and will dwell mostly on ocean bottoms, building our homes and factories and spaceships. They in turn will produce another generation that looks like me.”
“No, no,” Nicole replied eventually. “We have only a single manifestation. Our children always resemble their parents.”
The conversation lasted for five more minutes. The two spacefarers talked mostly about biology. The alien was especially impressed by the wide thermal range in which humans could function successfully. It told Nicole that members of its species were unable to survive if the ambient temperature of the surrounding liquid was outside a narrow range.
Nicole was fascinated by the creature’s description of a watery planet whose surface was almost totally covered by huge mats of photosynthetic organisms. The caped eels, or whatever they were, lived in the shallows just below these hundreds of different organisms and used the photo-synthesizers for practically everything—food, building materials, even as reproductive aids.
At length the Eagle told Nicole that it was time to depart. She waved at the alien, which was still pressed against the window. It responded with a final flurry of bubbles and unwrapped its two ends. Seconds later the distance between the two capsules was already hundreds of meters.
It was dark again inside the moving sphere. The Eagle was silent. Nicole was exhilarated. Her mind continued to race, still actively formulating questions for the alien creature with whom she had had the brief encounter. Do you have families? she thought. And if so, how do dissimilar creatures live together? Can you communicate with the bottom-dwellers who are your children?
Another genre of question intruded into Nicole’s stream of consciousness and she suddenly felt slightly disappointed in herself. / was much too clinical, too scientific, she thought. / should have asked about God, life after death, even ethics.
“It would have been virtually impossible to have had what you would call a philosophical conversation,” the Eagle said a few moments later after Nicole had expressed
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a lack of satisfaction in the topics that had been discussed. “There was absolutely no common ground for such an exchange. Until each of you knew a few basic facts about the other, there were no references for a discussion of values or other meaningful issues.”
Still, Nicole reflected, / could have tried. Who knows? That horseshoe-shaped alien might have had some answers. . . .
Nicole was jolted out of her contemplation by the sound of human voices. As she looked questioningly at the Eagle, the sphere turned completely around and Nicole saw that they were hovering only a few meters away from her living quarters.
A light went on in the bedroom that Michael and Si-mone were sharing. “Is that Benjy?” Nicole heard her daughter whisper to her husband of a few days.
“I think so,” Michael replied.
Nicole watched quietly as Simone rose from the bed, pulled her robe about her, and crossed into the hallway. When she switched on the light in the living room, Simone saw her retarded younger brother curled up on the sofa.
“What are you doing here, Benjy?” Simone asked kindly. “You should be in bed—it’s very, very late.” She stroked her brother’s anxious brow.
“I could not sleep,” Benjy replied with effort. “I was wor-ried a-bout Ma-ma.”
“She’ll be home soon,” Simone said soothingly. “She’ll be home soon.”
Nicole felt a lump in her throat and a few tears eased into her eyes. She looked over at the Eagle, then at the illuminated apartment in front of her, and finally at the firefly vehicles in the distance above her head. She took a deep breath. “All right,” Nicole said slowly, “I’m ready to do die video.”
“I’m jealous,” Richard said. “I really am. I would have been willing to trade both my arms for a conversation with that creature.”
“It was amazing,” Nicole said. “Even now, I’m still having difficulty believing that it actually happened. . . .
194 ARTHUR C. CLARKE AND GENTRY LEE –
It’s also amazing that the Eagle somehow knew how I would respond to everything.”
“He was just guessing. He really could not have expected to have solved his problem with you that easily. You didn’t even make him answer your question about their need for a reproductive couple. …”
“Yes, I did,” Nicole replied somewhat defensively. “He explained to me that human embryology was such an astonishingly complicated process that even they couldn’t possibly know the exact role played by a human mother without ever having watched a fetus mature and develop.”
“I’m sorry, darling,” Richard said quickly. “I wasn’t implying that you really had any choice—”
“I felt as if they were at least trying to satisfy my objections.” Nicole sighed. “Maybe I’m kidding myself. After all, hi the end I did make the video, exactly as they had planned.”
Richard put his arms around Nicole. “As I said, you really had no choice, darling. Don’t be too hard on yourself.”
Nicole kissed Richard and sat up in bed. “But what if they are taking this data so that they can prepare an efficient invasion, or something like that?”
“We’ve discussed all this before,” Richard replied. “Their technological capabilities are so advanced they could take over the Earth in minutes if that was their goal. The Eagle himself has pointed out that if invasion and subjugation was their objective, they could accomplish it with a far less elaborate procedure.”
“Now who’s the trusting one?” Nicole said, managing a smile.
“Not trusting. Just realistic. I’m certain that the overall welfare of the human species is not a significant factor in the priority queue of the Nodal Intelligence. But I do think you should stop worrying about being an accomplice in crime with your video. The Eagle is right. Most likely you have made the ‘acquisition process’ less difficult for the inhabitants of Earth as well.”
They were silent for a few minutes. “Darling,” Nicole
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said at length. “Why do you think we’re not going directly
to the Earth?”
“My guess is that we must stop somewhere else first.
Presumably to pick up another species in the same phase
of the project as we are.”
“And they will live in that other module inside Rama?” “That’s what I would assume,” Richard replied.
9
“he day of departure was January 13, 2215, according to the calendar that had been fastidiously kept by Richard and/or Nicole ever since Rama had escaped from the nuclear phalanx. Of course this date didn’t really mean anything—except to them. Their long trip to Sirius at slightly more man half the speed of light had slowed time inside Rama, at least relative to the Earth, so the date they were using was a complete artifice. Richard estimated that the actual date on the Earth, at the time of their departure from the Node, was three to four years later, in 2217 or 2218. It was impossible for him to compute the Earth date exactly, since he did not have an accurate velocity time history from the years that they had traveled inside Rama. Thus Richard could only approximate the relativistic corrections necessary to transform their own time basis into the one being experienced on the Earth.
“The date on Earth right now really has no significance to us anyway,” Richard explained to Nicole soon after they had awakened for their final day at the Node. “Be-
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sides,” he continued, “it’s almost certain that we will be returning to our solar system at extremely high velocities, meaning there will be additional time dilation before we rendezvous in Mars orbit.”
Nicole had never really understood relativity—it was totally inconsistent with her intuition—and she certainly wasn’t going to spend any energy worrying about it on her last day before separating from Simone and Michael. She knew mat the final partings would be extremely difficult, for everybody, and she wanted to concentrate all her resources on those last emotional moments.
“The Eagle said that he would come for us at eleven,” Nicole said to Richard while they were dressing. “I was hoping that after breakfast we could all sit together in the living room. I want to encourage the children to express their feelings.”
Breakfast was light, even cheerful, but when the eight members of the family gathered together in the living room, each mindful that there were less than two hours remaining before the Eagle arrived to take everyone but Michael and Simone away, the conversation was forced and strained.
The newlyweds sat together on the love seat, facing Richard, Nicole, and the other four children. Katie, as usual, was completely frenetic. She talked constantly. She jumped from subject to subject, steering safely away from any discussion of the imminent departure. Katie was in the middle of a long monologue about a wild dream she had had the night before when her story was interrupted by the sound of two voices coming from the entryway to the master suite.
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