Rama 2 by Arthur C. Clarke and Gentry Lee

Nicole was beginning to comprehend but could not keep up with the racing thoughts of Richard Wakefield. “And what does similarity of design prove?” he thought out loud. “What does it mean that human architects two thousand years ago constructed a theater with some of the same guiding principles of design as those used in the Raman ship? Similarity of nature? Similarity of culture? Absolutely not.”

He stopped, now aware that Nicole was staring fixedly at him. “Mathe­matics,” he said emphatically. A quizzical expression told him that she still didn’t understand completely. “Mathematics,” he said again, surprisingly lucid all of a sudden. “That’s the key. The Ramans almost certainly didn’t look like us and clearly evolved on a world far different from the Earth. But they must Have understood the same mathematics as the Romans.”

His face brightened. “Hah,” he shouted again, causing Nicole to jump. He was pleased with himself. “Ramans and Romans. That’s what tonight is all about. And at some level of development in between is modern-day homo sapiens.”

Nicole shook her head as Richard exulted in the joy of his wit. “You don’t understand, lovely lady?” he said, extending his hand to help her up from her seat. “Then perhaps you and I should go to watch a dolphin show and I will speak to you of Ramans there and Romans here, of cabbages and kings, of dum-de-dum and sealing wax, and whether pigs have wings.”

13 HAPPY NEW YEAR

After everyone had finished eating land all the plates had been cleared, Francesca Sabatini appeared in the center of the yard with a microphone and spent ten minutes thanking all the gala sponsors. Then she introduced Dr. Luigi Bardolini, suggesting that the techniques he had pioneered to communicate with the dolphins might prove extremely useful when humans try to talk to any extraterrestrials.

Richard Wakefield had disappeared just before Francesca had started speaking, ostensibly to find the rest room and obtain another drink. Nicole had caught sight of him briefly five minutes later, just after Francesca had finished with her introduction. He had been surrounded by a pair of buxom Italian actresses, both of whom were laughing heartily at his jokes. He had waved at Nicole and winked, pointing at the two women as if his actions were self-explanatory.

Good for you, Richard, Nicole had thought, smiling to herself. At least one of us social misfits is having a good time. She now watched Franceses walk gracefully across the bridge and start to move the crowd back from the water so that Bardolini and his dolphins would have plenty of room. Fran-cesca was wearing a tight black dress, bare on one shoulder, with a starburst of gold sequins in the front. A gold scarf was tied around her waist. Her long blond hair was braided and pinned against her head.

You really belong here, Nicole thought, truthfully admiring Francesca’s ease in large crowds. Dr. Bardolini began the first segment of his dolphin show and Nicole turned her attention to the circular pool of water. Luigi Bardolini was one of those controversial scientists whose work is brilliant but never quite as exceptional as he himself wants others to believe. It was true that he had developed a unique way of communicating with the dolphins and had isolated and identified the sounds of thirty to forty action verbs in their portfolio of squeaks. But it was not true, as he so often claimed, that two of his dolphins could pass a university entrance exam. Unfortunately, the way the twenty-second century international scientific community oper­ated, if your most outrageous or advanced theories could not be substanti­ated, or were held up to ridicule, then your other discoveries, no matter how solid, were often disparaged as well. This behavior had induced an endemic conservatism in science that was not altogether healthy.

Unlike most scientists, Bardolini was a brilliant showman. In the final segment of his show he had his two most famous dolphins, Emilio and Emilia, take an intelligence test in a real-time competition against two of the villa guides, one male and one female, who had been selected at random that evening. The construct of the competitive test was enticingly simple. On two of the four large electronic screens (one pair of screens was in the water and another pair was in the yard), a three-by-three matrix was shown with a blank in the lower right-hand corner. The other eight elements were filled with different pictures and shapes. The dolphins and humans taking the test were supposed to discern the changing patterns moving from left to right and top to bottom in the matrix, and then correctly pick out, from a set of eight candidates displayed on the companion screen, the element that should be placed in the blank lower right comer. The competitors had one minute to make their choice on each problem. The dolphins in the water, like the humans on the land above them, had a control panel of eight buttons they could push (the dolphins used their snouts) to indicate their selection.

The first few problems were easy, both for the humans and for the dolphins. In the first matrix, a single white ball was in the upper left corner, two white balls in the second column of the first row, and three white balls in the matrix element corresponding to row one and column three. Since the first element of the second row was a single ball as well, half white and half black, and since the beginning element of the third row was another single ball, now fully black, it was easy to read the entire matrix quickly and determine that what belonged in the blank lower right corner was three black balls.

Later problems were not so easy. With each successive puzzle, more com­plications were added. The humans made their first error on the eighth matrix, the dolphins on the ninth. Altogether Dr. Bardolini exhibited sixteen matrices, the last one so complicated that at least ten separate changing patterns had to be recognized to properly identify what should be entered as the last element. The final score was a tie, Humans 12, Dolphins 12. Both pairs took a bow and the audience applauded.

Nicole had found the exercise fascinating. She wasn’t certain if she be­lieved Dr. Bardolini’s assertion that the competition was fair and un­rehearsed, but it didn’t matter to her. What she thought was interesting was the nature of the competition itself, the idea that intelligence could be defined in terms of an ability to identify patterns and trends. Is there a way that synthesis can be measured? she thought. In children. Or even adults, for that matter.

Nicole had participated in the test along with the human and dolphin contestants and had correctly answered the first thirteen, missing the four­teenth because of a careless assumption, and just finishing the fifteenth accurately before the buzzer sounded the end of the allocated time. She had had no idea where to begin on the sixteenth. And what about you Ramans? she was wondering, as Franceses returned to the microphone to introduce Genevieve’s heartthrob, Julien LeClerc, Would you have been able to answer all sixteen correctly in one tenth the time? One hundredth? She gulped, as she realized the full range of possibilities. Or maybe even one millionth?

“I never lived, ’til I met you. … I never loved, ’til I saw you. . . .” The soft melody of the old recorded song swam in Nicole’s memory and brought back an image from fifteen years before, from another dance with another man when she had still believed that love could conquer everything. Julien LeClerc misread her body signals and pulled her closer to him. Nicole de­cided not to fight it. She was already very tired and, if the truth were known, it felt good being held tightly by a man for the first time in several years.

She had honored her agreement with Genevieve, When Monsieur LeClerc had finished his short set of songs, Nicole had approached the French singer and given him the message from her daughter. As she had anticipated, he had interpreted her approach to mean something entirely different. They had continued talking while Francesca had announced to the partygoers that there would be no more formal entertainment until after midnight and that all the guests were free to drink or snack or dance to the recorded music until then, Julien had offered his arm to Nicole and the two of them had walked back over to the portico, where they had been dancing ever since.

Julien was a handsome man, in his early thirties, but he was not really Nicole’s type. First of all, he was too conceited for her. He talked about himself all the time and did not pay any attention when the conversation switched to other topics. Although he was a gifted singer, he had no other particularly outstanding characteristics. But, Nicole reasoned as their contin­ued dancing brought stares from the other guests, he’s all right as a dancer and it beats standing around twiddling my thumbs.