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

It was the evening of the annual pageant, when the story of Sleeping Beauty was replayed in front of a live audience. Pierre and Nicole attended every year. Each time Nicole longed desperately for Aurora to avoid the deadly spinning wheel that would throw her into a coma. And each year she wept adolescent tears when the kiss of the handsome prince awakened the beauty from her deathlike sleep.

The pageant was over, the audience gone. Nicole was climbing up the circular steps that led to the tower where the real Sleeping Beauty had supposedly lapsed into her coma. The teenager was racing up the steps, laughing, leaving her father far behind.

Aurora’s room was on the other side of the long window. Nicole caught her breath and stared at all the sumptuous furnishings. The bed was canopied, the dressers richly decorated. Everything in the room was trimmed in white. It was magnificent. Nicole glanced back at the sleeping, girl and gasped. It was she, Nicole, lying in the bed in a white gown!

Her heart pounded furiously as she heard the door open and the footsteps coming toward her in the room. Her eyes remained closed as the first aroma of his mint breath reached her nose. This is it, she thought excitedly to herself. He kissed her, gently, on the lips. Nicole felt as if she were flying on the softest of clouds. Music was all around her. She opened her eyes and saw Henry’s smiling face only centimeters away. She reached her arms out to

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him and he kissed her again, this time with passion, as a man kisses a woman.

Nicole kissed him back, reserving nothing, allowing her kiss to tell him that she was his. But he pulled away. Her special prince was wearing a frown. He pointed at her face. Then he backed up slowly and left the room.

She had just started to cry when a distant sound intruded on her dream. A door was opening, light was coming into the room. Nicole blinked, then closed her eyes again to protect them against the light. The complicated set of ul-trathin, plasticlike wires that were attached to her body automatically rewound themselves into their containers on either side of the canvas mat on which she was sleeping.

Nicole awakened very slowly. The dream had been extremely vivid. Her feelings of unhappiness had not vanished as quickly as the dream. She tried to chase her despair by reminding herself that none of what she had. dreamed was real.

“Are you going to just lie there forever?” Her daughter Katie, who had been asleep beside her on the left, was already up and bending over her.

Nicole smiled. “No,” she said, “but I admit I am more than a little bit groggy. I was in the middle of a dream. . . . How long did we sleep this time?”

“A day short of five weeks,” Simone answered from the other side. Her oider daughter was sitting up, casually arranging her long hair that had become matted during the test.

Nicole glanced at her watch, verified that Simone was correct, and sat up herself. She yawned. “So how do you feel?” she said to the two girls.

“Full of energy,” eleven-year-old Katie answered with a grin. “I want to run, jump, wrestle with Patrick. … I hope this was our last long sleep.”

“The Eagle said it should be,” Nicole replied. “They’re hoping that they will have enough data now.” She smiled. “The Eagle says we women are more difficult to understand—because of the wild monthly variations in our hormones.”

Nicole stood up, stretched, and gave Katie a kiss. Then

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she eased over and hugged Simone. Although not quite fourteen, Simone was almost as tall as Nicole. She was a striking young woman with a dark brown face and soft, sensitive eyes. Simone always seemed calm and serene, in marked contrast to the restlessness and impatience of Katie.

“Why didn’t Ellie come with us for this test?” Katie asked a little querulously. “She’s a girl too, but it seems like she never has to do anything.”

Nicole put her arm around Katie’s shoulder as the three of them headed for the door and the light. “She’s only four years old, Katie, and according to the Eagle, Ellie’s too small to give them any of the critical data they still need.”

In the small illuminated foyer, directly outside the room where they had been sleeping for five weeks, they put on their tight body suits, transparent helmets, and the slippers that anchored their feet on the floor. Nicole checked the two girls carefully before activating the outside door of the compartment. She needn’t have worried. The door wouldn’t have opened if any of them were unprepared for the environmental changes.

If Nicole and her daughters had not seen the large room outside their compartment several times before, they would have stopped in amazement and stared for several minutes. Stretching in front of them was a long chamber, a hundred or more meters in length and fifty meters wide. The ceiling above them, filled with banks of lights, was about five meters high. The room looked like a mixture of a hospital operating room and a semiconductor manufacturing plant on the Earth. There were no walls or cubicles dividing the room into partitions, yet its rectangular dimensions were clearly suballocated into different tasks. The room was busy—the robots were all either analyzing data from one set of tests or preparing for another set. Around the edges of the room were compartments, like the one in which Nicole, Simone, and Katie had slept for five weeks, in which the “experiments” were carried out.

Katie walked over to the closest compartment on the left. It was set back in the corner and was suspended from the wall and ceiling along two perpendicular axes. A

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display screen built next to the metallic door showed a wide array of what was presumably data in some bizarre cuneiformlike script.

“Weren’t we in this one last time?” Katie asked, pointing at the compartment. “Wasn’t this the place where we slept on that peculiar white foam and felt all the pressure?”

Her question was transmitted inside the helmets of her mother and sister. Nicole and Simone both nodded and then joined Katie in staring at the unintelligible screen.

“Your father thinks they are trying to find a vt&y that we can sleep through an entire acceleration regime lasting for several months,” Nicole said. “The Eagle will neither confirm nor deny this conjecture.”

Although the three women had undergone four separate tests together in this laboratory, none of them had ever seen any forms of life or intelligence except for the dozen or so mechanical aliens that apparently were in charge. The humans called these beings “block robots” because, except for their cylindrical “feet” which allowed them to roll around the floor, the creatures were all made of rectangular solid chunks that looked like the blocks that human children played with on Earth.

“Why do you think we’ve never seen any of the Others?” Katie now asked. “I mean, in here. We see them for a second or two in the tube and that’s all. We know they’re here—we aren’t the only ones being tested.”

“This room is scheduled very carefully,” her mother replied. “It’s obvious that we weren’t meant to see the Others, except in passing.”

“But why*? The Eagle ought—” Katie persisted.

“Excuse me,” Simone interrupted. “But I think Big Block is coming over to see us.”

The largest of the block robots usually stayed in the square control area in the center of the room and monitored all the experiments that were under way. At that moment he was moving toward them down one of the lanes that formed a grid in the room.

Katie walked over to another compartment about twenty meters away. From the active monitor on its exterior wall, she could tell that an experiment was under way inside.

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Suddenly she pounded on the metal quite sharply with her gloved hand.

“Katie,” Nicole shouted.

“Stop that,’.’ a sound came from Big Block almost simultaneously. He was about fifty meters away and approaching them very rapidly. “You must not do that,” he said in perfect but clipped English.

“And what are you going to do about it?” Katie said defiantly as Big Block, all five square meters of him, ignored Nicole and Simone and headed for the young girl. Nicote ran over to protect her daughter.

“You must leave now,” Big Block said, hovering over Nicole and Katie from only a couple of meters away. “Your test is over. The exit is over there where the lights are flashing.”

Nicole tugged firmly on Katie’s arm and the girl reluctantly accompanied her mother toward the exit. “But what would they do,” Katie said stubbornly, “if we decided to stay here until another experiment was finished? Who knows? Maybe one of our octospiders is in there right now. Why are we never allowed to meet anyone else?”