His first serious attempt on die final day was a complete failure. Guessing that the accuracy of the timing of his transmission might be the problem, he and the Einsteins next developed a sequencing control routine that would enable them to issue a signal with femtosecond precision, so that the cylinders would receive the command within an extremely tiny time slice.
An instant after Richard had sent what he thought was a new set of parameters to the cylinders, a loud alarm sounded in the control center. Within seconds a wraithlike image of the Eagle appeared in the air above Richard and the biots.
“Human beings,” the holographic Eagle said, “be very careful. Great care and knowledge were used to design the delicate balance of your habitat. Do not change these critical algorithms unless there is a genuine emergency.”
Even though he was shocked, Richard acted immediately, ordering the Einsteins to record what they were seeing. The Eagle repeated his warning a second time and then vanished, but the entire scene was stored in the videorecording subsystems of the biots.
3
A;
re you going to be depressed forever?” Nicole asked, looking across the breakfast table at her husband. “Besides, thus far nothing terrible has happened. The weather has been fine.”
“I think it’s better than before, Uncle Richard,” Patrick offered. “You’re a hero at the university—even if some of the kids do think you’re part alien.”
Richard managed a smile. “The government is not following my recommendations,” he said quietly, “and is paying no heed whatsoever to the Eagle’s warning. There are even some people in the engineering office who are saying I created the hologram of the Eagle myself. Can you imagine that?”
“Kenji believes what you told him, darling.”
“Then why is he letting those weather people continually increase the strength of the commanded response? They can’t possibly predict the long-term effects.”
“What is it you’re worried about, Father?” Ellie asked a moment later.
“Managing such a large volume of gas is a very compli-
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cated process, EHie, and I have great respect for the ETs who designed the New Eden infrastructure in the first place. They were the ones who insisted the carbon dioxide and particulate concentrations must be maintained below specified levels. They must have known something.”
Patrick and EHie finished their breakfasts and excused themselves. Several minutes later, after the children had left the house, Nico!e walked around the table and put her hands on Richard’s shoulders. “Do you remember the night we discussed Albert Einstein with Patrick and Ellie?”
Richard looked at Nicole with a furrowed brow.
“Later on that night, when we were in bed, I commented that Einstein’s discovery of the relationship between matter and energy was ‘horrible,’ because it led to the existence of nuclear weapons. … Do you remember your response?”
Richard shook his head.
“You told me that Einstein was a scientist, whose life work was searching for knowledge and truth. ‘There is no knowledge that is horrible,’ you said. ‘Only what other human beings do with that knowledge can be called horrible.’ ”
Richard smiled. “Are you trying to absolve me of responsibility on this weather issue?”
“Maybe,” Nicole replied. She reached down and kissed him on the lips. “I know that you are one of the smartest, most creative human beings who ever lived and I don’t like to see you carrying all the burdens of the colony on your shoulders.”
Richard kissed her back with considerable vigor. “Do you think we can finish before Benjy wakes up?” he whispered. “He doesn’t have school today and he stayed up very late last night.”
“Maybe,” Nicole answered with a coquettish grin. “We can at least try. My first case is not until ten o’clock.”
Eponine’s senior class at Central High School, called simply “Art and Literature,” encompassed many aspects of the culture that the colonists had at least temporarily
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left behind. In her basic curriculum, Eponine covered a multicultural, eclectic set of sources, encouraging the students to pursue independent study in any specific areas they found stimulating. Although she always used lesson plans and a syllabus in her teaching, Eponine was the kind of instructor who tailored each of her classes to the interests of the students.
Eponine herself thought Les Miserables by Victor Hugo was the greatest novel ever written, and the nineteenth century impressionist painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir, from her home city of Limoges, the finest painter who had ever lived. She included the works of both of her countrymen in the class, but carefully structured the rest of the source material to give fair representation to other nations and cultures.
‘ Since the Kawabata biots helped her each year with the class play, it was natural to use the real Kawabata’s novels A Thousand Cranes and Snow Country as examples of. Japanese literature. The three weeks on poetry ranged from Frost to Rilke to Omar Khayyam. However, the principal poetic focus was Benita Garcia, not only because of the presence of the Garcia biots all over New Eden, but also because Benita’s poetry and life were both fascinating to young people.
. There were only eleven students in Eponine’s senior class the year she was required to wear the red armband for having tested positive for RV-41 antibodies. The results of her test had presented the school administration with a difficult dilemma. Although the superintendent had courageously resisted the efforts of a strident group of parents, mostly from Hakone, who had demanded that Eponine be “dismissed” from the high school, he and his staff had nevertheless bowed somewhat to the hysteria in the colony by making Eponine’s senior course optional. As a result her class was much smaller than it had been in the previous two years.
Ellie Wakefield was Eponine’s favorite student. Despite the great gaps in the young woman’s knowledge due to her years asleep on the trip back to the solar system from the Node, her natural intelligence and hunger for learning made her a joy in the classroom. Eponine often asked Ellie
350 ARTHUR C. CLARKE AND GENTRY LEE
to perform special tasks. On the morning that the class began its study of Benita Garcia, which was, incidentally, the same morning that Richard Wakefield had discussed with his daughter his worries about the weather control activities in the colony, Ellie had been asked to memoriz’; one of the poems from Benita Garcia’s first book, Dreams of a Mexican Girl, written when the Mexican woman was still a teenager. Before Ellie’s recitation, however, Epo-nine tried to fire the imaginations of the young people with a short lecture on Benita’s life.
‘ ‘The real Benita Garcia was one of the most amazing women who ever lived,” Eponine said, nodding at the expressionless Garcia biot in the corner who helped her with all the routine chores of teaching. “Poet, cosmonaut, political leader, mystic—her life was both a reflection of the history of her time and an inspiration for everyone.
“Her father was a large landowner in the Mexican state of Yucatan, far from the artistic and political heart of the nation. Benita was an only child, the daughter of a Mayan mother and a much older father. She spent most of her childhood alone on the family plantation that touched the marvelous Puuc Mayan ruins at Uxmal. As a small girl Benita often played among the pyramids and buildings of that thousand-year-old ceremonial center.
“She was a gifted student from the beginning, but it was her imagination and elan that truly separated her from the others in her class. Benita wrote her first poem when she was nine, and by the age of fifteen, at which time she was in a Catholic boarding school in the Yucatecan capital of Me’rida, two of her poems had been published in the prestigious Diario de Mexico.
“After finishing secondary school, Benita surprised her teachers and her family by announcing that she wanted to be a cosmonaut, hi 2129 she was the first Mexican woman ever admitted to the Space Academy in Colorado. When she graduated four years later, the deep cutbacks in space had already begun. Following the crash of 2134 the world plunged into the depression known as the Great Chaos and virtually all space exploration was stopped. Benita was laid off by the ISA in 2137 and thought that her space career was over.
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“In 2144 one of the last interplanetary transport cruisers, the James Martin, limped home from Mars to Earth carrying mostly women and children from the Martian colonies. The spacecraft was barely able to make it into Earth orbit and it appeared as if all the passengers would die. Benita Garcia and three of her friends from the cosmonaut corps jerryrigged a rescue vehicle and managed to save twenty-four of the voyagers in the most spectacular space mission of all times. …”
Ellie’s mind floated free from Eponine’s narrative and imagined how exhilarating it must have been-on Benita’s rescue mission. Benita had flown her space vehicle manually, without a lifeline to mission operations on the Earth, and risked her life to save others. Could there be any greater commitment to one’s fellow members of the species?
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