Richard and Nicole surveyed the scene around them and then looked at each other. "We're back in wonderland, Alice," Richard said with a short laugh. "Why don't we have a snack white I enter all this real estate in my trusty computer?"
While they were eating, a centipede biot approached on their side of the canal, stopped briefly as if to study them, and then passed on by. It climbed the ramp Richard and Nicole had just descended. "Did you see any crab or centipede biots in the second habitat?" Nicole asked.
"No," said Richard.
"And we purposely designed them out of the plans for New Eden, didn't we?"
Richard laughed. "Indeed we did. You convinced both the Eagle and me that ordinary humans would not be able to deal easily with them."
"So does their presence here imply the existence of a third habitat?" Nicole asked.
"Possibly. After all, we have no idea what's now in the Southern Hemicylinder. We have not seen it since Rama was refurbished. But there's another explanation as well. Suppose the crabs, centipedes, and other Raman biots just go with the territory, if you know what I mean. Maybe they are functioning in all parts of Rama, on all voyages, unless specifically proscribed by a given spacefarer."
As Richard and Nicole finished lunch, another barge came into view on their left. Like its predecessor, it was loaded with stacks of white, black, and gray objects. "These are different from the first ones," Nicole remarked. 'These piles remind me of the spare centipede biot parts that were stored in my pit."
"You could be right," Richard said, standing up. "Let's follow the canal and see where it leads us." He glanced around, first at the arched ceiling ten meters above their heads and then back at the ramp behind them. "Unless I have made an error in my computations, or the Cylindrical Sea is much deeper than I think, this canal runs from south to north under the sea itself."
"So following the barge will take us back under the Northern Hemicylinder?" Nicole asked.
"I believe so," Richard replied.
They followed the canal for more than two hours. Except for three spider biots, moving quickly as a team along the opposite bank, Richard and Nicole did not see anything else that was new. Two more barges passed them, carrying the same general kind of load downstream, and they intermittently encountered both centipede and crab biots without any interactions. They walked by one more bridge over the canal.
Richard and Nicole rested twice, drinking water or eating a snack while they talked. At the second rest stop Nicole suggested that perhaps they should turn back. Richard checked his watch. "Let's give it another hour," he said. "If my sense of position is correct, we should be under the Northern Hemicylinder already. Sooner or later we must find where the barges are taking all that stuff."
He was right. After another kilometer of hiking along the canal, Richard and Nicole saw a large pentagonal structure in the distance. As they drew closer, they could see that the canal flowed directly into the center of the pentagon. The building itself, which straddled the canal, was six meters tall. It had a flat roof, no windows, and a creamy white exterior. Each of its five sections or wings extended out twenty or thirty meters from the center of the structure.
The walkway along the canal ended in some stairs that rose to a perimeter lane that ran around the entire pentagon. There was a similar configuration on the other side of the canal; a centipede biot was at that moment using the perimeter lane as a bridge to change from one side of the canal to the other.
"Where do you suppose it's going?" Nicole asked as the two of them stood aside to permit the biot to trundle by.
"Maybe to New York," Richard answered. "On my long walks before the avians hatched I sometimes saw one of them in the distance."
They paused together outside the only door to the pentagon that was on the canal side of the building. "I guess we're going in?" Nicole said.
Richard nodded and pushed open the small door. Nicole bent down and entered the building. Surrounding them was a large room, well lit, perhaps a thousand cubic meters altogether, with a ceiling five meters above the floor. Their walkway was elevated above the floor by two or three meters, so Richard and Nicole could watch most of the activities taking place below them. Biot robot workers they had never seen before, each designed for a specialized task, were unloading the two barges in the room and separating the cargo according to some predefined plan. Many of the individual pieces from the stacks were loaded onto truck biots, which disappeared through one of the back doors once they were full.
After a few minutes of observation, Richard and Nicole continued along the walkway to where it intersected another path just above the center of the room. Richard stopped and made some notes in his computer. "I presume this layout is as simple as it looks," he said to Nicole. "We can go either left or right-each way we go into another wing of the pentagon."
Nicole chose the right walkway because the truck biots that she had thought were carrying parts for the centipede biot had gone in that direction. Her observations had been accurate. Soon after Richard and Nicole entered the second room, which was exactly the same size as the first, they realized that both a centipede and a crab biot were being manufactured on the floor below them. Richard and Nicole stopped to watch the process for several minutes.
"Absolutely fascinating," Richard said, finishing his computer diagram of the biot factory. "Are you ready to go?"
As Richard turned to face Nicole, she saw his eyes widen. "Don't look now," he said quietly a second later, "but we have company."
Nicole wheeled around and looked behind her. Across the room, forty meters behind them on the walkway, a pair of octospiders was slowly approaching them. Richard and Nicole had not heard their distinguishing sound, similar to dragging metallic brushes, because of the noise from the biot factory.
The octospiders stopped when they realized that the humans had noticed them. Nicole's heart was pumping furiously. She remembered clearly her last encounter with an octospider, when she had rescued Katie from the octo lair in Rama II. Then, as now, her overwhelming impulse had been to run.
She grabbed Richard's hand as they both stared at the aliens. "Let's go," Nicole said under her breath.
"I'm as scared as you are," he replied, "but let's not leave just yet. They aren't moving. I want to see what they are going to do."
Richard concentrated on the lead octospider and drew a careful picture in his mind. Its nearly spherical main body was charcoal gray, with a diameter of about a meter, and was featureless except for a vertical slit twenty or twenty-five centimeters wide that ran from the top to the bottom, where the body broke into the eight black and gold tentacles, each two meters long, that spread out across the floor. Inside the vertical slit were many unknown knobs and wrinkles—Almost certainly sensors, Richard thought—the largest of which was a big rectangular lens structure containing some kind of fluid.
As the two pairs of beings gazed at each other across the room, a broad band of bright purple coloring swept around the "head" of the lead octospider. This band originated on one of the parallel edges of the vertical slit. It moved around the head, disappearing into the opposite edge of the slit almost three hundred and sixty degrees later. It was followed in a few seconds by a complicated sequence containing some red bands, some green, and some that were apparently blank. This sequence made an identical journey around the head of the octospider.
"That's exactly what happened when that octospider confronted Katie and me," Nicole said nervously to Richard. "She said it was talking to us."
"But we have no way of knowing what it's saying," Richard replied. "Just because it can talk does not mean that it won't hurt us." As the lead octospider continued to talk in color, Richard suddenly remembered an episode from years earlier, during his odyssey in Rama II. At the time he had been lying on a table, surrounded by five or six octos, all with colored patterns on their heads. Richard recalled clearly the powerful terror that he had felt as he had watched some very small creatures, apparently under the control o
f the octospiders, crawl into his nose.
Richard's head began to throb with pain. "They weren't all that nice to me before," he said to Nicole. "When they—"
At that moment the far door to the room opened and four more octospiders entered. "That's enough," said Richard, feeling Nicole tense beside him. "I think it's time for us to make an exit."
Richard and Nicole walked quickly to the center of the room, where the walkway, as in the previous room, joined with the path leading to the outside of the building. They turned toward the outside but stopped after taking a few steps. Four more octospiders were coming through this door as well.
They didn't need to confer. Richard and Nicole spun around, returned to the main interior walkway, and bolted in the direction of the third wing of the pentagon. This time they raced on, without turning to the outside, until they were inside the fourth wing. It was completely dark in this section. They slowed as Richard pulled out his flashlight to examine their surroundings. There was sophisticated-looking equipment on the floor below them, but no activity of any kind.
"Should we try the outside again?" Richard asked as he was putting his flashlight back in his shirt pocket. Seeing her nod, Richard took Nicole's hand and they ran together toward the intersection, where they turned right and headed out of the pentagon altogether.
A few minutes later they were jogging down a dark corridor in completely unknown territory. Both of them were fatigued. Nicole was having difficulty breathing. "Richard," she said, "I need to rest. I can't keep running like this."
Richard and Nicole walked down the empty corridor for another fifty meters. They saw a door on their left. Richard cautiously opened the door, peered in, and scanned the room with his flashlight. "It must be a storage room of some kind," he said. "But it's currently empty."
Richard walked into the room, glanced through its back door into another empty chamber, and then returned for Nicole. They sat down with their backs against the wall. "When we return to our lair, darling," Nicole said a few seconds later, "I want you to help me check my heart. I have been having some strange pains lately."
"Are you all right now?" Richard asked, concern reflected in his voice.
"Yes," Nicole replied. She smiled in the dark and kissed her husband. "As well as can be expected after narrowly escaping from a gaggle of octospiders."
7
Nicole slept fitfully with her back against the wall and her head resting on Richard's shoulder. She had one nightmare after another, always waking with a start before dozing off again. In the last nightmare Nicole was on an island by the ocean with all her children. A huge tidal wave headed toward them on her dream screen. Nicole was frantic because her children were scattered all over the island. How could she possibly save all of them? She awakened with a shudder.
She nudged her husband in the dark. "Richard," Nicole said, "wake up. Something's not right."
At first Richard did not move. When Nicole touched him a second time, he slowly opened his eyes. "What's the matter?" he said at length.
"I have the feeling we're not safe here," she said. "I think we should go."
Richard switched on his flashlight and moved the beam slowly around the room. "There's nobody here," he said softly. "And I don't hear anything either. Don't you think we should rest some more?"
Nicole's fears increased as they sat in silence. "I'm still feeling a sense of danger, Richard," she said finally. "I know that you don't believe in anything you can't analyze, but I have learned to trust my premonitions."
"All right," Richard said unenthusiastically. He stood up and walked across the room, opening the back door, which led to a similar, adjacent area. He glanced inside. "Nothing here either," he said after several seconds. Richard next came back across the room and opened the door to the corridor they had used to escape from the pentagon. The moment the door was open, Nicole and he both heard the unmistakable sound of dragging brushes.
Nicole jumped to her feet. Richard closed the door without a sound and hurried over beside her. "Come on," he said in a whisper. "We have to find another way out of here."
They walked through the next room, then another and another. All were dark and empty. They lost their sense of direction as they raced through the unfamiliar territory. Eventually they came to a large double door at the far side of one of the many identical rooms. Richard told Nicole to stand back as he cautiously pushed open the door. "Holy shit!" he exclaimed as soon as he looked into the room. "What in the world is this?"
Nicole came up beside Richard and her eyes followed his flashlight beam as it fell on the bizarre contents of the adjoining chamber. The room was cluttered with large objects. The one closest to the door looked like a large amoeba on a skateboard, the next one like a gigantic ball of twine with two antennae sticking out of its center. There was no sound in the room and nothing moved. Richard lifted his beam higher and let it move quickly around the rest of the crowded room.
"Go back," Nicole said excitedly, catching a glimpse of something familiar. "Over there. A few meters to the left of the other door."
Seconds later the beam illuminated four humanlike figures, dressed in helmets and space suits, that were sitting against the far wall. "It's the human biots," Nicole said excitedly, "the ones we saw in Rama II out on the Central Plain."
"Norton and company?" Richard asked incredulously, a shiver of fear running down his spine.
"I bet it is," Nicole responded.
They entered the room slowly and tiptoed around the many objects as they made their way toward the figures in question. Both Richard and Nicole knelt down beside the four apparent humans. "This must be a biot dump," Nicole said, after they had verified that the face behind the transparent helmet was indeed a copy of the Commander Norton who led the first Rama expedition.
Richard stood up and shook his head. "Absolutely unbelievable," he said. "What are they doing here?" He let his flashlight beam wander around the room.
A second later Nicole screamed. No more than four meters away from her, an octospider was moving, or at least so it seemed in the peculiar light. Richard rushed to her side. The two of them quickly verified that what they were seeing was only an octospider biot, and then they both laughed for several minutes.
"Richard Wakefield," Nicole said when she could finally contain her nervous laughter, "may I go home now? I've had enough."
"I guess so," Richard said with a smile. "As long as we can find the way."
As they penetrated deeper and deeper into the maze of rooms and tunnels in the area around the pentagon, Nicole became convinced that they would never find their way out. Eventually Richard slowed the pace and started storing information in his portable computer. Afterward he was at least able to prevent their going in circles, but Richard never connected his growing map to any of the landmarks they had seen before they fled from the octospiders.
When both Richard and Nicole were starting to feel desperate, they chanced upon a small truck biot carrying an odd collection of small objects down a narrow corridor. Richard became more relaxed. 'Those things look as if they have been custom-made to someone's specifications," he said to Nicole, "like the objects delivered to us in the White Room. If we go back in the direction from which the biot came, then maybe we will locate where all our objects are manufactured. From there, it should be easy to find the path to our lair."
It was a long hike. They were both worn out several hours later when their corridor widened into a huge factory area with a very high ceiling. At the center of the factory were twelve fat cylinders that looked like old-fashioned boilers on the Earth. Each was four or five meters high and a meter and a half wide. The boilers were arranged in four rows of three.
Conveyor belts, or at least the Rama equivalent, led into and out of each of the boilers, two of which were in operation at the moment. Richard was fascinated. "Look over there," he said, pointing at a vast warehouse floor covered with stacks of objects of all sizes and descriptions. "That must be all the raw materi
al. A request arrives at the central computer, which is probably in that hut behind the boilers, where it is processed and allocated to one of these machines. Biots go out, gather up the proper items, and place them on the conveyor belts. Inside the boilers these raw materials are altered significantly, for what comes out is the object ordered by whatever intelligent species is using the keyboard or its equivalent to communicate with the Ramans."
Richard approached the closest active boiler. "But the real question," he said, overflowing with excitement, "is what kind of process takes place inside these boilers? Is it chemical? Is it perhaps nuclear, involving element transmutations? Or have the Ramans some other technology for manufacturing completely beyond our ken?"
He knocked several times very hard on the outside of the active boiler. "The walls are very thick," he announced. Richard then bent down where the conveyor belt entered the boiler and started to stick his hand inside. "Richard," Nicole yelled, "don't you think that's foolish?"
Richard glanced up at his wife and shrugged. As he bent down again to study the belt/boiler interface, a bizarre biot that looked like a camera box with legs scurried over from the back of the large room. It quickly wedged itself between Richard and the active conveyor belt and then expanded in size, forcing Richard away from the active process.
"Nice move," Richard said appreciatively. He turned to Nicole. "The system has excellent fault protection."
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