Rama: The Omnibus

by Arthur C. Clarke

  She had a single Priority Two message, three minutes long, from Carlo Bianchi. Francesca frowned, entered the proper codes into the terminal, and turned on the video monitor. A suave middle-aged Italian dressed in après-ski clothes, sitting on a couch with a burning fireplace behind him, came into view. "Buon giorno, cara," he greeted her. After allowing the video camera to pan around the living room at his new villa in Cortina d'Ampezzo, Signor Bianchi came right to the point. Why was she refusing to appear in the advertisements for his summer line of sportswear? His company had offered her an incredible amount of money and had even tailored the advertising campaign to pick up on the space theme. The spots would not be shown until after the Newton mission would be over, so there was no conflict with her ISA agreements. Carlo acknowledged that they had had some differences in the past, but according to him they were many years ago. He needed an answer in a week.

  Screw you, Carlo, Francesca thought, surprised at the intensity of her reactions. There were few people in the world who could upset Francesca, but Carlo Bianchi was one of them. She entered the necessary commands to record a message to her agent, Darrell Bowman, in London. "Hi Darrell. It's Francesca in Dallas. Tell that weasel Bianchi I wouldn't do his ads even if he offered me ten million marks. And by the way, since I understand that his main competition these days is Donatelli, why don't you find their advertising director, Gabriela something or other, I met her once in Milano, and let her know that I would be happy to do something for them after Project Newton is over. April or May." She paused for a moment. "That's it. Back in Rome tomorrow night. My best to Heather."

  Francesca's longest message was from her husband, Alberto, a tall, graying, distinguished executive almost sixty years old. Alberto ran the Italian division of Schmidt and Hagenest, the multimedia German conglomerate that owned, among other things, over one third of the free newspapers and magazines in Europe as well as the leading commercial television networks in both Germany and Italy. In his transmission Alberto was sitting in the den in their home, wearing a rich charcoal suit and sipping a brandy. His tone was warm, familiar, but more like a father than a husband. He told Francesca that her long interview with Admiral Otto Heilmann Had been on the news throughout Europe that day, that he had enjoyed her comments and insights as always, but that he had thought Otto came across as an egomaniac. Not surprising, Francesca had mused when she heard her husband's comment, since he absolutely is. But he is often useful to me.

  Alberto shared some good news about one of his children (Francesca had three stepchildren, all of whom were older than she) before telling her that he missed her and was looking forward to seeing her the next night. Me too, Francesca thought before responding to his message. It is comfortable living with you. I have both freedom and security.

  Four hours later Francesca was standing outside on her balcony, smoking a cigarette in the cold Texas December air. She was wrapped tightly in the thick robe supplied to the rooms by the hotel. At least it's not like California, she thought to herself as she pulled a deep drag into her lungs. At least in Texas some of the hotels do have smoking balconies. Those zealots on the American West Coast would make smoking a felony if they could.

  She walked over to the side of the railing so that she would have a better view of a supersonic airliner approaching the airport from the west. In her mind's eye she was inside the plane, as she would be the next day on her flight home to Rome. She imagined that this particular flight had come from Tokyo, the undisputed economic capital of the world before The Great Chaos. After being devastated by their lack of raw materials during the lean years in the middle of the century, the Japanese were now prosperous again as the world returned to a free market. Francesca watched the plane land and then looked up at the sky full of stars above her. She took another pull on her cigarette and then followed the exhaled smoke as it drifted slowly away from her into the air.

  And so, Francesca, she reflected, now comes what may be your greatest assignment. A chance to become immortal? At least I should be remembered a long time as one of the Newton crew. Her mind turned to the Newton mission itself and briefly conjured up images of fantastic creatures who might have created the pair of gargantuan spaceships and sent them to visit the solar system. But her thoughts jumped back quickly to the real world, to the contracts that David Brown had signed just before she had left his home that afternoon.

  That makes us partners, my esteemed Dr. Brown. And completes the first phase of my plan. And unless I miss my guess, that was a gleam of interest in your eyes today. Francesca had given David a perfunctory kiss when they had finished discussing and signing the contracts. They had been alone together in his study. For a moment she had thought he was going to return the kiss with a more meaningful one.

  Francesca finished her cigarette, stubbed it out in the ashtray, and went back into her hotel room. As soon as she opened the door she could hear the sound of heavy breathing. The oversized bed was in disarray and a naked Reggie Wilson was lying across it on his back, his regular snores disturbing the silence of the suite. You have great equipment, my friend, she commented silently, both for life and for lovemaking. But neither is an athletic contest. You would be more interesting if there was some subtlety, perhaps even a little finesse.

  7

  PUBLIC RELATIONS

  The solitary eagle soared high above the marshes in the early morning light. It banked on a gust of wind coming from the ocean and turned north along the coast. Far below the eagle, starting at the light brown and white sands beside the ocean and continuing through the collection of islands and rivers and bays that stretched for miles toward the western horizon, an intermittent complex of diverse buildings connected by paved roads broke up the grassland and swamp. Seventy-five years earlier, the Kennedy Spaceport had been one of a half dozen locations on the Earth where travelers could disembark from their high-speed trains and airplanes to catch a shuttle flight up to one of the LEO (Low Earth Orbit) space stations. But The Great Chaos had changed the spaceport into a ghostly reminder of a once flourishing culture. Its portals and fancy connecting passageways were abandoned for years to the grasses, water birds, alligators, and ubiquitous insects of Central Florida.

  In the 2160s, after twenty years of complete atrophy, the reactivation of the spaceport had begun. It had been used first as an airport and then had evolved again into a general transportation center serving the Florida Atlantic coast. When launches to space recommenced in the mid-2170s, it was natural that the old Kennedy launch pads would be recommissioned. By December of 2199 more than half of the old spaceport had been refurbished to handle the steadily growing traffic between Earth and space.

  From one of the windows of his temporary office Valeriy Borzov watched the magnificent eagle glide gracefully back to its nest high in one of the few tall trees within the center. He loved birds. He had been fascinated by them for years, beginning in his early boyhood in China. In his most vivid recurring dream General Borzov was always living on an amazing planet where the skies swarmed with flying creatures, He could still remember asking his father if there had been any flying biots inside the first Rama spacecraft and then being acutely disappointed with the reply.

  General Borzov heard the sound of a large transport vehicle and looked out his west-facing window. Across the way, in front of the test facility, the propulsion module that would be used by both Newton vehicles was emerging from its test complex, carried on a huge platform moving on multiple tracks. The repaired module, sent back to the subsystem test area because of a problem with its ion controller, would be placed that afternoon inside a cargo shuttle and transferred to the spacecraft assembly facility at space station LEO-2, where it would be retrofitted prior to the final integrated vehicle tests just before Christmas. Both of the two Newton flight spacecraft were currently undergoing final checkout and test at LEO-2. All of the simulation exercises for the cosmonauts, however, were conducted over at LEO-3 with the backup equipment. The cosmonauts would only use the actual fl
ight systems at LEO-2 during the last week before launch.

  On the south side of the building, an electric bus pulled to a stop outside the office complex and discharged a small handful of people. One of the passengers was a blond woman wearing a long-sleeved yellow blouse with vertical black stripes and a pair of black silk pants. She walked with an effortless grace over to the building entrance. General Borzov admired her from a distance, reminding himself that Francesca had been a successful model before becoming a television journalist. He wondered what it was that she wanted and why she had insisted on seeing him privately before the medical briefing this morning.

  A minute later he greeted her at the door to his office. "Good morning, Signora Sabatini," he said.

  "Still so formal, General?" she replied, laughing, "even when there's only the two of us? You and the two Japanese men are the only members of the team who refuse to call me Francesca." She noticed that he was staring strangely at her. She looked down at her clothing to see if something was wrong. "What's the matter?" she asked him after a momentary hesitation.

  "It must be your blouse," General Borzov answered with a start. "For just a moment I had the distinct impression that you were a tiger poised to pounce on a hapless antelope or gazelle. Maybe it's old age. Or mind has started playing tricks on me," He invited her to come into his office.

  "I have had men tell me before that I resemble a cat. But never a tiger." Francesca sat down in the chair beside the general's desk. She meowed with a mischievous smile. "I'm just a harmless tabby housecat"

  "I don't believe that for a moment," Borzov said with a chuckle. "Many adjectives can be used to describe you, Francesca, but harmless would never be one of them." He suddenly became very businesslike. "Now, what can I do for you? You said that you had something very important to discuss with me that absolutely could not wait."

  Francesca pulled a large sheet of paper out of her soft briefcase and handed it to General Borzov. "This is the press schedule for the project," she said. "I reviewed it in detail only yesterday with both the public information office and the world television networks. Notice that of the in-depth personal interviews with the cosmonauts, only five have already been completed. Four more were originally scheduled for this month. But notice also that when you added that extra three-day simulation to this coming set of exercises, you wiped out the time that had been allotted to interview Wake-field and Turgenyev."

  She paused for a moment to make sure he was following her. "We can still catch Takagishi next Saturday and will tape the O'Tooles on Christmas Eve in Boston. But both Richard and Irina say that they now have no time for their interviews. In addition, we still have an old problem: Neither you nor Nicole is scheduled at all—"

  "You insisted on a meeting at seven-thirty this morning to discuss this press schedule," Borzov interrupted, his voice clearly conveying the relative importance that he assigned to such activities.

  "Among other things," Francesca answered nonchalantly. She ignored the implied criticism in his comment. "Of the people on this mission," she continued, "the polls show that the public has the greatest interest in you, me, Nicole des Jardins, and David Brown. So far, I have been unable to pin you down on a date for your personal interview and Madame des Jardins says that she does not intend to have one at all. The networks are unhappy. My prelaunch coverage is going to be incomplete. I need some help from you."

  Francesca looked directly at General Borzov. "I am asking you to cancel the additional simulation, to set a definite time for your personal interview, and to talk to Nicole on my behalf."

  He frowned. The general was both angered and annoyed by Francesca's presumption. He was going to tell her that the scheduling of personal publicity interviews was not high on his priority list. But something held him back. Both his sixth sense and a lifetime of experience in dealing with people told him to hesitate, that there was more to this discussion than he had yet heard. He temporized by changing the subject.

  "Incidentally, I must tell you that I am growing increasingly concerned about the lavish scope of this New Year's Eve party that your friends in the Italian government/business coalition are hosting. I know we agreed at the beginning of our training that we would participate, as a group, in that one social function. But I had no idea that it was going to be billed as the party of the century, as it was called last week by one of those American personality magazines. You know all those people; can't you do something to reduce the scope of the party?"

  "The gala was another item on my agenda," Francesca replied, carefully avoiding the thrust of his comment. "I need your assistance there as well. Four of the Newton cosmonauts now say that they do not plan to attend and two or three more have suggested that they may have other commitments—even though we all agreed to the party back in March. Takagishi and Yamanaka want to celebrate the holiday with their families in Japan and Richard Wakefield tells me that he has made reservations to go scuba diving in the Cayman Islands. And then there's that Frenchwoman again, who simply says that she's not coming and refuses to offer any kind of explanation."

  Borzov could not suppress a grin. "Why are you having such a hard time with Nicole des Jardins? I would think that since both of you are women, you would be able to speak to her more easily than the others."

  "She is entirely unsympathetic with the role of the press in this mission. She has told me so several times. And she is very stubborn about her privacy." Francesca shrugged her shoulders. "But the public is absolutely fascinated with her. After all, not only is she a doctor and a linguist and a former Olympic champion, but also she is the daughter of a famous novelist and the mother of a fourteen-year-old daughter, despite never having been married—"

  Valeriy Borzov was looking at his watch. "Just for my information," he interrupted, "how many more items are on your 'agenda,' as you call it? We are due in the auditorium in ten more minutes." He smiled back at Francesca. "And I feel compelled to remind you that Madame des Jardins went out of her way today to accommodate your request for press coverage of this briefing."

  Francesca studied General Borzov for several seconds. I think he's ready now, she thought to herself. And unless I misjudged him he will understand immediately. She pulled a small cubic object out of her briefcase and handed it across the desk. "This is the only other item on my agenda," she said.

  The Newton commander-in-chief seemed puzzled. He turned the cube over in his hands. "A free-lance journalist sold it to us," Francesca said in a very serious tone. "We were assured it was the only copy in existence."

  She paused a moment while Borzov loaded the cube into the appropriate part of his desk computer. He blanched noticeably when the first video segment from the cube appeared on the monitor. He watched the wild rantings of his daughter, Natasha, for about fifteen seconds. "I wanted to keep this out of the hands of the tabloid press," Francesca added softly.

  "How long is the tape?" General Borzov asked quietly.

  "Almost half an hour," she replied. "I'm the only one who has seen the entire thing."

  General Borzov heaved a sigh. This was the moment his wife, Petra, had dreaded ever since it was first made official that he would be the commanding officer of the Newton. The institute director at Sverdlovsk had promised that no reporters would have access to his daughter. Now here was a videotape with a thirty-minute interview with her. Petra would be mortified.

  He stared out the window. In his mind he was assessing what would happen to the mission if his daughter's acute schizophrenia were paraded before the public. It would be embarrassing, he conceded, but the mission would not be damaged in any serious way… General Borzov looked across at Francesca. He hated making deals. And he wasn't certain that Francesca herself had not commissioned the interview with Natasha. Nevertheless…

  Borzov relaxed and forced a smile. "I guess I could thank you," he said, "but somehow it doesn't seem appropriate." He paused for a moment. "I assume I'm expected to show some gratitude."

  So far, so good, Fra
ncesca thought. She knew better than to say anything just yet.

  "All right," the general continued after the lengthy silence, "I will cancel the extra simulation. Others have already complained about it." He turned the data cube over in his hands. "And Petra and I will come to Rome early, as you once suggested, for the personal interview. I will remind all the cosmonauts tomorrow about the party on New Year's Eve and tell them that it is their duty to attend. But neither I nor anyone else can require Nicole des Jardins to talk to you about anything except her work." He stood up abruptly. "Now it's time for us to go to that biometry meeting."

  Francesca reached up and kissed him on the cheek. "Thank you, Valeriy," she said.

  8

  BIOMETRY

  The medical briefing had already begun when Francesca and General Borzov arrived. All the rest of the cosmonauts were present, as well as twenty-five or thirty additional engineers and scientists associated with the mission. Four newspaper reporters and a television crew completed the audience. At the front of the small auditorium stood Nicole des Jardins, wearing her gray flight outfit as always, and holding a laser pointer in her hand. To the side of her was a tall Japanese man in a blue dress suit. He was listening carefully to a question from the audience. Nicole interrupted him to acknowledge the new arrivals.

  "Sumimasen, Hakamatsu-san," she said. "Let me introduce our commander, General Valeriy Borzov of the Soviet Union, as well as the journalist-cosmonaut Francesca Sabatini."

  She turned toward the latecomers. "Dobriy Utra," Nicole said to the general, quickly nodding a greeting in Francesca's direction as well. "This is the esteemed Dr. Toshiro Hakamatsu," Nicole said. "He designed and developed the biometry system that we are going to use in flight, including the tiny probes that will be inserted into our bodies."