Rama Revealed

2

Nicole was awakened by the sound of the three children playing in the living room. As she was slipping on her robe, Ellie came to the door of the bedroom and asked if she had seen Nikki’s favorite doll. “I think it’s under her bed,” Nicole replied.

Ellie returned to her packing, Nicole could hear Richard in the bathroom. I won’t be long now, she was thinking when her granddaughter suddenly appeared in the doorway. “Mommy and I are leaving, Nonni,” the little girl said with a smile. “We’re going to see Daddy.”

Nicole opened her arms and the little girl ran over for a hug. “I know, darling,” Nicole said. She held the girl tightly in her arms and then began to stroke her hair. “I will miss you, Nikki,” she said.

A few seconds later the Watanabe twins both bounded into the room. “I’m hungry, Mrs. Wakefield,” Galileo said.

“Me too,” Kepler added.”

Nicole reluctantly released her granddaughter and started walking across the bedroom. “All right, boys,” she said. “I’ll have your breakfast in a few minutes.”

When the three children were almost finished eating, Max, Eponine, and Marius arrived at the door. “Guess what, Uncle Max,” Nikki said before Nicole had even had a chance to greet the Pucketts. “I’m going to see my daddy.”

The four hours flew by quickly. Richard and Nicole explained everything twice, first to Max and Eponine and then to the newlyweds, both of whom were still radiant from the pleasures of their wedding night. As the time neared for the departure of Richard, Ellie, and Nikki, the excitement and energy that had characterized the morning conversation began to wane. Butterflies started fluttering in Nicole’s stomach.

Max was the first to say good-bye. “Come over here, Princess,” he said to Nikki, “and give your Uncle Max a kiss.” The girl obediently followed directions. Max then stood up and crossed the room to where Ellie was talking with her mother. ‘Take care of that little girl, Ellie,” he said, embracing her, “and don’t let the bastards get away with anything.” Max shook hands with Richard and then called the Watanabe twins to join him outside.

The mood in the room was swiftly altered. Despite her promise to herself that she would remain calm, Nicole felt a surge of panic as she suddenly realized that she had only a few minutes to complete her farewells. Patrick, Nai, Benjy, and Eponine had followed Max’s cue and were hugging the departing trio.

Nicole tried to embrace Nikki again, but the little girl scurried away, running outside to play with the twins. Ellie finished saying good-bye to Eponine and turned to Nicole. “I will miss you, Mother,” she said brightly. “I love you very much.”

Nicole struggled to maintain her emotional equilibrium. “I couldn’t have asked for a better daughter,” she said. While the two women hugged, Nicole spoke softly in her daughter’s ear. “Be careful,” she said. ‘There’s a lot at stake.”

Ellie pulled away and looked in her mother’s eyes. She took a deep breath. “I know, Mother,” she said somberly, “and it frightens me, I hope I don’t disappoint—”

“You won’t,” Nicole said lightly, patting her daughter’s shoulders. “Just remember what the cricket said in Pinocchio.”

Ellie smiled. “And always let your conscience be your guide.”

“Archie’s here!” Nicole heard Nikki shout. She looked around for her husband. Where’s Richard? she thought in a fright. I haven’t said good-bye. Ellie passed by her quickly, headed for the door carrying two packs on her back.

Nicole could hardly breathe. She heard Patrick say, “Where’s Uncle Richard?” and a voice from the study reply, “I’m back here.”

She ran down the hall to the study. Richard was sitting on the floor amid electronic components and his own open backpack. Nicole stood in the doorway for a second, catching her breath.

Richard heard her behind him and turned around. “Oh, hi, darling,” he said nonchalantly. “I’m still trying to figure out how many backup components I should take for my translators.”

“Archie’s here,” Nicole said quietly.

Richard glanced at his watch. “I guess it’s time to go,” he said. He picked up a handful of electronic parts and stuffed them into his backpack. Then he stood up and walked toward Nicole.

“Uncle Richard,” Patrick yelled.

“I’m coming,” Richard shouted. “Just a minute.”

Nicole began to tremble the moment Richard put his arms around her. “Hey,” he said, “it’s all right… We’ve been apart before.”

The fear inside Nicole had become so strong that she could not speak. She tried desperately to be brave, but it was impossible. She knew that this was the last time she would ever touch her husband.

She put one hand behind Richard’s head and pulled away slightly so that she could kiss him. Nicole wanted to stop time, to make this one moment last an eternity. Her eyes took a photograph of Richard’s face, and she kissed him gently on the lips.

“I love you, Nicole,” he said.

For an instant she didn’t think she was going to be able to reply. “I love you too,” she finally managed to say.

He hoisted his backpack and gave a little wave. Nicole stood in the doorway and watched him walk toward the door. Remember, she heard Omeh’s voice say inside her head.

Nikki could hardly believe her good fortune. There in front of her, barely outside the gates of the Emerald City, an ostrichsaur was waiting for them, just as Archie had said. She moved about impatiently as her mother zipped her coat. “Can I feed it, Mother?” she said. “Can I? Can I?”

Even with the ostrichsaur sitting on the ground, Richard had to help Nikki mount the animal. “Thank you, Boobah,” the girl said when she was comfortably nestled in the bowl.

“The timing has been worked out very carefully,” Archie told Richard and Ellie while they were moving along the path through the forest. “We will arrive at the camp when all the troops are starting breakfast. That way everyone will see us.”

“How will we know precisely when to appear?” Richard asked.

“Some of the quadroids are being managed from the far northern fields. Soon after the first soldiers are awake and are moving around outside their tents, your avian friend Timmy, carrying a written announcement of our imminent arrival, will fly over their heads in the dark. Our message will indicate that we will be preceded by the fireflies and that we will be waving a white flag, as you suggested.”

Nikki noticed some strange eyes looking out at them from the dark of the forest. “Isn’t this fun?” she said to her mother. Ellie did not respond.

Archie stopped the ostrichsaur about a kilometer south of the human camp. The lanterns and other lights outside the distant tents in front of them looked like stars twinkling in the night. “Timmy should be dropping our message just about now,” Archie said.

They had been moving cautiously in the dark for several hours, not wanting to use the fireflies because of the possibility that they might be noticed too early. Nikki was sleeping peacefully, her head in her mother’s lap. Both Richard and Ellie were tense. “What are we going to do,” Richard had inquired before they stopped, “if the troops fire on us before we can say anything?”

“We’ll turn around and retreat as fast as we can,” Archie had replied.

“And what happens if they come after us with the helicopters and the searchlights?” Ellie had asked.

“At full speed it will take the ostrichsaur almost four wodens to reach the forest,” Archie had said.

Timmy returned to the group and reported, in a brief jabber and color conversation with Archie, that he had accomplished his mission. Richard and Timmy then said farewell to each other. The avian’s large eyes expressed an emotion Richard had not seen before as Richard rubbed his underbelly. A few moments later, as Timmy flew away in the direction of the Emerald City, a pair of fireflies ignited beside the path and then headed in the direction of the human camp. Richard led the procession, clutching the white flag in his right hand. The ostrichsaur followed about fifty meters behind carrying Ellie, Archie, and the sleeping child.

Richard could see the soldiers with his binoculars when their party was about four hundred meters away. The troops were standing around, looking in their general direction. Richard counted twenty-six of them altogether, including three with rifles poised and another pair scanning the darkness with binoculars.

As planned, Ellie, Nikki, and Archie dismounted when they were about two hundred meters from the camp. The ostrichsaur was sent back while the four of them walked toward the human soldiers. Nikki, who had not been ready to awaken, complained at first but became quiet when she sensed the importance of her mother’s request to remain silent.

Archie walked between the two adult humans. Nikki was holding her mother’s hand and scampering to keep up with the pace. “Hello, there,” Richard shouted when he thought he was within earshot. “This is Richard Wakefield. We come in peace.” He waved the white flag vigorously. “I am with my daughter Ellie, my granddaughter Nikki, and an octospider representative.”

They must have been an amazing sight for the soldiers, none of whom had ever seen an octospider before. With the fireflies hovering over the heads of the troops, Richard and his party emerged from the Raman dark. One of the soldiers stepped forward. “I am Captain Enrico Pioggi,” he said, “the commanding officer of this £ camp. I accept your surrender on behalf of the armed forces of New Eden.”

Because the announcement of their impending arrival had been delivered to the camp less than half an hour earlier, the New Eden chain of command had not had time to formulate a plan of what to do with the prisoners. As soon as he had confirmed that a party of a man, a woman, a child, and an alien octospider were indeed approaching his camp, Captain Pioggi had again radioed the front headquarters in New York and requested instructions on how to proceed. The colonel in charge of the campaign told him to “secure the prisoners” and “stand by for further orders.”

Richard had anticipated that none of the officers would v be willing to take any definitive action until Nakamura I himself had been consulted. He had told Archie, during their f long ride on the ostrichsaur, that it would be important to use whatever time they might have with the soldiers in the > camp to start rebutting the propaganda that the New Eden government was spreading.

“This creature,” Richard said in a loud voice after the prisoners had been searched and the curious troops were milling around them, “is what we call an octospider. All octospiders are very intelligent-in some ways more intelligent than we are-and about fifteen thousand of them live in the Southern Hemicylinder, which extends from here to the base of the south polar bowl. My family and I have been living in their realm for over a year-of our own choice, I might add-and we have found the octospiders to be moral and peace-loving. My daughter Ellie and I have come forward with this octospider representative, whom we call Archie, to try to find some way of stopping a military confrontation between our two species.”

“Aren’t you Dr. Robert Turner’s wife?” said one of the troops to Ellie. “The one who was kidnapped by the octospiders?”

“Yes, I am,” Ellie said in a clear voice. “Except that I wasn’t kidnapped in the truest sense of the word. The octospiders wanted to establish communications with us and had been unable to do so. I was taken because they believed that I had the capacity to learn their language.”

“That thing talks!” another soldier said with disbelief.

Until that moment Archie, as planned, had been silent. The troops all stared dumbfounded as colors began pouring out of the right side of his slit and circumnavigating his head. “Archie says greetings,” Ellie translated. “He asks each of you to understand that neither he nor any member of his species wishes you any harm. Archie also wants me to inform you that he can read lips and will be happy to answer any questions you might have.”

“Is this for real?” a soldier said.

Meanwhile, a frustrated Captain Pioggi was standing off to the side, providing an eyewitness account by radio to the colonel in New York. “Yes, sir,” he was saying, “colors on its head… all different colors, sir, red, blue, yellow… like rectangles, moving rectangles, they go around its head, and then more of them follow… What’s that, sir?… The woman, the doctor’s wife, sir… She apparently knows what the colors mean… No, sir, there aren’t any colored letters, just the colored strips…

“Right now, sir, the alien is talking to the soldiery… No, sir, they are not using colors… According to the woman, sir, the octospider can read lips… like a hearing impaired person, sir… same technique I guess… Anyway, it then answers in color and the doctor’s wife translates…

“No weapons of any kind, sir… Plenty of toys, clothes, weird-looking objects prisoner Wakefield says are electronic components… Toys, sir, I said toys… the little girl had a lot of toys in her backpack… No, we don’t have a scanner up here… Right, sir… Do you have any idea how long we might be waiting, sir?”

By the time Captain Pioggi finally received orders to send the prisoners to New York in one of the helicopters, Archie had thoroughly impressed all the soldiers at the camp. The octospider had begun the demonstration of his prodigious mental abilities by multiplying five- and six-place numbers in his head.

“Now, how do we know that the octospider thing is really coming up with the right answer?” one of the younger soldiers had asked. “All it does is show a string of colors.”

“My man,” Richard had replied with a laugh, “didn’t you just verify on the lieutenant’s calculator that the number my daughter gave was correct? Do you think she computed the product in her head?”

“Oh, yeah,” the youth said. “I see what you mean.”

What really overwhelmed the soldiers was Archie’s phenomenal memory. At Richard’s urging, one of the troops listed a sequence of several hundred numbers on a sheet of paper and then read the sequence to Archie, a single number at a time. The octospider repeated them back through Ellie, without any errors. Some of the soldiers thought that there had been a trick involved, that maybe Richard was flashing coded signals to Archie. However, when Archie duplicated his feat under carefully controlled conditions, all the doubters were convinced.

The atmosphere in the camp was relaxed and amiable by the time the orders were received to transport the prisoners to New York. The first part of their plan had succeeded beyond their wildest imaginings. Nevertheless, Richard was nervous as they climbed on board the helicopter to cross a portion of the Cylindrical Sea.

They only stayed in New York for about an hour. Armed guards met the prisoners at the helicopter pad in the western plaza, confiscated their backpacks over Richard’s and Nikki’s loud protests, and marched them to the Port. Richard carried Nikki in his arms. He barely had time to admire his favorite skyscrapers looming overhead in the dark.

The yacht that carried them across the northern half of the Cylindrical Sea was similar to the pleasure boats that Nakamura and his cronies used on Lake Shakespeare. At no time during the crossing did any of the guards speak to them. “Boobah,” Nikki whispered to Richard after several of her questions had gone unheeded, “don’t these men know how to talk?” She giggled.

A rover was waiting for them on a dock that had been recently constructed to support the new activities in New York and the Southern Hemicylinder. At considerable effort and expense, the humans had cut an opening through the southern barrier wall in-an area adjacent to the avian/sessile habitat and had built a large docking facility.

Richard wondered at first why he and his companions had not been flown directly back to New Eden in the helicopter. After a few quick mental calculations, however, he correctly concluded that because of the enormous height of the barrier wall, which extended well up into the region where the artificial gravity caused by the spinning Rama spacecraft began to drop substantially, as well as the probable lack of skilled pilots, there was an upper limit placed on the altitude at which the hastily built helicopters were allowed to fly. That means, Richard was thinking as he boarded the rover, that the humans must move all their equipment and personnel either through this dock or by means of the moat and tunnel underneath the second habitat.

Their rover was driven by a Garcia biot. In front and behind them were two other rovers, both with armed humans. They sped across the darkness to the Central Plain.

Richard sat in the front seat beside the driver, with Archie, Ellie, and Nikki in the back. Richard had turned around in his seat and was reminding Archie of the five kinds of biots in New Eden when the Garcia interrupted him. “The prisoner Wakefield is to face forward and remain silent,” the biot said.

“Isn’t that just a little bit ridiculous?” Richard said lightly.

The Garcia pulled its right arm off the steering wheel and struck Richard hard in the face with the back of its hand. “Face forward and remain silent,” the biot repeated, as Richard recoiled from the force of the slap.

Nikki started crying after the sudden display of violence. Ellie tried both to quiet and to comfort her. “I don’t like the driver, Mommy,” the little girl said. “I really don’t.”

It was night inside New Eden after they were ushered through the checkpoint at the entrance to the habitat. Archie and the three humans were placed into an open electric car driven by another Garcia biot. Richard noticed immediately that it was almost as cold in New Eden as it had been in Rama. The car bounced down the road, which was in an acute state of disrepair, and turned north at what had once been the train station for the village of Positano. Fifteen or twenty people were huddled around campfires on the concrete areas surrounding the old station, and another three or four were stretched out and sleeping underneath cardboard boxes and old clothing.

“What are those people doing, Mommy?” Nikki asked. Ellie did not answer because the Garcia turned around quickly with a hostile stare.

The neon lights of Vegas could already be seen in front of them when the car took a sharp left turn onto a residential lane in a wooded section that had once been part of Sherwood Forest. The car came to an abrupt halt in front of a large, rambling ranch house. Two Oriental men, armed with both pistols and daggers, approached the car. They gestured for the passengers to climb out of the car and then dismissed the biot. “Come with us,” said one of the men.

Archie and his human companions entered the house and were taken down a long flight of stairs into a basement with no windows. “There is food and water on the table,” the second man said. He turned and started to climb the stairs.

“Wait a minute,” Richard said. “Our backpacks… we need to have our backpacks.”

“They will be returned,” the man said impatiently, “as soon as all the contents have been carefully checked.”

“And when do we see Nakamura?” Richard inquired.

The man shrugged. His face was expressionless. He walked quickly up the stairs.