Nicole was fairly certain that her latest prison, where she had been for about five months, was somewhere in the New Eden farming strip between Hakone and San Mi-guel. She had been blindfolded when they had moved her the last time. Nicole had quickly concluded, however, that she was in a rural location. Occasionally a strong smell of animals drifted into her cell through the forty-centimeter-square window just below the ceiling. In addition, Nicole could see no reflected light of any kind outside the window when it was night in New Eden.
These last months have been the worst, Nicole thought
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as she stood on tiptoe to push a few grams of flavored rice through the window. No conversation, no reading, no exercise. Two meals a day of rice and water. The little red squirrel who visited her each morning appeared outside. Nicole could hear him. She backed across the cell so she could see him eating the rice.
“You are my only company, my handsome friend,” Nicole said out loud. The squirrel stopped eating and listened, always alert for any possible danger. “And you have never understood a single word that I have said.”
The squirrel didn’t stay long. When he had finished eating his ration of rice, he departed, leaving Nicole alone. For several minutes she stared out the window where the squirrel had been, wondering what was happening with her family.
Until six months earlier, when her trial for sedition had been “indefinitely postponed” at the last minute, Nicole had been allowed one visitor each week for one hour. Even though the conversation had been chaperoned by a guard, and any discussion of politics or current events had been strictly prohibited, she had eagerly awaited those weekly sessions with Ellie or Patrick. Usually it had been Ellie who had come. From some very carefully worded statements by both her children, Nicole had deduced that Patrick was involved in some kind of government work and was only available at limited times.
Nicole had been first angry, and then depressed, when she had learned that Benjy had been institutionalized and would not be permitted to see her. Ellie had tried to assure her mother that Benjy was all right, considering the circumstances. There had been very little discussion of Katie. Neither Patrick nor Ellie had known how to explain to Nicole that then- older sister had really shown no interest in visiting her mother.
Ellie’s pregnancy was always a safe topic of conversation during those earlier visits. Nicole was thrilled to touch her daughter’s stomach, or to talk about the special feelings of a mother-to-be. If Ellie would mention how active the baby was, Nicole would share and compare her own experiences (“When I was pregnant with Patrick,” Nicole said one time, “I was never tired. You, on the other hand,
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were a mother’s nightmare—always thrashing around in the middle of the night when I wanted to sleep”); if Ellie was not feeling well, Nicole would prescribe foods or physical activities that had helped her deal with the same conditions.
Elite’s last visit had been two months before the due date for the baby. Nicole had been moved to her new cell the following week, and had not talked to a human being since then. The mute biots who attended Nicole never gave any indication that they even heard her questions. Once, in a pique of frustration, she had shouted at the Tiasso giving her the weekly bath. “Don’t you understand?” she had said. “My daughter was supposed to have a baby, my grandchild, sometime last week. I need to know if they are all right.”
In her previous cells Nicole had always been allowed to*read. New bookdiscs had been brought to her from the library whenever she had asked, so the days between visits had passed fairly quickly. She had reread almost all her father’s historical novels, as well as some poetry, history, and a few of her more interesting medical books. Nicole had been especially fascinated by the parallels between her life and the lives of her two childhood heroines, Joan of Arc and Eleanor of Aquitaine. Nicole buttressed her own strength by noting that neither of the two other women allowed her basic attitudes to change despite long and difficult periods in prison.
Right after she was moved, when the Garcia who attended her in the new cell did not return her electronic reader with her personal effects, Nicole thought that a simple mistake had been made. However, after she asked for the reader several times and it still never appeared, she realized that she was now being denied the privilege of reading.
The time passed very slowly for Nicole in her new cell. For several hours each day she deliberately paced about, trying to keep her body and mind active. She attempted to organize these pacing sessions, steering them away from thoughts about her family, which inevitably caused her feelings of loneliness and depression to intensify, and toward more general philosophic concepts or ideas. Often at
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the conclusion of these sessions she would focus on some past event in her life and try to derive some new or meaningful insight from it.
During one such session Nicole remembered sharply a sequence of events that had taken place when she was fifteen years old. By that time she and her father were already comfortably ensconced at Beauvois and Nicole was performing brilliantly at school. She decided to enter the national competition to select three girls to play Joan of Arc in the set of pageants that would commemorate the 750th anniversary of the maid’s martyrdom at Rouen. Nicole threw herself into the contest with a passion and sin-gle-mindedness that both thrilled and worried her father. After Nicole won the regional contest at Tours, Pierre even stopped working on his novels for six weeks to help his beloved daughter prepare for the national finals at Rouen.
Nicole placed first in both the athletic and intellectual components of the contest. She even scored very high in die acting evaluations. She and her father had been certain that she was going to be selected. But when the winners were announced, Nicole had been a second runner-up.
For years, Nicole thought as she walked around her cell in New Eden, / thought that I had failed. What my father said about France not being ready for a copper-skinned Joan of Arc did not matter. In my mind I was a failure. I was devastated. My self-esteem did not really recover until the Olympics, and then it was only a few days before Henry knocked me down again.
The price was terrible, Nicole continued. / was completely self-absorbed for years because of my lack of self-esteem. It was much later before I was finally happy with myself. And only then was I able to give to others. She paused for a moment in her thoughts. Why is it that so many of us go through the same experience? Why is youth so selfish, and why must we first find ourselves to realize how much more there is to life?
When the Garcia who always brought her meals included some fresh bread and a few raw carrots with her dinner, Nicole suspected that there was about to be a
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change in her regimen. Two days later the Tiasso came into her cell with a portable bathtub, a hairbrush, some makeup, a mirror, and even a small bottle of perfume. Nicole took a long, luxurious bath and freshened herself for the first time in months. As the biot picked up the wooden tub and prepared to leave, it handed her a note. “You will have a visitor tomorrow morning,” the note said.
Nicole could not sleep. In the morning she chattered like a little girl to her friend the squirrel, discussing both her hopes and her anxieties about the coming rendezvous. She fussed with her face and hair several times before declaring both of them to be hopeless. The time went by very slowly.
At long last, just before lunch, she heard human footsteps coming down the corridor toward her cell. Nicole rushed forward expectantly. “Katie,” she yelled when she saw her daughter walking around the final corridor.
“Hello, Mother,” Katie said, unlocking the door and entering the cell. The two women hugged for many seconds. Nicole did not try to restrain the tears that were pouring from her eyes.
They sat on Nicole’s bed, the only furniture in the cell, and talked amiably for several minutes about the family. Katie informed Nicole that she had a new granddaughter (“Nicole des Jardins Turner,” she said. “You should be very proud”), and then pulled out about twenty photographs. The pictures included recent snapshots of the baby with her parents, Ellie and Benjy together in a park somewhere, Patrick in a uniform, and even a couple of Katie in an evening dress. Nicole studied them, one by one, her eyes brimming repeatedly. “Oh, Katie,” she exclaimed several times.
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