Rama II

31 ORVIETO PRODIGY

Good night, Otto,” David Brown said as the German admiral left his hut. “See you in the morning.” Dr. Brown yawned and stretched. He looked at his watch. It was a little more than eight hours until the lights should come on again.

He pulled off his flight suit and had a drink of water. He had just laid down on his cot when Francesca entered his hut. “David,” she said, “we have more problems.” She walked over and gave him a short kiss. “I’ve been talking to Janos. Nicole suspects that Valeriy was drugged.”

“Whaaat?” he replied. He sat up on his cot. “How could she? There was no way—”

“Apparently there was some evidence in his biometry data and she clev­erly found it. She mentioned it to Janos tonight.”

“You didn’t react when he told you, did you? I mean, we must be abso­lutely—”

“Of course not,” Francesca answered. “Anyway, Janos would never sus­pect anything in a thousand years. He is a total innocent. At least where things like this are concerned.”

“Damn that woman,” David Brown said. “And damn her biometry.” He rubbed his face with his hands. “What a day. First that stupid Wilson tries to be a hero. Now this… I told you we should have destroyed all the data from the operation. It would have been an easy matter to wipe out the central files. Then things would never—”

“She would still have his biometry records,” Francesca countered. “That’s where the prime evidence is. You would have to be an absolute genius to take the data from the operation itself and deduce anything.” She sat down and cradled Dr. Brown’s head against her chest. “Our big mistake was not when we failed to destroy the files. That would have aroused suspicion at the ISA. Our error was in underestimating Nicole des Jardins.”

Dr. Brown shook free from the embrace and stood up. “Dammit, Fran­cesca, it’s your fault. I never should have let you talk me into it. I knew at the time—”

“You knew at the time,” Francesca sharply interrupted, “that you, Dr. David Brown, were not going on the first sortie into Rama. You knew at the time that your future millions as the hero and perceived leader of this expedi­tion would be seriously compromised if you stayed onboard the Newton.” Brown stopped pacing and faced Francesca. “You knew at the time,” she continued more softly, “that I too had a vested interest in your going on the sortie. And that I could be counted on to provide you with support.”

She took his hands and pulled him back toward the cot. “Sit down, David,” Francesca said. “We’ve been over and over this. We did not kill General Borzov. We simply gave him a drug that created the symptoms of an appendicitis. We made the decision together, If Rama had not maneu­vered and the robot surgeon had not malfunctioned, then our plan would have worked perfectly. Borzov would be on the Newton today, recovering from his appendectomy, and you and I would be here leading the exploration of Rama.”

David Brown removed his hands from hers and started to wring them. “I feel so… so unclean,” he said. “I’ve never done anything like this before. I mean, whether we like it or not, we are partially responsible for Borzov’s death. Maybe even for Wilson’s as well. We could be indicted.” He was shaking his head again. There was a forlorn expression on his face. “I’m supposed to be a scientist,” he said. “What has happened to me? How did I get mixed up in these things?”

“Spare me your righteousness,” Francesca said harshly. “And don’t try to kid yourself. Aren’t you the man who stole the decade’s most important astronomical discovery from a woman graduate student? And then married her to keep her quiet forever? Your integrity was compromised a long long time ago.”

“That’s unfair,” Dr. Brown said petulantly. “I have mostly been honest. Except—”

“Except when it was important and worth a lot to you, What a pile of shit!” Francesca now stood up and paced around the hut herself. “You men are so damn hypocritical. You preserve your lofty self-images with amazing rationalizations. You never admit to yourselves who you really are and what you really want. Most women are more honest. We acknowledge our ambi­tions, our desires, even our basest wants. We admit our weaknesses. We face ourselves as we are, not as we would like to be.”

She returned to the cot and took David’s hands in hers again. “Don’t you see, darling?” she said earnestly. “You and I are soulmates. Our alliance is based on the strongest bond of all — mutual self-interest. We are both moti­vated by the same goals of power and fame.”

“That sounds awful,” he said.

“But it’s true. Even if you don’t want to admit it to yourself. David, darling, can’t you see that your indecisiveness comes from your failure to acknowledge your true nature? Look at me. I know exactly what I want and am never confused about what to do. My behavior is automatic.”

The American physicist sat quietly beside Francesca for a long time. At length he turned and put his head on her shoulder. “First Borzov, now Wilson,” he said with a sigh. “I feel whipped. I wish none of this had happened.”

“You can’t give up, David,” she said, stroking his head– “We’ve come too far. And the big prize is now within our reach.”

Francesca reached across him and started to remove his shirt. “It’s been a long and trying day!” she said soothingly. “Let’s try to forget it.” David Brown closed his eyes as she caressed his face and chest.

Francesca bent over and kissed him slowly on the lips. A few moments later she abruptly stopped. “You see,” she said, slowly removing her own clothes, “as long as we are in this together, we can derive strength from each other.” She stood up in front of David, forcing him to open his eyes.

“Hurry,” he said impatiently, “I was already—”

“Don’t worry so much about it,” Francesca replied, lazily pulling down her pants, “you’ve never had a problem with me.” Francesca smiled again as she pushed his knees apart and pressed his face against her breasts. “Remember,” she said, tugging easily at his shorts with her free hand, “I’m not Elaine.”

She studied David Brown as he slept beside her. The strain and anxiety that had dominated his face just minutes before had been replaced by the carefree smile of a boy. Men are so simple, Franceses was thinking. Orgasm is the perfect pain reliever. I wish it were that easy for us.

She slipped off the small cot and put her clothes on again. Francesca was very careful not to disturb her sleeping friend. But you and I still have a real problem, she said to herself as she finished dressing, which we need to address quickly. And it will be more difficult because we are dealing with a woman.

Francesca walked outside her hut, into the black of Rama. There were a few lights near the supplies at the other end of the camp, but otherwise the Beta campsite was dark. Everyone else was asleep. She switched on her small flashlight and walked away in a southerly direction, toward the Cylindrical Sea.

What is it that you want, Madame Nicole des jardins? she thought as she walked along. And where’s your weakness, your Achilles” heel? For several minutes Francesca flipped through her entire memory bank on Nicole, at­tempting to find any personality or character flaw that could be exploited. Money’s not the answer. Sex. isn’t either, at least not with me. She laughed involuntarily. And certainly not with David. Your dislike for him is obvious.

What about blackmail!” Francesca asked herself as she drew near to the banks of the Cylindrical Sea. She remembered Nicole’s strong reaction to her question about Genevieve’s father. Maybe, she thought, if I knew the answer to that question… But I don’t

Francesca was temporarily stumped. She could not figure out any way to compromise Nicole des Jardins. By this time the lights from the campsite behind her were barely visible. Francesca extinguished her flashlight and very cautiously sat down to dangle her feet over the edge of the cliff.

Having her legs suspended above the frozen ice of the Cylindrical Sea brought back a suite of poignant memories from her childhood in Orvieto. At the age of eleven, despite the barrage of health warnings that assaulted her from every direction, the precocious Francesca had decided to start smoking cigarettes. Every day after school she would wind her way down the hill to the plain below the town and sit on the bank of her favorite creek. There she would smoke in silence, an act of solitary rebellion. On those lazy afternoons she would inhabit a fantasy world of castles and princes, millions of kilometers away from her mother and stepfather.

The memory of those adolescent moments produced an irresistible desire to smoke in Francesca. She had been taking her nicotine pills throughout the mission, but they satisfied only the physical addiction. She laughed at herself and reached into one of the special pockets of her flight suit. Francesca had hidden away three cigarettes in a special container that would preserve them in fresh condition. She had told herself before leaving the Earth that the cigarettes were there “in case of an emergency”…

Smoking a cigarette inside an extraterrestrial space vehicle was even more outrageous than smoking at the age of eleven. Francesca wanted to hoot with delight when she threw back her head and expelled the smoke into the Raman air. The act made her feel free, liberated. Somehow the threat repre­sented by Nicole des Jardins did not seem so serious.

While she was smoking, Francesca recalled the acute loneliness of that young girl stealing down the slopes of old Orvieto. She also remembered the terrible secret that she had kept locked forever in her heart. Francesca had never told anyone about her stepfather, certainly not her mother, and she rarely thought about it anymore. But as she sat on the banks of the Cylindri­cal Sea, the anguish of her childhood appeared to her in sharp relief.

It began right after my eleventh birthday, she thought, plunging back into the details of her life eighteen years before. ! had no idea what the bastard wanted at first She took another deep drag from her cigarette. Even after he started bringing me gifts for no reason.

He had been the principal of her new school. When she had taken her first full set of aptitude tests, Francesca had made the highest scores in the history of Orvieto. She was off the scale, a prodigy. Until then he had never noticed her. He had married her mother eighteen months before and fa­thered the twins almost immediately. Francesca had been a nuisance, an­other mouth to feed, nothing more than a part of her mother’s furniture.

For several months he was especially nice to me. Then Mother went to visit Aunt Carlo for a few days. The painful memories came fast, rushing like a torrent through her mind. She remembered the smell of wine on her stepfa­ther’s breath, his sweat against her body, her tears after he had left her room.

The nightmare had lasted for over a year. He had forced himself upon her whenever her mother was not in the house. Then one evening, while he was putting on his clothes and looking in the other direction, Francesca had smacked him in the back of the head with an aluminum baseball bat. Her stepfather had fallen to the floor, bloody and unconscious. She had dragged him into the living room and left him there.

He never touched me again, Francesca remembered, putting out her ciga­rette in the Raman dirt. We were strangers in the same house. From then on I spent most of my time with Roberto and his friends. I was just waiting for my chance. I was ready when Carlo came.

Francesca was fourteen during the summer of 2184. She spent most of her time that summer loitering around the main square of Orvieto. Her older cousin Roberto had just completed his certificate to be a tour guide for the cathedral in the square. The old Duomo, the chief tourist attraction of the town, had been built in phases, starting in the fourteenth century. The church was an artistic and architectural masterpiece. The frescoes by Luca Signorelli inside its San Brizio chapel were widely hailed as the finest exam­ples of imaginative fifteenth century painting outside of the Vatican mu­seum.

To have become an official Duomo guide was considered quite an accom­plishment, especially at the age of nineteen. Francesca was very proud of Roberto. She sometimes accompanied him on his tours, but only if she agreed beforehand not to embarrass him with her wisecracks.

One August afternoon, right after lunch, a sleek limousine pulled into the piazza around II Duomo and the chauffeur requested a guide from the tourist bureau. The gentleman in the limousine had not made a reservation and Roberto was the only guide available. Francesca watched with great curiosity as a short, handsome man in his late thirties or early forties climbed out of the back of the car and introduced himself to Roberto. Automobiles had been banned from upper Orvieto, except by special permit, for almost a hundred years, so Francesca knew the man must be an unusual individual.

As he always did, Roberto began his tour with the reliefs sculptured by Lorenzo Maitani on the outside portals of the church. Still curious, Fran­cesca stood just off to the side, smoking quietly, while her cousin explained the significance of the weird demonic figures at the bottom of one of the columns. “This is one of the earliest representations of Hell,” Roberto said, pointing at a group of Dantesque figures. “The fourteenth century concept of Hell involved an extremely literal interpretation of the Bible.”

“Hah!” Francesca had suddenly interjected, dropping her cigarette on the cobblestones and walking toward Roberto and the handsome stranger. “It was also a very masculine concept of Hell. Notice that many of the demons have breasts and most of the sins depicted are sexual. Men have always believed that they were created perfect; it is women who have taught them to sin.”

The stranger was astonished by the appearance of this gangly teenager expelling smoke from her mouth. His trained eye immediately recognized her natural beauty and it was clear that she was very bright. Who was she?

“This is my cousin, Francesca” Roberto said, obviously flustered by her interruption.

“Carlo Bianchi,” the man said, extending his hand. His hand was moist Francesca looked up at his face and could see that he was interested. She could feel her heart pounding in her chest. “If you listen to Roberto!” she said coyly, “then all you’ll get is the official tour. He leaves out the juicy bits.”

“And you, young lady—”

“Francesca,” she said.

“Yes, Francesca. Do you have a tour of your own?”

Francesca gave him her prettiest smile. “I read a lot,” she said. “I know all about the artists who worked on the cathedral, particularly the painter Luca Signorelli!” She paused for a moment. “Did you know,” she continued, “that Michelangelo came here to study Signorelli’s nudes before he painted the ceiling at the Sistine Chapel?”

“No, I didn’t,” Carlo said, laughing heartily. He was already fascinated. “But I do now. Come. Join us. You can add to what your cousin Roberto says.”

She loved the way he kept staring at her. It was as if he were appraising her, as if she were a fine painting or a jeweled necklace, his eyes missing nothing as they roamed unabashedly over her figure. And his easy laughter spurred her on. Francesca’s comments became increasingly outrageous and bawdy.

“You see that poor girl on the demon’s back?” she said while they were gazing at the bewildering range of genius exhibited by Signorelli’s frescoes inside the San Brizio chapel. “She looks like she’s humping the demon in the butt, right? You know who she is? Her face and naked body are portraits of Signorelli’s girlfriend. While he was slaving in here day after day, she be­came bored and decided to diddle a duke or two on the side. Luca was really pissed, So he fixed her. He condemned her to ride a demon in perpetuity.”

When he stopped laughing, Carlo asked Francesca if she thought the woman’s punishment was fair. “Of course not!” the fourteen-year-old re­plied, “it’s just another example of the male chauvinism of the fifteenth century. The men could screw anybody they wanted and were called virile; but let a woman try to satisfy herself—”

“Francesca!” Roberto interrupted. “Really. This is too much. Your mother would kill you if she heard what you are saying—”

“My mother is irrelevant at this moment. I’m talking about a double standard that still exists today. Look at…”

Carlo Bianchi could hardly believe his good fortune. A rich clothes de­signer from Milano, one who had established an international reputation by the time he was thirty, he had just happened to decide, on a whim, to hire a car to take him to Rome instead of going on the usual high-speed train. His sister, Monica, had always told him about the beauty of II Duomo in Orvieto. It had been another last-minute decision to stop. And now. My, my. The girl was such a splendid morsel.

He invited Francesca to dinner when the tour was over. But when they reached the entrance to the fanciest restaurant in Orvieto, the young woman balked. Carlo understood. He took her to a store and bought her an expen­sive new dress with matching shoes and accessories. He was astonished by how beautiful she was. And only fourteen!

Francesca had never before drunk really fine wine. She drank it as if it were water. Each dish was so delicious that she positively squealed. Carlo was enchanted with his woman-child. He loved the way she let her cigarette dangle from the corner of her lips. It was so unspoiled, so perfectly gauche.

When the meal was over it was dark. Francesca walked with him back to the limousine parked in front of II Duomo. As they went down a narrow alley, she leaned over and playfully bit his ear. He spontaneously pulled her to him and was rewarded with an explosive kiss. The surge in his loins overwhelmed him.

Francesca had felt it too. She did not hesitate a second when Carlo sug­gested they go for a ride in the car. By the time the limousine had reached the outskirts of Orvieto, she was sitting astride him in the backseat. Thirty minutes later, when they finished making love the second time, Carlo could not bear the thought of parting with this incredible girl. He asked Francesca if she would like to accompany him to Rome.

“Andiamo,” she replied with a smile.

So we went to Rome and then Capri, Francesca remembered. Paris for a week. In Milano you had me live with Monica and Luigi. For appearances. Men are always so worried about appearances.

Francesca’s long reverie was broken when she thought she heard footsteps in the distance. She cautiously stood up in the dark and listened. It was hard for her to hear anything over her own breathing. Then she heard the sound again, off to the left. Her ears told her the sound was out on the ice. A burst of fear flooded her with an image of bizarre creatures attacking their camp from across the ice. She listened again very carefully, but heard nothing.

Francesca turned back toward the camp. ! loved –you, Carlo, she said to herself, if I ever loved any man. Even after you began to share me with your friends. More long-buried pain came to the surface and Francesca fought it with hard anger. Until you started hitting me. That ruined everything. You proved that you were a real bastard.

Francesca very deliberately pushed aside the memories. Now, where were we? she thought as she approached her hut. Ah yes. The issue was Nicole des Jardins. How much does she really know? And what are we going to do about it?