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

Katie was another issue. Richard always argued that Nicole was much too hard on Katie. He also blames me, Nicole thought as she gazed at the faraway lights, for not spending enough time with her. He contends my jumping into colony politics left the children with only a part-time mother at the most critical period of their lives.

Katie was almost never at home anymore. She still had a room in the Wakefield house, but she spent most of her nights in one of the fancy apartments that Nakamura had built inside the Vegas compound.

“How do you pay the rent?” Nicole had asked her daughter one night, just before the usual unpleasantness.

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“How do you think, Mother?” Katie had answered belligerently. “I work. I have plenty of time. I’m only taking three courses at the university.”

“What kind of work do you do?” Nicole had asked.

“I’m a hostess, an entertainer . . . you know, whatever is needed,” Katie had answered vaguely.

Nicole turned away from the lights of Vegas. Of course, she said to, herself, it is entirely understandable that Katie is confused. She never had any adolescence. But still, she doesn’t seem to be getting any better. . . . Nicole started walking briskly up the mountain again, trying to dispel her mounting gloom.

Between five hundred and a thousand meters in altitude, the mountain was covered with thick trees that were already five meters high. Here the path to the summit ran between the mountain and the outside wall of the colony in an extremely dark stretch that lasted for more than a kilometer. There was one break in the blackness, near the end, at a lookout point facing north.

Nicole had reached the highest point in her ascent. She stopped at the lookout and stared across at San Miguel. There is the proof, she thought, shaking her head, that we have failed here in New Eden. Despite everything, there is poverty and despair in paradise.

She had seen the problem coming, had even accurately predicted it toward the end of her one-year term as provisional governor. Ironically, the process that had produced San Miguel, where the standard of living was only half what it was in the other three New Eden villages, had begun soon after the arrival of the Pinta. That first group of colonists had mostly settled in the Southeast Village, which would later become Beauvois, setting a precedent that was accentuated after the Nina reached Rama. As the free settlement plan was implemented, almost all the Orientals decided to live together in Hakone; the Europeans, white Americans, and middle Asians chose either Positano or what was left of Beauvois. The Mexicans, other Hispanics, black Americans, and Africans all gravitated toward San Miguel.

As governor, Nicole had tried to resolve the de facto segregation in the colony with a Utopian resettlement plan

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that would have allocated to each of the four villages racial percentages that mirrored the colony as a whole. Her proposal might have been accepted very early in the colony’s history, especially right after the days in the somnarium, when most of the other citizens viewed Nicole as a goddess. But it was too late after more than a year. Free enterprise had already created gaps in both personal wealth and real estate values. Even Nicole’s most loyal followers realized the impracticality of her resettlement concept at that point.

After Nicole’s term as governor was completed, the Senate had resoundingly approved Kenji’s appointment of Nicole as one of New Eden’s five permanent judges. Nevertheless, her image in the colony suffered considerably when the remarks she had made in defense of the aborted resettlement plan became widely circulated. Nicole had argued that it was essential for the colonists to live in small, integrated neighborhoods to develop any real appreciation of racial and cultural differences. Her critics had thought that her views were “hopelessly naive.”

Nicole stared at the twinkling lights of San Miguel for several more minutes as she warmed down from her strenuous climb up the mountain. Just before she turned around and headed back toward her home in Beauvois, she suddenly recalled another set of twinkling lights, from the town of Davos, in Switzerland, back on the planet Earth. During Nicole’s last ski vacation, she and her daughter Genevieve had had dinner on the mountain above Davos and, after eating, had held hands in the bracing cold out on the restaurant balcony. The lights of Davos had shone like tiny jewels many kilometers below them. Tears came into Nicole’s eyes as she thought of the grace and humor of her first daughter, whom she had not seen for so many years. Thank you again, Kenji, she mumbled as she began to walk, recalling the photographs her new friend had brought from Earth, for sharing with me your visit with Genevieve.

It was again black all around her as Nicole wound back down the side of the mountain. The outer wall of the colony was now on her left. She continued to think about life in New Eden. We need special courage now, she said

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to herself. Courage, and values, and vision. But in her heart she feared the worst was still ahead for the colonists. Unfortunately, she reflected gloomily, Richard and I and even the children have remained outsiders, despite everything we have tried to do. It is unlikely that we will ho able to change anything very much.

Richard checked to ensure that the three Einstein biots had all properly copied the procedures and data that had been on the several monitors in his study. As the four of them were leaving the house, Nicole gave him a kiss.

“You are a wonderful man, Richard Wakefield,” she said.

“You’re the only one who thinks so,” he replied, forcing a smile.

“I’m also the only one who knows,” Nicole said. She paused for a moment. “Seriously, darling,” she continued, “1 appreciate what you’re doing. I know—”

“I won’t be very late,” he interrupted. “The three Als and I have only two basic ideas left to try. … If we aren’t successful today, we’re giving up.”

With the three Einsteins following close behind him, Richard hurried down to the Beauvois station and caught the train for Positano. The train stopped momentarily by the big park on Lake Shakespeare where the Settlement Day picnic had been two months earlier. Richard and his supporting biot cast disembarked several minutes later at Positano and walked through the village to the southwest comer of the colony. There, after having their identification checked by one human and two Garcias, they were allowed to pass through the colony exit into the annulus that circumscribed New Eden. There was one more brief electronic inspection before they reached the only door that had been cut in the thick external wall surrounding the habitat. It swung open and Richard led the biots into Rama itself.

Richard had had misgivings when, eighteen months earlier, the Senate had voted to develop and deploy a penetrating probe to test the environmental conditions in Rama just outside their module. Richard had served on the committee that had reviewed the engineering design of the

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probe; he had been afraid that the external environment might be overwhelmingly hostile and that the design of the probe might not properly protect the integrity of their habitat. Much time and money had been spent guaranteeing that the boundaries of New Eden were hermetically sealed during the entire procedure, even while the probe was inching its way through the wall.

Richard had lost credibility in the colony when the environment in Rama had turned out to be not significantly different from that in New Eden. Outside there was permanent darkness, and some small, periodic variations in both atmospheric pressure and constituents, but the ambient Raman environment was so similar to the one in the colony that the human explorers did not even need their space suits. Within two weeks after the first probe revealed the benign atmosphere in Rama, the colonists had completed the mapping of the area of the Central Plain that was now accessible to them.

New Eden and a second, almost identical rectangular construct to the south, which Richard and Nicole both believed to be a habitat for a second life-form, were enclosed together in a larger, also rectangular region whose extremely tall, metallic gray barriers separated it from the rest of Rama. The barriers on the north and south sides of this larger region were extensions of the walls of the habitats themselves. On both the east and west side of the two enclosed habitats, however, there were about two kilometers of open space.

At the four corners of this outer rectangle were massive cylindrical structures. Richard and the other technological personnel in the colony were convinced that the impenetrable corner cylinders contained the fluids and pumping mechanisms whereby the environmental conditions inside the habitats were maintained.