Rama Revealed r-4 Read online

  Again Nicole was frightened. The biot certainly wasn’t acting friendly. What if… But she had very little time to think. The Garcia led Nicole through the corridor outside her cell at a rapid pace. Twenty meters later, they passed both the regular set of biot guards and a human commanding officer, a young man Nicole had never seen before. “Wait,” the man yelled from behind them just as Nicole and the Garcia were about to climb the stairs. Nicole froze.

  “You forgot to sign the transfer papers,” the man said, holding out a document to the Garcia. “Certainly,” the biot replied, entering its identification signature on the papers with a flourish. After less than a minute Nicole was outside the large house where she had been imprisoned for months. She took a deep breath of the fresh air and started to follow the Garcia down a path toward Central City.

  “No,” Nicole heard Eleanor call from her pocket. “We’re not going with the biot. Go west. Toward that windmill with the light on top. And you must run. We must arrive at Max Puckett’s before dawn.”

  Her prison was almost five kilometers from Max’s farm. Nicole jogged down the small road at a steady pace, urged on periodically by one of the two robots, who were keeping careful track of the time. It was not long until dawn. Unlike on the Earth, where the transition from night to day was gradual, in New Eden dawn was a sudden, discontinuous event. One moment it would be dark and then, in the next instant, the artificial sun would ignite and begin its mini-arc across the ceiling of the colony habitat.

  “Twelve more minutes until light,” Joan said, as Nicole reached the bicycle path that led the final two hundred meters to the Puckett farmhouse. Nicole was nearly exhausted, but she kept running. Two separate times during her run across the farmland she had felt a dull ache in her chest. I am definitely out of shape, she thought, chastising herself for not having exercised regularly in her prison cell. 45 is as well as sixty years old, more or less.

  The farmhouse was dark. Nicole stopped on the porch, catching her breath, and the door opened a few seconds later. “I have been waiting for you,” Max said, his earnest expression underscoring the seriousness of the situation. He gave Nicole a quick hug. “Follow me,” he said, moving quickly off toward the barn.

  “There have been no police cars yet on the road,” Max said when they were inside the bam. “They probably have not yet discovered that you’re gone. But it’s only a matter of minutes now.”

  The chickens were all kept on the far side of the barn. The hens had a separate enclosure, sealed off from the roosters and the rest of the building. When Max and Nicole entered the henhouse, mere was a huge commotion. Animals scurried in all directions, clucking and squawking and beating their wings. The stench in the henhouse nearly overpowered Nicole.

  Max smiled. “I guess I forget how bad chicken shit smells to everyone else,” he said, “I’ve grown so used to it myself.” He slapped Nicole lightly on the back. “Anyway, it’s another level of protection for you, and I don’t think you’ll be able to smell the shit from your hideout.”

  Max walked over to a corner of the henhouse, chased several hens out of the way, and bent down on his knees. “When those weird little robots of Richard’s first appeared,” he said, pushing aside hay and chicken feed, “I couldn’t decide where I should build your hideout. Then I thought about this place.” Max pulled up a couple of boards to expose a rectangular hole in the floor of the barn. “I sure as hell hope I was right.”

  He motioned for Nicole to follow him and then crawled into the hole. They were both on their hands and knees in the dirt. The passageway, which ran parallel to the floor for a few meters and then turned downward at a steep angle, was extremely cramped. Nicole kept bumping up against Max in front of her and the dirt walls and ceiling all around her. The only light was the small flashlight that Max was carrying in his right hand. After fifteen meters the small tunnel opened into a dark room. Max stepped carefully down a rope ladder and then turned to help Nicole descend. A few seconds later they both walked into the center of the room, where Max reached up and switched on a solitary electric light.

  “It’s not a palace,” he said as Nicole glanced around, “but I suspect it’s a damn sight better than that prison of yours.”

  The room contained a bed, a chair, two shelves full of food, another shelf with electronic book discs, a few clothes hanging in an open closet, basic toiletries, a large drum of water that must have barely fit through the passageway, and a deep, square latrine in the far corner.

  “Did you do all this yourself?’ Nicole asked.

  “Yep,” Max replied. “At night… during the last several weeks. I didn’t dare ask anybody to help.”

  Nicole was touched. “How can I ever thank you?” she said.

  “Don’t get caught.” Max grinned. “I don’t want to die any more than you do… Oh, by the way,” he added, handing Nicole an electronic reader into which she could place the book discs, “I hope the reading material is all right. Manuals on raising pigs and chickens are not the same as your father’s novels, but I didn’t want to attract too much attention by going to the bookstore.”

  Nicole crossed the room and kissed him on the cheek. “Max,” she said lightly, “you are such a dear friend. I can’t imagine how you—”

  “It’s dawn outside now,” Joan of Arc interrupted from Nicole’s pocket. “According to our timeline, we are behind schedule. Mr. Puckett, we must inspect our egress route before you leave us.”

  “Shit,” said Max. “Here I go again, taking orders from a robot no longer than a cigarette.” He lifted Joan and Eleanor out of Nicole’s pockets and placed them on the top shelf behind a can of peas. “Do you see that little door?” he said. “There’s a pipe on the other side. It comes out just beyond the pig trough… Why don’t you check it out?”

  During the minute or two that the robots were gone, Max explained the situation to Nicole. “The police will searching everywhere for you,” he said. “Particularly here since they know that I am a friend of the family. So going to seal the entrance to your hideout. You should hi everything you need to last for at least several weeks.

  “The robots can come and go freely, unless they eaten by the pigs,” Max continued with a laugh. “They be your only contact with the outside world. They’ll let you know when it’s time to move to the second phase of escape plan.”

  “So I won’t see you again?” Nicole asked.

  “Not for at least a few weeks,” Max answered. “It’s too dangerous… One more thing: if there are police on the premises, I will cut off your power. That will be your signal to stay especially quiet.”

  Eleanor of Aquitaine had returned and was standing on the shelf next to the can of peas. “Our egress route is excellent,” she announced. “Joan has departed for a few days. She intends to leave the habitat and communicate with Richard.”

  “Now I must leave also,” Max said to Nicole. He was silent for a few seconds. “But not before I tell you one thing, my lady friend… As you probably know, I have been a fucking cynic all my life. There are not very many people who impress me. But you have convinced me that maybe some of us are superior to chickens and pigs.” Max smiled. “Not many of us,” he added quickly, “but at least some.”

  “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.

  2

  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,

  Ellie had been overjoyed that her father was still alive. It had been almost impossible for her to keep the news a secret, even though she was well aware of the political significance of her information. When, almost two weeks later, Ellie had been again confronted in Avalon by the little robots, she had been ready with a torrent of questions. However, on that occasion Joan and Eleanor had been programmed to discuss another subject-a possible forthcoming attempt to break Nicole out of prison. The robots told Ellie during this second meeting that Richard acknowledged such an escape would be a dangerous endeavor. “We would never attempt it,” the robot Joan said, “unless your mother’s execution were absolutely certain. But if we are not prepared ahead of time, there can be no possibility of a last-minute escape.”

  “What can I do to help?” Ellie had asked.

  Joan and Eleanor had handed her a sheet
of paper, on which there was a list of items including food, water, and clothing. Ellie had trembled when she recognized her father’s handwriting.

  “Cache these things at the following location,” the robot Eleanor had said, handing Ellie a map. “No later than ten days from now.” A moment later another colonist had come into sight and the two robots had vanished.

  Enclosed inside the map had been a short note from her father. “Dearest Ellie,” it had said, “I apologize for the brevity. I am safe and healthy, but deeply concerned about your mother. Please, please gather up these items and take them to the indicated spot in the Central Plain. If you cannot accomplish the task by yourself, please limit your support to a single person. And make certain that whoever you pick is as loyal and dedicated to Nicole as we are. I love you.”

  Ellie had quickly determined that she would need help. But whom should she select as an accomplice? Her husband Robert was a bad choice for two reasons. First, he had already shown that his dedication to his patients and the New Eden hospital was a higher priority in his mind than taking a political stand. Second, anyone caught helping Nicole escape would certainly be executed. If Ellie were to involve Robert in the escape plan, then their daughter Nicole might be left without both her parents.

  What about Nai Watanabe? There was no question about her loyalty, but Nai was a single parent with twin four-year-old sons. It was not fair to ask her to take the chancy. That left Eponine as the only reasonable choice. Any worries that Ellie might have had about her afflicted friend had been quickly dispelled. “Of course I’ll help you,” Eponine had replied immediately. “I have nothing to lose. According to your husband, this RV-41 is going to kill me in another year or two anyway.”

  Eponine and Ellie had clandestinely gathered the required items, one at a time, over a period of a week. They had wrapped them securely in a small sheet that was hidden in the comer of Eponine’s normally cluttered room in Avalon. On the appointed day, Ellie had signed out of New Eden and walked across to Avalon, ostensibly to “monitor carefully” a full twelve hours of Eponine’s biometry data. Actually, explaining to Robert why she wanted to spend the night with Eponine had been much more difficult than convincing the single human guard and the Garcia biot at the habitat exit of the legitimacy of her need for an overnight pass.