Arthur Clarke - Rama Revealed

“Thank you, Max,” Nicole said.

Max walked over to the ladder. He turned around and waved before he began his climb.

Nicole sat down in the chair and took a deep breath. From the sounds in the direction of the tunnel, she surmised correctly that Max was sealing the entrance to her hideout by placing the big bags of chicken feed directly over the hole.

So what happens now? Nicole asked herself. She realized that she had thought about very little except her approaching death during the five days since the conclusion of her trial. Without the fear of her imminent execution to structure her thought patterns, Nicole was able to let her mind drift freely.

She thought first of Richard, her husband and partner, from whom she had been separated now for almost two years. Nicole recalled vividly their last evening together, a horrible Walpurgisnacht of murder and destruction that had begun on a hopeful note with her daughter Ellie’s marriage to Dr. Robert Turner. Richard was certain that we, like Kenji and Pyotr, were also marked for death, she remembered. And he was probably right. Because he escaped, they made him the enemy and left me alone for a while, I thought you were dead, Richard, Nicole thought. I should have had more faith… But how in the world did you end up in New York again?

As she sat in the only chair in the underground room, her heart ached for the company of her husband. A montage of memories paraded through her mind. She first saw herself again in the avian lair in Rama II, years and years earlier, temporarily a captive of the strange birdlike creatures whose language was jabbers and shrieks. It had been Richard who had found her there. He had risked his own life to return to New York to determine if Nicole was still alive. If Richard had not come, Nicole would have been marooned on the island of New York forever.

Richard and Nicole had become lovers during the time that they were struggling to figure out how to cross the Cylindrical Sea and return to their cosmonaut colleagues from the Newton spacecraft. Nicole was both surprised and amused by the strong stirrings inside her caused by her recollection of their early days of love. We survived the nuclear missile attack together. We even survived my wrongheaded attempt to produce genetic variation in our offspring by steeping with another man.

Nicole winced at the memory of her own ‘naοvetι’ so many years before. You forgave me, Richard, which could not have been easy for you. And then we grew even closer at the Node during our design sessions with the Eagle.

What was the Eagle really? Nicole mused, shifting her train of thought. And who or what created him? In her mind was a vivid picture of the bizarre creature who had been their only contact while they had stayed at the Node during the refurbishing of the Rama spaceship. The alien being, who had had the face of an eagle and a body similar to a man’s, had informed them that he was an advancement in artificial intelligence designed especially as a companion for humans. His eyes were incredible, almost mystical, Nicole remembered. And they were as intense as Omeh’s.

Her great-grandfather Omeh had worn the green robe of the tribal shaman of the Senoufo when he had come to see Nicole in Rome two weeks before the launch of the Newton spacecraft. Nicole had met Omeh twice before, both times in her mother’s native village in the Ivory Coast: once during the Poro ceremony when Nicole was seven, and then again three years later at her mother’s funeral. During those brief encounters Omeh had started preparing Nicole for what the old shaman had assured her would be an extraordinary life. It had been Omeh who had insisted that Nicole was indeed the woman who the Senoufo chronicles had predicted would scatter their tribal seed “even to the stars.”

Omeh, the Eagle, even Richard, Nicole thought. Quite a group, to say the least. The face of Henry, Prince of Wales, joined the other three men and Nicole remembered for a moment the powerful passion of their brief love affair in the days immediately after she had won her Olympic gold medal. She recalled sharply the pain of rejection. But without Henry, she reminded herself, there would not have been a Genevieve.

While Nic6le was remembering the love she had shared with her daughter on Earth, she glanced across the room at (he shelf containing the electronic book discs. Suddenly distracted, she crossed to the shelf and started reading titles. Sure enough, Max had left her some manuals on raising pigs and chickens. But that was not all. It looked as if he had given Nicole his entire private library.

Nicole smiled as she pulled out a book of fairy tales and inserted it into her reader. She flipped through the pages and stopped at the story of Sleeping Beauty. The phrase and they lived happily ever after summoned another vivid memory, this one of herself as a small child, maybe six or seven, sitting on her father’s lap in their house in the Parisian suburb of Chilly-Mazarin.

I longed as a little girl to be a princess and live happily ever after, she thought. There was no way I could have known then that my life would make even the fairy tales seem ordinary.

Nicole replaced the book disc on the shelf and returned to her chair. And now, she thought, idly surveying the room, when I thought this incredible life was over, I seem to have.been given at least a few more days.

She thought again of Richard and her intense longing to see him returned. We have shared much, my Richard. I hope I can again feel your touch, hear your laughter, and see your face. But if not, I will try not to complain. My life has already seen its share of miracles.

Eleanor Wakefield Turner arrived at the large auditorium in Central City at seven-thirty in the morning. Although the execution was not scheduled to take place until eight o’clock, there were already about thirty people in the front seats, some talking, most just sitting quietly. A television crew wandered around the electric chair on the stage. The execution was being broadcast live, but the policemen in the auditorium were nevertheless expecting a full house, for the government had encouraged the citizens of New Eden to witness personally the death of their former governor.

Ellie had argued with her husband the night before. “Spare yourself this pain, Ellie,” Robert had said, when she had told him that she intended to attend the execution. “Seeing your mother one last time cannot be worth the horror of watching her die.”

But Ellie had known something that Robert did not know. As she took her seat in the auditorium, Ellie tried to control the powerful feelings inside her. There can be nothing on my face, she told herself, and nothing in my body language. Not the slightest hint. Nobody must suspect that I know anything about the escape. Several pairs of eyes suddenly turned around to look at her. Ellie felt her heart skip before she realized that someone had recognized her and that it was completely natural for the curious to stare at her.

Ellie had first encountered her father’s little robots Joan of Arc and Eleanor of Aquitaine only six weeks before, when she was outside of the main habitat, over in the quarantine village of Avalon helping her physician husband Robert take care of the patients who were doomed by the RV-41 retrovirus inside their bodies. Ellie had just finished a pleasant and encouraging late evening visit with her friend and former teacher Eponine. She had left Eponine’s room and was walking along a dirt lane, expecting to see Robert at any moment. All of a sudden she had heard two strange voices calling her name. Ellie had searched the area around her before finally locating the pair of tiny figures on the roof of a nearby building.

After crossing the lane so that she could see and hear the robots better, the stunned Ellie had been informed by Joan and Eleanor that her father Richard was still alive. It had taken her a few moments to recover from the shock. Then Ellie had begun to question the robots. She had become quickly convinced that Joan and Eleanor were telling the truth; however, before Ellie had ascertained why her father had sent the robots to her, she had seen her husband approaching in the distance. The figures on the rooftop had then told her hurriedly that they would return soon. They had also cautioned Ellie not to tell anyone of their existence, not even Robert, at least not yet,