Rama 2 by Arthur C. Clarke and Gentry Lee

He placed both bottles in General O’Toole’s hands and the American adroitly used the liquid dispenser to channel the vodka into small covered cups that were passed around the table. “As Irina Turgenyev knows/’ the commander continued, “there is always a small worm in the bottom of a bottle of Ukrainian vodka. Legend has it that he who eats the worm will be endowed with special powers for twenty-four hours. Admiral Heilmann has marked two of the cup bottoms with an infrared cross. The two people who drink from the marked cups will each be allowed to eat one of the vodka-saturated worms.”

“Yuch,” said Janos a moment later, as he passed the infrared scanner to Nicole. He had first verified that he had no cross on the bottom of his cup. “This is one contest I am glad to lose.”

Nicole’s cup did have a marking on the bottom. She was one of the two lucky cosmonauts who would be able to eat a Ukrainian worm for dessert. She found herself wondering, Must I do this? and then answering her own question affirmatively as she saw the earnest look on her commanding of­ficer’s face. Oh well, she thought, it probably won’t kill me. Any parasites have probably been rendered harmless by the alcohol.

General Borzov himself had the second cup with a cross on the bottom. The general smiled, placed one of the two tiny worms in his own cup (and the other in Nicole’s), and raised his vodka toward the ceiling of the space­craft.

“Let us all drink to a successful mission,” he said. “For each of us, these next few days and weeks will be the greatest adventure of our lives. In a real sense, we dozen are human ambassadors to an alien culture. Let us each resolve to do our best to properly represent our species.”

He took the cover off his cup, being careful not to jiggle it, and then drank it all in one gulp. He swallowed the worm whole. Nicole also swallowed the worm quickly, commenting to herself that the only thing she had ever eaten that tasted worse than the worm was that awful tuber during her Poro ceremony in the Ivory Coast.

After several more short toasts the lights in the room began to dim. “And now,” General Borzov announced with a grand gesture, “direct from Strat­ford, the Newton proudly presents Richard Wakefield and his talented ro­bots.” The room became dark except for a square meter to the left of the table that was spotlit from above. In the middle of the light was a cutaway of an old castle. A female robot, twenty centimeters high and dressed in a robe, was walking around in one of the rooms. She was reading a letter at the beginning of the scene. After a few steps, however, she dropped her hands to her sides and began to speak.

“Glamis thou art, and Cawdor; and shalt be What thou art promised. Yet do I fear thy nature: It is too full o’th’milk of human kindness To catch the nearest way. Thou wouldst be great .

“I know that woman,” Janos said with a grin to Nicole. “1 have met her somewhere before.”

“Shh,” replied Nicole. She was fascinated by the precision in the move­ments of Lady Macbeth. That Wakefield really is a genius, she was thinking. How is he able to design such extraordinary detail into those little things? Nicole was astonished by the range of expressions on the robot’s face.

As she concentrated, the tiny stage began to swim in Nicole’s mind. She momentarily forgot she was watching robots in a miniature performance. A messenger came in and told Lady Macbeth both that her husband was drawing near and that King Duncan would be spending the night in their castle. Nicole watched Lady Macbeth’s face explode with ambitious antici­pation as soon as the messenger had departed.

“. . . Come you Spirits That tend on mortal thoughts. Unsex me here And fill me, from the crown to the toe, top-full Of direst cruelty! Make thick my blood . . .”

My God, Nicole thought, blinking her eyes to make certain they were not playing tricks on her, she’s changing! Indeed she was. As the words “Unsex me here” came from the robot, her (or its) shape began to change. The impression of the breasts against the metal gown, the roundness of the hips, even the softness of the face all disappeared. An androgynous robot played on as Lady Macbeth.

Nicole was spellbound and floating in a fantasy induced both by her wild imagination and the sudden intake of alcohol. The new face on the robot was vaguely reminiscent of someone she knew. She heard a disturbance to her right and turned to see Reggie Wilson talking avidly with Franceses. Nicole glanced back and forth quickly from Francesca to Lady Macbeth. That’s it, she said to herself. This new Lady Macbeth resembles Francesca.

A burst of fear, a premonition of tragedy, suddenly overwhelmed Nicole and plunged her into terror. Something terrible is going to happen, her mind was saying. She took several deep breaths and tried to calm herself but the eerie feeling would not go away. On the little stage King Duncan had just been greeted by his gracious hostess for the evening. To her left Nicole saw Francesca offer General Borzov the last sips of the wine. Nicole could not quell her panic.

“Nicole, what’s the matter?” Janos asked. He could tell she was distressed.

“Nothing,” she said. She gathered all her strength and rose to her feet. “Something I ate must have disagreed with me. I think I’ll go to my room.”

“But you’ll miss the movie after dinner,” Janos said humorously. Nicole

forced a pained smile. He helped her stand up. Nicole heard Lady Macbeth berating her husband for his lack of courage and one more wave of premoni­tory fear surged through her. She waited until the adrenaline burst had subsided and then excused herself quietly from the group. She walked slowly back to her room.

17 DEATH OF A SOLDIER

In her dream Nicole was ten years old again and playing in the woods behind her home in the Paris suburb of Chilly-Mazarin. She had a sudden feeling that her mother was dying. The little girl panicked. She ran toward the house to tell her father. A small snarling cat blocked her path. Nicole stopped, She heard a scream. She left the path and went through the trees. The branches scraped her skin. The cat followed her. Nicole heard another scream. When she awakened a frightened Janos Tabori was standing over her. “It’s General Borzov,” Janos said. “He’s in excruciating pain.”

Nicole jumped swiftly out of bed, threw her robe around her, grabbed her portable medical kit, and followed Janos into the corridor, “It looks like an appendicitis,” he mentioned as they hurried into the lobby, “But I’m not certain.”

Irina Turgenyev was kneeling beside the commander and holding his hand. The general himself was stretched out on a couch. His face was white and there was sweat on his brow. “Ah, Dr. des Jardins has arrived.” He managed a smile. Borzov then tried to sit up, winced from the pain, and let himself lie back down. “Nicole,” he said quietly, “I am in agony. I’ve never felt anything like this in my life, not even when I was wounded in the army.”

“How long ago did it start?” she asked. Nicole had pulled out her scanner and biometry monitor to check all his vital statistics. Meanwhile Francesca and her video camera had moved over right behind Nicole’s shoulder to film the doctor performing the diagnosis. Nicole impatiently motioned for her to back away.

“Maybe two or three minutes ago,” General Borzov said with effort. “I was sitting here in a chair watching the movie, laughing heartily as I recall, when there was an intense, sharp pain, here on my lower right side. It felt as if something were burning me from the inside.”

Nicole programmed the scanner to search through the last three minutes of detailed data recorded by the Hakamatsu probes inside Borzov. She lo­cated the onset of the pain, easily identifiable in terms of both heart rate and endocrine secretions. She next requested a full dump over the time period of interest from all channels. “Janos,” she then said to her colleague, “go over to the supply room and bring me the portable diagnostician.” She handed Tabori the code card for the door.

“You have a slight fever, suggesting your body is fighting some infection,” Nicole told General Borzov. “All the internal data confirms that you are feeling severe pain.” Cosmonaut Tabori returned with a small electronic array shaped like a box. Nicole extracted a small data cube from the scanner and inserted it into the diagnostician. In about thirty seconds the little monitor blinked and the words 94% likely appendicitis appeared. Nicole pressed a key and the screen displayed the other possible diagnoses, includ­ing hernia, internal muscle tear, and drug reaction. None were, according to the diagnostician, more than 2 percent probable.