Rama II

60 RETURN TO RAMA

I can’t believe I’m doing this, Nicole said to herself as she carried her final ferryload of supplies to the heavy elevator at the top of the Beta stairway. It was dark inside Rama. The beam from her flashlight shone into the black void,

The dream had been so incredibly vivid that Nicole had been completely discombobulated for more than five minutes after she woke up. Even now, almost two hours later, when she closed her eyes Nicole could see Omeh’s face perfectly and hear his magical voice intoning the words. I hope Richard doesn’t wake up before I’m gone, Nicole thought. There’s no way he would ever understand.

She returned to the ferry and made one last trip through the shell toward the Newton. For thirty minutes she had been drafting her good-bye remarks in her mind, but now that the moment had come, Nicole was apprehensive.

“Dear Michael and dearest Richard,” she would begin, “last night I had the most compelling dream of my life. The old Senoufo chieftain Omeh ap­peared to me and told me that my destiny was with Rama.”

Nicole passed through the airlock and entered the control center. She sat down in front of the camera and cleared her voice. This is ridiculous, she thought, just before she turned on the lights. ! must be insane. But the power of Omeh’s image in her mind calmed all of her last-minute doubts, Moments later she continued with her final remarks to her friends.

“There is no way I can summarize in this short farewell the importance of Omeh and my African background in my life. Michael, Richard can tell you some of the Senoufo stories as the two of you fly home to Earth. Suffice it to say that I have never been misled by the old shaman. I know well that voices in a dream have no substance and are most likely creations of my own subconscious, but nevertheless I have decided to follow the directions Omeh gave me.

“I intend to do whatever I can to communicate to Rama that nuclear missiles may be on the way. I don’t know exactly how I will accomplish this, but I will have some hours to plan while I am assembling the sailboat to cross the Cylindrical Sea. I do remember, Richard, our discussion about the key­board commands that might lead into the higher hierarchy…

“It is extremely difficult for me to say good-bye like this, and I am keenly aware that it is a poor substitute for a final embrace. But if you two were awake, you would never let me go back inside Rama… , I love you, Rich­ard, never doubt it for a moment. I know it’s unlikely, but maybe somehow, someday we will be united in another place. I promise you that if I survive to give birth to our child, I will never cease telling her about the intelligence, wit, and sensitivity of her father.

“I have one last request. If it turns out that either of you reaches home safely and I never return to the Earth, please explain to Genevieve what happened to me. Tell her the whole story, about the dream, the vial and the vision, and the Poro when I was a child. And tell her that I loved her with all my heart.”

Tears were flowing down Nicole’s cheeks when she finished her message. She stood up and rewound the tape. She played it for a minute, to make certain that it had recorded properly, and then walked over to the airlock. Goodness, she thought as she put on her helmet, I’m really going to do it

During Nicole’s eerie descent on the chairlift in the dark she had strong misgivings about her decision to return. It was only her supreme self-disci­pline that allowed her to chase away the lingering fears. As she climbed into the rover and started to drive toward the Cylindrical Sea, Nicole thought about how she would communicate with the intelligence governing Rama. !’!! definitely use pictures, she said to herself, and wherever possible the pre­cise language of science. That much I have learned from Richard.

The thought of Richard rekindled her anxieties. Hell think that I have abandoned him, she worried. And how can I really expect him to think otherwise? Nicole recalled the depressing first days of her pregnancy with Genevieve and how very lonely she had been having nobody with whom she could share her feelings. Again she felt a strong call to turn around and leave Rama. Her introspection was broken by the spectacular arrival of light. Dawn had come again to Rama. As before, Nicole was mesmerized by the sights around her. There’s nothing like this anywhere in the universe.

When she reached what had been the Beta campsite, she first found and started to unpack the large sailboat. It was in good shape. It had been packed at the bottom of a large storage container. Working to assemble the sailboat kept Nicole from brooding too much about her decision to leave the New­ton. Mechanical assembly was not her forte. She almost despaired once when she had to disassemble a major fitting that had taken her ten minutes to put together in the first place. The entire exercise reminded her of several frustrating Christmas Eves at Beauvois when she and Pierre had worked almost all night to put Genevieve’s new toys together. “There ought to be a law that stores can only sell assembled toys,” Nicole laughingly muttered as she struggled with the directions for the sailboat.

Nicole carried the hull of the boat down the steps and placed it right next to the water. Each of the major substructures she assembled on the cliff above, where the light was brighter. She was so engrossed in her work that she did not hear the footsteps until they were only two or three meters away. When Nicole, who was working on her knees, turned to her right and saw something approaching her from very close, she was frightened almost out of her wits.

Moments later she and Richard were kissing and hugging joyously. “O’Toole’s coming too,” he said, sitting down next to Nicole and immedi­ately beginning to work on the sailboat. “At first, when I explained that I wasn’t leaving without you, that whatever life I could have on Earth wouldn’t mean anything if you weren’t with me, he told me that you and I were both crazy. But after we talked, and I explained to him that I thought we had a decent probability of warning the Ramans, he decided that he’d rather spend his last hours with us than take a chance on a lonely and painful death in the pod.”

“But I thought you said that it would be a safe trip for a solitary passen­ger.”

“It’s not completely clear, The software loaded in the pod is a nightmare.

You can tell from the programming that it was done hastily. And how could it have been properly checked? O’Toole by himself might have had a better chance than the two of us together… But remember, he would face serious problems upon his arrival on Earth. That court-martial comment was not idle chatter.”

“I don’t think that Michael was afraid of a court-martial. He might have wanted to spare his family, but—”

A shout from the distance interrupted their conversation. General O’Toole was waving at them from an approaching rover. “But I don’t under­stand,” Nicole said. “How did he get here so quickly? You didn’t walk, did you?”

Richard laughed. “Of course not. I left a beacon at the bottom of the chairlift After I arrived at Beta and saw that you had removed the sailboat and its parts, I sent the rover back on automatic.”

“That was brave of you,” Nicole said. “What if I had set sail during the extra time that it took you to find me on foot?”

Richard peered over the cliff at the boat’s hull down next to the water. “Actually you’ve done better than I expected,” he said with a tease in his voice. “You might have finished in another hour or two.”

He grabbed Nicole’s hands as she tried to hit him.

General O’Toole was the only practiced sailor among the three of them. Soon after they reached the midpoint of their sail, he relegated Richard to holding an oar as a possible weapon in case the pair of shark biots that were shadowing them decided to attack. “It’s not Marblehead or the Cape!1 O’Toole said as he stared across at New York, “but it’s definitely an interest­ing sail.”

During the voyage Richard tried, without success, to convince a nervous Nicole that the shark biots were unlikely to bother them. “After all,” he told her, “they didn’t bother the boats at all during the first Rama expedition. They must have capsized me because of something special in the design of our new motorboats.”

“How can you be so certain?” Nicole asked, staring uncomfortably at the gray shadows in the water beside them. “And if they are not going to attack us, why have they been following us for so long?”

“We’re a curiosity, that’s all,” Richard replied. Nevertheless, he braced himself when one of the shadows suddenly veered toward the boat. It disap­peared underneath them and joined its companion on the other side. “See,” he said, releasing his grip on the oar, “I told you there was nothing to worry about.”

They moored the sailboat on the New York side before climbing up the nearby stairway. Since General O’Toole had never been to New York before and was naturally very curious about what he was seeing, Richard went ahead to start working on the computer while Nicole gave the briefest of tours to O’Toole along the way.

By the time Nicole and the general reached the White Room, Richard already had some progress to report. “My hypothesis was correct,” he said only seconds after the other two had joined him. “I’m fairly certain that I now have accessed the entire sensor list, They must have radar or its equiva­lent onboard. While I’m trying to locate it, why don’t you two develop a flow diagram for how we will communicate our warning. Remember, keep it simple. We probably don’t have more than twenty-four hours until the first missile arrives.”

Twenty-four hours, Nicole said to herself. One more day. She glanced over at Richard, hard at work at the keyboard, and General O’Toole, who was looking at some of the black objects still scattered in one of the corners. Nicole’s momentary feelings of fondness for the two men were quickly trun­cated by a sharp burst of fear. The reality of their predicament overpowered her. Will we all die tomorrow? she wondered.