Rama Revealed r-4

by Arthur C. Clarke

  She always saved Richard for last. Although Nicole never really shook the premonition that she would not touch her husband again, she did not let that feeling detract from the daily pleasure she experienced sharing his life in the basement in New Eden. She especially enjoyed his conversations with Archie, even though it was often difficult for her to read his lips. Their discussions reminded Nicole of earlier days, after her escape from prison and New Eden, when Richard and she would talk and talk about everything. Watching Richard always left Nicole feeling uplifted and much more able to deal with her own loneliness.

  The reunion between Richard and Katie caught her by surprise. She had not been following Katie’s life closely enough to know that her daughter and Franz had success-folly designed a plan to secure a short visit with Richard. Because the quadroid images covered the infrared portion of the spectrum as well as the visible, Nicole actually had a better view of the reunion than the participants. She was deeply moved by Katie’s action, and even more by Katie’s sudden admission (which Nicole watched over and over, in super slow motion, to make certain she was properly leading Katie’s lips) that she was a drug addict. The first step to overcoming a problem, Nicole remembered from somewhere, is to admit to someone you love that the problem exists.

  There were happy tears in Nicole’s eyes as she rode the nearly empty transport back to the human enclave in the Emerald City. Despite the fact that the bizarre world around her was deteriorating into chaos, for once Nicole was optimistic about Katie.

  Patrick and the twins were outside when Nicole stepped off the transport at the end of the street. As she drew closer, she could tell that Patrick was trying to adjudicate one of the boys’ innumerable disputes.

  “He always cheats,” Kepler was saying. “I told him that I wasn’t going to play with him anymore and he hit me.”

  “That’s a lie,” Galileo replied. “I hit him because he made a face at me. Kepler’s a sore loser. If he can’t win, he thinks it’s all right to quit.”

  Patrick separated the two boys and sent them, as punishment, to sit against opposite corners of the house. He then greeted his mother with a kiss and a hug.

  “I have some big news,” Nicole said, smiling at her son. “Richard had a surprise visitor today-Katie!”

  Of course Patrick wanted to know all the details of the visit between his sister and Richard. Nicole summarized what she had seen, admitting that she was encouraged by Katie’s confession of her drug habit. “Don’t read too much into her action,” Patrick admonished. “The Katie I knew would rather die than be without her precious kokomo.”

  Patrick had turned around and was almost ready to tell the twins that they could resume playing, when a pair of rockets raced skyward, bursting into bright red balls of light just underneath the dome. Moments later the city was plunged into darkness. “Come on, boys,” Patrick said. “We must go inside.”

  “That’s the third time today,” Patrick commented to Nicole as they followed Kepler and Galileo into the house.

  “Dr. Blue said they extinguish the city lights the moment any helicopter rises to within twenty meters of the top of the forest canopy. Under no circumstances do the octospiders want to risk showing the location of the Emerald City.”

  “Do you think Archie and Uncle Richard will ever have a chance to meet with Nakamura?” Patrick asked.

  “I doubt it,” Nicole replied. “If he were going to see them, it should have happened before now.”

  Eponine and Nai greeted Nicole and embraced her. The three women talked briefly about the blackout. Eponine was holding little Marius on her hip. The boy was a fat, happy baby with a major drooling habit. She wiped off his face with a cloth so that Nicole could kiss him,

  “Ah-ha,” she heard Max say behind her, “the Queen of Frowns is now kissing the Prince of Drools.”

  Nicole turned around and gave Max a hug. “What’s this Queen of Frowns bit?” she said lightly.

  Max handed her a glass containing some clear liquid. “Here, Nicole, I want you to drink this. It’s not tequila, but it’s the best substitute the octospiders could make from my description. We’re all hoping that maybe you’ll find your sense of humor before you finish the drink.”

  “Come on, Max,” Eponine said. “Don’t make Nicole think that we’re all somehow involved. This was your idea, after all. The only thing that Patrick, Nai, and I did was agree with you that she has been very serious lately.”

  “Now, my lady,” Max said to Nicole, raising his glass and clinking it against hers, “I want to propose a toast. To all of us, who have absolutely no control over our future. May we love each other and share laughter until the end, whenever and however it might come.”

  Nicole had not seen Max drunk since before she went to prison. At his insistence she took a small drink. Her throat and esophagus burned and her eyes watered. The drink contained a lot of alcohol.

  “Before dinner tonight,” Max now said, opening his arms in a dramatic flourish, “we are going to tell farm jokes. This will provide us some much-needed comic relief. You, Nicole des Jardins Wakefield, as our leader by example if not by election, will have the floor first.”

  Nicole managed a smile. “But I don’t know any farm jokes,” she protested.

  Eponine was relieved to see that Nicole was not offended by Max’s behavior. ‘That’s all right, Nicole,” Eponine said, “none of us do. Max knows enough farm jokes for all of us.”

  “Once upon a time,” Max began a few moments later, “there was a farmer from Oklahoma who had a fat wife named Whistle. She was called Whistle because, at the climax of her lovemaking, she would close her eyes, screw up her mouth, and make a long whistling sound.”

  Max belched. The twins giggled. Nicole worried that maybe it was not appropriate for the children to hear Max’s story, but Nai was sitting behind her boys, laughing with them. Relax, Nicole told herself. You really have become the Queen of Frowns.

  “Now, one night,” Max continued, “this farmer and Whistle had a big brouhaha-that’s a fight, to you, boys- and she went to bed early and fuming. The fanner sat by himself at the table, drinking some fine tequila. As the evening progressed, he became sorry that he had been such an ornery son of a bitch and began to apologize in a loud voice.

  “Meanwhile, ole Whistle, who was now angry all over again because the farmer had awakened her, knew that when he finished drinking, her husband was going to enter the bedroom and try to seal his apology with some wild lovemaking. While the farmer emptied the bottle of tequila, Whistle slipped out of the house, went over to the pigpen, and carried the youngest and smallest of the sows back into their bedroom.

  “When the drunken farmer staggered into the dark bedroom later that night, singing one of his favorite hymns, Whistle was watching from the corner and the sow was in the bed. The farmer took all his clothes off and jumped under the sheets. He grabbed the sow by the ears and kissed her on me lips. The sow squealed and the fanner pulled back. ‘Whistle, my love,’ he said, ‘did you forget to brush your teeth tonight?’

  “His wife bolted from the corner and began beating the farmer on the head with a broom.”

  Everyone was laughing. Max was so amused by his own joke that he could not sit upright. When he ^finished laughing, he took another drink of the octospider alcohol.

  “My brother Clyde,” Max said, “knew more farm jokes than anyone I ever met. He courted Winona with them, or so he claimed. Clyde used to tell me that a ‘laughing woman already has one hand on her panties.’ When we would go duck hunting with the guys, we’d never shoot a single goddamn duck. Clyde would start telling stories, and we’d be laughing and drinking. After a while we’d forget why we got up at five a.m. to go and sit in the cold.”

  Max stopped talking and there was a momentary quiet in the room. “Damn,” he said after the brief silence. “For a while there I was imagining I was back in Arkansas.” He stood up. “I don’t even know now which way Arkansas is from here, or how many billions of kilomete
rs away it is.” Max shook his head. “Sometimes, when I’m dreaming and it’s real lifelike, I think the dream is reality. I believe I’m back in Arkansas. Then when I wake up I am lost, and I think for a few seconds that this life we’re living here in the Emerald City is the dream.”

  “The same thing happens to me,” Nai said. “Two nights ago I dreamed I was doing my morning meditation in the hawng pro in my family home in Lamphun. As I was reciting my mantra, Patrick awakened me. He told me that I was talking in my sleep. For a few seconds, however, I didn’t know who he was. It was frightening.”

  “All right,” Max said after a protracted silence. He turned to Nicole. “I guess we’re ready for the news of the day. What do you have to tell us?”

  “The quadroid videos today were very peculiar,” a smiling Nicole replied. “For the first few minutes, I was certain I had entered the wrong data base. Image after image showed a pig, or a chicken, or a drunken Oklahoma farm boy trying to court a sweet young thing. In the last series of pictures a fanner was trying to drink tequila, eat fried chicken, and make love with his sweetheart all at the same time-which reminds me, that chicken sure looked good. Is anyone else hungry?”

  6

  “I think they were somewhat reassured by what the Chief Optimizer told me,” Nicole said to Dr. Blue. “Max, of course, had his doubts. He doesn’t believe taking care of us will be a very high priority if the situation really becomes desperate.”

  “That’s very unlikely,” the octospider replied. “Any further escalation of hostilities will be met by a massive retaliation. Many octospiders have been working on our war plans for almost two months.”

  “Have I understood correctly, then,” Nicole asked, “that every individual member of your species who has been involved in the design and prosecution of this war will be terminated when it is over?”

  “Yes,” Dr. Blue replied, “although they will not all die immediately. They will be notified that they have been placed on the termination list. The new Chief Optimizer will define the exact schedule for the terminations, depending on the needs of the colony and the pace of replenishment.”

  Nicole and her octospider colleague were sharing lunch at the hospital. They had spent the morning trying unsuccessfully to save the lives of two of the six-armed utility creatures who had been blasted by human troops while they were working in one of the few remaining grain fields on the north side of the forest.

  During their lunch, a centipede biot trundled by in the hall beside them. Dr. Blue noticed that Nicole followed the biot with her eyes for several seconds. “When we first came inside Rama,” the octospider said, “before we had developed our full cadre of support animals, we used the available biots for routine tasks, like maintenance. Now we need their help again.”

  “But how do you give them instructions?” Nicole asked. “We were never able to communicate with them at all.”

  “Their programming is done in firmware, at the time of their manufacture. What we did in the early days, using a kind of keyboard analogous to the one you had in your lair, was ask the Ramans to alter the programming for our specific uses. That’s what all the biots are here for… to be turned into useful servants by the passengers on board.”

  Well, Richard, Nicole thought, that’s at least one concept we missed altogether. In fact, I don’t think the idea ever even occurred to us.

  “We wanted our settlement here in Rama to be indistinguishable from any of our other colonies,” Dr. Blue continued, “so as soon as we no longer needed the biots, we requested that they be removed from our domain in Rama.”

  “And since then you have had no direct contact at all with the Ramans?”

  “Not much,” Dr. Blue replied. “But we have maintained the capability to communicate with the high-technology factories underneath the surface, primarily so that we can request the manufacture of certain raw materials that we do not have in our warehouses.”

  A door opened from the corridor and an octospider entered. It talked rapidly with Dr. Blue in their language, using very narrow color bands. Nicole recognized the words “permission” and “this afternoon,” but very little else.

  After the visitor had departed, Dr. Blue told Nicole that she had a surprise for her. “Today one of our queens is going to have her egg rush. Her attendants are estimating it will take place in half a tert. The Chief Optimizer has approved my request for you to observe. To my knowledge, you are the only alien-except for the Precursors, of course-who has ever had the privilege of witnessing an egg rush. I think you will find it very interesting.”

  During the transport ride to the Queen’s Domain, which was in a part of the Emerald City that Nicole had never visited before, Dr. Blue reminded Nicole of some of the more unusual aspects of octospider reproduction. “In normal times, each of the three queens in our colony is fertilized once every three to five years, and only a small fraction of the fertilized eggs is permitted to grow to maturity. Because of the war preparations, however, the Chief Optimizer recently declared a Replenishment Event. All three of our queens are now producing a full set of eggs. They have been fertilized by the new warrior males, those octospiders selected for the war effort who have recently passed through sexual, transition. This activity is very important, for it ensures, at least symbolically, that each of these octospiders will have continued genetic involvement in the colony. Remember, they know, as soon as they are designated as warriors, that their termination time is not too far away.”

  Whenever I think that we have a lot in common with the octospiders, Nicole was thinking, I see something so bizarre that I am reminded how very different we are. But, as Richard would say, how could it be otherwise? They are the product of a process totally alien to us.

  “Don’t be alarmed at the size of me queen,” Dr. Blue continued, “and please, under no circumstances should you express anything but delight at what you see. When I first suggested that you attend the egg rush, one of the Chief Optimizer’s staff members objected, saying that there was no way you could fully appreciate what you were seeing. Some of the other staff members were worried that you might display discomfort or even disgust and thereby detract from the experience for the other octospiders in attendance.”

  Nicole assured Dr. Blue that she would do nothing untoward during the ceremony. She was indeed flattered that she had been included in the activity, and was feeling considerable excitement when the transport deposited them outside the thick walls of the Queen’s Domain.

  The building Nicole entered with Dr. Blue was dome-shaped and built of blocks of white rock. It was about ten meters tall inside and covered a ground area of roughly thirty-five hundred square meters. There was a large map just inside the door in the atrium area, and a written message in color identifying where the egg rush would take place. Nicole followed Dr. Blue and several other octospiders up a pair of ramps and then down a long corridor. At the end of the hallway they turned right and entered a balcony area that overlooked a rectangular floor fifteen meters long and five or six meters wide.

  Dr. Blue took Nicole to the front row, where a railing a meter high protected the audience from falling onto the floor four meters below. Behind them the five elevated rows filled up quickly. Across the way, there was another, similar viewing area that would hold about sixty octospiders.

  Looking down, Nicole could see a pool of water resembling a canal that ran the length of the floor and then disappeared under an arch on the right. There were narrow walkways on either side of the pool. On the opposite side, however, the walkway expanded into a broad platform three meters or so before it encountered the rock wall that formed the entire left side of the large room. This wall, painted with many different colors and designs, contained a hundred or so protruding silver rods or spikes, each standing out a meter from where it was embedded in the wall. Nicole noticed immediately the similarity between the wall and the vertical corridor, shaped like a barrel, that she and her friends had descended inside the octospider lair beneath New York.<
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  Less than ten minutes after the two balcony areas were filled, the Chief Optimizer shuffled through a doorway on the lower level, stood on the walkway beside the pool, and made a short speech. Dr. Blue helped Nicole translate as the Chief Optimizer reminded the onlookers that although the exact timing of an egg rush was never known, it was likely the queen would be ready to enter the room in several more fengs. After making a few comments about the critical importance of replenishment in the continuity of the colony, the Chief Optimizer made her exit.

  After what seemed like a long wait, the great doors at the left end of the far walkway opened and the massive queen lumbered in. She was huge, at least six meters tall, with a gigantic swollen body above her eight long tentacles. She stopped on the platform and said something to the audience. Bright colors spilled in profusion all over her body, creating a vivid spectacle. Nicole could not understand what the queen was saying because she could not follow the exact sequence of colors pouring out of the slit.

  The queen slowly turned toward the wall, extended her tentacles, and began the laborious process of pulling herself up onto the spikes. Throughout the climb, disordered bursts of color decorated her body. Nicole assumed these were emotional expressions of some kind, perhaps pain and fatigue. Looking around her, Nicole noticed that the octospiders in the audience were all silent, their heads dark and devoid of color.

  When the queen had finally positioned herself in the center of the wall, she wrapped all eight tentacles around the spikes and exposed her cream-colored underbelly. While she had been working in the hospital, Nicole had become quite familiar with octospider anatomy, but she had never imagined that the soft tissue underneath their bellies could be distended so much. As Nicole watched, the queen began rocking slightly, moving forward and backward, gently bouncing off the rock wall with each motion. The emotional color display continued. The colors reached their peak intensity when a geyser of greenish black fluid spewed forth from the queen’s underside, followed immediately by an immense outpouring of white objects of different sizes contained in a thick, viscous fluid.