Rama 2 by Arthur C. Clarke and Gentry Lee

Back at the hotel she prepared quickly for bed. But just as she was ready to turn out the lights, Nicole thought she heard a light knock on the door. She stopped and listened, but there was no sound for several seconds. She had almost decided that her ears were playing tricks on her when she heard the knock again. Nicole pulled the hotel robe around her and approached the locked door very cautiously. “Who’s there?” she said forcefully but not con­vincingly. “Identify yourself.”

She heard a sound of scraping and a piece of folded paper was thrust under the door. Nicole, still wary and frightened, picked up the paper and opened it. On it was written, in the original Senoufo script of her mother’s tribe, three simple words: Ronata. Omeh. Here. Ronata was Nicole’s name in Senoufo.

A mixture of panic and excitement caused Nicole to open the door without first checking on the monitor to see who was outside. Standing ten feet away from the door, his amazing old eyes already locked on hers, was an ancient, wizened man with his face painted in green and white horizontal streaks. He was wearing a full-length, bright green tribal costume, similar to a robe, on which were gold swashes and a collection of line drawings of no apparent meaning.

“Omeh!” Nicole said, her heart threatening to jump out of her chest. “What are you doing here?” she added in Senoufo.

The old black man said nothing. He was holding out a stone and a small vial of some kind, both in his right hand. After several seconds he stepped deliberately forward into the room. Nicole backpedaled with each of his steps. His gaze never wavered from her. When they were in the center of her hotel room and only three or four feet apart, the old man looked up at the ceiling and began to chant. It was a ritual Senoufo song, a general blessing and spell invocation used by the tribal shaman for hundreds of years to ward off evil spirits.

When he had finished the chant the old man Omeh stared again at his great-granddaughter and began to speak very slowly. “Ronata,” he said, “Omeh has sensed strong danger in this life. It is written in the tribal chronicles that the man of three centuries will chase the evil demons away from the woman with no companion. But Omeh cannot protect Ronata after Ronata leaves the kingdom of Minowe. Here,” he said, taking her hand and placing the stone and vial in it, “these stay with Ronata always.”

Nicole looked down at the stone, a smooth, polished oval about eight inches long and four inches in each of the other two dimensions. The stone was mostly creamy white with a few strange brown lines wriggling across its surface. The small green vial that he had given her was no bigger than a traveling bottle of perfume.

“The water from the Lake of Wisdom can help Ronata,” Omeh said. “Ronata will know the time to drink.” He tilted his head back and earnestly repeated the earlier chant, this time with his eyes closed. Nicole stood beside him in puzzled silence, the stone and the vial in her right hand. When he was finished singing, Omeh shouted three words that Nicole did not under­stand. Then he abruptly turned around and walked quickly toward the open door. Startled, Nicole ran out into the hall just in time to see his green gown disappear into the elevator.

14 GOOD-BYE HENRY

Nicole and Genevieve walked arm in arm up the hill through the light snow. “Did you see the look on that American’s face when I told him who you were?” Genevieve said with a laugh. She was very proud of her mother.

Nicole shifted her skis and poles over to the other shoulder as they ap­proached the hotel. “Guten Abend,” an old man who would have made a perfect Santa Claus mumbled as he ambled by. “I wish you wouldn’t be so quick to tell people,” Nicole said, not really chastizing her daughter. “Some­times it’s nice not to be recognized.”

There was a small shed for the skis beside the entrance to the hotel. Nicole and Genevieve stopped and placed their equipment in a locker. They exchanged their ski boots for soft snow slippers and walked back out into the fading light Mother and daughter stood together for a moment and looked back down the hill toward the village of Davos. “You know,” said Nicole,, “there was a time today, during our race down that back piste toward Klos-ters, when I found it impossible to believe that I will actually be way out there (she gestured at the sky) in less than two weeks, headed for a rendez­vous with a mysterious alien spacecraft. Sometimes the human mind balks at the truth.”

“Maybe it’s only a dream,” her daughter said lightly. Nicole smiled. She loved Genevieve’s sense of play. Whenever the day-to­day drudgery of the hard work and tedious preparation would begin to over­whelm Nicole, she could always count on her daughter’s easy nature to bring her out of her seriousness. They were quite a trio, the three of them that lived at Beauvois. Each of them was sorely dependent on the other two. Nicole did not like to think how the hundred-day separation might affect their harmonious accord.

“Does it bother you that I will be gone so long?” Nicole asked Genevieve as they entered the hotel lobby. A dozen people were sitting around a roaring fire in the middle of the room. An inconspicuous but efficient Swiss waiter was serving hot drinks to the apres-ski crew. There would be no robots in a Morosani hotel, not even for room service.

“I don’t think of it that way,” her cheerful daughter responded. “After all, I’ll be able to talk with you almost every night on the videophone. The delay time will even make it fun. And challenging.” They walked past the old-fashioned registration desk. “Besides,” Genevieve added, “I’ll be the center of attention at school for the whole mission. My class project is already set; I’m going to draw a psychological portrait of the Ramans based on my conversations with you.”

Nicole smiled again and shook her head. Genevieve’s optimism was always infectious. It was a shame—

“Oh, Madame des Jardins.” The voice interrupted her thought. The hotel manager was beckoning to her from the desk. Nicole turned around. “There’s a message for you,” the manager continued. “I was told to deliver it to you personally.”

He handed her a small plain envelope. Nicole opened it and saw just the tiniest portion of a crest on the note card. Her heart raced into overdrive as she closed the envelope again. “What is it, Mother?” Genevieve inquired. “It must be special to be hand delivered. Nobody does things like that these days.”

Nicole tried to hide her feelings from her daughter. “It’s a secret memo about my work,” she lied. “The deliveryman made a terrible mistake. He should never have given it even to Herr Graf. He should have put it in my hands only.”

“More confidential medical data about the crew?” Genevieve asked. She and her mother had often discussed the delicate role of the life science officer on a major space mission.

Nicole nodded. “Darling,” she said to her daughter, “why don’t you run upstairs and tell your grandfather that I’ll be along in a few minutes. We’ll still plan dinner for seven-thirty. I’ll read this message now and see if any urgent response is required.”

Nicole kissed Genevieve and waited until her daughter was on the elevator before walking back outside into the light snow. It was dark now. She stood under the streetlight and opened the envelope with her cold hands. She had difficulty controlling her trembling fingers. You fool, she thought, you care­less fool. After all this time. What if the girl had seen. . . .

The crest was the same as it had been on that afternoon, fifteen and a half years ago, when Darren Higgins had handed her the dinner invitation out­side the Olympic press area. Nicole was surprised by the strength of her emotions, She steeled herself and finally looked at the rest of the note below the crest.

“Sorry for the last-minute notice. Must see you tomorrow. Noon exactly. Warming hut #8 on the Weissfluhjoch. Come alone. Henry.”

The next morning Nicole was one of the first in line for the cable car that carried skiers to the top of the Weissfluhjoch. She climbed into the polished glass car with about twenty others and leaned against the window while the door automatically shut. / have seen him only once in these fifteen years, she thought to herself, and yet . . .

As the cable car ascended, Nicole pulled her snow glasses down over her eyes. It was a dazzling morning, not unlike the January morning seven years earlier when her father had called for her from the villa. They had had a rare snowfall at Beauvois the night before and, after much pleading, she had let Genevieve stay home from school to play in the snow. Nicole was working at the hospital in Tours at the time and was waiting to hear about her applica­tion to the Space Academy.