The Garden of Rama(Rama III)

RETURN TO THE NODE Chapter 3
10 June 2201

Richard was right. He was certain that the intermittent, low-frequency whistle early yesterday was announcing another mission phase transition. He even suggested that maybe we should go over to the new tank and be prepared to take positions on our individual hammocks. Michael and I both argued with him, insisting that there was not "nearly enough information" to jump to such a conclusion.

We should have followed Richard's advice. Essentially we ignored the whistle and went on with our normal (if that term can ever be used for our existence inside this spacecraft of extraterrestrial origin) routine. About three hours later, the foreman mantis appeared suddenly in the doorway of our main room and scared me out of my wits. It pointed down the corridor with its peculiar fingers and made it clear that we were to move with some dispatch.

Simone was still asleep and not at all happy when I woke her up. She was also hungry, but the mantis biot would not let me take the time to feed her. So Simone was crying fitfully as we were herded across our lair to the tank.

A second mantis was waiting on the walkway that rings the lip of the tank. It was holding our transparent helmets in its strange hands. It must also have been the inspector, for this second mantis would not let us descend to our hammocks until it checked to ensure that the helmets were properly placed over our heads. The plastic or glass compound that forms the helmet front is remarkable; we can see perfectly through it. The bottoms of the helmets are also extraordinary. They are made of a sticky, rubberlike compound that adheres to the skin very tightly and creates an impermeable seal.

We had only been lying on our hammocks for thirty seconds when a powerful surge pressed us down against the webbed elements with such force that we sank halfway into the empty tank. An instant later tiny threads (they seemed to grow out of the hammock material) wrapped themselves around the trunks of our bodies, leaving only our arms and necks free. I glanced over at Simone to see if she was crying; she had a big smile on her face.

The tank had already begun to fill with a light green liquid. In less man a minute we were surrounded by the fluid. Its density was very close to our own, for we half floated on its surface. Soon thereafter the top of the tank closed. I became frightened as the liquid continued to fill the volume. Although I considered it unlikely that we were in any actual danger, I was relieved when the liquid stopped rising, leaving us a few centimeters of breathing space beneath the lid.

All this time the strong acceleration continued. Luckily it wasn't completely dark inside the tank. There were tiny lights scattered around the tank cover. I could see Simone next to me, her body bouncing like a buoy, and I could even see Richard in the distance.

We were inside the tank for slightly more than two hours. Richard was extremely excited when we were finished. He told Michael and me that he was certain we had just completed a "test" to see how we could withstand "excessive" forces.

"They are not satisfied with the paltry accelerations that we have been experiencing heretofore," he exuberantly informed us. "The Ramans want to really increase the velocity. To accomplish that, the spacecraft must be subjected to long duration, high gee forces. This tank has been designed to provide us with enough cushioning that our biological construction can accommodate the unusual environment."

Richard spent all day doing calculations and a few hours ago showed us his preliminary reconstruction of yesterday's "acceleration event." "Look at this," he shouted, barely able to contain himself. "We made an equivalent velocity change of seventy kilometers per second during that short two-hour period. That is absolutely monstrous for a spacecraft the size of Rama! We were accelerating at close to ten gees the entire time." He then grinned at us. "This ship has one hell of an overdrive mode."

When we finished the test in the tank, I inserted a new set of biometry probes in all of us, including Simone. I have not seen any unusual responses, at least nothing that has triggered a warning, but I admit that I am stiil a little concerned about how our bodies will react to the stress. A few minutes ago Richard chided me. "The Ramans are certainly watching too," he said, indicating that he thought the biometry was unnecessary. "I bet they are taking their own data through those threads."

19 June 2201

My vocabulary is inadequate to describe my experiences of the last several days. The word amazing, for example, falls far short of conveying the true sense of how extraordinary these long hours in the tank have been. The only remotely similar experiences in my life were both induced by the ingestion of catalytic chemicals, first during the Poro ceremony in the Ivory Coast when I was seven years old and then, more recently, after drinking Omen's vial while I was at the bottom of the pit in Rama. But both those trips or visions or whatever were isolated incidents and comparatively short in duration. My recent episodes in the tank have lasted for hours.

Before throwing myself totally into a description of the world inside my mind, I should summarize first the "real" events of the past week so that the hallucinatory episodes can be placed in context. Our daily life has now evolved into a repeating pattern. The spacecraft continues to maneuver, but in two separate modes: "regular," when the floor shakes and everything moves but a quasi-normal life can be lived, and "overdrive," when Rama accelerates at a ferocious rate that Richard now estimates is in excess of eleven gees.

When die spacecraft is in overdrive, the four of us must be inside the tank. The overdrive periods last for just under eight hours out of each twenty-seven-hour, six-minute cycle in the repetitive pattern. We are clearly intended to sleep during the overdrive segments. The tiny lights above our heads in the closed tank are extinguished after the first twenty minutes of each segment and we lie mere in the total darkness until five minutes before the end of the eight-hour period.

All this rapid velocity change, according to Richard, is speeding our escape from the Sun. If the current maneuver remains consistent in both magnitude and direction, and continues for as long as a month, we will then be traveling at half the speed of light with respect to our solar system.

"Where are we going?" Michael asked yesterday.

"It's still too early to tell," Richard responded. "All we know is that we're blasting away at a fantastic rate."

The temperature and density of the liquid inside the tank have been carefully adjusted each period until they are now exactly equal to ours. As a result, when I lie there in the dark, I can feel nothing at all except a barely perceptible downward force. My mind always tells me that I am inside an acceleration tank, surrounded by some kind of fluid cushioning my body against the powerful force, but the absence of sensation eventually causes me to lose my sense of body altogether. That's when the hallucinations begin. It's almost as if some normal sensory input to the brain is necessary to keep me properly functioning. If no sounds, no sights, no tastes, no smells, and no pain reach my brain, then its activity becomes unregulated.

I tried to discuss this phenomenon with Richard two days ago, but he just looked at me as if I were crazy. He has had no hallucinations. He spends his time in the "twilight zone" (his name for the period of no sensory input prior to deep sleep) doing mathematical calculations, conjuring up a wide variety of maps of the Earth, or even reliving his most outstanding sexual moments. He definitely manages his brain, even in the absence of sensory input. That is why we are so different. My mind wants to find a direction of its own when it is not being used for chores such as processing the billions of pieces of data coming from all the other cells in my body.

The hallucinations usually begin with a colored speck of red or green that appears in the total dark surrounding me. As the speck enlarges, it is joined by other colors, often yellow, blue, and purple. Each of the colors rapidly forms into its own irregular pattern and spreads across my vision screen. What I am seeing becomes a kaleidoscope of bright colors. The movement in the field accelerates until hundreds of strips and splotches fuse into one raging explosion.

In the middle of this riot of color a coherent image always forms. At first I cannot tell exactly what it is, for the figure or figures are very small, as if they are far, far away. As the image moves closer, it changes colors several times, adding both to the surreal overtone of the vision and to my inner sense of dread. More than half the time the image that eventually resolves itself contains my mother, or some animal like a cheetah or a lioness that I intuitively recognize as my mother in disguise. As long as I just watch, and make no volitional attempt to interact with my mother, she remains a character in the changing image. However, if I try to contact Mother in any way, she, or the animal representing her, immediately disappears, leaving me with an overwhelming feeling of having been abandoned.

During one of my recent hallucinations the waves of color broke into geometric patterns and these in turn changed to human silhouettes marching single file across my field of view. Omen was leading the procession in a bright green robe. The two figures at the rear of the group were both women, the heroines of my adolescence, Joan of Arc and Eleanor of Aquitaine. When I first heard their voices the procession dissolved and the scene instantly shifted. Suddenly I was in a small rowboat in the early morning fog on the small duck pond near our villa at Beauvois. I shivered with fear and began to weep uncontrollably. Joan and Eleanor appeared in the fog and mist to assure me that my father was not going to marry Helena, the English duchess with whom he had gone to Turkey on a vacation.

Another night the overture of color was followed by a bizarre theatrical performance somewhere in Japan. There were only two characters in the hallucinatory play, both of whom were wearing brilliant, expressive masks. The man who was dressed in the Western suit and tie recited poetry and had magnificently clear, open eyes that could be seen through his friendly mask. The other man looked like a seventeenth century samurai warrior. His mask was a perpetual scowl. He began to threaten both me and his more modern colleague. I screamed at the end of this hallucination because the two men met in the middle of the stage and merged into a single character.

Some of my most powerful hallucinatory images have only lasted for a few seconds. On the second or third night, a naked Prince Henry, engorged with desire, his body a vibrant purple in color, appeared for two or three seconds in the middle of another vision in which I was riding on a giant green octospider.

During yesterday's sleep period there were no colors for hours. Then, as I became aware of being incredibly hungry, a giant pink manna melon appeared in the darkness. When I attempted to eat the melon in my vision, it grew legs and scampered away, disappearing into unresolved colors.

Does any of this mean anything at all? Can I learn something about myself or my life from these apparently random outpourings of my undirected mind?

The debate about the significance of dreams has raged now for almost three centuries and is still unresolved. These hallucinations of mine, it seems to me, are even more removed from reality than normal dreams. In a sense they are distant cousins of the two psychedelic trips that I took earlier in my life, and any attempt to interpret them logically would be absurd. However, for some reason I still believe some fundamental truths are contained in these wild and seemingly unconnected rampagings of my mind. Maybe that's because I cannot accept that the human brain ever operates in a purely random manner.

22 July 2201

Yesterday the floor finally stopped shaking. Richard had predicted it. When we didn't go back into the tank two days ago at the customary time, Richard correctly conjectured that the maneuver was almost over.

So we enter still another phase of our incredible odys-sey. My husband informs us that we are now traveling at a velocity of more than half the speed of light. That means we are covering the Earth-Moon distance approximately every two seconds. We are headed, more or less, in the direction of the star Sirius, the brightest true star in the night sky of our home planet. If there are no more maneuvers, we will arrive in the vicinity of Sirius in another twelve years.

I am relieved that our life may now return to some kind of local equilibrium. Simone seems to have weathered the long periods in the tank without any noticeable difficulties, but I can't believe that such an experience will leave an infant totally unscathed. It is important for her that we now reestablish a daily routine.

In my moments alone I still think often about those vivid hallucinations during the first ten days in the tank. I must admit that I was delighted when I finally endured several "twilight zones" of total sensory deprivation without the wild, colored patterns and disjointed images flooding my mind. By that time J was starting to worry about my sanity and, quite frankly, was already way past "overwhelm." Even though the hallucinations abruptly stopped, my recollection of the strength of those visions still made me wary each time the fights in the top of the tank were extinguished during the fast several weeks.

I had only one additional vision after those first ten days - and it may actually just have been an extremely vivid dream during a normal period of sleep. Despite the fact that this particular image was not as sharp as the earlier ones, I have nevertheless retained all the details because of its similarity to one of the hallucinatory segments while I was at the bottom of the pit last year.

In my final dream or vision I was sitting with my father at an outdoor concert in an unknown place. An old Oriental gentleman with a long white beard was by himself on the stage, playing music on some kind of strange stringed instrument. Unlike my vision at the bottom of the pit, however, my father and I did not turn into little birds and fly away to Chinon in France. Instead, my father's body disappeared completely, leaving only his eyes. Within a few seconds there were five other pairs of eyes forming a hexagon in the air above me. I recognized Omeh's eyes immediately, and my mother's, but the other three were unknown. The eyes at the vertices of the hexagon all stared at me, unblinking, as if they were trying to communicate something. Just before the music stopped I heard a single distinct sound. Several voices simultaneously uttered the word "Danger."

What was the origin of my hallucinations and why was I the only one of the three of us to experience them? Richard and Michael also endured sensory deprivation, and they have each admitted seeing "bizarre colored patterns," but their images were never coherent. If, as we have conjectured, the Ramans initially injected us with a chemical or two, using the tiny threads that wound around our bodies, to help us sleep in the unfamiliar surroundings, why was I the only one to respond with such wild visions?

Richard and Michael both think the answer is simple, that I am a "drug labile individual with a hyperactive imagination." As far as they are concerned, that's the entire explanation. They don't pursue the subject any further and, although they are polite when I raise the many issues associated with my "trips," they don't even seem interested anymore. I might have expected that kind of a response from Richard, but certainly not from Michael.

Actually even our predictable General O'Toole has not been completely himself since we began our sessions in the tank. He has clearly been preoccupied with other matters. Only this morning did I obtain a small glimpse of what has been going on in his mind.

"I have always," Michael finally said slowly, after I had been pestering him with friendly questions for several minutes, "without consciously acknowledging it, redefined and relimited God with each new breakthrough in science. I had managed to integrate a concept of the Ramans into my Catholicism, but in so doing I had merely expanded my limited definition of Him. Now, when I find myself onboard a robot spacecraft traveling at relativistic speeds, I see that I must completely unfetter God. Only then can He be the supreme being of all the particles and processes in the universe."

The challenge of my life in the near future is at the other extreme. Richard and Michael are focused on profound ideas - Richard in the realm of science and engineering, Michael in the world of the soul. Although I thoroughly enjoy the stimulating ideas produced by each of them in his separate search for the truth, someone must pay attention to the everyday tasks of living. The three of us have the responsibility, after all, of preparing our only member of the next generation for her adult life. It looks as if the task of being the primary parent will always fall to me.

It is a responsibility I gladly embrace. When Simone smiles radiantly at me during a break from her nursing, I don't muse about my hallucinations, it really doesn't matter that much whether or not there is a God, and it is not of overwhelming significance that the Ramans have developed a method for using water as nuclear fuel. At that instant the only thing that is important is that I am Simone's mother.

31 July 2201

Spring has definitely come to Rama. The thaw began as soon as the maneuver was completed. By that time the temperature topside had reached a frigid twenty-five below zero, and we had begun to worry about how much lower the outside temperature could become before the system regulating the thermal conditions in our lair would be stretched to the limit. The temperature has been rising steadily almost a degree per day since then and, at that rate, will cross the freezing level within two more weeks.

We are now outside the solar system in the near-perfect vacuum that fills the immense voids between neighboring stars. Our sun is still the dominant object in the sky, but none of the planets is even visible. Two or three times a week Richard searches through the telescopic data for some sign of the comets in the Oort Cloud, but thus far he has seen nothing.

Where is the heat coming from that is warming the interior of our vehicle? Our master engineer, the handsome cosmonaut Richard Wakefield, had a quick explanation when Michael asked him that question yesterday. "The same nuclear system that was providing the huge velocity change is probably now generating the heat. Rama must have two different operating regimes. When it is in the neighborhood of a heat source, like a star, it turns off all its primary systems, including propulsion and thermal control."

Both Michael and I congratulated Richard for an eminently plausible explanation. "But," I asked him two days ago, "there are still many other questions. Why, for example, does it have the two separate engineering systems? And why does it turn off the primary one at all?"

"Here I can only speculate," Richard answered with his usual grin. "Maybe the primary systems need periodic repairs and these can only be accomplished when there is an external source of heat and power. You have seen how the various biots maintain the surface of Rama. Maybe there's another set of biots who perform all the maintenance on the primary systems."

"I have another idea," Michael said slowly. "Do you believe we are meant to be dhboard this spacecraft?"

"What do you mean?" Richard asked, his brow furrowed.

"Do you think it is a random event that we are here? Or is it a likely event, given all the probabilities and the nature of our species, that some members of the human race would be inside Rama at this moment?"

I liked Michael's line of reasoning. He was hinting, although he didn't yet understand it completely himself, that perhaps the Ramans were not just geniuses in the hard sciences and engineering. Perhaps they knew something about universal psychology as well. Richard wasn't following.

"Are you suggesting," I asked, "that the Ramans purposely used their secondary systems in the neighborhood of the Earth, expecting thereby to lure us into a rendezvous?"

"That's preposterous," Richard said immediately.

"But Richard," Michael rejoined, "think about it. What would have been the probability of any contact if the Ramans had streaked into our system at a significant fraction of the speed of light, rounded the Sun, and then gone on their merry way? Absolutely zero. And, as you have indicated yourself, there may be other 'foreigners,' if we can call ourselves that, on this ship as well. I doubt if many species have the ability..."

The conversation continued for almost half an hour. When it was over I reminded the men that the Cylindrical Sea would soon melt from below, and that there would be hurricanes and tidal waves immediately afterward. We all later agreed that we should retrieve the backup sailboat from the Beta site.

It took the men slightly more than twelve hours to trek both ways across the ice. Night had already fallen by the time they returned. When Richard and Michael reached our lair, Simone, who is already completely aware of her surroundings, reached out her arms to Michael.

"I see someone is glad that I'm back," Michael said jokingly.

"As long as it's just Simone," Richard said. He seemed strangely tense and distant.

Last night his peculiar mood continued. "What's the matter, darling?" I asked him when we were alone together on our mat. He didn't reply immediately, so I kissed him on the cheek and waited.

"It's Michael," Richard said at length. "I just realized today, when we were carrying the sailboat across the ice, that he's in love with you. You should hear him. All he talks about is you. You're the perfect mother, the perfect wife, the perfect friend. He even admitted that he was envious of me."

I caressed Richard for a few seconds, trying to figure out how to respond. "I think you're making too much of some casual statements, darling," I said finally. "Michael was simply expressing his honest affection. I am very fond of him as well - "

"I know - that's what bothers me," Richard interrupted me abruptly. "He takes care of Simone most of the time when you're busy, the two of you talk for hours while I'm working on my projects - "

He stopped and stared at me with a strange, forlorn look in his eyes. His gaze was scary. This was not the same Richard Wakefield that I have known intimately for over a year. A chill rushed through my system before his eyes softened and he reached over to kiss me.

After we made love and he fell asleep, Simone stirred and I decided to feed her. While I was nursing I thought back over the entire period of time since Michael found us at the foot of the chairlift. There was nothing I could cite that should have caused Richard the slightest bit of jealousy. Even our lovemaking has remained regular and satisfying throughout, although I will admit it hasn't been too imaginative since Simone's birth.

The crazy look that I had seen in Richard's eyes continued to haunt me even after Simone was finished nursing. I promised myself I would find more time to be alone with Richard in the coming weeks.

20 June 2202

I verified today that I am indeed pregnant again. Michael was delighted, Richard surprisingly unresponsive. When I talked to Richard privately, he acknowledged that he had mixed feelings because Simone had finally reached the stage where she didn't need "constant attention" anymore. I reminded him that when we had talked two months ago about having another child, he had given his enthusiastic consent. Richard suggested to me that his eagerness to father a second child had been strongly influenced by my "obvious excitement" at the time.

The new baby should arrive in mid-March. By then we will have finished with the nursery and will have enough living space for the entire family. I am sorry that Richard is not thrilled about being a father again, but I am glad that Simone will now have a playmate.

15 March 2203

Catharine Colin Wakefield (we will call her Katie) was born on the thirteenth of March at 6:16 in the morning. It was an easy birth, only four hours from the first strong contraction to delivery. There was no significant pain at any time. I delivered squatting on my haunches and was in such good shape that I cut the umbilical myself.

Katie already cries a lot. Both Genevieve and Simone were sweet, mellow babies, but Katie is obviously going to be a noisemaker. Richard is pleased that I wanted to name her after his mother. I had hoped that he might be more interested in his role as father this time, but at present he is too busy working on his "perfect data base" (it will index and provide easy access to all our information) to pay much attention to Katie.

My third daughter weighed just under four kilograms at birth and was fifty-four centimeters long. Simone was almost certainly not as heavy when she was born, but we did not have an accurate scale at the time. Katie's skin color is quite fair, almost white in fact, and her hair is much lighter than the dark black tresses of her sister. Her eyes are surprisingly blue. I know that it's not unusual for babies to have blue eyes and that often they darken significantly in the first year. But I never expected a child of mine to have blue eyes for even a moment.

18 May 2203

It's hard for me to believe that Katie is already more than two months old. She is such a demanding baby! By now I should have been able to teach her not to pull on my nipples, but I cannot break her of the habit. She is especially difficult when anyone else is present while I am nursing. If I even turn my head to talk to Michael or Richard, or especially if I try to answer one of Simone's questions, then Katie jerks on my nipple with a vengeance.

Richard has been extremely moody lately. At times he is his usual brilliant, witty self, keeping Michael and me laughing with his erudite banter; however, his mood can shift in an instant. A single seemingly innocuous observation by either of us can plunge him into depression or even anger.

I suspect that Richard's real problem these days is boredom. He has finished his data base project and not yet started another major activity. The fabulous computer he built last year contains subroutines that make our interface with the black screen almost routine. Richard could add some variety to his days by playing a more active part in Simone's development and education, but I guess it's just not his style. He does not seem to be fascinated, as Michael and I are, with the complex patterns of growth that are emerging in Simone.

When I was first pregnant with Katie, I was quite concerned about Richard's apparent lack of interest in children. I decided to attack the problem directly by asking him to help me set up a minilaboratory that would enable us to analyze part of Katie's genome from a sample of my amniotic fluid. The project involved complex chemistry, a level of interaction with the Ramans deeper than any we had ever tried before, and the creation and calibration of some sophisticated medical instruments.

Richard loved the task. I did too, for it reminded me of my days in medical school. We worked together for twelve, sometimes fourteen hours a day (leaving Michael to take care of Simone - those two are certainly fond of each other) until we were finished. Often we would talk about our work late into the night, even while we were making love.

When the day came, however, that we completed the analysis of our own future child's genome, I discovered, much to my amazement, that Richard was more excited about the fact that the equipment and analysis met all our specifications than he was about the characteristics of our second daughter. I was astonished. When I told him that the child was a girl, and didn't have Down's or Whitting-ham's syndrome, and none of her a priori cancer tendencies were outside the acceptable ranges, he reacted matter-of-factly. But when I praised the speed and accuracy with which the system had completed the test, Richard beamed with pride. What a different man my husband is! He is much more comfortable with the world of mathematics and engineering than he is with other people.

Michael has noticed Richard's recent restlessness as well. He has encouraged Richard to create more toys for Simone like the brilliant dolls he made when I was in the final months of my pregnancy with Katie. Those dolls are still Simone's favorite playthings. They walk around on their own and even respond to a dozen verbal commands. One night, when Richard was in one of his exuberant moods, he programmed TB to interact with the dolls. Simone was almost hysterical with laughter after The Bard (Michael insists on calling Richard's Shakespeare-spouting robot by its full name) chased all three of the dolls into a corner and then launched into a medley of love sonnets.

Not even TB has cheered Richard these last two weeks. He's not sleeping well, which is unusual for him, and he has shown no passion for anything. Our regular and varied sex life has even been suspended, so Richard must be really struggling with his internal demons. Three days ago he left early in the morning (it was also just after dawn in Rama - every now and then our Earth clock in the lair and the Raman clock outside are in synch) and stayed up in New York for over ten hours. When I asked him what he had been doing, he replied that he had sat on the wall and stared at the Cylindrical Sea. Then he changed the subject.

Michael and Richard are both convinced that we are now alone on our island. Richard has entered the avian lair twice recently, both times staying on the side of the vertical corridor away from the tank sentry. He even descended once to the second horizontal passageway, where I made my leap, but he saw no signs of life. The octo-spider lair now has a pair of complicated grills between the covering and the first landing. For the past four months, Richard has been electronically monitoring the region around the octo lair again; even though he admits there may be some ambiguities in his monitor data, Richard insists he can tell from visual inspection alone that the grills have not been opened for a long time.

The men assembled the sailboat a couple of months ago, and then spent two hours checking it out on the Cylindrical Sea. Simone and I waved to them from the shore. Fearful that the crab biots would define the boat as "garbage" (as they apparently did the other sailboat - we never did figure out what happened to it; a couple of days after we escaped from me phalanx of nuclear missiles we returned to where we had left the sailboat and it was gone), Richard and Michael disassembled it again and brought it into our lair for safekeeping.

Richard has said several times that he would like to sail across the sea, toward the south, and see if he can find any place where the five-hundred-meter cliff can be scaled. Our information about the Southern Hemicylinder of Rama is very limited. Except for the few days when we were on the biot hunt with the original Newton cosmonaut team, our knowledge of the region is limited to the crude mosaics assembled in realtime from the initial Newton drone images. It would certainly be fascinating and exciting to explore the south - maybe we could even find out where all those octospiders went. But we can't afford to take any risks at this juncture. Our family is critically dependent on each of the three adults - the loss of any one of us would be devastating.

I believe Michael OToole is content with the life we have made for ourselves on Rama, especially since the addition of Richard's large computer has made so much more information readily available to us. We now have access to all the encyclopedic data that was stored onboard the Newton military ship. Michael's current "study unit," as he calls his organized recreation, is art history. Last month his conversation was full of the Medici and the Catholic popes of the Renaissance, along with Michelangelo, Raphael, and the other great painters of the period. He is now involved with the nineteenth century, a time in art history that I find more interesting. We have had many recent discussions about the impressionist "revolution," but Michael does not accept my argument that impressionism was simply a natural by-product of the advent of the camera.

Michael spends hours with Simone. He is patient, tender, and caring. He has carefully monitored her development and has recorded her major milestones in his electronic notebook. At present Simone knows twenty-one of her twenty-six letters by sight (she confuses the pairs C and 5, as well as ¥ and V, and for some reason cannot learn the K), and can count to twenty on a good day.

Simone can also correctly identify drawings of an avian, an octospider, and the four most prevalent types of biots. She knows the names of the twelve disciples as well, a fact that does not make Richard happy. We have already had one "summit meeting" about the spiritual education of our daughters, and the result was polite disagreement.

That leaves me. I am happy most of the time, although I do have some days when Richard's restlessness or Katie's crying or just the absurdity of our strange life on this alien spaceship combine to overwhelm me. I am always busy. I plan most of the family activities, decide what we're eating and when, and organize the children's days, including their naps. I never stop asking the question, where are we going? But it no longer frustrates me that I do not know the answer.

My personal intellectual activity is more limited than I might choose if I were left to my own devices, but I tell myself that there are only so many hours in the day. Richard, Michael, and I engage often in lively conversation, so there is certainly no dearth of stimulation. But neither of them has much interest in some intellectual areas that have always been a part of my life. My skills in languages and linguistics, for example, have been a source of considerable pride for me since my earliest days in school. Several weeks ago I had a terrifying dream in which I had forgotten how to write or speak in anything but English. For two weeks thereafter I spent two hours by myself each day, not just reviewing my beloved French, but also studying Italian and Japanese as well.

One afternoon last month Richard projected on the black screen a Raman external telescope output that included our Sun and another thousand stars in the field of view. The Sun was the brightest of the objects, but just barely. Richard reminded Michael and me that we are already more than twelve trillion kilometers away from our oceanic home planet in close orbit around that insignificant distant star.

Later the same evening we watched Eleanor the Queen, one of the thirty or so movies originally carried onboard the Newton to entertain the cosmonaut crew. The movie was loosely based on my father's successful novels about Eleanor of Aquitaine and was filmed in many of the locations that I had visited with my father when I was an adolescent. The final scenes of the movie, showing the years before Eleanor died, all took place in L'Abbaye de Fontevrault. I remember being fourteen years old and standing in the abbey beside my father opposite the carved effigy of Eleanor, my hands trembling with emotion as I clutched his. "You were a great woman," I once said to the spirit of the queen who had dominated twelfth century history in France and England, "and you have set an example for me to follow. I will not disappoint you."

That night, after Richard was asleep and while Katie was temporarily quiet, I thought about the day again and was filled with a deep sorrow, a sense of loss that I could not quite articulate. The juxtaposition of the retreating Sun and the image of myself as a teenager, making bold promises to a queen who had been dead for almost a thousand years, reminded me that everything I had ever known before Rama is now finished. My two new daughters will never see any of the places that meant so much to me and Genevieve. They will never know the smell of freshly mown grass in springtime, the radiant beauty of the flowers, the songs of the birds, or the glory of the full moon rising out of the ocean. They will not know the planet Earth at all, or any of its inhabitants, except for this small and motley crew they will call their family, a meager representation of the overflowing life on a blessed planet.

That night I wept quietly for several minutes, knowing even as I was weeping that by morning I would again be wearing my optimistic face. After all, it could be much worse. We have the essentials: food, water, shelter, clothing, good health, companionship, and, of course, love. Love is the most important ingredient for the happiness of any human life, either on Earth or on Rama. If Simone and Katie learn only of love from the world we've left behind, it will be enough.