She had never dealt with real hunger before. Even during the Poro, after the lion cubs took her food, Nicole had not been seriously hungry. She had told herself before she slept that she would carefully ration her remaining food, but that was before the hunger pangs had become overpowering. Now Nicole tore into her food packets with trembling hands and just barely stopped herself from eating all the food that was left. She wrapped the paltry remainder, put it back into one of her pockets, and buried her face in her hands. Nicole allowed herself to cry for the first time since she had fallen.
She also allowed herself to acknowledge that starving to death would be a terrible way to die. Nicole tried to imagine what it would feel like to weaken from hunger and then ultimately to perish. Would it be a gradual process, each successive stage more horrible than the one before? “Then let it come soon,” Nicole said out loud, momentarily abandoning all hope. Her digital watch was glowing in the dark, counting off the last precious seconds of her life. How much longer will it be before I die? she wondered.
Several hours passed. Nicole grew weaker and more despondent. She sat with her head bowed in the cold corner of the pit. Just as she was about to give up completely and accept her death, however, from inside her there came a different voice, an assertive, optimistic voice that refused to let her quit. It told her that any time of being alive was precious and wonderful, that simply being conscious at all, ever, was an overwhelming miracle of nature. Nicole took a slow, deep breath and opened her eyes. !! I’m to die here, she said to herself, then at least let me do it with elan. She resolved that she would spend whatever time remained concentrating on the outstanding moments of her thirty-six years.
Nicole still retained a tiny hope of being rescued. But she had always been a practical woman, and logic told her that what was left of her life was probably measured in hours. During her unhurried trip into her treasured memories, Nicole wept several times, without inhibition, tears of joy at the past recaptured, bittersweet tears because she knew, as she relived each episode, that it was probably her last visit to that particular portion of her memory.
There was no pattern to her wanderings through the life that she had lived. She did not categorize, measure, or compare her experiences. Nicole simply lived them again as they came to her, each old event transformed and enriched by her heightened awareness.
Her mother occupied a special place in her memory. Because she had died when Nicole was only ten, her mother had retained all the attributes of a queen or goddess. Anawi Tiasso had indeed been beautiful and regal, a jet-black African woman of uncommon stature. All Nicole’s images of her were bathed in soft, glowing light.
She remembered her mother in the living room of their home in Chilly-Mazarin, gesturing to Nicole to come sit upon her lap. Anawi read a book to her daughter every night before bedtime. Most of the stories were fairy tales about princes and castles and beautiful, happy people who overcame every obstacle. Her mother’s voice was soft and mellow. She would sing lullabies to Nicole as the little girl’s eyes grew heavier and heavier.
The Sundays of her childhood were special days. In the spring they would go to the park and play on the wide fields of grass. Her mother would teach Nicole how to run. The little girl had never seen anything as beautiful as her mother, who had been an international class sprinter as a young woman, racing gracefully across the meadow.
Of course Nicole remembered vividly all the details of her trip with Anawi to the Ivory Coast for the Poro. It was her mother who had held her during the nights in Nidougou before the ceremony. During those long, frightening nights, the little girl Nicole had struggled with all her fears. And each day, calmly and patiently, her mother had answered all her questions and had reminded her that many many other girls had passed through the transitional rite without undue difficulty.
Nicole’s fondest memory from that trip was set in the hotel room in Abidjan, the night before she and Anawi returned to Paris. She and her mother had discussed the Poro only slightly during the thirty hours since Nicole and the other girls had finished the ceremonies. Anawi had not yet offered any praise. Omeh and the village elders had told Nicole that she had been exceptional, but to a seven-year-old girl no appraisal is as important as the one from her mother. Nicole had summoned her courage just before dinner.
“Did I do all right, Mama?” the little girl had said tentatively. “At the Poro, I mean.”
Anawi had burst into tears. “Did you do all right? Did you do all right?” She had wrapped her long sinuous arms around her daughter and picked her up off the floor. “Oh, Darling,” her mother had said as she had held Nicole high above her head. “I’m so proud of you that I could split.” Nicole had jumped into her mother’s arms and they had hugged and laughed and cried for fifteen minutes.
Nicole lay on her back in the bottom of the pit, the tears from her memories rolling sideways across her face and down into her ears. For almost an hour she had been thinking about her daughter, starting with her birth and then going through each of the major events of Genevieve’s life. Nicole was recalling the vacation trip to America that they had taken together, three years earlier when Genevieve had been eleven. How very close they had been on that trip, especially on the day they had hiked down the South Kaibab trail into the Grand Canyon.
Nicole and Genevieve had stopped at each of the markers along the trail, studying the imprint of two billion years of time on the surface of the planet Earth. They had lunched on a promontory overlooking the desert desiccation of the Tonto plateau. That night, mother and daughter had spread their sleeping mats, side by side, right next to the mighty Colorado River. They had talked and shared dreams and held hands throughout the night.
! would not have taken that trip, Nicole mused, beginning to think about her father, if it hadn’t been for you. You were the one who knew it was the right time to go. Nicole’s father was the cornerstone of her life. Pierre des Jardins was her friend, confessor, intellectual companion, and most ardent supporter. He had been there when she was born and at every significant moment of her life. It was he whom she missed the most as she lay in the bottom of the pit inside Rama. It was he with whom she would have chosen to have had her final conversation.
There was no single memory of her father that jumped out at her, that demanded renewal above all the rest. Nicole’s mental montage of Pierre framed all the events of her own life. Not all of them were happy. She remembered clearly, for example, the two of them in the savanna not far from Nidougou, silently holding hands as they both wept quietly while the funeral pyre for Anawi burned into the African night. She could also still feel his arms around her as she sobbed without cease following her failure, at the age of fifteen, to win the nationwide Joan of Arc competition.
They had lived together at Beauvois, an unlikely pair, from a year after the death of her mother until Nicole had finished her third year of studies at the University of Tours. It had been an idyllic existence. Nicole roamed through the woods around their villa after she bicycled home from school. Pierre wrote his novels in the study. In the evening Marguerite rang the bell and called them both to dinner before the lady climbed on her own bicycle, her day’s work complete, and returned to her husband and children in Luynes.
During the summers Nicole traveled with her father throughout Europe, visiting the medieval towns and castles that were the primary venues of his historical novels. Nicole knew more about Eleanor of Aquitaine and her husband Henry Plantagenet than she knew about the active political leaders of France and Western Europe. When Pierre won the Mary Renault Prize for historical fiction in 2181, she went with him to Paris to receive the award. Nicole sat on the first row in the large auditorium, dressed in the tailored white skirt and blouse that Pierre had helped her choose, and listened to the speaker extol her father’s virtues.
Nicole could still recite parts of her father’s acceptance speech from memory. “I have often been asked,” her father had said near the end of his delivery, “if I have accum
ulated any wisdom that I would like to share with future generations.” He had then looked directly at her in the audience. “To my precious daughter Nicole, and all the young people of the world, I offer one simple insight. In my life I have found two things of priceless worth — learning and loving. Nothing else — not fame, not power, not achievement for its own sake — can possibly have the same lasting value. For when your life is over, if you can say “I have learned” and “I have loved,” you will also be able to say “I have been happy.”
I have been happy, Nicole said as another group of tears ran down the side of her face, and mostly because of you. You never disappointed me. Not even in my most difficult moment. Her memory turned, as she knew it would, to the summer of 2184, when her life had accelerated at such a fantastic pace that she had lost control of its direction. In one six-week period Nicole won an Olympic gold medal, conducted a short but torrid affair with the Prince of Wales, and returned to France to tell her father that she was pregnant.
Nicole could remember the key events from that period as if they had happened only yesterday. No emotion in her life had ever quite matched the joy and exhilaration that she had felt when she was standing on the victory stand in Los Angeles, the gold medal around her neck and the cheers of a hundred thousand people echoing in her ears. It was her moment. For almost a week she was the darling of the world media. She was on the front page of every newspaper, highlighted in every major broadcast on sports.
After her final interview in the television studio adjoining the Olympic stadium, a young Englishman with an engaging smile had introduced himself as Darren Higgins and handed her a card. Inside was a handwritten invitation to dinner from none other than the Prince of Wales, the man who would become Henry XI of Great Britain.
The dinner was magical, Nicole recalled, her desperate situation in Rama temporarily forgotten. He was charming. The next two days were absolutely wonderful. But thirty-nine hours later, when she awakened in Henry’s bedroom suite in Westwood, her fairy tale was suddenly over. Her prince who had been so attentive and affectionate was now frowning and fretful. As the inexperienced Nicole tried unsuccessfully to understand what had gone wrong, it slowly dawned on her that her flight of fantasy was over. ! was just a conquest, she remembered, the celebrity of the moment. I was unsuitable for any permanent relationship.
Nicole would never forget the last words the prince had said to her in Los Angeles. He had been circling her while she was hurriedly packing. He could not understand why she was so distraught. Nicole had not replied to any of his questions and had resisted his attempts to embrace her. “What did you expect?” he had asked finally, his frustration obvious. “That we would ride off into the sunset and live happily ever after? Come on, Nicole, this is the real world. You must know that the English people would never accept a half-black woman as their queen.”
Nicole had escaped before Henry saw her tears. And so, my darling Gene-vieve, Nicole said to herself in the bottom of the pit in Rama, I left Los Angeles with two new treasures. I had a gold medal and a wonderful baby girl within my body. Her thoughts quickly skipped across the following weeks of anxiety to the desperate, lonely moment when she finally summoned her courage to talk to her father.
“I… I don’t know what to do,” Nicole had said tentatively to Pierre on that September morning in the living room of their villa at Beauvois. “I know that I have disappointed you terribly — I have disappointed myself — but I want to ask you if it’s all right. I mean, if I want to, Papa, can I stay here and try—”
“Of course, Nicole!” her father had interrupted her. He was softly crying. It was the only time Nicole had seen him cry since the death of her mother. “We’ll do whatever’s right!” he had said as he pulled her into his embrace.
! was so lucky, Nicole thought. He was so accepting. He never faulted me. He never asked anything. When I told him that Henry was the father and that I never wanted anyone else to know, least of all Henry or the child, he promised he would keep my secret And he has.
The lights came on suddenly and Nicole stood up to survey her prison under the new conditions. Only the center of the pit was fully lighted; both the ends were in shadow. Considering her situation, she was feeling amazingly cheerful and upbeat.
She looked up to the roof of the barn and through it to the nondescript sky of Rama. Nicole thought about her last few hours and had a sudden impulse. She had not said a prayer in over twenty years but she dropped down on her knees in the full light in the middle of the pit. Dear God, she said, I know it’s a little late, but thank you for my father, my mother, and my daughter. And all the wonders of life. Nicole glanced up at the ceiling. She was smiling and had a twinkle in her eye. And right now, dear God, I could use a little help.
38
VISITORS
The tiny robot strode out into the light and unsheathed his sword. The English army had arrived at Harfleur.
“Once more into the breach, dear friends, once more,
Or close the wall up with our English dead.
In peace there’s nothing so becomes a man
As modest stillness and humility:
But when the blast of war blows in our ears,
Then imitate the action of the tiger…”
Henry V, new king of England, continued to exhort his imaginary soldiers. Nicole smiled as she listened. She had spent the better part of an hour following Wakefield’s Prince Hal from the debauchery of his youth, onto the battlefields fighting against Hotspur and the other rebels, and thence to the throne of England. Nicole had only once read the three Henry plays, and that had been years before, but she was well aware of the historical period because of her lifelong fascination with Joan of Arc.
“Shakespeare made you into something you never were,” she said out loud to the little robot as she bent beside it to insert Richard’s baton in the off slot. “You were a warrior,, to be sure, nobody would argue with that. But you were also a cold and heartless conqueror. You made Normandy bleed under your powerful yoke. You almost crashed the life out of France.”
Nicole laughed nervously at herself. Here I am, she thought, talking to a senseless ceramic prince twenty centimeters high. She remembered her feelings of hopelessness an hour earlier after she had tried one more time to figure out a way to escape. The fact that her time was running out had been reinforced when she had drunk the next to last swig of water. Oh well, she mused, turning back to Prince Hal, at least this is better than feeling sorry for myself.
“And what else can you do, my little prince?” Nicole said. “What happens if I insert this pin in the slot marked C ?”
The robot activated, walked a few steps, and finally approached her left foot. After a long silence Prince Hal spoke, not in the rich actor’s voice he had used during his earlier recitals, but instead in Wakefield’s British twang. “C stands for converse, my friend, and I have a considerable repertoire. But I don’t speak until you say something first.”
Nicole laughed. “All right, Prince Hal,” she said after a moment’s thought, “tell me about Joan of Arc,”
The robot hesitated and then frowned. “She was a witch, dear lady, burned at the stake in Rouen a decade after my death. During my reign the north of France had been subjugated by my armies. The French witch, claiming she was sent by God—”
Nicole stopped listening and jerked her head up as a shadow crossed over them. She thought she saw something flying above the roof of the bam. Her heart pounded furiously. “Here. I’m here,” she shouted at the top of her voice. Prince Hal droned on in the background about how Joan of Arc’s success had sadly resulted in the return of his conquests to the realm of France. “So English. So typically English,” Nicole said as she once again inserted the baton in Prince Hal’s off button.
Moments later the shadow was large and completely darkened the bottom of the pit. Nicole looked up and her heart caught in her throat. Hovering over the pit, its wings spread and flapping, was a gigantic birdlik
e creature. Nicole shrunk back and screamed involuntarily. The creature stuck its neck into the pit and uttered a set of noises. The sounds were harsh yet slightly musical. Nicole was paralyzed. The thing repeated almost the same set of noises and then tried, without success because its wings were too large, to lower itself slowly into the narrow pit.
During this brief period Nicole, her traumatic terror giving way to normal fear, studied the great flying alien. Its face, except for two soft eyes that were a deep blue surrounded by a brown ring, reminded her of the pterodactyls that she had seen in the French museum of natural history. The beak was quite long and hooked. The mouth was toothless and the two talons, bilaterally symmetrical about the main body, each had four sharp digits.
Nicole would have guessed the avian’s mass at about a hundred kilograms. Its body, except for the face and beak, the ends of the wings, and the talons, was covered by a thick black material that resembled velvet. When it was clear to the avian that it would not be able to fly down to the bottom of the pit, it sounded two sharp notes, pulled itself up, and disappeared.
Nicole did not move at all during the first minute after the creature departed. Then she sat down and tried to collect her thoughts. The adrenaline from her fright was still coursing through her body. She tried to think rationally about what she had seen. Her first idea was that the thing was a biot, like all the rest of the mobile creatures that had been seen previously in Rama. If that’s a biot, she said to herself, then it’s extremely advanced. She pictured the other biots she had seen, both the crabs from the Southern Hemicylinder and the wide variety of weird creations filmed by the first Raman expedition. Nicole could not convince herself that the avian was a biot. There was something about the eyes…
She heard wings flapping in the distance and her body tensed. Nicole cowered in the shadowy corner just as the light in the pit was again obscured by a huge hovering body. Actually it was two bodies. The first avian had returned with a companion, the second one considerably the larger. The new bird stuck its neck down and stared at Nicole with its blue eyes while it hovered over the pit. It made a sound, louder and less musical than the other, and then craned its neck around to look at its companion. While the two avians jabbered back and forth, Nicole noticed that this one was covered with a polished surface, like linoleum, but in all other respects except size was identical to her first visitor. At length the new bird ascended and the strange pair landed on the side of the pit, still jabbering. They observed Nicole quietly for a minute or two. Then, after a brief conversation, they were gone.
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