Arthur Clarke - Rama Revealed

She searched the features in the mirror, guided by her memory, for vestiges of the lovely young woman she had been. Here and there she could see the outlines of what was once considered to be a beautiful face, but the eye had to know where to look. Her heart ached as Nicole suddenly remembered a simple incident years earlier, when she was a teenager walking along a country road with her father near her home in Beauvois. An old woman using a cane had been coming toward them and Nicole had asked her father if they could cross over the road to avoid her.

“Why?” her father had asked.

“Because I don’t want to see her up close,” Nicole had said. “She is old and ugly. She makes me shiver.”

“You too will be old someday,” her father had answered, refusing to cross the road.

I am old and ugly, Nicole thought. I even make myself shiver. She handed the mirror back to the Eagle. “You warned me,” she said wistfully. “Maybe I should have listened.”

“Of course you’re shocked,” the Eagle said. “You have not seen yourself for sixteen years. Most humans have a difficult time with the aging process even if they follow it day by day.” He extended the cosmetics bag in her direction.

“No, thank you,” Nicole said despondently, refusing the bag. “It’s a hopeless situation. Not even Michelangelo could do anything with this face.”

“Suit yourself,” the Eagle said. “But I thought you might want to use the cosmetics before your visitor arrives.”

“A visitor!” Nicole said, with both alarm and excitement. “I’m going to have a visitor? Who is it?” She reached out for the mirror and the cosmetics.

“I think I’ll leave it as a surprise,” the Eagle said. “Your visitor will be here in a few minutes.”

Nicole put on lipstick and powder, brushed her gray hair, and straightened out and plucked her eyebrows. When she was finished, she cast a disapproving look in the mirror. “That’s about all I can do,” she said, as much to herself as to the Eagle.

A few minutes later the Eagle opened the door on the other side of the room and went outside. When he returned mere was an octospider with him. From across the room Nicole saw the royal blue color spill out of its boundaries. “Hello, Nicole. How are you feeling?” the octospider said.

“Dr. Blue!” Nicole yelled excitedly.

Dr. Blue held the monitoring device in front of Nicole. “I will be staying here with you until you are ready to be transferred,” the octospider physician said. ‘The Eagle has other duties at present.”

Bands of color raced across the tiny screen. “I don’t understand,” Nicole said, looking at the device upside down. “When the Eagle used that thing, the readout was all in squiggles and other funny symbols.”

“That’s their special-purpose technological language,” Dr. Blue said. “It’s incredibly efficient, much better than our colors. But of course I can’t read any of it. This device actually is polylingual. There’s even an English mode.”

“So what do you speak when you communicate with the Eagle and I’m not around?” Nicole asked.

“We both use colors,” Dr. Blue responded. “They run across his forehead from left to right.” “You’re kidding,” Nicole said, trying to picture the Eagle with colors on his forehead.

“Not at all,” the octospider answered. “The Eagle is amazing. He jabbers and shrieks with the avians, squeals and whistles with the myrmicats.”

Nicole had never seen the word “myrmicat” in the language of color before. When she asked about the word, Dr. Blue explained that six of the strange creatures were now living in the Grand Hotel and that another four were about to burst forth from germinating manna melons.

“Although all the octospiders and humans slept during the long voyage,” Dr. Blue said, “the manna melons were allowed to develop into myrmicats and then sessile material. They are already into their next generation.”

Dr. Blue replaced the device on the table. “So what’s the verdict for today, Doctor?” Nicole asked.

“You’re gaining strength,” Dr. Blue replied. “But you’re alive because of all the supplemental probes that have inserted. At some time you should consider—”

“— replacing my heart. I know,” said Nicole. “It may seem peculiar, but the idea does not appeal to me very much. I don’t know exactly why I’m against it. Maybe I haven’t yet seen what remains to live for. I know that if Richard were still alive…”

She stopped herself. For an instant Nicole imagined she was back in the viewing room, watching the slow-motion frames of the last seconds of Richard’s life. She had not thought about that moment since she awakened.

“Do you mind if I ask you something very personal?” Nicole said to Dr. Blue.

“Not at all,” the octospider said.

“We watched the deaths of Richard and Archie together,” Nicole said, “and I was so distraught that I could not function- Archie was murdered at the same time, and he was your lifelong partner. Yet you sat beside me and gave me comfort. Did you not feel any sense of loss or sadness at Archie’s death?”

Dr. Blue did not respond immediately. “All octospiders are trained from birth to control what you humans call emotions. The alternates, of course, are quite susceptible to feelings. But those of us who—”

“With all due respect,” Nicole interrupted softly, touching her octospider colleague, “I wasn’t asking you a clinical question, doctor to doctor. It was a question from one friend to another.”

A short burst of crimson, then another of blue, unrelated, slowly flowed around Dr. Blue’s head. “Yes, I felt a sense of loss,” Dr. Blue said. “But I knew it was coming. Either then or later. When Archie joined the war effort, his termination became certain. And besides, my duty at that moment was to help you.”

The door to the room opened and the Eagle entered. The alien was carrying a large box full of food, clothing, and miscellaneous equipment. He informed Nicole that he had brought her space suit and that she was going to venture out of her controlled environment in the very near future.

“Dr. Blue says that you can speak in color,” Nicole said playfully. “I want you to show me.”

“What do you want me to say?” the Eagle replied in orderly narrow color bands that started on the left side of his forehead and scrolled to the right.

“That’s enough,” Nicole said with a laugh. “You are truly amazing.”

Nicole stood on the floor of the gigantic factory and stared at the pyramid in front of her. Off to her right, less than a kilometer away, a group of special-purpose biots, including a pair of mammoth bulldozers, were building a tall mountain. “Why are you doing all this?” Nicole said into the tiny microphone inside her helmet.

“It’s part of the next cycle,” the Eagle replied. “We have determined that these particular constructions enhance the likelihood of obtaining what we want from the experiment.”

“So you already know something about the new space-farers?”

“I don’t know the answer to that,” the Eagle said. “I have no assignment associated with the future of Rama.”

“But you told us before,” Nicole said, not satisfied, “that no changes were made unless they were necessary.”

“I can’t help you,” the Eagle said. “Come, get in the rover. Dr. Blue wants to have a closer look at the mountain.”

The octospider looked peculiar in her space suit. In fact, Nicole had laughed out loud when she had first seen Dr. Blue with the glove-fitting white fabric covering her charcoal body and her eight tentacles. Dr. Blue also had a transparent helmet around her head, through which it was easy to read her colors.