54
ARTHUR C. CLARKE AND GENTRY LEE
into the corridor. In no more than a minute TB, a.k.a. Henry II, returned. The robot walked over to Simone. “I fell in love with another woman,” he .said, “and Queen Eleanor was angry. To get even with me, she turned my sons against me. …”
A short time later Richard and I were involved in a mild argument about the real reasons why Henry imprisoned Eleanor (we have discovered many times that we each learned a different version of Anglo-French history) when we heard a distant but unmistakable shriek. Within moments all five of us were topside. The shriek repeated.
We looked up in the sky above us. A solitary avian was flying a wide pattern a few hundred meters above the tops of the skyscrapers. We hurried over to the ramparts, beside the Cylindrical Sea, so we could have a better look. Once, twice, three times the great creature flew around the perimeter of the island. At the end of each loop the avian emitted a single long shriek. Richard waved his arms and shouted throughout the flight, but there was no indication that he was noticed.
The children became restless after about an hour. We agreed that Michael would take them back to the lair and Richard and I would stay as long as there was any possibility of contact. The bird continued flying in the same pattern. “Do you think it’s looking for something?” I asked Richard.
“I don’t know,” he said, shouting again and waving at the avian as it reached the point in its loop where it was closest to us. This time it changed course, inscribing long graceful arcs in its helical descent. As it grew closer, Richard and I could see both its gray velvet underbelly and the two bright, cherry-red rings around its neck.
“It’s our friend,” I whispered to Richard, remembering the avian leader who had agreed to transport us across the Cylindrical Sea four years earlier.
But this avian was not the healthy, robust creature that had flown in the center of the formation when we had escaped from New York. This bird was skinny and emaciated, its velvet dirty and unkempt. “It’s sick,” Richard said as the bird landed about twenty meters away from us.
The avian jabbered something softly and jerked its head
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around nervously, as if it were expecting more company. Richard took one step toward it and the creature waved its wings, flapped them once, and backed up a few meters. “What food do we have available,” Richard said in a low voice, “that is chemically most like the manna melon?”
I shook my head. “We don’t have any food at all except last night’s chicken— Wait,” I said, interrupting myself, “we do have that green punch the children like. It looks like the liquid in the center of the manna melon.”
Richard was gone before I had finished my sentence. During the ten minutes until he returned, the avian and I stared silently at one another. I tried to focus my mind on friendly thoughts, hoping that somehow my good intentions would be communicated through my eyes. Once I did see the avian change its expression, but of course I had no idea what either expression meant.
Richard returned carrying one of our black bowls filled with the green punch. He set the bowl in front of us and pointed at it as we backed away six or eight meters. The avian approached it in small, halting steps, stopping eventually right in front of the bowl. The bird dropped its beak into the liquid, took a small sip, and then threw its head back to swallow. Apparently the punch was all right, for die liquid was drained in less than a minute. When the avian was finished, it backed up two steps, spread its wings to their full extent, and made a full circular turn.
“Now we should say you’re welcome,” I said, extending my hand to Richard. We executed our circular turn, as we had done when we had said good-bye and thank you four years earlier, and bowed slightly in the avian’s direction when we were finished.
Both Richard and I thought that the creature smiled, but we readily admitted later that we might have imagined it. The gray velvet avian spread its wings, lifted off the ground, and soared over our heads into the air.
“Where do you think it’s going?” I asked Richard.
“It’s dying,” he replied softly. “It’s taking one last look around the world it has known.”
56 ARTHUR C. CLARKE AND GENTRY LEE 6 January 2205
Today is my birthday. I am now forty-one years old. Last night I had another of my vivid dreams. I was very old. My hair was completely gray and my face was heavily wrinkled. I was living in a castle—somewhere near the Loire, not too far from Beauvois—with two grown daughters (neither of whom looked, in the dream, like Simone or Katie or Genevieve) and three grandsons. The boys were all teenagers, healthy physically, but there was something wrong with each of them. They were all dull, maybe even retarded. I remember in the dream trying to explain to them how the molecule of hemoglobin carries oxygen from the pulmonary system to the tissues. None of them could understand what I was saying.
I woke up from the dream in a depression. It was the middle of the night and everyone else in the family was asleep. As I often do, I walked down the corridor to the nursery to make certain that the girls were still covered by their light blankets. Simone hardly ever moves at night but Katie, as usual, had thrown her blanket off with her thrashing around. I put the cover back over Katie and then sat down in one of the chairs.
What is bothering me? I wondered. Why have I been having so many dreams about children and grandchildren? One day last week I made a joking reference to the possibility of having a third child and Richard, who is going through another of his extended gloomy periods, almost jumped out of his skin. I think he’s still sorry I talked him into having Katie. I dropped the subject immediately, not wanting to provoke another of his nihilistic tirades.
Would I really want another baby at this juncture? Does it make any sense at all, given the situation in which we find ourselves? Putting aside for the moment any personal reasons I might have for giving birth to a third child, there is a powerful biological argument for continuing to reproduce. Our best guess at our destiny is that we will never have any future contact with other members of the human species. If we are the last in our line, it would be wise for us to pay heed to one of the fundamental tenets of evolution: Maximum genetic variation
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produces the highest probability of survival in an uncertain environment.
After I had thoroughly awakened from my dream last night, my mind carried the scenario even further. Suppose, I told myself, that Rama is really not going anywhere, at least not soon, and that we will spend the rest of our lives in our current conditions. Then, in all likelihood, Simone and Katie will outlive the three of us adults. What will happen next? I asked. Unless we have somehow saved some semen from either Michael or Richard (and both the biological and sociological problems would be formidable), my daughters will not be able to reproduce. They themselves may arrive at paradise or nirvana or some other world, but they will eventually perish and the genes they carry will die with them.
But suppose, I continued, that I give birth to a son. Then the two girls will have a male companion their age and the problem of succeeding generations will be dramatically lessened.
It was at this point in my thought pattern that a truly crazy idea jumped into my brain. One of my major areas of specialty during my medical training was genetics, especially hereditary defects. I remembered my case studies of the royal families of Europe between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries and the many “inferior” individuals produced from the excessive inbreeding. A son produced by Richard and me would have the same genetic ingredients as Simone and Katie. That son’s children with either of the girls, our grandchildren, would have a very high risk of defects. A son produced by Michael and me, on tiie other hand, would share only half his genes with the girls and, if my memory of the data serves me correctly, his offspring with Simone or Katie would have a drastically lower defect risk.
I immediately rejected this outrageous thought. It did not, however, go away. Later in the night, when I should have been sleeping, my mind returned to the same topic. What if I become pregnant by Richard again, I asked myself, and I have a third girl? Then it will be necessary to repeat the entire process. I’m already forty-one. How many more years do I have before the onset of menopause,
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