Rama II r-2 Read online

  “Actually, Dad,” Nicole said, again turning around so that her father could see the entire outfit, “I bought this for Francoise’s wedding three years ago. But of course I never had a chance to wear it. Do you think it’s too simple?”

  “Not at all,” Pierre replied. “In fact, I think it’s just perfect for this kind of extravaganza. If it’s like the big fetes that I used to attend, every woman there will be wearing her fanciest and most expensive clothing and jewelry. You will stand out in your simple black and white. Particularly with your hair down like that. You took perfect.”

  “Thanks,” Nicole said. “Even though I know you’re prejudiced, I still like to hear your compliments.” She looked at her father and daughter, her only two close companions for the last seven years. “Tin really surprisingly anx­ious. I don’t think I’ll be this nervous on the day we encounter Rama. I often feel out of my element at big parties like this and tonight I have a peculiar sense of foreboding that I can’t explain. You remember, Dad, like I felt the day before our dog died when I was a child.”

  Her father’s face became serious. “Maybe you’d better consider staying in the hotel. Too many of your premonitions have been accurate in the past. I remember your telling me that something was wrong with your mother two days before we received that message—”

  “It’s not that strong a feeling,” Nicole interrupted. “And besides, what would I give as an excuse? Everyone’s expecting me, especially the press, according to Francesca Sabatini. She’s still annoyed with me for refusing to have a personal interview with her.”

  “Then I guess you should go. But try to have some fun. Don’t take things so seriously for this one night.”

  “And remember to say hello to Julien LeClerc for me,” Genevieve added.

  “I’ll miss you both when midnight comes,” Nicole said. “It will be the first time I’ve been away from you on New Year’s Eve since 2194.” Nicole paused for a moment, remembering their family celebrations together. “Take care, both of you. You know I love you very much.”

  “I love you, too, Mom,” Genevieve shouted. Pierre waved good-bye.

  Nicole switched off the videophone and checked her watch. It was eight o’clock. She still had an hour before she was supposed to meet her driver in the lobby. She walked over to the computer terminal to order something to eat. With a few commands she requested a bowl of minestrone and a small bottle of mineral water. The computer monitor told her to expect them both in between sixteen and nineteen minutes.

  I really am high-strung tonight, Nicole thought as she leafed through the magazine Italia and waited for her food. The feature story in Italia was devoted to an interview with Francesca Sabatini. The article covered ten full pages and must have had twenty different photographs of “la bella signora.” The interviewer discussed both of Francesca’s highly successful documentary projects (the first on modern love and the second on drugs), stressing the point, in the middle of some questions about the drug series, that Francesca repeatedly smoked cigarettes during the conversation.

  Nicole perused the article in a hurry, noting as she read that there were facets to Francesca she had never considered. But what motivates her? Nicole wondered to herself. What is it that she wants? Near the end of the maga­zine story, the interviewer had asked Francesca her opinion of the other two women in the Newton crew. “I feel that I’m actually the only woman on the mission,” Francesca had answered. Nicole slowed down to read the rest of the paragraph. “The Russian pilot Turgenyev thinks and acts like a man and the French-African princess Nicole des Jardins has purposely suppressed her femininity, which is sad because she could be such a lovely woman.”

  Nicole was only slightly angered by Francesca’s glib comments. More than anything, she was amused. She felt a brief competitive surge but then chided herself for such a childish reaction. I’ll ask Francesca about this article at just the right time, Nicole thought with a smile. Who knows? Maybe I’ll even ask her if seducing married men qualifies her as feminine.

  The forty-minute drive from the hotel to the party at Hadrian’s Villa, which was located on the outskirts of the Roman suburbs not far from the resort town of Tivoli, was passed in total silence. The other passenger in Nicole’s car was Hiro Yamanaka, the most taciturn of all the cosmonauts. In her television interview two months earlier with Yamanaka, a frustrated Francesca Sabatini, after ten minutes of two– and three-word, monosyllabic responses to all her questions, had asked Hiro if the rumor about his being an android were true.

  “What?” Hiro Yamanaka had asked.

  “Are you an android?” Francesca had repeated with a mischievous smile. “No,” the Japanese pilot had responded, his features remaining absolutely expressionless while the camera zoomed in on his face.

  When the car turned off the main road between Rome and Tivoli to drive the final mile to the Villa Adriana, the traffic became congested. Progress was very slow, not only because of the many cars carrying people to the gala, but also because of the hundreds of curious onlookers and paparazzi who were lining the small two-lane road.

  Nicole took a deep breath as the automobile finally pulled into a circular drive and stopped. Outside her tinted window she could see a bevy of pho­tographers and reporters, poised to pounce on whoever climbed out of the car. Her door opened automatically and she stepped out slowly, pulling her black suede coat around her and trying to be careful not to catch her heels. “Who’s that?” she heard a voice say. “Franco, over here, quick — it’s cosmonaut des Jardins.” There was a smattering of applause and the flash of many cameras. A kindly looking Italian gentleman came forward and took Nicole by the hand. People moiled around her, several microphones were stuck in her face, and it seemed as if she were being given a hundred simultaneous questions and requests in four or five different languages,

  “Why have you refused all personal interviews?” “Please open your coat so we can see your dress.” “Do the other cosmonauts respect you as a doctor?” “Stop a moment. Please smile.” “What is your opinion of Francesca Sabatini?”

  Nicole said nothing as the security men held back the crowd and led her to a covered electric cart. The four-passenger cart moved slowly up a long hill, leaving the crowd behind, as a pleasant Italian woman in her mid-twenties explained in English to Nicole and Hiro Yamanaka what they were seeing around them. Hadrian, who had ruled the Roman empire between A.D. 117 and 138, had built this immense villa, she told them, for his own enjoyment. The architectural masterpiece represented a blending of all the building styles Hadrian had seen on his many journeys to the distant prov­inces and was designed by the emperor himself on three hundred acres of plain at the foot of the Tiburtini Hills.

  The initial cart ride past the ancient assortment of buildings was appar­ently an integral part of the evening’s festivities. The lighted ruins them­selves were only vaguely suggestive of their previous glory, for roofs were mostly missing, the decorative statuary had all been removed, and the rough stone walls were bare of adornment. But by the time the cart wound past the ruins of the Canopus, a monument built around a rectangular pool in the Egyptian style (it was the fifteenth or sixteenth building in the complex — Nicole had lost count), a general sense of the huge extent of the villa had definitely emerged.

  This man died over two thousand yean ago, Nicole thought to herself, remembering her history. One of the smartest humans who ever lived. Sol­dier, administrator, linguist She smiled as she recalled the story of Antinous. Lonely most of his life. Except for one brief, all consuming passion that ended in tragedy,

  The cart came to a stop at the end of a short walkway. The woman guide finished her monologue. “To honor the great Pax Romana, an extended time of world peace two millennia ago, the Italian government, helped by gener­ous donations from the corporations listed underneath the statue over there on your right, decided in 2189 to construct a perfect replica of Hadrian’s Maritime Theater. You may recall that we passed the ruins of the original at the beginn
ing of the ride. The goal of the reconstruction project was to show what it would have been like to have visited a part of this villa during the emperor’s lifetime. The building was finished in 2193 and has been used for state events ever since.”

  The guests were met by formally clad young Italian men, uniformly tall and handsome, who escorted them along the walkway, up to and through Philosopher’s Hall, and finally into the Maritime Theater. There was a brief security check at the actual entrance and then the guests were free to roam as they pleased.

  Nicole was enchanted by the building. It was basically round in shape, about forty meters in diameter. An annulus of water separated an inner island — on which was located a large house with five rooms and a big yard — from the wide portico with its fiuted columns. There was no roof above the water or the inner part of the portico, the open skies giving the entire theater a wonderful feeling of freedom. Around the building the guests mixed and talked and drank; advanced robot waiters rolled around carrying large trays of champagne and wine and other alcoholic spirits. Across the two small bridges that connected the island with its house and yard to the portico and the rest of the building, Nicole could see a dozen people, all dressed in white, working to set up the dinner buffet.

  A heavy blond woman and her pint-size, jocular husband, a bald man wearing an old-fashioned pair of spectacles, were rapidly approaching Nicole from about thirty feet away. Nicole prepared for the coming onslaught by taking a small sip of the champagne and cassis cocktail that had been handed to her by a strangely insistent robot a few minutes before.

  “Oh, Madame des Jardins,” the man said, waving at her and closing in with great speed. “We just have to talk to you. My wife is one of your biggest fans.” He walked up beside Nicole and gestured to his wife. “Come on, Cecelia,” he shouted, “I’ve got her.”

  Nicole took a deep breath and forced a wide smile. It’s going to be one of those evenings, she said to herself.

  Finally, Nicole was thinking, maybe III have a few minutes of peace and quiet She was sitting by herself, her hack purposely toward the door, at a small table in the comer of the room. The room was at the rear of the island house in the middle of the Maritime Theater. Nicole finished the last few bites of her food and washed them down with some wine.

  Whew, she thought, trying without success to remember even half the people she had met in the last hour. She had been like a prized photograph, passed from person to person and praised by everyone. She bad been em­braced, kissed, hugged, pinched, flirted with (by both men and women), and even propositioned by a rich Swedish shipbuilder who had invited her to his “castle” outside the city of Goteborg. Nicole had hardly said a word to any of them. Her face ached from polite smiling and she was a trifle tipsy from the wine and champagne cocktails.

  “Well* as I live and breathe,” she heard a familiar voice behind her say, “I believe the lady in the white dress is none other than my fellow cosmonaut, the ice princess herself, Madame Nicole des Jardins.” Nicole turned and saw Richard Wakefield staggering toward her. He bounced off a table, reached out to stabilize himself on a chair, and nearly fell in her lap.

  “Sorry,” he said, grinning and managing to seat himself beside her. “I’m afraid I’ve had too much gin and tonic.” He took a big gulp from the glass that had miraculously remained unspilled in his right hand. “And now,” he said with a wink, “if you don’t mind, I’m going to take a nap before the dolphin show.”

  Nicole laughed as Richard’s head hit the wooden table with a splat and he feigned unconsciousness. After a moment she leaned over playfully and forced one of his eyelids open. “If you don’t mind, comrade, could you not pass out until after you explain to me the bit about the dolphin show.”

  With great effort Richard sat up and began rolling his eyes. “You mean you don’t know? You, who always know all the schedules and all the proce­dures? That’s impossible.”

  Nicole finished her wine. “Seriously, Wakefield. What are you talking about?”

  Richard opened one of the small windows and stuck his arm through it, pointing at the pool of water that encircled the house. “The great Dr. Luigi Bardolini is here with his intelligent dolphins. Francesca is going to intro­duce him in about fifteen minutes.” He stared at Nicole with wild abandon. “Dr, Bardolini is going to prove, here and tonight,” he shouted, “that his dolphins can pass our university entrance exams.”

  Nicole pulled back and looked carefully at her colleague. He really is drunk, she thought to herself. Maybe he feels as out of place as I do.

  Richard was now gazing intently out the window. “This party is really some zoo, isn’t it?” Nicole said after a long silence. “Where did they find—”

  “That’s it,” Wakefield interrupted her suddenly, giving the table a trium­phant pounding. “That’s why this place has seemed familiar to me since the moment we walked in.” He glanced at Nicole, who was eyeing him as if he had lost his mind. “It’s a miniature Rama, don’t you see?” He jumped up, unable to contain his happiness at his discovery. “The water surrounding this house is the Cylindrical Sea, the porticoes represent the Central Pkin, and we, lovely lady, are sitting in the city of New York.”

  Nicole was beginning to comprehend but could not keep up with the racing thoughts of Richard Wakefield. “And what does similarity of design prove?” he thought out loud. “What does it mean that human architects two thousand years ago constructed a theater with some of the same guiding principles of design as those used in the Raman ship? Similarity of nature? Similarity of culture? Absolutely not.”

  He stopped, now aware that Nicole was staring fixedly at him. “Mathe­matics,” he said emphatically. A quizzical expression told him that she still didn’t understand completely. “Mathematics,” he said again, surprisingly lucid all of a sudden. “That’s the key. The Ramans almost certainly didn’t look like us and clearly evolved on a world far different from the Earth. But they must Have understood the same mathematics as the Romans.”

  His face brightened. “Hah,” he shouted again, causing Nicole to jump. He was pleased with himself. “Ramans and Romans. That’s what tonight is all about. And at some level of development in between is modern-day homo sapiens.”

  Nicole shook her head as Richard exulted in the joy of his wit. “You don’t understand, lovely lady?” he said, extending his hand to help her up from her seat. “Then perhaps you and I should go to watch a dolphin show and I will speak to you of Ramans there and Romans here, of cabbages and kings, of dum-de-dum and sealing wax, and whether pigs have wings.”

  13

  HAPPY NEW YEAR

  After everyone had finished eating land all the plates had been cleared, Francesca Sabatini appeared in the center of the yard with a microphone and spent ten minutes thanking all the gala sponsors. Then she introduced Dr. Luigi Bardolini, suggesting that the techniques he had pioneered to communicate with the dolphins might prove extremely useful when humans try to talk to any extraterrestrials.

  Richard Wakefield had disappeared just before Francesca had started speaking, ostensibly to find the rest room and obtain another drink. Nicole had caught sight of him briefly five minutes later, just after Francesca had finished with her introduction. He had been surrounded by a pair of buxom Italian actresses, both of whom were laughing heartily at his jokes. He had waved at Nicole and winked, pointing at the two women as if his actions were self-explanatory.

  Good for you, Richard, Nicole had thought, smiling to herself. At least one of us social misfits is having a good time. She now watched Franceses walk gracefully across the bridge and start to move the crowd back from the water so that Bardolini and his dolphins would have plenty of room. Fran-cesca was wearing a tight black dress, bare on one shoulder, with a starburst of gold sequins in the front. A gold scarf was tied around her waist. Her long blond hair was braided and pinned against her head.

  You really belong here, Nicole thought, truthfully admiring Francesca’s ease in large crowds. Dr. Bard
olini began the first segment of his dolphin show and Nicole turned her attention to the circular pool of water. Luigi Bardolini was one of those controversial scientists whose work is brilliant but never quite as exceptional as he himself wants others to believe. It was true that he had developed a unique way of communicating with the dolphins and had isolated and identified the sounds of thirty to forty action verbs in their portfolio of squeaks. But it was not true, as he so often claimed, that two of his dolphins could pass a university entrance exam. Unfortunately, the way the twenty-second century international scientific community oper­ated, if your most outrageous or advanced theories could not be substanti­ated, or were held up to ridicule, then your other discoveries, no matter how solid, were often disparaged as well. This behavior had induced an endemic conservatism in science that was not altogether healthy.

  Unlike most scientists, Bardolini was a brilliant showman. In the final segment of his show he had his two most famous dolphins, Emilio and Emilia, take an intelligence test in a real-time competition against two of the villa guides, one male and one female, who had been selected at random that evening. The construct of the competitive test was enticingly simple. On two of the four large electronic screens (one pair of screens was in the water and another pair was in the yard), a three-by-three matrix was shown with a blank in the lower right-hand corner. The other eight elements were filled with different pictures and shapes. The dolphins and humans taking the test were supposed to discern the changing patterns moving from left to right and top to bottom in the matrix, and then correctly pick out, from a set of eight candidates displayed on the companion screen, the element that should be placed in the blank lower right comer. The competitors had one minute to make their choice on each problem. The dolphins in the water, like the humans on the land above them, had a control panel of eight buttons they could push (the dolphins used their snouts) to indicate their selection.