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“I had another foggy spell today,” Richard said. ‘”It lasted for almost three hours.”
“Goodness,” Nicole said. She sat up in bed. “Are you all right now? Should I get the scanner and see if I can tell anything from your biometry?”
“No,” Richard answered, shaking his head. “My fogs have never registered on your machine. But this one really disturbed me. I realized how incapacitated I am during them. I can barely function at all, much less help you or the children in any kind of crisis. They scare me.”
“Do you remember what started this one?”
“Absolutely. Like always. I was thinking of our trip to the Hangar, especially about that other habitat. I inadvertently started remembering a few disconnected scenes from my odyssey and then suddenly there was the fog. It was total. I’m not certain I would have even recognized you during the first five minutes of its duration.”
“I’m sorry, darling,” Nicole said.
“It’s almost as if something is monitoring my thoughts. And when I reach into a certain portion of my memory, then bam, I’m given some kind of warning.”
Richard and Nicole were silent for almost a minute.
“When I close my eyes,” Nicole said, “I still see all those robots scurrying around inside Rama.”
“Me too.”
“And yet, I still have great difficulty believing it was a real scene and not something I dreamed or saw in a movie.” Nicole smiled. “We have lived an utterly unbelievable life these last fourteen years, haven’t we?”
“Absolutely,” Richard said, turning over on his side in his normal sleeping posture. “And who knows? The most interesting part may be still ahead of us.”
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6
T!
“he holographic model of New Eden was projected into the center of the large conference room at a 1/2,000 scale. Inside Rama the actual Earth habitat would occupy an area of one hundred and sixty square kilometers in the Central Plain, starting just opposite the bottom of the long northern stairway. Its enclosed volume would be twenty kilometers long in the direction around the cylinder, eight kilometers wide in the direction parallel to the cylindrical spin axis, and eight kilometers high from the colony floor to the towering ceiling.
The New Eden model at the Habitation Module, however, which the Eagle, Richard, and Nicole used for their design work, was a more manageable size. It easily fit into the single large room, and the holographic projections made it easy for the designers to walk through and among the various structures. Changes were made using the computer-aided design subroutines that acted upon the voice commands of the Eagle.
“We’ve changed our minds again,” Nicole said, beginning their third marathon design discussion with the Eagle
by encircling, with her black “flashlight,” a concentration of buildings in the center of the colony. “We now think it’s a bad idea to have everything in one place, with the people all on top of each other. Richard and I think it would make more sense if the living areas and small trade shops were in four separate villages at the corners of the rectangle. Only the buildings used by everyone in the colony would be in the central complex.”
“Of course, our new concept will completely change the transportation flow you and I discussed yesterday,” Richard added, “as well as the specific coordinate assignments for the parks, Sherwood Forest, Lake Shakespeare, and Mount Olympus. But all the original elements can still be accommodated in our current design for New Eden— here, take a look at this sketch and you can see where we have moved everything.”
The Eagle seemed to grimace as he stared at his human helpers. After a second he looked at the map in Richard’s electronic notebook. “I hope this will be the last major alteration,” he commented. “We don’t make much progress if every time we meet we essentially start the design all over.”
“We’re sorry,” Nicole said. “But it has taken us a little while to grasp the magnitude of our task. We now understand that we’re designing the long-term living situation for as many as two thousand human beings; if it takes several iterations to get it right, then we must spend the time.”
“I see you’ve increased again the number of large structures in the central complex,” the Eagle said. “What’s the purpose of this building behind the library and auditorium?”
“It’s a sports and recreation building,” Nicole replied. “It will have a track, a baseball diamond, a soccer field, tennis courts, a gymnasium, and a swimming pool—plus enough seating in each area to handle almost all the citizens. Richard and I imagine that athletics will be very important in New Eden, especially since so many of the routine tasks will be handled by the biots.”
“You’ve also expanded the sizes of the hospital and the schools—”
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“We were too conservative in our original allocations of the space,” Richard interrupted. “We didn’t leave enough unassigned floor area for activities that we cannot yet define specifically.”
The first two design meetings had lasted ten hours each. Both Richard and Nicole had marveled initially at how quickly the Eagle was able to integrate their comments into specific design recommendations. By the third meeting they were no longer amazed by the speed and accuracy of his synthesis. But the alien biot did surprise them regularly by showing a keen interest in some of the cultural details. For example, he queried them at length about the name the humans had given to their new colony. After Nicole had explained to him that it was essential that the habitat have some specific name, the Eagle asked about the meaning and significance of “New Eden.”
“The whole family discussed the name of the habitat for most of one evening,” Richard explained, “and there were many good suggestions, mostly derived from the history and literature of our species. Utopia was a leading candidate. Arcadia, Elysium, Paradise, Concordia, and Beauvois were all seriously considered. But in the end we thought New Eden was the best choice.”
“You see,” Nicole added, “the mythological Eden was a beginning, the start of what we might call our modern Western culture. It was a lush, verdant paradise, supposedly designed especially for humans by an all-powerful God who had also created everything else in the universe. That first Eden was rich in life-forms but devoid of technology.
“New Eden is also a beginning. But in almost every other way it is the opposite of the ancient garden. New Eden is a technological miracle without any life-forms, at least initially, except a few human beings.”
Once the general layout of the colony was complete, there were still hundreds of details that had to be decided. Katie and Patrick were given the task of designing the neighborhood parks for each of the four villages. Even though neither of them had ever seen an actual blade of
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grass, a real flower, or a tall tree, they had watched plenty of movies and seen many, many photographs. They ended up with four different, tasteful designs for the five acres of open area, communal gardens, and peaceful walkways in each village.
“But where will we get the grass? And the flowers?” Katie asked the Eagle.
“They will be brought by the people from Earth,” the Eagle replied.
“How will they know what to bring?”
“Someone will tell them.”
It was also Katie who pointed out that the design of New Eden had omitted a key element, one that had played a major role in the bedtime stories her mother had told her when she was a little girl. ‘”I’ve never seen a zoo,” she said. “Can we have one in New Eden?”
The Eagle altered die master plan during the next design session to include a small zoo at the edge of Sherwood Forest.
Richard worked with the Eagle on most of the technological details for New Eden. Nicole’s area of speciality was the living environment. The Eagle had originally suggested one kind of house with a standard set of furniture for all the homes in the colony. Nicole had laughed out loud. “You certainly haven’t learned very much about us as a species,” she said. “Human beings must have variety. Otherwise we become bored. If we make all the houses the same, people will start changing them immediately.”
Because she had only limited time (the Eagle’s requests for information were keeping Richard and Nicole working ten to twelve hours a day—luckily Michael and Simone were happy to look after the children), Nicole decided on eight basic house plans and four modular furniture arrangements. Altogether, then, there were thirty-two different living configurations. By varying the external’ design of the buildings in each of the four villages (details that Nicole worked out with Richard, after some useful input from art historian Michael O’Toole), Nicole finally
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