After verifying that all the bins were indeed empty, I started to walk back toward the vertical corridor. Then, on a hunch, I reversed my direction, passed the storage room, and continued on down the tunnel. It must go somewhere, I reasoned, or it would have ended at the melon room.
After another half a kilometer the tunnel widened gradually until it entered a large circular chamber. In the center of the room, which had a high ceiling, was a broad domed structure. Around the walls were about twenty alcoves, cut into the walls at regular intervals. There was no light except my flashlight beam, so it took several minutes to integrate the room, with the domed building in the middle, into a composite picture.
I walked completely around the perimeter, examining the alcoves one after another. Most were empty. In one of them I found three identical tank sentries neatly arrayed against the back wall. My initial impulse was to be wary of the sentries, but it was not necessary. They were all dormant.
By far the most interesting of the alcoves, however, was the one at the center of the room, exactly one hundred and eighty degrees around the circle from the entrance tunnel. This special alcove was carefully organized and had thick shelves cut into its walls. There were fifteen shelves in all, five each on the two sides and five more on the wall opposite the doorway to the alcove. The shelves on the sides had objects arranged on them (everything was very orderly); the shelves against the far wall each had five round pits hollowed out along their lengths.
The contents of these pits, which were each further subdivided into sections, like portions of a pie, were fascinat-
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ing. One of the sections in each of the pits contained a very fine material, like ash. A second section contained one, two, or three rings, either cherry red or gold, that I immediately recognized because of their similarity to the rings we had seen around the neck of our gray velvet avian friend. There did not seem to be any particular pattern to the rest of the articles in the pits—in fact, some of the pits were empty except for the ash and the rings.
Eventually I turned around and approached the domed structure. Its front door faced the special alcove. I examined the door with my flashlight. An intricate design was carved on its rectangular surface. There were four separate panels, or quadrants, in the design. An avian was in the top left quadrant, with a manna melon in the adjacent panel, on the right. The lower two quadrants contained unfamiliar pictures. On the left side was a carving of a jointed, striped creature running on six legs. The final panel, on the bottom right, featured a large box filled with very thin mesh or webbing.
After some hesitation I pushed open the door. I nearly jumped out of my skin when a loud alarm, like a Klaxon, pierced the silence. I stood inside the door without moving while the alarm sounded for almost a minute. When it was over, I still did not move. I was trying to hear if anyone (or anything) was responding to the alarm.
No sound disturbed the silence. After a few minutes I began examining the inside of the building. A transparent cube, roughly two and a half meters in each dimension, occupied the center of the single room. The walls of the cube were stained in spots, partially obscuring my vision, but I could still see that the bottom ten centimeters were covered by a fine, dark material. The room around the cube was decorated with geometric patterns on the walls, floors, and ceiling. One of the cube faces had a narrow entryway that permitted access to the cube interior.
I went inside. The fluffy black material appeared to be ash, but it was a slightly different consistency than the similar stuff I had found in the alcove pits. My eyes followed the beam of my flashlight as it moved in an orderly pattern around the cube. Near the center there was an
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object partially buried in the ash. I walked over, picked up the object, shook it off, and nearly fainted. It was Richard’s robot TB.
TB was considerably altered. His exterior was blackened, his tiny control panel had melted off, and he no longer operated. But it was unmistakably him. I put the little robot to my lips and kissed him. In my mind’s eye I could see him spouting one of Shakespeare’s sonnets as Richard listened with rapt enjoyment.
It was obvious that TB had been hi a fire. Had Richard also been trapped in an inferno inside the cube? I sifted through the ash carefully but found no bones. I did wonder, however, what it was that had burned and created all the ash. And what was TB doing inside the cube in the first place?
I was convinced that Richard was somewhere hi the avian lair, so I spent another eight long hours scrambling up and down ledges and exploring tunnels. I visited all tiie places I had been before, during my short sojourn long ago, and even found some interesting new chambers of unknown purpose. But there were no signs of Richard. There were, in fact, no signs of life of any kind. Mindful that the short Raman day was almost over and that the four children would be waking up soon in our own lair, I finally returned, tired and dejected, to my Raman home.
Both the cover and the grill to our lair were open when I arrived. Although I was fairly certain that I had closed them both before leaving, I could not remember my exact actions at departure. Eventually I told myself that perhaps I had been too excited at the time and had forgotten to close everything. I had just started to descend when I heard Michael call “Nicole” from behind me.
I turned around. Michael was approaching from the lane to the east. He was moving quickly, which was unusual for him, and was carrying baby Patrick in his arms. “There you are,” he said, panting as I walked up to him. “I was beginning to worry—”
He stopped abruptly, stared at me for an instant, and then looked around quickly. “But where’s Katie?” he said anxiously.
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“What do you mean, where’s Katie?” I asked, the look on Michael’s face causing me alarm.
“Isn’t she with you?” he asked.
When I shook my head and said that I hadn’t seen her, Michael suddenly erupted in tears. I rushed forward and comforted little Patrick, who was frightened by Michael’s sobs and started crying himself.
“Oh, Nicole,” Michael said. “I’m so, so sorry. Patrick was having a bad night, so I brought him into my room. Then Benjy had a stomachache and Simone and I had to nurse him for a couple of hours. We all fell asleep while Katie was alone in the nursery. About two hours ago, when we all woke up, she was gone.”
I had never seen Michael so distraught before. I tried to comfort him, to tell him that Katie was probably just playing in the neighborhood somewhere (And when we find her, I was thinking, / will give her a scolding she’ll never forget), but Michael argued with me.
“No, no,” he said, “she’s nowhere around. Patrick and I have been looking for over an hour.”
Michael, Patrick, and I went. downstairs to check on Simone and Benjy. Simone informed us that Katie had been extremely disappointed when I had decided to look for Richard alone. “She had hoped,” Simone said serenely, “that you would take her with you.”
“Why didn’t you tell me this last night?” I asked my eight-year-old daughter.
“It didn’t seem that important,” Simone said. “Besides, it never occurred to me that Katie would try to find Daddy by herself.”
Michael and I were both exhausted, but one of us had to look for Katie. I was the correct choice. I washed my face, ordered breakfast for everybody from the Ramans, and told a quick version of my descent into the avian lair. Simone and Michael turned the blackened TB over slowly in their hands. I could tell they too were wondering what had happened to Richard.
“Katie said that Daddy went to find the octospiders,” Simone commented just before I left. “She said it was more exciting in their world.”
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I was filled with dread as I trudged over to the plaza near the octospider lair. While I was walking, the lights went out and it was night again in Rama. “Great,” I muttered to myself. “Nothing like trying to find a missing child in the darkness.”
Both the octospider covering and the pair of protective grills were open. I had never seen the grills open before. My heart skipped a beat. I knew instinctively that Katie had gone down into their lair and that, despite my fear, I was about to follow her. First I bent down on my knees and shouted “Katie” twice into the blackness beneath me. I heard her name echoing through the tunnels. I strained to listen for a response, but there were no sounds at all. At least, I told myself, / also don’t hear any dragging brushes accompanied by a high-frequency whine.
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