The Garden of Rama(Rama III)

EPITHALAMION Chapter 3

Are you going to be depressed forever?" Nicole asked, looking across the breakfast table at her husband. "Besides, thus far nothing terrible has happened. The weather has been fine."

"I think it's better than before, Uncle Richard," Patrick offered. "You're a hero at the university - even if some of the kids do think you're part alien."

Richard managed a smile. "The government is not following my recommendations," he said quietly, "and is paying no heed whatsoever to the Eagle's warning. There are even some people in the engineering office who are saying I created the hologram of the Eagle myself. Can you imagine that?"

"Kenji believes what you told him, darling."

"Then why is he letting those weather people continually increase the strength of the commanded response? They can't possibly predict the long-term effects."

"What is it you're worried about, Father?" Ellie asked a moment later.

"Managing such a large volume of gas is a very complicated process, Ellie, and I have great respect for the ETs who designed the New Eden infrastructure in the first place. They were the ones who insisted the carbon dioxide and particulate concentrations must be maintained below specified levels. They must have known something."

Patrick and Ellie finished their breakfasts and excused themselves. Several minutes later, after the children had left the house, Nico!e walked around the table and put her hands on Richard's shoulders. "Do you remember the night we discussed Albert Einstein with Patrick and Ellie?"

Richard looked at Nicole with a furrowed brow.

"Later on that night, when we were in bed, I commented that Einstein's discovery of the relationship between matter and energy was 'horrible,' because it led to the existence of nuclear weapons... Do you remember your response?"

Richard shook his head.

"You told me that Einstein was a scientist, whose life work was searching for knowledge and truth. 'There is no knowledge that is horrible,' you said. 'Only what other human beings do with that knowledge can be called horrible.' "

Richard smiled. "Are you trying to absolve me of responsibility on this weather issue?"

"Maybe," Nicole replied. She reached down and kissed him on the lips. "I know that you are one of the smartest, most creative human beings who ever lived and I don't like to see you carrying all the burdens of the colony on your shoulders."

Richard kissed her back with considerable vigor. "Do you think we can finish before Benjy wakes up?" he whispered. "He doesn't have school today and he stayed up very late last night."

"Maybe," Nicole answered with a coquettish grin. "We can at least try. My first case is not until ten o'clock."

Eponine's senior class at Central High School, called simply "Art and Literature," encompassed many aspects of the culture that the colonists had at least temporarily left behind. In her basic curriculum, Eponine covered a multicultural, eclectic set of sources, encouraging the students to pursue independent study in any specific areas they found stimulating. Although she always used lesson plans and a syllabus in her teaching, Eponine was the kind of instructor who tailored each of her classes to the interests of the students.

Eponine herself thought Les Miserables by Victor Hugo was the greatest novel ever written, and the nineteenth century impressionist painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir, from her home city of Limoges, the finest painter who had ever lived. She included the works of both of her countrymen in the class, but carefully structured the rest of the source material to give fair representation to other nations and cultures.

' Since the Kawabata biots helped her each year with the class play, it was natural to use the real Kawabata's novels A Thousand Cranes and Snow Country as examples of. Japanese literature. The three weeks on poetry ranged from Frost to Rilke to Omar Khayyam. However, the principal poetic focus was Benita Garcia, not only because of the presence of the Garcia biots all over New Eden, but also because Benita's poetry and life were both fascinating to young people.

. There were only eleven students in Eponine's senior class the year she was required to wear the red armband for having tested positive for RV-41 antibodies. The results of her test had presented the school administration with a difficult dilemma. Although the superintendent had courageously resisted the efforts of a strident group of parents, mostly from Hakone, who had demanded that Eponine be "dismissed" from the high school, he and his staff had nevertheless bowed somewhat to the hysteria in the colony by making Eponine's senior course optional. As a result her class was much smaller than it had been in the previous two years.

Ellie Wakefield was Eponine's favorite student. Despite the great gaps in the young woman's knowledge due to her years asleep on the trip back to the solar system from the Node, her natural intelligence and hunger for learning made her a joy in the classroom. Eponine often asked Ellie to perform special tasks. On the morning that the class began its study of Benita Garcia, which was, incidentally, the same morning that Richard Wakefield had discussed with his daughter his worries about the weather control activities in the colony, Ellie had been asked to memoriz'; one of the poems from Benita Garcia's first book, Dreams of a Mexican Girl, written when the Mexican woman was still a teenager. Before Ellie's recitation, however, Epo-nine tried to fire the imaginations of the young people with a short lecture on Benita's life.

"The real Benita Garcia was one of the most amazing women who ever lived," Eponine said, nodding at the expressionless Garcia biot in the corner who helped her with all the routine chores of teaching. "Poet, cosmonaut, political leader, mystic - her life was both a reflection of the history of her time and an inspiration for everyone.

"Her father was a large landowner in the Mexican state of Yucatan, far from the artistic and political heart of the nation. Benita was an only child, the daughter of a Mayan mother and a much older father. She spent most of her childhood alone on the family plantation that touched the marvelous Puuc Mayan ruins at Uxmal. As a small girl Benita often played among the pyramids and buildings of that thousand-year-old ceremonial center.

"She was a gifted student from the beginning, but it was her imagination and elan that truly separated her from the others in her class. Benita wrote her first poem when she was nine, and by the age of fifteen, at which time she was in a Catholic boarding school in the Yucatecan capital of Me'rida, two of her poems had been published in the prestigious Diario de Mexico.

"After finishing secondary school, Benita surprised her teachers and her family by announcing that she wanted to be a cosmonaut, hi 2129 she was the first Mexican woman ever admitted to the Space Academy in Colorado. When she graduated four years later, the deep cutbacks in space had already begun. Following the crash of 2134 the world plunged into the depression known as the Great Chaos and virtually all space exploration was stopped. Benita was laid off by the ISA in 2137 and thought that her space career was over.

"In 2144 one of the last interplanetary transport cruisers, the James Martin, limped home from Mars to Earth carrying mostly women and children from the Martian colonies. The spacecraft was barely able to make it into Earth orbit and it appeared as if all the passengers would die. Benita Garcia and three of her friends from the cosmonaut corps jerryrigged a rescue vehicle and managed to save twenty-four of the voyagers in the most spectacular space mission of all times..."

Ellie's mind floated free from Eponine's narrative and imagined how exhilarating it must have been-on Benita's rescue mission. Benita had flown her space vehicle manually, without a lifeline to mission operations on the Earth, and risked her life to save others. Could there be any greater commitment to one's fellow members of the species?

As she thought about Benita Garcia's selflessness, an image of her mother came into Ellie's mind. A montage of pictures of Nicole rapidly followed. First, Ellie saw her mother in her judge's robes speaking articulately before the Senate. Next Nicole was rubbing Ellie's father's neck in the study late at night, patiently teaching Benjy to read day after day, riding off beside Patrick on a bicycle for a game of tennis in the park, or telling Line what to prepare for dinner. In the last image Nicole was sitting on Ellie's bed late at night, answering questions about life and love. My mother is my hero, Ellie suddenly realized. She is as unselfish as Benita Garcia.

"...Imagine, if you will, a young Mexican girl of sixteen, home from boarding school for vacation, climbing slowly up the steep steps of the Pyramid of the Magician in Uxmal. Below her, in the already warm spring morning, iguanas play among the rocks and the ruins."

Eponine nodded at Ellie. It was time for her poem. She stood at her seat and recited.

"You have seen it all, old lizard Seen our joys, our tears, Our hearts full of dreams and terrible desires. And does it never change?

Did my Indian mother's mother Sit here on these steps One thousand years ago And tell to you the passions she would not, could not share? At night I look unto the stars And dare to see myself among them. My heart soars above these pyramids, flying free into the every thing-can-be. Yes, Benita, the iguanas tell me, Yes to you and your mother's mother, whose yearning dreams years ago will now become fulfilled in you."

When Ellie had finished her cheeks were glistening from the silent tears that had fallen. Her teacher and the other students probably thought that she had been deeply moved by the poem and by the lecture on Benita Garcia. They couldn't have understood that Ellie had just experienced an emotional epiphany, that she had just discovered the true depth of her love and respect for her mother.

It was the last week of rehearsals for the school play. Eponine had picked an old work, Waiting for Godot, by the twentieth century Nobel laureate Samuel Beckett, because its theme was so germane to life in New Eden. The two main characters, both dressed in rags throughout, were played by Ellie Wakefield and Pedro Martinez, a handsome nineteen-year-old who had been one of the "troubled" teenagers added to the colony contingent during the last months before launch.

Eponine could not have produced the play without the Kawabatas. The biots designed and created the sets and the costumes, controlled the lights, and even conducted rehearsals when she could not be present. The school had four Kawabatas altogether, and three of them were under Eponine's jurisdiction during the six weeks immediately preceding me play.

"Good work," Eponine called out, approaching her students on the stage. "Let's call it quits for today."

"Miss Wakefield," Kawabata #052 said, "there were three places where your words were not exactly correct. In your speech beginning - "

"Tell her tomorrow," Eponine interrupted, gently waving the biot away. "It will mean more to her then." She turned to face the small cast. "Are there any questions?"

"I know we've been through this before, Miss Eponine," Pedro Martinez said hesitantly, "but it would help me if we could discuss it again... You told us that Godot was not a person, that he or it was actually a concept, or a fantasy... that we were all waiting for something... I'm sorry, but it's difficult for me to understand exactly what..."

"The whole play is basically a commentary on the absurdity of life," Eponine replied after a few seconds. "We laugh because we see ourselves in those bums on the stage, we hear our words when they speak. What Beckett has captured is the essential longing of the human spirit. Whoever he is, Godot will make everything all right. He will somehow transform our lives and make us happy."

"Couldn't Godot be God?" Pedro asked.

"Absolutely," Eponine said. "Or even the superad-vanced extraterrestrials who built the Rama spacecraft and oversaw the Node where Ellie and her family stayed. Any power or force or being that is a panacea for the woes of the world could be Godot. That's why the play is universal."

"Pedro," a demanding voice shouted from the back of the small auditorium, "are you almost finished?"

"Just a minute, Mariko," the young man answered. "We're having an interesting discussion. Why don't you come join us?"

The Japanese girl remained in the doorway. "No," she said rudely. "I don't want to - let's go now."

Eponine dismissed the cast and Pedro jumped down from the stage. Ellie came over beside her teacher as the young man hurried toward the door.

"Why does he let her act that way?" Ellie mused out loud.

"Don't ask me," Eponine replied with a shrug. "I'm certainly no expert when it comes to relationships."

That Kobayashi girl is trouble, Eponine thought, remembering how Mariko had treated both Ellie and her as if they were insects one night after rehearsal. Men are so stupid sometimes.

"Eponine," Ellie asked, "do you have any objections if my parents come to the dress rehearsal? Beckett is one of my father's favorite playwrights and - "

"That would be fine," Eponine replied. "Your parents are welcome anytime. Besides, I want to thank them - "

"Miss Eponine," a young male voice shouted from across the room. It was Derek Brewer, one of Eponine's students who had a schoolboy crush on her. Derek ran a few steps toward her and then shouted again. "Have you heard the news?"

Eponine shook her head. Derek was obviously very excited. "Judge Mishkin has ruled the armbands unconstitutional!"

It took a few seconds for Eponine to absorb the information. By then Derek was at her side, delighted to be the one giving her the news. "Are... are you certain?" Eponine asked.

"We just heard it on the radio hi the office."

Eponine reached for her arm and the hated red band. She glanced at Derek and Ellie and with one swift movement pulled the band off her arm and tossed it into the air. As she watched it arc toward the floor her eyes filled with tears.

"Thank you, Derek," she said.

Within moments Eponine felt four young arms embracing her. "Congratulations," Ellie said softly.