"Bravo," the Eagle said, coming up beside her. "You are making fabulous progress. We never thought that you would walk so well in such a short period of time."
"I definitely need some water now," she said, smiling. 'This old body is sweating furiously."
The Eagle retrieved a glass of water from the table. When she was finished drinking, Nicole turned to her alien friend. "Now are you going to keep your part of the bargain?" she said. "Do you have a mirror and a change of clothes in that suitcase over there?"
"Yes, I do," the Eagle answered. "And I even brought the cosmetics you requested. But first I want to examine you to see how your heart responded to the exercise." He held a small black device in front of her and watched some markings appear on the tiny screen. "That's good," he said. "No, that's excellent… No irregularities at all. Just an indication that your heart is working very hard, which would be expected in a human your age."
"May I see that?" Nicole asked, pointing at the monitoring device. The Eagle handed it to her. "I suppose," she said, "that this thing is receiving signals from inside my body … but what exactly are all those squiggles and strange symbols on the screen?"
"You have over a thousand tiny probes inside your body, more than half in the cardiac region. They not only measure the critical performance of your heart and other organs, but also regulate such important parameters as blood flow and oxygen allocation. Some of the probes even supplement the normal biological functions. What you are seeing on the screen is summary data from the time interval when you were exercising. It has been compressed and telemetered by the processor inside you."
Nicole frowned. "Maybe I shouldn't have asked. Somehow the idea of all that electronic junk inside me is not very comforting."
"The probes are not really electronic," the Eagle said, "at least not in the way you humans use the word. And they are entirely necessary at this point in your life. If they weren't there, you wouldn't survive even one day."
Nicole stared at the Eagle. "Why didn't you just let me die?" she asked. "Do you have some purpose for me yet that justifies all this effort? Some function I must still perform?"
"Perhaps," the Eagle said. "But perhaps we thought you might like to see your family and friends one more time."
"I find it difficult to believe," Nicole said, "that my desires play any significant role in your hierarchy of values."
The Eagle did not respond. He walked over to the suitcase, which was sitting on the floor beside the table, and returned with a mirror, a damp cloth, a simple blue dress, and a cosmetics bag. Nicole slipped out of the white nightgown she had been wearing, wiped herself all over with the cloth, and put on the dress. She took a deep breath as the Eagle handed her the mirror. "I'm not certain I'm ready for this," she said with a wan smile.
Nicole would not have recognized the face in the mirror if she had not mentally prepared herself first. Her face looked to her like a crazy quilt of bags and wrinkles. All her hair, including her eyebrows and eyelashes, was now either white or gray. Nicole's first impulse was to cry, but she gamely fought back the tears.
She searched the features in the mirror, guided by her memory, for vestiges of the lovely young woman she had been. Here and there she could see the outlines of what was once considered to be a beautiful face, but the eye had to know where to look. Her heart ached as Nicole suddenly remembered a simple incident years earlier, when she was a teenager walking along a country road with her father near her home in Beauvois. An old woman using a cane had been coming toward them and Nicole had asked her father if they could cross over the road to avoid her.
"Why?" her father had asked.
"Because I don't want to see her up close," Nicole had said. "She is old and ugly. She makes me shiver."
"You too will be old someday," her father had answered, refusing to cross the road.
I am old and ugly, Nicole thought. I even make myself shiver. She handed the mirror back to the Eagle. "You warned me," she said wistfully. "Maybe I should have listened."
"Of course you're shocked," the Eagle said. "You have not seen yourself for sixteen years. Most humans have a difficult time with the aging process even if they follow it day by day." He extended the cosmetics bag in her direction.
"No, thank you," Nicole said despondently, refusing the bag. "It's a hopeless situation. Not even Michelangelo could do anything with this face."
"Suit yourself," the Eagle said. "But I thought you might want to use the cosmetics before your visitor arrives."
"A visitor!" Nicole said, with both alarm and excitement. "I'm going to have a visitor? Who is it?" She reached out for the mirror and the cosmetics.
"I think I'll leave it as a surprise," the Eagle said. "Your visitor will be here in a few minutes."
Nicole put on lipstick and powder, brushed her gray hair, and straightened out and plucked her eyebrows. When she was finished, she cast a disapproving look in the mirror. "That's about all I can do," she said, as much to herself as to the Eagle.
A few minutes later the Eagle opened the door on the other side of the room and went outside. When he returned mere was an octospider with him.
From across the room Nicole saw the royal blue color spill out of its boundaries. "Hello, Nicole. How are you feeling?" the octospider said.
"Dr. Blue!" Nicole yelled excitedly.
Dr. Blue held the monitoring device in front of Nicole. "I will be staying here with you until you are ready to be transferred," the octospider physician said. "The Eagle has other duties at present."
Bands of color raced across the tiny screen. "I don't understand," Nicole said, looking at the device upside down. "When the Eagle used that thing, the readout was all in squiggles and other funny symbols."
"That's their special-purpose technological language," Dr. Blue said. "It's incredibly efficient, much better than our colors. But of course I can't read any of it. This device actually is polylingual. There's even an English mode."
"So what do you speak when you communicate with the ;Eagle and I'm not around?" Nicole asked.
"We both use colors," Dr. Blue responded. "They run across his forehead from left to right."
"You're kidding," Nicole said, trying to picture the Eagle with colors on his forehead.
"Not at all," the octospider answered. "The Eagle is amazing. He jabbers and shrieks with the avians, squeals and whistles with the myrmicats."
Nicole had never seen the word "myrmicat" in the language of color before. When she asked about the word, Dr. Blue explained that six of the strange creatures were now living in the Grand Hotel and that another four were about to burst forth from germinating manna melons. "Although all the octospiders and humans slept during the long voyage," Dr. Blue said, "the manna melons were allowed to develop into myrmicats and then sessile material.
They are already into their next generation."
Dr. Blue replaced the device on the table. "So what's the verdict for today, Doctor?" Nicole asked.
"You're gaining strength," Dr. Blue replied. "But you're alive because of all the supplemental probes that have been inserted. At some time you should consider—"
"—replacing my heart. I know," said Nicole. "It may seem peculiar, but the idea does not appeal to me very much. I don't know exactly why I'm against it. Maybe I haven't yet seen what remains to live for. I know that if Richard were still alive…"
She stopped herself. For an instant Nicole imagined she was back in the viewing room, watching the slow-motion frames of the last seconds of Richard's life. She had not thought about that moment since she awakened.
"Do you mind if I ask you something very personal?" Nicole said to Dr. Blue.
"Not at all," the octospider said.
"We watched the deaths of Richard and Archie together," Nicole said, "and I was so distraught that I could not function. Archie was murdered at the same time, and he was your lifelong partner. Yet you sat beside me and gave me comfort. Did you not feel any sense of loss or sadness at Archie's death?"
Dr. Blue did not respond immediately. "All octospiders are trained from birth to control what you humans call emotions. The alternates, of course, are quite susceptible to feelings. But those of us who—"
"With all due respect," Nicole interrupted softly, touching her octospider colleague, "I wasn't asking you a clinical question, doctor to doctor. It was a question from one friend to another."
A short burst of crimson, then another of blue, unrelated, slowly flowed around Dr. Blue's head. "Yes, I felt a sense of loss," Dr. Blue said. "But I knew it was coming. Either then or later. When Archie joined the war effort, his termination became certain. And besides, my duty at that moment was to help you."
The door to the room opened and the Eagle entered. The alien was carrying a large box full of food, clothing, and miscellaneous equipment. He informed Nicole that he had brought her space suit and that she was going to venture out of her controlled environment in the very near future.
"Dr. Blue says that you can speak in color," Nicole said playfully. "I want you to show me."
"What do you want me to say?" the Eagle replied in orderly narrow color bands that started on the left side of his forehead and scrolled to the right.
"That's enough," Nicole said with a laugh. "You are truly amazing."
Nicole stood on the floor of the gigantic factory and stared at the pyramid in front of her. Off to her right, less than a kilometer away, a group of special-purpose biots, including a pair of mammoth bulldozers, were building a tall mountain. "Why are you doing all this?" Nicole said into the tiny microphone inside her helmet.
"It's part of the next cycle," the Eagle replied. "We have determined that these particular constructions enhance the likelihood of obtaining what we want from the experiment."
"So you already know something about the new spacefarers?"
"I don't know the answer to that," the Eagle said. "I have no assignment associated with the future of Rama."
"But you told us before," Nicole said, not satisfied, "that no changes were made unless they were necessary."
"I can't help you," the Eagle said. "Come, get in the rover. Dr. Blue wants to have a closer look at the mountain."
The octospider looked peculiar in her space suit. In fact, Nicole had laughed out loud when she had first seen Dr. Blue with the glove-fitting white fabric covering her charcoal body and her eight tentacles. Dr. Blue also had a transparent helmet around her head, through which it was easy to read her colors.
"I was astonished," Nicole said to Dr. Blue, who was sitting beside her as the open rover moved across the flat .terrain toward the mountain, "when we first came outside… No, that's not a strong enough word. You and the Eagle had both told me that we were in the factory and that Rama was being prepared for another voyage, but I never expected all this."
"The pyramid was built around you," the Eagle interjected from the driver's seat in front of them, "while you sleeping. If we had not been able to build without disturbing your environment, it would have been necessary to awaken you much earlier."
"Doesn't this entire business just amaze you?" Nicole continued to face Dr. Blue. "Don't you wonder what kind of beings conceived of this grand project in the first place? And also created artificial intelligence like the Eagle? It is almost impossible to imagine."
"It's not as difficult for us," the octospider said. "Remember, we have known about superior beings from the beginning. We only exist as intelligent creatures because the Precursors altered our genes. We have never had a period in our history when we thought we were at the apex of life."
"Nor will we, ever again," mused Nicole. "Human history, whatever it turns out to be, has now been profoundly and irrevocably altered."
"Maybe not," the Eagle said from the front seat. "Our data base indicates that some species are not significantly impacted by contact with us. Our experiments are designed to allow for that possibility. Our contact occurs during a finite interval, with only a small percentage of the population. There is no continuous interaction unless the species under study takes overt action to create it. I doubt if life on Earth at this very moment is much different than it would have been if no Rama spacecraft had ever visited your solar system."
Nicole leaned forward in her seat. "Do you know that for a fact?" she said. "Or are you just guessing?"
The Eagle's answer was vague. "Certainly your history was changed by Rama's appearance," he said. "Many major events would not have occurred if there had not been any contact. But a hundred more years from now, or five hundred… How different will Earth be then from what it would have been?"
"But the human point of view must have changed," Nicole argued. "Surely the knowledge that there exists in the universe, or at least existed in some earlier epoch, an intelligence advanced enough to build an interstellar robotic spacecraft larger than our greatest city cannot be cast aside as insignificant information. It creates a different perspective for the entire human experience. Religion, philosophy, even the fundamentals of biology must be revised in the presence—"
"I am glad to see," the Eagle interrupted, "that at least some small measure of your optimism and idealism has survived all these years. Recall, however, that in New Eden the humans knew that they were living inside a domain especially constructed for them by extraterrestrials. And they were told, by you and others, that they were being continually observed. Even so, when it became apparent that the aliens, whoever they were, did not intend to interfere in the daily activities of the humans, the existence of those advanced beings became irrelevant."
The rover arrived at the base of the mountain. "I wanted to come over here," Dr. Blue said, "out of curiosity. We did not have any mountains, as you know, in our realm on Rama. And not many in my region of our home planet when I was a juvenile. I thought it would be nice to stand on the top."
"I have commandeered one of the large bulldozers," the Eagle said. "Our journey to the summit will only take ten minutes. You may be frightened in spots because of the steepness of the climb, but it is perfectly safe, as long as you wear your seat belts."
Nicole was not too old to enjoy the spectacular climb. The bulldozer, as large as an office building, did not have very comfortable seats for passengers and some of the bumps were quite violent, but the vistas that opened up as the trio ascended were definitely worth the trouble.
The mountain was over a kilometer high and about ten kilometers around its approximately round circumference. Nicole could clearly see the pyramid in which she had been staying when the bulldozer was only a quarter of the way up the mountain. Farther away, in all directions, the horizon was dotted with isolated construction projects of unknown purpose.
So now it all begins again, Nicole thought. This rebuilt Rama will soon enter another set of star systems. And what will it find? Who are the spacefarers who will next walk across this ground? Or climb this mountain?
The bulldozer halted on a plateau very near the summit and the three passengers disembarked. The view was breathtaking. As Nicole surveyed the scene, she recalled her wonder on that very first trip into Rama, when she had been riding down the chairlift and the vast alien world had stretched out in front of her. Thank you, she thought, addressing the Eagle in her mind, for keeping me alive. You were right. This experience alone and the memories it triggers are more than enough reason to continue.
Nicole turned around to face the rest of the mountain. She saw something small flying in and out of some bushy-looking growths, red in color, that were no more than twenty meters away. She walked over and captured one of the flying objects in her hand. It was the size and shape of a butterfly. Its wings were decorated with a variegated pattern without symmetry or any other design principle that Nicole could discern. She let one go and then captured another. The pattern on the second Raman butterfly was altogether different, but still rich in both color and decoration.
The Eagle and Dr. Blue walked up beside her. Nicole showed them what she was holding in her hand. "Flying biots," the
Eagle said without additional comment.
Nicole marveled again at the tiny creature. Something astonishing happens every day, she remembered Richard saying. And we are then always reminded of what a joy it is to be alive.
2
Nicole had barely finished her bath when the two biots entered the room. One was a crab and the other looked like a small truck. The crab used a combination of its powerful pincers and its formidable array of ancillary gadgetry to cut Nicole's sleeping container into manageable pieces. The pieces were then stacked in the bed of the truck. On its way out of the room less than a minute later, the crab grabbed the white bathtub and all the remaining chairs and piled them on top of the stacks in the truck bed. It then put the table on its own back and disappeared from the empty room behind the truck biot.
Nicole straightened her dress. "I'll never forget the first time I saw a crab biot," she commented to her two companions. "It was on the huge screen in the Newton control center, years and years ago. We were all terrified."
"So today's the day," Dr. Blue said in color several seconds later. "Are you ready to check into the Grand Hotel?"
"Probably not," Nicole said with a smile. "From what you and the Eagle have said, I guess I have enjoyed my last moment of solitude."
"Your family and friends are very excited about seeing you," the Eagle said. "I visited them yesterday and told them you would be coming. You'll stay with Max, Eponine, Ellie, Marius, and Nikki. Patrick, Nai, Benjy, Kepler, and Maria are next door. As I explained to you last week, Patrick and Nai have been treating Maria as their own daughter since shortly after everyone awakened. They know the whole story of how you rescued Maria during the bombing."
"I don't know if 'rescued' is exactly the correct word," Nicole said, remembering clearly her last hours in the old Rama spacecraft. "I picked her up because there was no one to look after her. Anybody would have done the same thing."
"You saved her life," the Eagle said. "Not more than an hour after you left the zoo with the girl, three large bombs devastated her compound and the two adjacent sections. Maria certainly would have been killed if you hadn't found her."
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