“That’s certainly brave of you, Watanabe, but unnecessary. No, I think we’ll all go forward. Cautiously, of course. Leaving a couple of men at the rear to report in case we’re zapped by a ray gun or something.”
The commander turned on his radio. “Deputy Ulanov, Macmillan here. We’ve encountered two beings of some kind. They’re either human or in human disguise. One looks like Abraham Lincoln and the other like that famous Mexican cosmonaut. . . . What’s that, Dmitri? . . . Yes, you copy correctly. Lincoln and Garcia. We’ve encountered Lincoln and Garcia in a tunnel inside Rama. You may report that to the others. . . . Now, I’m leaving Sny-der and Finzi here while the rest of us advance toward the strangers.”
The two figures did not move as the fourteen explorers from the Pinta approached. The soldiers were spread out in front of the group, ready to fire at the fist sign of trouble.
“Welcome to Rama,” Abraham Lincoln said when the first scout was only twenty meters away. “We are here to escort you to your new homes.”
Commander Macmillan did not respond immediately. It was the irrepressible Max Puckett who broke the silence. “Are you a ghost?” he shouted. “I mean, are you really Abraham Lincoln?”
“Of course not,” the Lincoln replied matter-of-factly. “Bom Benita Garcia and I are human biots. You will find
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five categories of human biots in New Eden, each designed with specific capabilities to free humans from tedious, repetitive tasks. My areas of specialty arc clerical and legal work, accounting, bookkeeping and housekeeping, home and office management, and other organizational tasks.”
Max was dumbfounded. Ignoring his commander’s order to “stand back,” Max walked up to within several centimeters of the Lincoln. “This is some fucking robot,” he muttered to himself. Oblivious to any possible danger, Max next reached out and put his fingers on the Lincoln’s face, first touching the skin around the nose and then feeling the whiskers in the long black beard. “Incredible,” he said out loud. “Absolutely incredible.”
“We have been manufactured with very careful attention to detail,” the Lincoln now said. “Our skin is chemically similar to yours and our eyes operate on the same basic optical principles as yours, but we are not dynamic, constantly renewing creatures like you. Our subsystems must be maintained and sometimes even replaced by technicians.”
Max’s bold move had defused all the tension. By mis time me entire scouting party, including Commander Macmillan, were poking and probing the two biots. Throughout the examination both the Lincoln and the Garcia answered questions about their design and implementation. At one point Kenji realized that Max Puckett had withdrawn from the rest of the scouting party and was sitting by himself against one of the walls of the tunnel.
Kenji walked over to his friend. “What’s the matter, Max?” he asked.
Max shook his head. “What kind of genius could produce something like these two? It’s positively scary.” He was silent for several seconds. “Maybe I’m strange, but those two bi-ots frighten me much more than this huge cylinder.”
The Lincoln and the Garcia walked with the scouting party to what appeared to be the end of the tunnel. Within seconds a door opened in the wall and the biots motioned for the humans to go inside. Under questioning from Mac-
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millan, the biots explained that the humans were about to enter a “transportation device” that would cany them to the outskirts of the Earth habitat.
Macmillan communicated what the biots had said to Dmitri Ulanov on the Pinta and told his Russian deputy to “blast off” if he didn’t hear anything from them within forty-eight hours.
The tube ride was astonishing. It reminded Max Puckett of the giant roller coaster at the state fair in Dallas, Texas. The bullet-shaped vehicle sped along an enclosed, helical track that dropped all the way from the bowl-shaped northern end of Rama to the Central Plain below. Outside the tube, which was encased in a heavy transparent plastic of some kind, Kenji and the others glimpsed the vast network of ladders and stairways that traversed the same territory as their ride. But they did not see the incomparable vistas reported by the previous Rama explorers—their view to the south was blocked by an extremely tall wall of metallic gray.
The ride took less than five minutes. It deposited them in an enclosed annulus that completely circumscribed the Earth habitat. When the Pinta scouts exited from the tube, the weightlessness in which they had been living since they had departed from Earth had vanished. The gravity was close to normal. “The atmosphere in this corridor, like the atmosphere in New Eden, is just like your home planet,” the Lincoln biot said. “But that is not the case in me region on our right, outside the walls protecting your habitat.”
The annulus surrounding New Eden was dimly lit, so the colonists were not prepared for the bright sunlight that greeted them when the huge door opened and they entered their new world. On the short walk to the nearby train station they carried their space helmets in their hands. The men passed empty buildings on both sides of the path— small structures that could be houses or shops, as well as a larger one (“That will be an elementary school,” the Benita Garcia informed them) right opposite the station itself.
A train was waiting for them when they arrived. The sleek subway car with soft, comfortable seats, and a con-
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stantly updating electronic status board, raced quickly toward the center of New Eden, where they were to have a “comprehensive briefing,” according to the Lincoln biot. The train ran first along the side of a beautiful, crystalline lake (“Lake Shakespeare,” the Benita Garcia said), and men turned to the left, heading away from the light gray walls that enclosed the colony. During the last part of the ride a large, barren mountain dominated the landscape on the right-hand side of the train.
Throughout the ride the entire contingent from the Pinta was very quiet. In truth they were all completely overwhelmed. Not even in the creative imagination of Kenji Watanabe had anything like what they were seeing ever been envisioned. It was all much too large, much more magnificent than they had pictured.
The central city, where all the major buildings had been located by the designers of New Eden, was the final stunner. The members of the party stood silently and gawked at the array of large and impressive structures that formed the heart of the colony. That the buildings were still empty only added to the mystical quality of the entire experience. Kenji Watanabe and Max Puckett were the last two men to enter the edifice where the briefing was to occur.
“What do you think?” Kenji asked Max as the two of mem stood on the top of the stairs of the administration building and surveyed the astonishing complex around them.
“I cannot think,” answered Max, the awe in his tone quite obvious. “This whole place defies thought. It is heaven, Alice’s wonderland, and all the fairy tales of my boyhood wrapped up in one package. I keep pinching myself to make sure that I’m not dreaming.”
“On the screen in front of you,” the Lincoln biot said, “is an overview map of New Eden. Each of you will be given a full packet of maps, including all the roads and structures in the colony. We are here, in Central City, which was designed to be the administrative center of New Eden. Residences have been built, along with shops, small offices, and schools, in the four corners of the rectangle mat is enclosed by the outside wall. Because the naming
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of these four towns will be left to the inhabitants, we will refer to them today as the Northeast., Northwest, Southeast, and Southwest villages. In doing this we are following the convention, adopted by earlier Roman explorers from the Earth, of referring to the end of Rama where your spacecraft docked as the north end.
“Each of the four sides of New Eden has an allocated geographic function. The freshwater lake along the south edge of the colony, as you have already been informed, is called Lake Shakespeare. Most of the fish and water life that you have brought with you will live there, although some of die specimens may be perfect for emplacement in the two rivers that empty into Lake Shakespeare from Mount Olympus, here on the east side of the colony, and Sherwood Forest on the west side.
“At present both the slopes of Mount Olympus and all the regions of Sherwood Forest, as well as the village parks and greenbelts throughout the colony, are covered with a fine lattice of gas exchange devices, or GEDs, as we call them. These tiny mechanisms serve but one function—they convert carbon dioxide into oxygen. In a very true sense they are mechanical plants. They are to be replaced by all the real plants that you have brought from
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