by Arthur C.
"This whole dinner has seemed like a dream," Nicole said. "I have not yet accepted that any of this is really happening."
"We felt that way last night," Simone said, "when we were told that we were going to see Patrick this morning. Neither Michael nor I slept a wink." She laughed. "At one point during the night we had convinced ourselves that we were going to meet a 'fake' Patrick, and we thought of questions we could ask that nobody except the real Patrick could answer."
"Their technological skills are awesome," Michael said. "If they wanted to create a robot Patrick and pass him off as the genuine article, it would be very difficult for us to ascertain the truth."
"But they didn't," Simone said. "I knew within minutes that it was really Patrick."
"How did he seem to you?" Nicole asked. "In all the confusion of the last day, I didn't have a chance to talk to him very much."
"Resigned, mostly," Simone said, "but certain that he had made the correct decision. He said it would probably be weeks before he had sorted through all the emotions he had experienced in the last twenty-four hours."
"That must be true for all of us," Nicole said.
There was a brief silence at the table. "Are you tired, Mother?" Simone asked. "Patrick told us about your health problems, and when we received the message this afternoon that you had been delayed…"
"Yes, I'm a little tired," Nicole said. "But I certainly couldn't sleep. At least not immediately." She backed her wheelchair away from the table and lowered her seat. "I would, however, like to use the powder room."
"Certainly," Simone said, jumping up. "I'll come with you."
Simone accompanied her mother down a long hall with a simulated wooden floor. "So you have six children living with you here," Nicole said, "including three that you carried?"
'That's right," Simone said. "Michael and I had two boys and two girls by the 'natural method,' as you called it. The first of the boys, Darren, died when he was seven. It's a long story. If we have time, I'll tell it to you tomorrow. All the rest of the children were developed from embryos in the laboratories."
They had reached the door to the powder room. "Do you know how many children the Eagle and his colleagues have developed from your eggs?" Nicole asked.
"No," Simone answered. "But they did tell me that they took more than a thousand healthy eggs from my ovaries."
On the way back to the dining room, Simone explained that all the children who had been born by the "natural method" had lived their whole lives with Michael and her. Their spouses, who were of course also the product of Michael's sperm and her eggs, had been selected as the result of a comprehensive genetic matching technique developed by the aliens.
"So these were arranged marriages?" Nicole asked.
"Not exactly," Simone said. She laughed. "Each natural child was introduced to several possible mates, all of whom had passed the genetic screening."
"And you've had no problems with your grandchildren?"
"Nothing that is 'statistically significant,' to use Michael's term," Simone replied.
When they reached the dining room, the table was empty. Michael told them that he had moved the coffeepot and cups into the study. Nicole activated her wheelchair controls and followed them into a large, masculine study with dark wood bookshelves, and a fire burning in the fireplace.
"Is the fire real?" Nicole asked.
"Indeed it is," Michael said. He leaned forward in his soft chair. "You have been asking about the children," he said, "and we certainly want you to meet them, but we didn't want to overwhelm you."
"I understand," Nicole said, taking a sip from a fresh cup of coffee, "and I agree with you. You certainly could not have had such a leisurely, informative dinner if there had been six more people."
"And don't forget the fourteen grandchildren," Simone said.
Nicole looked at Michael and smiled. "I'm sorry, Michael," she said, "but you are the part of this evening that is the most unreal. Whenever I look at you, my mind balks. You must be forty years older than I am, but you look not a day over sixty, and definitely younger than when we left you at the Node. How is this possible?"
"Their technology is absolute magic," he said. "They have reworked virtually every part of me. My heart, lungs, liver, entire digestive and excretory systems, and most of my endocrine glands have all been replaced, some several times, by smaller, more efficient functional equivalents. My bones, muscles, nerves, and blood vessels are all buttressed by millions of microscopic implants that not only ensure the critical functions are accomplished, but also, in many cases, biochemically rejuvenate the aged cells. My skin is a special material they only recently perfected, which has all the good properties of real human skin but never ages or develops warts or moles. Once a year I go over to their hospital. I'm unconscious for two days, and when I emerge I am literally a new man."
"Would you mind coming over here," Nicole said, "and letting me touch you?" She laughed. "I don't need to put my fingers through the holes in your hands, or anything like that, but you can certainly understand that what you are telling me is difficult to believe."
Michael O'Toole crossed the room and knelt beside the wheelchair. Nicole reached out and touched the skin on his face. It was smooth and supple, like a young man's. His eyes were fresh and clear. "And your brain, Michael," Nicole asked softly. "What have they done to your brain?"
He smiled. Nicole noticed that there were no wrinkles in his forehead. "Many things," he said. "When my memory started to slip, they reconditioned my hippocampus. They even supplemented it with a small structure of their own—to give me more capacity, they said. About twenty years ago they also installed what they described as a 'better operating system,' to sharpen my thinking processes."
Michael was less than a meter away from her. The light from the fire reflected off his face. Nicole was suddenly swept away by a flood of memories. She recalled what close friends they had been in Rama, as well as their moments of intimacy when Richard had been gone and presumed lost. She touched his face again.
"And are you still Michael O'Toole?" she asked. "Or have you become something else, part human and part alien?"
He stood up without saying anything and walked back to his chair. He moved like an athlete, not like a man who was more than one hundred and twenty years old. "I don't know how to answer your question," he said. "I can remember clearly all the details of my childhood in Boston, and every other important phase of my life. As far as I know, I am still more or less the same."
"Michael is still extremely interested in religion and creation as well," Simone added. "But he has changed some—all of us are altered by our experiences in life."
"I have remained a devout Roman Catholic," Michael said, "and I still say my daily prayers. But naturally my view of God, and of humanity too, has been drastically changed by what Simone and I have seen. If anything, my faith has strengthened … primarily because of my enlightening conversations with…"
He stopped and glanced across the room at Simone. "In the early years, Mother," she said, "when Michael and I were alone at the Node, near Sirius, there were many difficulties. We had only each other to talk with. I was still just a girl, and Michael was a mature man. I could not discuss physics or religion or many of his other favorite topics."
"There were no major problems, you understand," Michael said. "Still, we were both lonely, in a peculiar sort of way. What we had together was remarkable and enriching… But we both needed something else, something additional.
"The Nodal Intelligence, or whatever we should call the power that was taking care of us, sensed our difficulty. It also recognized that the Eagle could not fulfill our individual needs. So a companion—like the Eagle, in a sense—was created for each of us."
"It was a stroke of genius," Simone said, "that removed the emotional tension that was threatening our perfect marriage. When Saint Michael—"
"Let me tell it, please," Michael interrupted. "One night, almost two years after you and
the others had left, Simone was in the bedroom of the apartment nursing Katya when there was a knock on our door. I assumed that it was the Eagle. When I opened the door, however, a young man with dark, curly hair and blue eyes, a perfect reconstruction of Saint Michael of Siena, was standing there. He informed me that the Eagle would no longer be interacting with us and that he would be my new intermediary with the intelligence governing the Node."
"Saint Michael," Simone said, "came equipped with a vast set of knowledge of Earth history, and Catholicism, and physics, and all the other subjects about which I was totally ignorant."
"Plus," Michael said, rising from his chair, "he was willing to answer questions about what was going on around us at the Node. Not that the Eagle wasn't, but Saint Michael was much warmer, more personal. It was as if he had been sent by them, or by God, to be a companion for my mind."
Nicole glanced back and forth from Michael to Simone. Michael's face was positively radiant. His religious fervor has not waned, she thought. It has only been redirected.
"And is this Saint Michael character still around?" Nicole asked, swallowing the last sip of her coffee.
"Absolutely," Michael said. "We did not introduce Patrick to him—the time was too short, as Simone said—but we definitely want you to meet him." Michael walked across the room, suddenly bubbling with energy. "Do you remember all those infinite questions Richard used to ask, about who built the Node and Rama, and what was the purpose of this and that? Saint Michael knows all the answers. And he explains everything so eloquently!"
"Goodness," said Nicole, with just a slight trace of sarcasm in her voice, "he sounds fantastic. Much too good to be true. When will I have the privilege of meeting Saint Michael?"
"Right now, if you would like," Michael O'Toole said expectantly.
"All right," Nicole said, stifling a yawn. "But remember I'm a tired, ailing, crotchety old woman. I can't stay up forever."
Michael walked briskly to the far door of the study. "Saint Michael," he called, "would you come in please and meet Simone's mother, Nicole?"
A few seconds later what looked like a young human priest in his early twenties, dressed in a dark blue robe, entered the room and crossed to Nicole's wheelchair. "I am delighted," Saint Michael said, with a beatific smile. "I have heard about you for years."
Nicole extended her hand and studied the alien intently. There was absolutely nothing she could see that would identify this individual as anything other than a human being. My God, Nicole thought quickly, not only is their technology fantastic, but also their rate of learning is staggering.
"Now let's get one thing straight at the outset," she said to Saint Michael with a wry smile, "there are too many Michaels here. I do not intend to address you regularly as Saint Michael. It's not my style. Do I just call you Saint, or Mike, or even Mikey—what do you prefer?"
"When they're both around I call my husband Big Michael," Simone said. "That seems to work fine."
"All right," Nicole said. "As Richard always said, 'When in Rome…' Sit down, Michael, here close to my wheelchair. Big Michael has praised you so highly I don't want my bad hearing to cause me to miss any of your pearls of wisdom."
"Thank you, Nicole," Saint Michael said with a smile of his own. "Michael and Simone have extolled your virtues as well, but they clearly understated the cleverness of your wit."
He has a personality too, Nicole thought. Will wonders never cease?
An hour later, after Simone had helped her to bed in the guest room at the end of the hall, Nicole was lying on her side staring toward the windows. Although she was very tired, she could not sleep. Her mind was too active, going over and over the events of the day.
Maybe I should ring for something to help me sleep, Nicole thought, her hand automatically feeling for the button on the table beside her bed. Simone said Saint Michael would come if I called. And that he could do anything the Eagle could. Having assured herself that she could indeed summon help if her insomnia persisted, Nicole turned back to her most comfortable sleeping position and allowed her mind to float freely.
Her thoughts focused on what she had seen and heard since she had arrived at this isolated enclave in which Michael, Simone, and their family lived. Saint Michael had explained that this pseudo-New England was a small section inside the Habitation Module of the Node and that there were several hundred other species who were semipermanent residents in the near vicinity. Why, Nicole had asked, had Big Michael and Simone chosen an everyday existence separate from all the others?
"For years," Nicole remembered Michael O'Toole responding, "we lived in a multispecies environment. In fact, both during and after our four natural children were born, we were whisked, or so it seemed, from place to place, testing both our adaptability and compatibility with a wide range of other plant and animal species. Saint Michael confirmed at the time what we suspected, namely that our hosts were purposely exposing us to a variety of environments to gather more information about us. Each new venue was another challenge."
Big Michael paused for a moment, as if he were struggling emotionally. "The psychological hardships were immense in those early days. As soon as we adapted to a given set of living conditions, they were abruptly changed. I still believe that Darren's death would not have occurred if everything hadn't been so strange in that underground world. And we nearly lost Katya when she was only two or so and her curiosity was mistaken by a squidlike sea creature as an act of aggression."
"After we were put to sleep the second time," Simone said, "and transported to this Node, both Michael and I were exhausted from the years of tests. The children were grown by then and starting to have families of their own. We requested, and were granted, some privacy."
"We still go out into the other world," Michael added, "but we interact with the exotic beings from distant star systems because we want to, not because it is a necessity. Saint Michael briefs us regularly on the comings and goings of the basketball creatures, the sky-hoppers, and the flying turtles. He is our information window to the rest of the Node."
Saint Michael is extraordinary, Nicole thought, and much more advanced even than the Eagle. He answers all questions with such certitude. But there's something about him that makes me wonder. Are all those crisp answers about God and the origin and destiny of the universe really correct? Or has Saint Michael somehow been programmed, based on Michael's love of catechismal processes, to be his perfect alien companion?
Nicole rolled over in bed and considered her own relationship with the Eagle. Maybe I'm just jealous, she thought, because Michael seems to have learned so much … and the Eagle has been unwilling or unable to answer my questions. But who is better off, the child with a mentor who knows and tells everything or the one whose teacher helps the child find her own answers? I don't know… I don't know. But that was one hell of an impressive performance by Saint Michael at the easel.
"Don't you see, Nicole?" Big Michael had jumped up from his chair for the umpteenth time. "We're all participating in God's great experiment. This entire universe, not just our own galaxy, but all the galaxies that stretch to the end of the heavens, will provide one single data point for God. He, She, or It is searching for perfection, for that small range of initial parameters which, once the universe is set into motion by the transformation of energy into matter, will evolve, over billions of years, into one perfect harmony, a testimony to the Creator's consummate skill."
Nicole had had some difficulty following the higher mathematics, but she had certainly understood the gist of the diagrams that Saint Michael had drawn on the easel in the study. "So at this moment," Nicole had said to the alien with the curly hair and the blue eyes, "there are countless other universes evolving, each having been started by God with different initial conditions, and God has somehow slipped you, the Eagle, the Node, and Rama inside this particular evolution process to acquire information? And the purpose of all this is so that God can define some mathematical construct associated with creation tha
t will always produce a harmonious result?"
"Exactly," Saint Michael had responded. Again he had pointed at the diagram on the easel. "Imagine that this coordinate system I have drawn is a symbolic, two-dimensional representation of the available hypersurface of parameters defining the creation instant, the moment that energy is first transformed into matter. Any arrangement or vector representing a specific set of initial conditions for the universe may be depicted as a single point in my diagram. What God is, and has been, searching for is a very special closed dense set located on this mathematical hypersurface. This special set He is seeking has the property that any of its elements—that is, any arrangement of conditions for the instant of creation chosen from within this set—will produce a universe that will eventually end in harmony."
"It's a nearly impossible problem," Big Michael said, "to create a universe that will end up with all living beings proclaiming the glory of God. If there is not enough matter, the explosion and inflation of the creation instant results in a universe that expands forever, without sufficient interaction of the individual components during evolution to produce and sustain life. If there is too much matter, then there is insufficient time for life and intelligence to develop fully before gravity causes the Great Crunch that ends the universe."
"Chaos confounds God as well," Saint Michael explained. "Chaos is an outgrowth of all the physical laws governing the evolution of any created universe. It prevents the accurate prediction of the outcomes of large-scale processes, so God cannot, a priori, simply calculate what is going to happen in the future and therefore, by analytical techniques, isolate the zones of harmony. Experimentation is the only possible way for Him to discover what He is seeking."
"The structure opposing God's design is overwhelming," Big Michael added. "In order for God to succeed, not only must life and intelligence evolve from raw subatomic particles made into atoms by stellar cataclysms, but also this life must reach such a level of both spiritual self-awareness and technological capability that it can actively transform everything around it."