Rama 2 by Arthur C. Clarke and Gentry Lee

The black velvet avian had flown up closer to the opening for a better look. Now it turned and screeched back into the dark below. Within seconds a second familiar bird, the likely mate for the black velvet one, flew up and landed on the first ledge below the ground- Nicole repeated the display. The two birds talked and then flew deeper into the lair.

Minutes went by. Nicole could hear occasional jabbering from the depths of the corridor. At length her two friends returned, each carrying a small manna melon in its talons. They landed in the plaza near the opening. Nicole walked over toward the melons, but the avians continued to clutch them. What followed was (Nicole assumed) a long lecture. The two birds jabbered both individually and together, always looking at her and often tapping on the melons. Fifteen minutes later, apparently satisfied that they had communicated their message, the avians took flight, swooped around the plaza, and vanished into their lair.

I think they were telling me that melons are in short supply, Nicole thought as she walked back toward the eastern plaza. The melons were heavy. She had one in each of the two backpacks that she had emptied that morning before she left the White Room. Or maybe that I should not disturb them in the future. Whatever it was, we will not be welcome anymore.

She thought that Richard would be ecstatic when she returned to the White Room. He was, but not because of Nicole and the manna melons. He had a grin on his face from one ear to the other and was holding one hand behind his back. “Wait until I show you what I have,” he said as Nicole unloaded the backpacks. Richard brought his hand around in front of him and opened it. The hand contained a solitary black ball about ten centime­ters in diameter.

“I’m nowhere near figuring out all the logic, or How much information can go in the request,” Richard said. “But I have established a fundamental principle. We can ask for and receive ‘things’ using the computer.”

“What do you mean?” Nicole asked, still not certain why Richard was so excited about a small black ball.

“They made this for me,” he said, handing her the ball again. “Don’t you understand? Somewhere here they have a factory and can make things for us.”

“Then maybe ‘they,’ whoever they are, can start making us some food,” said Nicole. She was a little annoyed that Richard had neither congratulated her nor thanked her for the melons. “The avians are not likely to give us any more.”

“It will be no problem,” Richard said. “Eventually, once we learn the full range of the request process, we may be able to order fish and chips, steak and potatoes, anything, as long as we can state what we want in unambigu­ous scientific terms.”

Nicole stared at her friend. With his unkempt hair, his unshaven face, the bags under his eyes, and his wild grin, he looked at the moment like a fugitive from an insane asylum. “Richard,” she asked, “will you slow down a little? If you’ve found the Holy Grail, can you at least spend a second explaining it to me?”

“Look at the screen,” he said, Using the keyboard he drew a circle, then scratched it out and made a square. In less than a minute Richard had carefully drawn a cube in three dimensions. When he was finished with the graphics, he put the eight action keys into a predetermined configuration and then pressed the key with the small rectangle designator. A set of strange symbols appeared on the black monitor. “Don’t worry,” Richard said, “we don’t need to understand the details. They are just asking for the dimensional specifications on the cube.”

Richard next made a string of entries from the normal alphanumeric keys. “Now,” he said, turning back to face Nicole, “if I have done it correctly, we will have a cube, made from the same material as that ball, in about ten minutes.”

They ate some of the new melon while they waited. It tasted the same as the others. Steak and potatoes would be unbelievably good, Nicole was think­ing, when suddenly the end wall lifted up half a meter above the floor and a black cube appeared in the gap.

“Wait a minute, don’t touch it yet,” Richard said as Nicole went over to investigate. “Look here!” He shone his flashlight into the darkness behind the cube. “There are vast tunnels beyond these walls,” he said, “and they must lead to factories so advanced we couldn’t even recognize them. Imag­ine! They can even make objects on request.”

Nicole was beginning to understand why Richard was so ecstatic. “We now have the capability to control our own destiny in some small way,” he continued, “If I can break the code fast enough, we should be able to request food, maybe even what we need to build a boat.”

“Without loud motors, I hope,” quipped Nicole.

“No motors,” agreed Richard. He finished his melon and turned back to the keyboard.

Nicole was becoming worried. Richard had succeeded in making only one new breakthrough in a full Raman day. All he had to show for thirty-eight hours of work (he had only slept eight hours during the entire period) was one new material. He could make “light” black objects like the first ball, whose specific gravity was close to balsa wood, or he could make “heavy” black objects of density similar to oak or pine. He was wearing himself out with his work. And he could not, or would not, share any of the load with Nicole.

What if his first discovery was just blind luck? Nicole said to herself as she climbed the stairs for her dawn walk. Or what if the system cannot make anything but two kinds of black objects? She could not help worrying about wasted time. It was only sixteen more days until Rama would encounter the Earth. There was no sign of a rescue team. At the back of her mind was the thought that perhaps she and Richard had been abandoned altogether.

She had tried to talk to Richard about their plans the previous evening, but he had been exhausted. Richard hadn’t responded in any way when Nicole had mentioned to him that she was very concerned. Later, after she had carefully outlined all their options and asked his opinion about what they should do, she noticed that he had fallen asleep. When Nicole awakened after a brief nap herself, Richard was already working again at the keyboard and refused to be distracted by either breakfast or conversation. Nicole had stumbled over the growing array of black objects on the floor as she had exited the White Room for her early morning exercise.

Nicole was feeling very lonely. The last fifty hours, which she had spent mostly by herself, had passed very slowly. Her only escape had been the pleasure of reading. She had the text of five books stored in her computer. One was her medical encyclopedia, but the other four were all for recreation. / bet all of Richard’s discretionary memory is filled with Shakespeare, she thought as she sat on the wall surrounding New York. She stared out at the Cylindrical Sea. In the far distance, barely visible in her binoculars through the mist and clouds, she could see the northern bowl where they had entered Rama the first time.

She had two of her father’s novels stored in the computer. Nicole’s per­sonal favorite was Queen for All Ages, the story of Eleanor of Aquitaine’s younger years, beginning with her adolescence at the ducal court in Poitiers, The story line followed Eleanor through her marriage to Louis Capet of France, their crusade to the Holy Land, and her extraordinary personal ap­peal for an annulment from Pope Eugenius. The novel culminated with Eleanor’s divorce from Louis and betrothal to the young and exciting Henry Plantagenet.

The other Pierre des Jardins novel in her computer’s memory was his universally acclaimed chef d’oeuvre, I Richard Coeur de Lion, a mixture of first-person diary and interior monologue, set during two winter weeks at the end of the twelfth century. In the novel Richard and his soldiers, embarked on another crusade, are quartered near Messina under the protection of the Norman king of Sicily, While there the famous warrior-king and homosexual son of Eleanor of Aquitaine and Henry Plantagenet, in a burst of self-exami­nation, relives the major personal and historical events of his life.

Nicole remembered a long discussion with Genevieve after her daughter had read / Richard the previous summer. The young teenager had been fascinated by the story, and had surprised her mother by asking extremely intelligent questions. Thoughts of Genevieve made Nicole wonder what her daughter might be doing at Beauvois at the very moment. They have told you that I have disappeared, Nicole surmised. What does the military call it? Missing in action?