The Garden of Rama(Rama III)

RETURN TO THE NODE Chapter 8

Good morning," Simone said with a soft smile. The rest of the family were all seated at the table having breakfast when she and Michael walked in, hand in hand.

"Good mor-ning," Benjy replied. His mouth was stuffed with buttered toast and jam. He rose from his seat, walked slowly around the table, and hugged his favorite sister.

Patrick was right behind him. "Are you going to help me with my math today?" he asked Simone. "Mother says that now that we're going back I have to be serious about my studies."

Michael and Simone sat down at the table after the boys had returned to their seats. Simone reached for the coffeepot. She was like her mother in one respect. She didn't function well in the morning until she had had her coffee.

"Well, is the honeymoon finally over?" Katie asked in her usual irreverent manner. "After all, it's been three nights and two days. You must have listened to every piece of classical music in the data base."

Michael laughed easily. "Yes, Katie," he said, smiling warmly at Simone. "We've taken the DO NOT DISTURB sign off the door. We want to do whatever we can to help everyone pack for the voyage."

"We're actually in pretty good shape," Nicole commented, delighted to see Michael and her daughter so comfortable together after their long seclusion. I needn't have worried, she thought quickly. In some ways Simone is more adult than I am.

"I wish the Eagle would give us more specifics about our return trip," Richard complained. "He won't tell us how long the journey will take or whether or not we'll sleep all the way or anything definite."

"He says he doesn't know for certain," Nicole reminded her husband. "There are 'uncontrollable' variables that could result in many different scenarios."

"You always believe him," Richard countered. "You are the most trusting - "

The doorbell interrupted their conversation. Katie went to the door and returned a few moments later with the Eagle. "I hope I'm not disturbing your breakfast," the birdman apologized, "but we have much to accomplish today. I will need for Mrs. Wakefield to come with me."

Nicole took the final sip of her coffee and looked quizzically at the Eagle. "Alone?" she said. She was aware of a vague fear inside her. She had never left the apartment by herself with the Eagle during their sixteen-month stay at the Node.

"Yes," the Eagle replied. "You'll be coming with me alone. There is a special task that only you can perform."

"Do I have ten minutes to get ready?"

"Certainly," the Eagle replied.

While Nicole was out of the room, Richard peppered the Eagle with questions. "Okay," Richard said at one juncture, "I understand that as a result of all these tests, you are confident now that we can safely remain asjeep throughout the acceleration and deceleration periods. But what about during normal cruise? Will we be awake or asleep?"

"Mostly asleep," the Eagle replied, "because that way we can both retard the aging process and ensure your good health. But there are many uncertainties in the schedule. It may be necessary to awaken you several times en route."

"Why have you not told us this before?"

"Because it wasn't yet decided. The scenario for your mission is quite complicated and the baseline plan has only recently been defined."

"I don't want my aging process to 'be retarded,' " Katie said. "I want to be a grown woman when we meet other people from the Earth."

"As I told your mother and father yesterday," the Eagle said to Katie, "it is important that we have the ability to slow the aging process while you and your family are asleep. We do not know exactly when you will return to your solar system. If you were to sleep for fifty years, for example - "

"Whaaat?" Richard interrupted in consternation. "Who said anything about fifty years? We reached here in twelve or thirteen. Why wouldn't - "

"I'll be older than Mama," Katie said, a frightened look on her face.

Nicole entered from the next room. "What's this I heard about fifty years? Why will it take so long? Are we going someplace else first?"

"Obviously," Richard said. He was angry. "Why were we not told all this before we made the 'allocation' decision? We might have done something differently... My God, if it take fifty years, Nicole and I will be a hundred years old!"

"No, you won't," the Eagle replied without emotion. "We estimate that you and Mrs. Wakefield will only age one year in five or six while we have you 'suspended.' For the children, the ratio will be closer to one year in two, at least until their growth subsides. We are wary of tampering too much with the growth hormones. And besides, the fifty years is an upper bound, what a human engineer would call a three-sigma number."

"Now I'm completely confused," Katie said, walking over and directly confronting the Eagle. "How old will I be when I meet up with a human being who is not part of my family?"

"I can't answer that question exactly, because there are statistical uncertainties involved," their alien colleague replied. "But your body should be at the equivalent development level of your early to mid-twenties. At least that's a most likely answer." The Eagle motioned to Nicole. "Now that's all I'm going to say. I have business with your mother. We should return before dinner tonight."

"As usual," Richard grumbled, "we're told almost nothing. Sometimes I wish that we had not been so cooperative."

"You could have been more difficult," the Eagle remarked as he and Nicole were leaving the room, "and in fact our predictions, based on our observational data, were for less cooperation than we have had. In the end, though, there would have been no substantive difference in the outcome. This way it has been more pleasant for you."

"Good-bye," Nicole said.

"Good-bye," said Benjy, waving to his mother after the door was already closed.

It was a long document. Nicole calculated that it would take her at least ten, maybe fifteen minutes to read the entire text out loud.

"Are you almost finished with your study?" the Eagle inquired again. "We'd like to begin the shooting, as you call it, as soon as possible."

"Explain to me again what happens to this video after I make it," Nicole requested.

"We broadcast it toward the Earth several years before you arrive in your solar system. That gives your fellow human beings ample time to respond."

"How do you know if they have actually heard it?" ' 'We have requested a simple return signal acknowledging receipt."

"And what if you don't ever receive this return signal?"

"That's what contingency plans are for."

Nicole had serious misgivings about reading the message. She asked if she could have some time to discuss the document with Richard and Michael.

"What is it that you are worried about?" the Eagle asked.

"Everything," Nicole replied. "It just doesn't seem right. I feel as if I'm being used to further your purpose - and since I don't know exactly what your purpose is, I'm afraid that I'm being a traitor to the human species."

The Eagle brought Nicole a glass of water and sat down beside her in the alien studio. "Let's look at this logically," the Eagle said. "We have very clearly told you that our primary objective is to gather detailed information about spacefaring species in the galaxy. Right?"

Nicole nodded.

"We have also constructed a habitat inside Rama for two thousand Earthlings and are sending you and your family back to gather those humans for an observational voyage. All you're doing, with that video, is informing the Earth that we are on our way and that the two thousand members of your species, along with the supporting artifacts of your culture, should meet us in Mars orbit. What could be wrong with that?"

"The text of this document," Nicole protested, pointing at the electronic notebook the Eagle had given her, "is extremely vague. I never indicate, for example, what will be the eventual fate of all these humans - only that they will be 'cared for' and 'observed' during some kind of a journey. There is also no mention of why the humans are being studied, or anything at all about the Node and its controlling intelligence. In addition, the tone is definitely threatening. I am telling the people on Earth who receive this transmission that if a contingent of humans does not rendezvous with Rama in Mars orbit, then the spaceship will approach closer to the Earth and 'acquire its specimens in a less organized way.' That is clearly a hostile statement."

"You may edit the remarks, if you would like, just as long as the intent is not changed," the Eagle replied. "But I should tell you that we have a great deal of experience with this type of communication. With species similar to yours, we have always been more successful when the message has not been too specific."

"But why won't you let me take the document back to the apartment? I could discuss it with Richard and Michael and we could jointly edit it to soften the tone."

"Because the video must be prepared by you today," the Eagle said stubbornly. "We are open to discussing modifications to the content and will work with you as long as necessary. But the sequence must be completed before you return to your family."

The voice sounded friendly but the meaning was absolutely clear. I have no choice, Nicole thought. I am being ordered to do the video. She stared for several seconds at the strange creature sitting beside her. This Eagle is just a machine, Nicole said to herself, feeling her anger rise. He is carrying out his programmed instructions... My quarrel is not with him.

"No," she said abruptly, astonishing even herself. She shook her head. "I won't do it."

The Eagle was not prepared for Nicole's response. There was a long silence. Despite her emotional agitation, Nicole was fascinated by her companion. What's going on with him now? she wondered. Are complicated new logic loops being exercised in his equivalent of a brain? Or is he perhaps receiving signals from somewhere else?

At length the Eagle stood up. "Well," he said, "this is quite a surprise... We never expected you to refuse to do the video."

"Then you haven't been paying attention to what I've been saying... I feel as if you, or whoever is commanding you, are using me... and purposely telling me as little as possible. If you want me to do something for you, then at least some of my questions should be answered."

"What is it precisely that you want to know?"

"I've told you already," Nicole replied, her frustration showing. "What the hell is really going on in this place? Who or what are you? Why do you want to observe us? And while you're at it, how about a good explanation of why you need for us to leave a 'reproductive pair' here? I've never liked the idea of breaking up my family - I should have protested more forcefully at the beginning. If your technology is so wonderful that it can create something like this incredible Node, why can't you simply take a human egg and some sperm - "

"Calm down, Mrs. Wakefield," the Eagle said. "I've never seen you so agitated before. I had you classified as the most stable individual in your group."

And most malleable too, I'll bet, Nicole thought. She waited for her anger to subside. Somewhere in that bizarre brain is doubtless a quantitative assessment of the probability that I would meekly follow orders... Well, I fooled you this time...

"Look, Mr. Eagle," Nicole said a few seconds later, "I'm not stupid. I know who is in control here. I just think we humans deserve to be treated with a little more respect. Our questions are quite legitimate."

"And if we answer them to your satisfaction?"

"You've been watching me carefully for over a year," Nicole said. She smiled. "Have I ever been completely unreasonable?"

"Where are we going?" Nicole asked.

"On a short tour," the Eagle replied. "That may be the best way to deal with your uncertainties."

The strange vehicle was small and spherical, just large enough for the Eagle and Nicole. The entire front hemisphere was transparent. Behind the window, on the side where the alien birdman was sitting, was a small control panel. During the flight the Eagle occasionally touched the panel, but most of the time the craft seemed to be operating on its own.

Within seconds after they were seated inside, the sphere zipped down a long corridor and through a large set of double doors into total blackness. Nicole gasped. She felt as if she were floating in space.

"Each of the three spherical modules of the Node," the Eagle said, as Nicole struggled vainly to see anything at all, "has a hollow center. We have now entered a passageway that leads to the core of the Habitation Module."

After almost a minute some distant lights appeared in front of their small craft. Soon thereafter the vehicle emerged from the black passageway and entered the immense hollow core. The sphere flipped and turned, disorienting Nicole as it headed toward the darkness, away from the many lights on what must have been the inside of the main body of the Habitation Module.

"We observe everything that occurs with all our guest species, both temporary and permanent," the Eagle said. "As you have suspected, we have hundreds of monitoring devices inside your apartment. But all your walls are also one-way mirrors - from this core region we can watch your activities from a wider perspective."

Nicole had grown accustomed to the wonders of the Node, but the new sights around her were still staggering. Dozens, maybe hundreds of tiny blinking lights moved about in the vast darkness of the core. They looked like a group of scattered fireflies on a dark summer night. Some of the lights were hovering near the walls; others were moving slowly across the void. Some were so far away that they seemed to be standing still.

"We have a major maintenance center here as well," the Eagle said, pointing in front of them at a dense collection of lights in the distance. "Every element of the module can be reached very quickly from this core, in case there are engineering or any other kind of problems."

"What's going on over there?" Nicole asked, tapping on the window. About twenty kilometers to the right a group of vehicles were stationed just away from a large, illuminated portion of the Habitation Module.

"That's a special observation session," the Eagle replied, "using our most advanced remote sensing monitors. Those particular apartments house an unusual species, one that has characteristics never before recorded in this sector of the Galaxy. Many of its individuals are dying and we do not understand why. We are trying to figure out how to save them."

" So everything doesn' t always work the way you planned it?"

"No," replied the Eagle. In the reflected light the creature seemed to be smiling. "That's why we have so many contingency plans."

"What would you have done if no humans had ever come to find out about Rama in the first place?" Nicole suddenly asked.

"We have alternate methods of accomplishing the same goals," the Eagle answered vaguely.

The vehicle accelerated along its chordal path in the darkness. Soon a similar sphere, slightly larger than theirs, approached them from the left. "Would you like to meet a member of a species whose development level is approximately equal to yours?" the Eagle said. He touched the control panel and the interior of their craft was illuminated by soft lights.

Before Nicole could respond, the second vehicle was beside mem. It also had a transparent forward hemisphere. This second sphere was filled with a colorless liquid, and two creatures were swimming about. They looked like large eels wearing capes, and they moved in undulations through the liquid. Nicole estimated that the creatures were about three meters long and twenty centimeters thick. The black cape, which spread out like a wing during movement, was about a meter wide when fully extended.

"The one on your right, without the colored markings," the Eagle said, "is an artificial intelligence system. It serves a role similar to mine, acting as a host for the aquatic species. The other being is a spacefarer from another world."

Nicole stared at the alien. It had folded its cape tightly around its slightly greenish body and was sitting nearly motionless in the liquid. The creature had arranged itself in a horseshoe configuration with both ends of its body facing her. A burst of bubbles came from one of its two ends.

"It says, 'Hello, and wow are you intriguing,'" the Eagle said.

"How do you know that?" Nicole replied, unable to take her eyes off the bizarre being. Its two ends, one bright red and the other gray, had now wrapped around each other. Both were pressed against the window of the craft.

"My colleague in the other vehicle is translating and then communicating to me...Do you wish to respond?"

Nicole's mind was a blank. What do I say? she thought, her eyes focused on the unusual wrinkles and protuberances on the alien's extremities. There were half a dozen separate features on each end, including a pair of white slits on the red "face." None of me markings looked like anything that Nicole had ever seen on the Earth. She stared silently, remembering the many conversations that she and Richard and Michael had had about the questions they would ask if, and when, they were ever able to communicate directly with an intelligent extraterrestrial. But we never imagined a situation like this, Nicole thought.

More bubbles flooded the window opposite her. "Our home planet accreted five billion years ago," the Eagle said, translating. "Our binary stars reached stability a billion years later. Our system has fourteen major planets, on two of which some kind of life evolved. Our oceanic planet has three intelligent species, but we are the only spacefarers. We began our space exploration slightly more man two thousand years ago."

Nicole was now embarrassed by her silence. "Hello... hello," she said haltingly. "It is a pleasure to meet you... Our species has only been spacefarers for three hundred years. We are the only highly intelligent organism on a planet that is two thirds covered by water. Our heat and light come from a solitary, stable, yellow star. Our evolution began in the water, three or four billion years ago, but now we live on the land - "

Nicole stopped. The other creature, its two ends still entwined, had now brought the rest of its body over against the window so that the details of its physical structure could be seen more clearly. Nicole understood. She stood up next to the window and turned around slowly. Then she held her hands out, wiggling her fingers. More bubbles followed.

"Do you have an alternate manifestation?" the Eagle translated a few seconds later.

"I don't understand," Nicole replied. The Nodal host in the other sphere communicated her message using both body motions and bubbles.

"We have two manifestations," the alien explained. "My offspring will have appendages, not unlike yours, and will dwell mostly on ocean bottoms, building our homes and factories and spaceships. They in turn will produce another generation that looks like me."

"No, no," Nicole replied eventually. "We have only a single manifestation. Our children always resemble their parents."

The conversation lasted for five more minutes. The two spacefarers talked mostly about biology. The alien was especially impressed by the wide thermal range in which humans could function successfully. It told Nicole that members of its species were unable to survive if the ambient temperature of the surrounding liquid was outside a narrow range.

Nicole was fascinated by the creature's description of a watery planet whose surface was almost totally covered by huge mats of photosynthetic organisms. The caped eels, or whatever they were, lived in the shallows just below these hundreds of different organisms and used the photo-synthesizers for practically everything - food, building materials, even as reproductive aids.

At length the Eagle told Nicole that it was time to depart. She waved at the alien, which was still pressed against the window. It responded with a final flurry of bubbles and unwrapped its two ends. Seconds later the distance between the two capsules was already hundreds of meters.

It was dark again inside the moving sphere. The Eagle was silent. Nicole was exhilarated. Her mind continued to race, still actively formulating questions for the alien creature with whom she had had the brief encounter. Do you have families? she thought. And if so, how do dissimilar creatures live together? Can you communicate with the bottom-dwellers who are your children?

Another genre of question intruded into Nicole's stream of consciousness and she suddenly felt slightly disappointed in herself. I was much too clinical, too scientific, she thought. I should have asked about God, life after death, even ethics.

"It would have been virtually impossible to have had what you would call a philosophical conversation," the Eagle said a few moments later after Nicole had expressed a lack of satisfaction in the topics that had been discussed. "There was absolutely no common ground for such an exchange. Until each of you knew a few basic facts about the other, there were no references for a discussion of values or other meaningful issues."

Still, Nicole reflected, I could have tried. Who knows? That horseshoe-shaped alien might have had some answers...

Nicole was jolted out of her contemplation by the sound of human voices. As she looked questioningly at the Eagle, the sphere turned completely around and Nicole saw that they were hovering only a few meters away from her living quarters.

A light went on in the bedroom that Michael and Si-mone were sharing. "Is that Benjy?" Nicole heard her daughter whisper to her husband of a few days.

"I think so," Michael replied.

Nicole watched quietly as Simone rose from the bed, pulled her robe about her, and crossed into the hallway. When she switched on the light in the living room, Simone saw her retarded younger brother curled up on the sofa.

"What are you doing here, Benjy?" Simone asked kindly. "You should be in bed - it's very, very late." She stroked her brother's anxious brow.

"I could not sleep," Benjy replied with effort. "I was wor-ried a-bout Ma-ma."

"She'll be home soon," Simone said soothingly. "She'll be home soon."

Nicole felt a lump in her throat and a few tears eased into her eyes. She looked over at the Eagle, then at the illuminated apartment in front of her, and finally at the firefly vehicles in the distance above her head. She took a deep breath. "All right," Nicole said slowly, "I'm ready to do die video."

"I'm jealous," Richard said. "I really am. I would have been willing to trade both my arms for a conversation with that creature."

"It was amazing," Nicole said. "Even now, I'm still having difficulty believing that it actually happened...

It's also amazing that the Eagle somehow knew how I would respond to everything."

"He was just guessing. He really could not have expected to have solved his problem with you that easily. You didn't even make him answer your question about their need for a reproductive couple..."

"Yes, I did," Nicole replied somewhat defensively. "He explained to me that human embryology was such an astonishingly complicated process that even they couldn't possibly know the exact role played by a human mother without ever having watched a fetus mature and develop."

"I'm sorry, darling," Richard said quickly. "I wasn't implying that you really had any choice - "

"I felt as if they were at least trying to satisfy my objections." Nicole sighed. "Maybe I'm kidding myself. After all, hi the end I did make the video, exactly as they had planned."

Richard put his arms around Nicole. "As I said, you really had no choice, darling. Don't be too hard on yourself."

Nicole kissed Richard and sat up in bed. "But what if they are taking this data so that they can prepare an efficient invasion, or something like that?"

"We've discussed all this before," Richard replied. "Their technological capabilities are so advanced they could take over the Earth in minutes if that was their goal. The Eagle himself has pointed out that if invasion and subjugation was their objective, they could accomplish it with a far less elaborate procedure."

"Now who's the trusting one?" Nicole said, managing a smile.

"Not trusting. Just realistic. I'm certain that the overall welfare of the human species is not a significant factor in the priority queue of the Nodal Intelligence. But I do think you should stop worrying about being an accomplice in crime with your video. The Eagle is right. Most likely you have made the 'acquisition process' less difficult for the inhabitants of Earth as well."

They were silent for a few minutes. "Darling," Nicole said at length. "Why do you think we're not going directly to the Earth?"

"My guess is that we must stop somewhere else first.

Presumably to pick up another species in the same phase of the project as we are."

"And they will live in that other module inside Rama?" "That's what I would assume," Richard replied.