Rama 3 – The Garden of Rama by Clarke, Arthur C.

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20June2202 I verified today that I am in-

I deed pregnant again. Michael was delighted, Richard surprisingly unresponsive. When I talked to Richard privately, he acknowledged that he had mixed feelings because Simone had finally reached the stage where she didn’t need “constant attention” anymore. I reminded him that when we had talked two months ago about having another child, he had given his enthusiastic consent. Richard suggested to me that his eagerness to father a second child had been strongly influenced by my “obvious excitement” at the time.

The new baby should arrive in mid-March. By then we will have finished with the nursery and will have enough living space for the entire family. I am sorry that Richard is not thrilled about being a father again, but I am glad that Simone will now have a playmate.

1 5 March 2203

Catharine Colin Wakefield (we will call her Katie) was born on the thirteenth of March at 6:16 in the morning. It

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was an easy birth, only four hours from the first strong contraction to delivery. There was no significant pain at any time. I delivered squatting on my haunches and was in such good shape that I cut the umbilical myself.

Katie already cries a lot. Both Genevieve and Simone were sweet, mellow babies, but Katie is obviously going to be a noisemaker. Richard is pleased that I wanted to name her after his mother. I had hoped that he might be more interested in his role as father this time, but at present he is too busy working on his “perfect data base” (it will index and provide easy access to all our information) to pay much attention to Katie.

My third daughter weighed just under four kilograms at birth and was fifty-four centimeters long. Simone was almost certainly not as heavy when she was born, but we did not have an accurate scale at the time. Katie’s skin color is quite fair, almost white in fact, and her hair is much lighter than the dark black tresses of her sister. Her eyes are surprisingly blue. I know that it’s not unusual for babies to have blue eyes and that often they darken significantly in the first year. But I never expected a child of mine to have blue eyes for even a moment.

18 May 2203

It’s hard for me to believe that Katie is already more than two months old. She is such a demanding baby! By now I should have been able to teach her not to pull on my nipples, but I cannot break her of the habit. She is especially difficult when anyone else is present while I am nursing. If I even turn my head to talk to Michael or Richard, or especially if I try to answer one of Simone’s questions, then Katie jerks on my nipple with a vengeance.

Richard has been extremely moody lately. At times he is his usual brilliant, witty self, keeping Michael and me laughing with his erudite banter; however, his mood can shift in an instant. A single seemingly innocuous observation by either of us can plunge him into depression or even anger.

I suspect that Richard’s real problem these days is bore-

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dom. He has finished his data base project and not yet started another major activity. The fabulous computer he built last year contains subroutines that make our interface with the black screen almost routine. Richard could add some variety to his days by playing a more active part in Simone’s development and education, but I guess it’s just not his style. He does not seem to be fascinated, as Michael and I are, with the complex patterns of growth that are emerging in Simone.

When I was first pregnant with Katie, I was quite concerned about Richard’s apparent lack of interest in children. I decided to attack the problem directly by asking him to help me set up a minilaboratory that would enable us to analyze part of Katie’s genome from a sample of my amniotic fluid. The project involved complex chemistry, a level of interaction with the Ramans deeper than any we had ever tried before, and the creation and calibration of some sophisticated medical instruments.

Richard loved the task. I did too, for it reminded me of my days in medical school. We worked together for twelve, sometimes fourteen hours a day (leaving Michael to take care of Simone—those two are certainly fond of each other) until we were finished. Often we would talk about our work late into the night, even while we were making love.

When the day came, however, that we completed the analysis of our own future child’s genome, I discovered, much to my amazement, that Richard was more excited about the fact that the equipment and analysis met all our specifications than he was about the characteristics of our second daughter. I was astonished. When I told him that the child was a girl, and didn’t have Down’s or Whitting-ham’s syndrome, and none of her a priori cancer tendencies were outside the acceptable ranges, he reacted matter-of-factly. But when I praised the speed and accuracy with which the system had completed the test, Richard beamed with pride. What a different man my husband is! He is much more comfortable with the world of mathematics and engineering than he is with other people.

Michael has noticed Richard’s recent restlessness as well. He has encouraged Richard to create more toys for

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Simone like the brilliant dolls he made when I was in the final months of my pregnancy with Katie. Those dolls are still Simone’s favorite playthings. They walk around on their own and even respond to a dozen verbal commands. One night, when Richard was in one of his exuberant moods, he programmed TB to interact with the dolls. Simone was almost hysterical with laughter after The Bard (Michael insists on calling Richard’s Shakespeare-spouting robot by its full name) chased all three of the dolls into a corner and then launched into a medley of love sonnets.

Not even TB has cheered Richard these last two weeks. He’s not sleeping well, which is unusual for him, and he has shown no passion for anything. Our regular and varied sex life has even been suspended, so Richard must be really struggling with his internal demons. Three days ago he left early in the morning (it was also just after dawn in Rama—every now and then our Earth clock in the lair and the Raman clock outside are in synch) and stayed up in New York for over ten hours. When I asked him what he had been doing, he replied that he had sat on the wall and stared at the Cylindrical Sea. Then he changed the subject.

Michael and Richard are both convinced that we are now alone on our island. Richard has entered the avian lair twice recently, both times staying on the side of the vertical corridor away from the tank sentry. He even descended once to the second horizontal passageway, where I made my leap, but he saw no signs of life. The octo-spider lair now has a pair of complicated grills between the covering and the first landing. For the past four months, Richard has been electronically monitoring the region around the octo lair again; even though he admits there may be some ambiguities in his monitor data, Richard insists he can tell from visual inspection alone that the grills have not been opened for a long time.

The men assembled the sailboat a couple of months ago, and then spent two hours checking it out on the Cylindrical Sea. Simone and I waved to them from the shore. Fearful that the crab biots would define the boat as “garbage” (as they apparently did the other sailboat—we never did figure out what happened to it; a couple of days after we escaped

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from me phalanx of nuclear missiles we returned to where we had left the sailboat and it was gone), Richard and Michael disassembled it again and brought it into our lair for safekeeping.

Richard has said several times that he would like to sail across the sea, toward the south, and see if he can find any place where the five-hundred-meter cliff can be scaled. Our information about the Southern Hemicylinder of Rama is very limited. Except for the few days when we were on the biot hunt with the original Newton cosmonaut team, our knowledge of the region is limited to the crude mosaics assembled in realtime from the initial Newton drone images. It would certainly be fascinating and exciting to explore the south—maybe we could even find out where all those octospiders went. But we can’t afford to take any risks at this juncture. Our family is critically dependent on each of the three adults—the loss of any one of us would be devastating.