“Now watch carefully,” the Eagle said. “In less than a minute your window will vanish and you will have access to the red sphere through that cylindrical corridor.”
The Eagle’s prediction was correct. Several moments later Maria’s shuttle window disappeared. To her right was a long red corridor that stretched into darkness.
“Now’s when you really make the decision,” the Eagle said. “The ribbons are not going to allow me or this shuffle any closer to the sphere. Unless I have misinterpreted their actions, however, they are inviting you to join them. Remember, Maria, the moment you enter that red corridor, it will almost certainly disengage from this shuffle. From that point forward you will be utterly on your own.”
Fear registered on Maria’s face for a brief moment. “You don’t have to go,” the Eagle added. “It would not be cowardly for you to change your mind at this point. Fear of the unknown has been a life-preserving characteristic of your species throughout history. If our shuttle makes any kind of maneuver, I am confident the red corridor will disappear, your window will again be in its place, and that red sphere will return to its home.”
Maria looked at the Eagle and then stared for along time down the strange red corridor in space. She could feel her heart pounding furiously inside her space suit. Taking a deep breath and clutching the small silver cylinder in her hand, she pressed the button that retracted her seat belt.
“Good-bye,” she said, standing up. “Thanks for everything.”
AFTER HER FIRST three steps into the red corridor, Maria turned around and looked behind her. The Eagle and their shuffle had vanished. The red corridor was now closed and shrinking with each step that she took. Again she felt a powerful rush of anxiety but Maria forced herself to continue walking forward.
A hundred meters into the corridor Maria saw a white object in the distance moving in her direction. As it drew closer, her trepidation increased. What was coming to meet her looked like two giant, stacked snowballs, riding on a flat white plate with six red wheels. This snowman, however, had no eyes, no ears, and no arms. At least not until it stopped just in front of Maria.
She screamed involuntarily when the snowman suddenly convulsed and extended two white appendages out of the upper snowball, immediately grabbing and removing the helmet to her space suit. For a brief moment Maria expected to die, but when she began to breathe more easily she realized that the environment in the red corridor had been designed for her.
One of the snowman’s long, skinny two-fingered arms was now tugging at her space suit. Maria understood. She removed the suit and placed it on the floor of the corridor. Moments later, the external surface of the snowman began to glow and soften. As Maria watched in astonishment, what had been the snowman dissolved before her eyes, first becoming a glowing, formless mass of white containing thousands of sparkling, drifting particles, and then breaking into hundreds of tiny, separate elements, each no larger than a marble. This group of elements spread out into a formation that was approximately Maria’s size, and moved in her direction.
Fighting against a powerful desire to flee, Maria held her breath and stood motionless as the tiny particle elements came in contact with all parts of her body and her clothing. She closed her eyes. She could feel the aliens rubbing against her cheeks, her neck, even her eyelids. Then suddenly they were all gone.
When Maria opened her eyes, the snowman was again standing in front of her. Satisfied that she was no longer a remote sensing laboratory, it retracted its arms into its upper snowball and scurried away in front of her. Maria followed, her pulse gradually returning to normal. Occasionally she turned around and noted that the red corridor was no longer shortening and that her space suit still remained at the far end.
When she reached the red sphere, the snowman was standing in its center beside a tall, narrow chamber with a transparent window There was nothing else visible in the sphere except its red walls. The snowman was pointing at the chamber with an extended arm. Maria entered. Immediately after the door closed, some unseen force propelled the chamber through a hidden door out into space. Maria’s short flight ended in less than a minute. The chamber was now standing on a platform just inside the equatorial lips of the huge white spherical spacecraft. The red sphere disappeared from her view as the opening to the outside closed.
So what happens now? Maria asked herself as she stood in total darkness. She didn’t wait long for an answer. From behind her, inside the white sphere, a glowing flying white ribbon approached her capsule. It circled her twice in ten seconds, long enough for Maria to examine the characteristic sparkling and dancing particles that were drifting, apparently aimlessly from side to side inside the ribbon’s ever changing external structure.
When the ribbon extended itself and opened her chamber door, lights flooded the area around Maria. At first the illumination was so bright that Maria was forced to cover her eyes. Once her eyes had adjusted, however, Maria saw that she was in a large rectangular white room with very high ceilings. A number of objects were scattered around the room, including a series of large vats with transparent sides, each filled with a liquid of a slightly different color, which were lined up against the wall farthest away.
As Maria tentatively left the capsule, the ribbon transformed itself into the shape of a woman. In the part of the room across from the vats, the ribbon woman demonstrated both the shower and the toilet before simulating eating one of the food cylinders and drinking from a water vessel. Next the particle woman briefly lay down on a sleeping mat in a corner against one of the walls before changing back into a ribbon and flying into the center of the room.
Maria wasted no time. Holding the silver cylinder that had been removed from her mother high above her head, she leaned toward the hovering ribbon. Something like a hand with three fingers formed on one side of the ribbon, reaching down and taking the cylinder from her. Maria felt a brief tingle when a part of the ribbon brushed against her forearm. She then watched with fascination as the cylinder, somehow held aloft by the particle being, was opened along the side by a zipperlike motion, revealing the existence of twenty-six objects inside. One, by far the largest, was shaped like a dumbbell. Except for a small powder-blue cylinder, the other twenty-four objects were all tiny spheres. Ten were black, seven were white, and seven were black with a bisecting white stripe. Each of them drifted slowly in midair inside the body of the ribbon.
The ribbon now moved quickly across the room to where the vats were located. The powder-blue cylinder and the twenty-four spheres were neatly placed on the floor by one extended arm of the ribbon while another dropped the dumbbell into the first vat on the left. The body of the silver cylinder, apparently no longer important, was returned to Maria by still another extension of the constantly changing particle being.
Curious, Maria crossed the room to examine the vats. She picked up the blue cylinder and a mixture of the three kinds of spheres, black, white, and striped, turning them over in her hands before returning them to their locations on the floor. Then she moved closer to the first vat on the left, where the dumbbell had sunk to the bottom. Maria stood there a few moments, waiting for something to happen, until the ribbon attracted her attention by flying almost into her face and then dashing across the room.
The ribbon changed briefly back into a woman and stretched out on the mat. Suddenly realizing how tired she was from all the day’s activities, Maria yawned. Not five minutes later she was asleep on the mat.
THREE
MARIA’S DREAMS WERE vivid, but sporadic and confusing. In one episode Nicole was sitting on a throne at the top of her dream screen and Maria was standing below her with other members of Nicole’s extended family.
“Life is not about things,” Nicole was lecturing to them all in the dream. “It is about the processes and experiences of learning and loving. What we remember most clearly when we confront death are treasured moments with those we have loved and individual instances of piercing insight into the nature of our existen
ce.”
In another episode the Eagle was holding Maria’s hand. There was a sudden flash of light in the dream and the Eagle vanished, leaving her with an intense feeling of abandonment. As Maria stood alone in a black room, a glowing ribbon came toward her from the bottom of her dream monitor.
“I will not hurt you,” the ribbon said telepathically Maria stood transfixed in the dream, watching the individual sparkling, dancing motes in the apparition’s interior drift back and forth from side to side. Suddenly one of the particles transformed into a dumbbell, burst through the external structure of the ribbon, and ominously occupied Mafia’s entire dream screen.
This disturbing final dream was still in her mind when Maria awoke, groggy, and remembered where she was. Looking around, she noticed that there was no ribbon present in the dimly illuminated room. Across from her, Maria could barely tell that there was now an object in the second vat from the left, but all the others were empty. It appeared as if the twenty-five objects on the floor had not been moved.
Maria drank from the water vessel beside her mat and then ate two of the food cylinders as she crossed the room. She approached the vats, curious about what had happened to the dumbbell and wondering if this oddly shaped growing mass in the second vat might once have been the largest object removed from her silver cylinder. So what is going on here? Maria asked herself. Some amazing technological magic?
Her questions were only partially answered about an hour later when the ribbon again appeared in the room, apparently coming through the walls, and zoomed over to the vats. As Maria watched, the ribbon removed the mass inside the second vat, which was now about the size of a soccer ball but lumpy and uneven, and placed it in the adjacent third vat.
As the day passed, and the ribbon appeared twice more to move the constantly growing object from one vat to the next, Maria surmised that this mass had indeed once been the dumbbell and that it was being transformed by the chemicals in the vats into a new and different entity. For ten to twelve hours, Maria watched it grow and change shape, but none of its manifestations looked like anything she had ever seen before, or gave any clues to its ultimate identity. Eventually, she became tired and even a little bored. Returning to her mat, Maria fell into a long, deep, and refreshing sleep.
What she saw in the second vat from the right when she awakened was so startling that she blinked twice to make certain she was not dreaming. Something resembling a human figure was standing upright in the vat, still changing and forming as she watched. Maria hurried across the room, her astonishment increasing, and inspected the figure from close range.
Standing inside the vat was a very tall man, with white skin, a well-muscled body, and a salt-and-pepper beard. He was wearing only a pair of shorts. Parts of his anatomy, the eyes, fingers, and toes especially, were not yet human in appearance, but Maria’s careful examination of the activity in the vat indicated that it was exactly in those areas of the body that the continuing process of evolution was still the most active. Maria watched for another hour, flabbergasted, as the incomplete eyes and other parts of the body became more and more real.
Once the figure truly looked like a human being, the liquid in the vat began to drain. Simultaneously, the man began to move his limbs, awkwardly at first, but then in a more natural manner. When the liquid had completely emptied from the vat, its door opened and the man walked out into the room.
Backpedaling in fear, Maria kept her eyes fixed on the man who had apparently been created from the dumbbell that had been inside the cylinder removed from her mother.
“Hello,” the man said in English. “My name is Johann Eberhardt. Who are you?”
It took a supreme effort for Maria not to faint. She was totally unable to speak.
The man approached her, smiling. “I probably should say, more exactly, I was Johann Eberhardt. I am not really a living human being, as you are I presume, but rather a reconstruction of someone who once lived.”
“ALL I AM able to tell you,” the man said to Maria some time later, after she had recovered from her shock enough to pepper him with questions, “is that I have been created by an information-expansion process that is the inverse of a data-compression algorithm. This expansion process is very similar to that which naturally occurs in embryonic development for virtually all creatures from your home planet.”
Although Maria did not understand most of what the Johann was telling her, she listened with rapt attention. “My zygote was the dumbbell,” the man said. “Instead of a mother and a placenta, these vats provided the proper environment for the information expansion that resulted in my being here now. A long sequence of complicated chemical interactions inside the vats supplied the raw materials for my growth and development. But what I would eventually become was already contained in the compressed. information of that original object, just as the characteristics of the human infant are contained in the genes and chromosomes of its zygote.
“The intelligence that resurrected me has mastered all aspects of data compression and expansion. Stored in my brain, doubtless by them, is information that suggests that they often select living beings and provide them with this unusual kind of immortality for library purposes. These particle beings have the ability to take the life and experiences of virtually any creature that has ever lived, distill its essence by using complex data-compression algorithms, and later resurrect it, almost exactly as it was, for their uses.”
Even though Maria heard all the words the resurrected Johann was saying to her, her mind still balked at his explanations. She could not conceive of a technology so advanced that it could store a human being’s entire physical likeness, life experiences and memory, and even his personality in an object no larger initially than her smallest toe.
All of Maria’s immediate questions to Johann had been about what he was, and how it was even possible that he was standing there talking to her. At length she became convinced that she was not capable of truly comprehending how he had been re-created and her focus turned to the reasons she had sought an encounter with the particle culture in the first place.
“All right, Johann Eberhardt, or whatever you are, she said, “let me now tell you who I am and why I am here. My name is Maria and I am currently living at a place we call the Node, a gigantic space tetrahedron built by an advanced extraterrestrial intelligence, but not the same one who is responsible for this sphere and your existence. I was brought here at my own request, for I thought that perhaps I might find some answers to questions about my own origins.”
She paused for a moment. The Johann’s expression was one of patience. “I was found as an infant,” Maria continued, “inside an alien spacecraft that human beings call Rama. Nobody has any idea where I came from or how I happened to be inside that particular spacecraft. The only clues to my background were a silver cylinder that a woman named Nicole des Jardins Wakefield found inserted in my dead mother’s buttock—inside of which was the dumbbell artifact from which you developed—and a simple necklace I was wearing as an infant that had my name Maria inscribed on one side. The aliens at the Node said that the silver cylinder—”
“Excuse me,” the Johann interrupted, suddenly showing excitement. “May I see your necklace and amulet? It could be very, very important. And tell me everything that you know about your mother, especially what she looked like.”
Maria stared at the figure towering over her. She took a deep breath and recited the few things she knew about her mother. Johann nodded several times during her remarks, growing increasingly animated. When she was finished, Maria, surprised to discover that her fingers were trembling, pulled the necklace over her head and handed it to him.
“Yes,” he said emphatically. “This is exactly the same one. It couldn’t be possible that there would be another like it.”
The puzzled Maria looked at the Johann, who was positively beaming, as he gave the necklace back to her. “Young lady,” he announced with a dramatic flourish, “this necklace and amulet were origi
nally the property of a woman named Sister Beatrice, who received them when she was ordained as a Michaelite priestess on Earth. It was I myself who inscribed the word ‘Maria’ on the back of the amulet at the time of the birth of Beatrice’s daughter, who was indeed named Maria… It is very likely that you and I are relatives.”
Maria heard his words but her internal emotions were in such turmoil that she was having difficulty accepting what this smiling giant was telling her. She couldn’t think of anything to say. She just stood there, still staring at Johann, tears easing into her eyes.
“Based on what you have told me,” Johann said softly, “I believe that you are either my granddaughter or great-granddaughter. Your mother’s name was Franzi. For reasons I will explain later, your father might have been my son, Siegfried, or my grandson, Rowen. I don’t know which one of them might have escaped—”
Johann was not able to continue. Maria had rushed forward and thrown her arms around him. With a fountain of tears running down her cheeks, she pulled his head down and began kissing him on the forehead, on the nose, everywhere she could find.
“Thank you, oh thank you,” she said. “This is the happiest day of my life.”
THEY WALKED HAND in hand across the room and sat down together on her mat. Maria drank some water and offered it to Johann. He explained that he didn’t need food or water, and was not, in fact, even remotely similar to a human being underneath his skin.
“I am a sophisticated machine,” he reminded her, “similar to a member of your species only on the surface. My creators have substituted brilliantly designed engineering subsystems for the brain, the heart, and all the other biological organs that you have. Although my memory contains exactly the same information as Johann Eberhardt’s did before he died, it is actually about the size of one of your fingernails and is located here, beneath my armpit.”
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