole gasped. The final heart attack was under way. "Please," she said, "may I see my last conversation with Richard before he left?"

It won't be long, a voice inside Nicole said. She clenched her teeth and tried to concentrate on the scene" that had suddenly appeared in front of her. Richard was explaining to pseudo-Nicole why he was the one who should accompany Archie back to New Eden.

"I understand," pseudo-Nicole said in the scene.

I understand, die real Nicole said to herself. That is the most important statement anyone can ever make. The whole key to life is understanding. And now I understand that I am a mortal creature whose time of death has come.

Another surge of intense pain was accompanied by a fleeting memory of a Latin line from an old poem: Timor Mortis conturbat me. But I will not be afraid because I understand.

The Eagle was watching her closely. "I would like to see Richard and Archie," she said, laboring, "their final moments... in the cell... just before the biots came."

I will not be afraid because I understand.

"And my children, if they can somehow be here. And Dr. Blue."

The room became dark. Seconds ticked by. The pain was terrible. I will not be afraid...

The lights came on again. Richard and Archie were in their cell immediately in front of Nicole's wheelchair. She heard the biots open the cellblock door down the hall.

"Freeze it there, please," Nicole said with difficulty. Just to the left of the scene with Richard and Archie, her children and Dr. Blue were lined up in a tableau. Nicole struggled to her feet and walked the few meters to be among them. Tears poured from her eyes as she touched one final time the faces that she loved.

The walls of her heart began to collapse. Nicole stumbled into the scene in Richard's cell and embraced the representation of her husband. "I understand, Richard," she said.

Nicole dropped to her knees slowly. She turned to face the Eagle. "I understand," she said with a smile.

And understanding is happiness, she thought.