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

Elite looked up at Dr. Turner and squeezed his hand again. “I know very little of romance,” she said slowly, ‘^for I have had no experience with it. But I do know that

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what I feel when 1 think about you is wonderful. I admire you, I respect you, I may even love you. I would like to talk to my parents about this, of course … but yes, Dr. Robert Turner, if they do not object I would be very happy to marry you.”

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icole leaned over the basin and stared at her face in the mirror. She ran her fingers across the wrinkles under her eyes and smoothed her gray bangs. You’re almost an old woman, she said to herself. Then she smiled. “I grow old, I grow old, I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled,” she said out loud.

Nicole laughed and backed up from the mirror, turning herself around so that she could see what she looked like from the back. The kelly green dress that she planned to wear in Elite’s wedding fit snugly against her body, which was still trim and athletic after all the years. Not too bad, Nicole thought approvingly. At least Ellie won’t be embarrassed.

On the end table beside her bed were the two photographs of Genevieve and her French husband that Kenji Watanabe had given her. After Nicole returned to the bedroom, she picked up the photos and stared at them. 1 couldn’t be at your wedding, Genevieve, she thought suddenly with a burst of sadness. / never even met your husband.

Struggling with her emotions, Nicole crossed quickly

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over to the-other side of the bedroom. She stared for almost a minute at a photograph of Simone and Michael O’Toole, taken the day of their wedding at the Node. And I left you only a week after your wedding. . . . You were so very young, Simone, Nicole thought to herself, but in many ways you were far more mature than Ellie—

She did not let herself finish the thought. There was too much heartache in remembering either Simone or Genevieve. It was healthier to focus on the present. Nicole purposely reached up and grabbed the individual picture of Ellie that was hanging on the wall beside her brothers and sisters. So you will be my third daughter to marry, Nicole thought. It seems impossible. Sometimes life moves much too fast.

A montage of images of Ellie flashed through Nicole’s mind. She saw again the shy little baby lying beside her in Rama II, Ellie’s awestruck little girl face as they approached the Node in the shuttle, her new adolescent features at the moment of awakening from the long sleep, and finally Ellie’s mature determination and courage as she spoke in front of the citizens of New Eden in defense of Dr. Turner’s program. It was a powerful emotional journey into the past.

Nicole replaced Ellie’s picture on the wall and started to undress. She had just hung her dress in the closet when she heard a strange sound, like someone crying, at the very limit of her hearing. What was that? she wondered. Nicole sat still for several minutes, but didn’t hear any other noises. When she stood up, however, she suddenly had the eerie feeling that both Genevieve and Simone were in the room with her. Nicole glanced around her quickly, but she was still alone.

What is going on with me? she asked herself. Have I been working too hard? Has the combination of the Marti-nez case and the wedding pushed me over the brink? Or is this another of my psychic episodes?

Nicole tried to calm herself by breathing slowly and deeply. She was not, however, able to shake the feeling that Genevieve and Simone were indeed there in the room with her. Their presence beside her was so strong that Nicole had to restrain herself to keep from talking to them.

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She remembered clearly the discussions that she had had with Simone prior to her marriage to Michael O’Toole. Maybe that’s why they are here, Nicole thought. They’ve come to remind me that I’ve been so busy with my work, I haven’t had my wedding talk with Ellie. Nicole laughed out loud nervously, but the goose bumps remained on her arm.

Forgive me, my darlings, Nicole said to both Ellk’s photograph and the spirits of Genevieve and Simone in the room. / promise that tomorrow—

This time the shriek was unmistakable. Nicole froze in her bedroom, the adrenaline coursing through her system. Within seconds she was running across the house to the study where Richard was working.

“Richard,” she said, just before reaching the door to the study, “did you hear—”

Nicole stopped herself in midsentence. The study was a mess. Richard was on the floor, surrounded by a pair of monitors and a jumbled pile of electronic equipment. The little robot Prince Hal was in one hand and Richard’s precious portable computer from the Newton mission was in the other. Three biots—two Garcias and a partially disassembled Einstein—were bending over him.

“Why, hello, darling,” Richard said nonchalantly. “What are you doing here? I thought you’d be asleep by now.”

“Richard, I am certain that I heard an avian shriek. Only about a minute ago. It was close by.” Nicole hesitated, trying to decide whether or not to tell him about the visit from Genevieve and Simone.

Richard’s brow furrowed. “I didn’t hear anything,” he replied. “Did any of you?” he asked the biots. They all shook their heads, including the Einstein, whose chest was wide open and connected by four cables to the monitors on the floor.

“I know I heard something,” Nicole reiterated. She was silent for a moment. Is this another sign of terminal stress? she asked herself. Nicole now surveyed the chaos on the floor in front of her. “By the way, darling, what are you doing?”

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“This?” Richard said with a vague sweep of his hand. “Oh, it’s nothing special. Just another project of mine.”

“Richard Wakefield,” she said quickly, “you are not telling me the truth. This mess all over the floor could not possibly be ‘nothing special’—I know you better than that. Now, what’s so secret—”

Richard had changed the displays on all three of his active monitors and was now shaking his head vigorously. “I don’t like this,” he mumbled. “Not at all.” He glanced up at Nicole. “Have you by any chance accessed my recent data files that are stored in the central supercomputer? Even inadvertently?”

“No, of course not. I don’t even know your entry code. . . . But that’s not what I want to talk about—”

“Somebody has.” Richard quickly keyed in a diagnostic security subroutine and studied one of the monitors. “At least five times in the last three weeks. You’re certain that it wasn’t you?”

“Yes, Richard,” Nicole said emphatically. “But you’re still trying to change the subject. I want you to tell me what this is all about.”

Richard set Prince Hal down on the floor in front of him and looked up at Nicole. “I’m not quite ready to tell you, darling,” he said after a moment’s hesitation. “Please give me a couple of days.”

Nicole was puzzled. At length, however, her face brightened. “All right, darling. If it’s a wedding present for Ellie, then I’ll gladly wait.”

Richard returned to his work. Nicole plopped down in the only chair in the room that was not cluttered. As she watched her husband, she realized how tired she was. She convinced herself that her fatigue must have caused her to imagine the shriek. And the visits from Simone and Genevieve.

“Darling,” Nicole said softly a minute or two later.

“Yes,” he answered, glancing up at her from the floor.

“Do you ever wonder what’s really going on here in New Eden? I mean, why have we been left so utterly alone by the creators of Rama? Most of the colonists go about their lives with hardly a thought about the fact that

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they’re traveling in an interstellar spaceship constructed by extraterrestrials. How can this be possible? Why doesn’t the Eagle or some other equally marvelous manifestation of their superior alien technology suddenly appear? Then maybe our petty problems—”

Nicole stopped when Richard started laughing. “What is it?” she said.

“This reminds me of a conversation that I had once with Michael O’Toole. He was frustrated because I would not accept on faith the eyewitness reports of the apostles. He then told me that God should have known that we were a species of doubting Thomases and should have scheduled frequent return visits from the resurrected Christ.”

“But that situation was entirely different,” Nicole argued.

“Was it?” Richard replied. “What the early Christians reported about Jesus could not have been any harder to accept than our description of the Node and our long, time-dilating journey at relativistic velocities. . . . It’s far more comforting for the other colonists to believe that this spaceship was created as an experiment by the ISA. Very few of them understand science well enough to know that Rama is way beyond our technological capability.”