Rama Revealed(Rama IV)

ESCAPE Chapter 5
Everything was so familiar. Except for Richard's clutter, accumulated during his months alone, and the conversion of the nursery into the bedroom of the two avian hatchlings, the lair underneath New Yoric was exactly the same as it had been when Richard, Nicole, Michael O'Toole, and their children had departed from Rama years before.

Richard had parked the submarine at a natural harbor on the south side of the island, in a place he had called the Port.

"Where did you get the sub?" Nicole had asked him while they were walking together toward the lair.

"It was a gift," Richard had said. "Or at least I think it was. After the superchief of the avians showed me how to operate it, he or she disappeared, leaving the submarine here."

Walking in New York had been an eerie experience for Nicole. Even in the dark the skyscrapers reminded her vividly of the years that she had lived on this mysterious island in the middle of the Cylindrical Sea.

"How many years has it been since we left New York?" Nicole had asked as they entered their lair.

"I can't give you an accurate answer," Richard had answered with a shrug. "We've taken two long interstellar voyages at relativistic speeds. Unless we know our exact velocity profiles, we can't make the proper time corrections."

"The only changes made in the Rama spacecraft on each visit to the Node," Richard had said sometime later, while Nicole was still musing about the wonders of relativity, "are those necessary to accommodate the next mission. So nothing has changed in here. The black screen is still there in the White Room, as well as our old keyboard. The procedures for making requests from the Ramans, or whatever our hosts should be called, are still intact also."

"And what about the other lairs?" Nicole had asked. "Have you visited them also?"

"The avian lair is a tomb," Richard had replied. "I've been all through it several times. Once, I entered the octospider lair cautiously, but I went only as far as that cathedral room with the four tunnels leading away - "

Nicole had interrupted him, laughing. "The ones we called Eenie, Meenie, Mynie, and Moe."

"Yes," Richard had continued. "Anyway, I wasn't comfortable there. I had the feeling, although I could not identify anything specific, mat the lair was still inhabited. And that the octos, or whatever might be living there, were watching my every step." This time it was his turn to laugh. "Believe it or not, I was also worried about what would happen to Tammy and Timmy if I didn't return for any reason."

Nicole's first introduction to Tammy and Timmy, the pair of avian hatchlings that Richard had raised from infancy, was priceless. Richard had buUt a half-door to the nursery and had closed it securely when he had left to meet Nicole inside the second habitat Since the birdlike creatures couldn't yet fly, they had remained safely inside th* nursery during Richard's absence. As soon as they heard his voice in the lair, however, the hatehfa"gs began to shriek and jabber.

They did not even stop squawking when Richard opened their door and cradled both of them in his arms.

"They're telling me," Richard shouted to Nicole above the frightful noise, "that I shouldn't have left them alone."

Nicole couldn't stop laughing as she watched the two hatchlings extend then- long necks toward Richard's face. They interrupted their jabbers and shrieks only to rub the undersides of their beaks softly against Richard's bearded cheek. The avians were still small, about seventy centimeters tall when standing on their legs, but their necks were so long that they appeared to be much larger.

Nicole watched with admiration as her husband tended to his alien wards. He cleaned up their wastes, made certain that they had fresh food and water, and even checked the softness of their haylike beds in the corner of the nursery. You have come a long, long way, Richard Wakefield, Nicole thought, remembering his reluctance years earlier to deal with any of the more mundane duties associated with parenting. She was deeply touched by his obvious affection for the gangly hatchlings. Is it possible, Nicole asked herself, that each of us has inside this kind of selfless love? And that we must somehow work through all the problems that both heredity and environment,have created before we can find it?

Richard had stored the four manna melons and the slice from the sessile in one corner of the White Room. He explained to Nicole that he hadn't noticed any changes in either the melons or the sessile material since he had arrived in New York. "Maybe the melons can rest dormant for a long time, like seeds," Nicole offered after listening to Richard's explanation of the complex life cycle of the sessile species.

"That's what I was thinking," Richard said. "Of course I have no idea at all under what conditions the melons might germinate. The species is so strange and so complicated, I wouldn't be surprised if the process is controlled somehow by that small piece of the sessile."

On their first evening together, Richard had difficulty getting the hatchlings to go to sleep. "They're afraid I'm going to leave them again," Richard explained when he returned to the White Room after the third time that Tammy's and Timmy's furious squawks had interrupted his dinner with Nicole. At length, Richard programmed Joan and Eleanor to amuse the avians. It was the only way he could keep his alien wards quiet so that he could have some time alone with Nicole.

They made love slowly and tenderly. Richard had admitted while he was undressing that he wasn't certain how well... But Nicole had informed him that his performance, or lack thereof, was of absolutely no consequence. She insisted that it would be a delight just to hold his body next to hers and that any actual sexual stimulation would be a marvelous bonus. They were, of course, compatible, as they had been since the first time they had slept together.

After their easy lovemaking, Richard and Nicole held hands and said nothing. Nicole fell asleep gloriously happy.

For the first time ever, there was no hurry in their lives. Every night they talked easily, sometimes even while they were making love. Richard told Nicole more about his childhood and adolescence than he ever had before. He included his most painful memories of his father's abuse, as well as the harrowing details of his disastrous first marriage to SarAll Tydings.

"I now realize that SarAll and Dad had something fundamental in common," Richard said late one evening. "They were both incapable of granting me the approval I so desperately sought-and somehow they both knew that I would continue to try to obtain that approval, even if it meant abandoning everything else in my life."

Nicole shared with Richard for the first time all the drama of her forty-eight-hour affair with the Prince of Wales right after she had won her Olympic gold medal. She even admitted to Richard that she had yearned to marry Henry and that she had been completely devastated when she had realized that the prince had excluded Nicole as a candidate to be the queen of England primarily because of her skin

color. Richard was fascinated by the story that Nicole told. But never once did he seem even the least bit threatened or jealous.

He has become more mature, Nicole was thinking several nights later, while her husband was finishing his nightly task of tucking the hatchlings into bed. "Darling," Nicole said when Richard joined her in their bedroom in the lair, "there's something that I want to tell you. I have been wailing for the right time..."

"Uh-oh." Richard feigned a frown. "This sounds serious... I hope it won't take long, for I had some plans of my own for us this evening."

He crossed the room and started to kiss her. "Please, Richard, not now," she said, pushing him away gently. "This is very important to me."

Richard backed up a couple of steps. "When I thought I was going to be executed," Nicole said slowly, "I realized that all my personal affairs were in order, except for two. There were still things that I wanted to say, both to you and to Katie. I even asked the policeman who explained the execution procedure to me if he would give me pen and paper so that I could write two final letters."

Nicole paused a moment, as if she were searching for exactly the right words. "During those terrifying days, I couldn't remember, Richard," she continued, "if I had ever told you, explicitly, how glad I was that we had been husband and wife... I also didn't want to die without..."

She paused a second time, glanced briefly around the room, and then looked directly into Richard's eyes again. "There was one more thing I wanted to accomplish with that last letter," Nicole said. "I believed at the time that it was 0 necessary to make my life complete, so that I could depart from this world without any loose ends... Richard, I wanted to apologize for my insensitivity back when you and Michael and I... I made a mistake then by going to MichaelVbed too soon when I feared..." Nicole took a deep breath. "I should have had more faith," she said. "Not that I would for a minute remove either Patrick or Benjy from the world, but I realize now that I surrendered too quickly to my loneliness. I wish..."

Richard touched his ringer to her lips. "No apology is necessary, Nicole," he said softly. "I know that you have loved me well."

They settled into an easy rhythm in their simple existence. In the mornings they would walk around New York, usually arm in arm, exploring anew every comer of the island domain they had called home once before. Because it was always dark, the city looked different now. Only their flashlight beams illuminated the enigmatic skyscrapers whose details were indelibly imprinted in their memories.

Often they walked along the ramparts of the city, looking out at the waters of the Cylindrical Sea. One morning they spent several hours standing in one place, the very spot where they had entrusted their lives to the three avians years and years before. Together they recalled both their fear and their excitement at the moment when the great bird creatures had lifted them off the ground to carry them across the sea.

Every day after lunch Nicole, who had always needed more sleep than her husband, would take a short nap. Richard would use the keyboard to order more food or supplies from the Romans, or take the hatchlings topside for some exercise, or work on one of his myriad projects scattered around the lair. In the evening, after a leisurely dinner, they would lie together, side by side, and talk for hours before making love or just falling asleep. They talked about everything: the Eagle, the Ramans, the existence of God, the politics in New Eden, books of all kinds, and most of all, their children.

Although they could converse enthusiastically about Ellie, Patrick, Benjy, or even Simone, whom they had not seen for many years, it was difficult for Richard to talk about Katie for any length of time. He regularly castigated himself for not having been stricter with his favorite daughter during her childhood, and blamed her irresponsible behavior as an adult on his permissiveness. Nicole

tried to console and reassure him, reminding Richard that their circumstances in Rama had been unusual and that, after all, nothing in his background had prepared him for the proper discipline required of a parent.

One afternoon when Nicole awakened from her nap, she could hear Richard mumbling to himself down the hall. Curious, she stood up quietly and walked down to the room mat had once been Michael O'Toole's bedroom. Nicole stood at the door and watched Richard put the final touches on a large model that occupied most of the room.

"Voila," he said, turning around to acknowledge that he had heard Nicole's footsteps. "It won't win any aesthetic awards," Richard said with a grin, motioning in the direction of the model, "but it's a reasonable representation of our part of the universe, and it certainly has provided me with plenty of food for thought."

A flat rectangular platform covered most of the floor. Thin vertical rods of varying heights had been inserted at twenty locations around the platform. At the top end of each rod was at least one colored sphere, representing a star.

The vertical rod in the center of the model, which had a yellow sphere attached to its top, rose about a meter and a half off the platform. "This, of course," Richard said to Nicole, "is our Sun. And here we are-or I should say Rama is-over in this quadrant, about one-fourth of the way between the Sun and our closest similar star, Tau Ceti. Sinus, where we were when we stayed at the Node, is back over there..."

Nicole walked around in the model depicting the stellar neighborhood of the Sun. 'There are twenty star systems within twelve and a half light-years of our home," Richard explained, "including six binary systems and one triplet group, our nearest neighbors, the Centauris, over here. Note that the Centauris are the only stars inside the five-light-year sphere."

Richard pointed at the three separate balls representing the Centauris. Each was a different size and color. The trio, attached to each other with tiny wires, were resting on top of the same vertical rod, just inside an open wire sphere centered at the Sun and marked with a large number 5.

"During my many days of solitude down here," Richard continued, "I often found myself wondering why Rama is going in this particular direction. Do we have a specific destination? It would seem so, since our path has not varied since our initial acceleration. And if we are going to Tau Ceti, what will we find there? Another complex like the Node? Or will the same Node perhaps have moved during the intervening time?"

Richard stopped. Nicole had walked over to the edge of the model and was stretching her arms up to a pair of red stars at the end of a three-meter rod. "I assume you varied the length of these rods to demonstrate the full three-dimensional relationship of all these stars," she said.

"Yes. That particular binary group you are touching, incidentally, is called Struve 2398," Richard replied in his human catalog voice. "They have a very high declination and are slightly over ten light-years away from the Sun."

Seeing the slight grimace on Nicole's face, Richard laughed at himself and crossed the room to take her hand. "Come over here with me," he said, "and I will show you something really interesting."

They walked to the other side of the model and stood facing die Sun, halfway between the stars Sirius and Tau Ceti. "Wouldn't it be fantastic if our Node really has moved," Richard said excitedly, "and we will see it again, over here, on the opposite side of our solar system?"

Nicole laughed. "Of course," she said, "but we have absolutely no evidence - "

"But we do have brains, and imaginations," Richard interrupted. "And the Eagle did tell us that the entire Node was capable of moving. It just seems to me..." Richard stopped in midsentence and men changed the subject slightly. "Haven't you ever asked yourself," he said, "where our Rama spacecraft went, after we left the Node, during all those years that we were asleep? Suppose, for example, that the avians and the sessiles were picked up over here somewhere, around the Procyon binaries, perhaps, or maybe even over here, around Epsilon Eridani, which easily could have been on our trajectory. We know that there are planets around Eridani. At a significant fraction of the speed of light, Rama could have easily doubled back to the Sun - "

"Hold it, Richard," Nicole said. "You're way ahead of me on this subject. Why don't we start at the beginning?" She sat down on the platform in the interior of the model, next to a red ball elevated only a few centimeters by a very short rod, and crossed her legs. "If I understand your hypothesis, our current voyage will end at Tau Ceti?"

Richard nodded. "The trajectory is too perfect for it to be a coincidence. We will reach Tau Ceti in another fifteen years or so, and I believe our experiment will be concluded."

Nicole groaned. "I'm already old," she said. "By then, if I'm even still alive, Til be as withered as a prune... Just out of curiosity, what do you think will happen to us after our 'experiment is concluded,' as you put it?"

"That's where we need our imaginations. I suspect that we'll be unloaded from Rama, but what happens to us next is completely unknown... I suppose our fate will be dependent in some way on what has been observed all this time."

"So you definitely agree with me that the Eagle and his buddies back at the Node have been watching us?"

"Absolutely. They have made such a huge investment in this project. I'm certain they're monitoring everything that's going on here in Rama. I must admit I'm surprised that they have left us completely to our own devices and have never interfered in our affairs, but that must be their method."

Nicole was silent for a few seconds. She played absent-mindedly with the red ball beside her, which Richard informed her represented the star Epsilon Indi. "The judge in me," she said somberly, "fears what any reasonable extraterrestrial would conclude about us, based on our behavior in New Eden."

Richard shrugged. "We've been no worse in Rama than we have been for centuries on Earth. Besides, I can't accept that any truly advanced aliens would be making such subjective judgments. If this process of observing spacefar-ers has been going on for tens of thousands of years, as the Eagle suggested, then the Ramans must have developed quantitative metrics for assessing all aspects of the civilizations they encounter. They are almost certainly more interested in our exact natures, and what this means in some larger sense, than whether we are bad or good."

"I suppose you're right," Nicole said wistfully. "But it's depressing that we, as a species, behave so barbarically, even when we are fairly certain we're being observed." She paused and reflected. "So in your opinion our long interaction with the Ramans, beginning with that first spaceship over a hundred years ago, is almost over?"

"I think so," Richard replied. "Somewhere in the future, possibly when we reach Tau Ceti, our part of this experiment will be concluded. My guess is that after all the data on the creatures currently inside Rama are entered in the Great Galactic Data Base, Rama will be emptied. Who knows, maybe soon thereafter this great cylindrical spacecraft will appear in another planetary system where a different spacefarer is living, and another cycle will begin."

"And that brings us back to my earlier question, which you really did not answer. What will happen to us then?"

"Maybe we, or our offspring, will be sent on a slow journey back to the Earth. Or maybe we will be deemed expendable and terminated once all the data have been collected."

"Neither of those outcomes is very appealing," Nicole said. "And I must say that although I agree with you that we are heading for Tau Ceti, all the rest of your hypothesis strikes me as pure conjecture."

Richard grinned. "I have learned a lot from you, Nicole. Everything else in my hypothesis is intuitive. It feels right to me, based on everything I have learned about the Ramans."

"But wouldn't it be more straightforward to imagine that the Ramans simply have waystations scattered throughout the galaxy, and that the two nearest to us are at Ships and Tau Ceti?"

"Yes," Richard replied, "but my gut feel is that it's unlikely. The Node was such an awesome engineering creation. If similar facilities exist every twenty or so light-years in the galaxy, there would be billions of them altogether... And remember, the Eagle definitely said the Node could move."

Nicole acknowledged to herself that it was unlikely that a facility as astonishing as the Node had been duplicated billions of times in some great cosmic assembly process. Richard's hypothesis did make some sense. But how sad, Nicole thought briefly, that our entry in the galactic data base will contain so much negative information.

"So where do the avians, sessiles, and our old friends the octospiders fit into your scenario?" Nicole asked a minute later. "Are they just part of the same experiment, with us? And if so, are you suggesting that there is also a colony of octos onboard and that we just haven't met them yet?"

Richard nodded again. "That conclusion is inescapable. If the final phase of each experiment is observing a representative sample of the spacefarers under controlled conditions, it makes sense that the octos are here also." He laughed nervously. 'There may even be some of our same friends from Rama II on the spacecraft with us at this very moment."

"What a lovely set of ideas to think about before sleeping," Nicole said with a smile. "If you're right, you and I have fifteen more years to spend on a spacecraft that's inhabited not only by humans who want to capture and kill us, but also by huge, possibly intelligent arachnids whose nature we do not understand."

"Remember," Richard said with a grin, "I could be wrong."

Nicole stood up and walked toward the door.

"Where are you going?" Richard asked.

"To my bed," Nicole replied with a laugh. "I think I'm developing a headache. I can only contemplate the infinite for a finite period of time."