“There were three lairs underneath the city,” Nicole was explaining to Dr. Blue. “One for us, one for the avians, and a third occupied by your cousins. I was down inside the avian lair when Richard came to-rescue me—” She stopped. Nicole realized that she had told Dr. Blue the story before and that octospiders never forgot anything. “Do you mind?” she asked.
“Please continue,” the octospider said.
“During the whole time that we were here, none of us on this island knew that there were entrances to some of these buildings. Isn’t that amazing? Oh, how I wish that Richard were still alive and I could have seen his face when the Eagle opened the door to the octahedron. He would have been so shocked.
“Anyway,” Nicole said, “Richard came back inside Rama to find me. And then we fell in love and figured out how to escape from the island using the avians. It was such a glorious time, so many years ago. . . .”
Nicole stepped forward, grabbed the rail with^both hands, and gazed around her. In her mind’s eye she could see New York as it had been. Over there were the ramparts.
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Out beyond was the Cylindrical Sea. And somewhere in the middle of those ugly heaps of metal was the barn and the pit in which I nearly died.
The tears came suddenly, surprising her. They poured out of Nicole’s eyes and ran down her cheeks. She did not turn around. Five of my six children were born over there, Nicole thought, underneath that ground. Just outside our lair we found Richard after he had been gone for two years. He was comatose.
The memories came tumbling into her mind, one after another, each bringing a vague heartache and a new flow of tears. Nicole could not stop them. At one moment she was again descending into the octospider lair to save her daughter Katie, at another she was feeling the excitement and exhilaration of soaring over the Cylindrical Sea, attached by a harness to three avians. We must eventually die, Nicole thought, wiping her eyes with the back of her hand, because there is not any room left in our brains for more memories.
As Nicole gazed out across the broken landscape of New York, transforming it in her mind’s eye into what it had been years before, she had a sharp recollection of an even earlier epoch in her life. She remembered a cold late autumn evening at Beauvois during her last days on Earth, just before Genevieve and she had gone skiing at Davos. Nicole was sitting with her father and her daughter in front of the fireplace in their villa. Pierre had been very reflective that evening. He had shared with Nicole and Genevieve many special moments from his courtship with Nicole’s mother.
Later, at bedtime, Genevieve had asked her mother a question. “Why does Grampa talk so much about what happened long ago?” the teenager had said.
“Because that is what is important to him,” Nicole had answered.
Forgive me, Nicole thought, still staring out at the skyscrapers in front of her. Forgive me, all you elderly people whose stories f ignored. I did not mean to be rude or condescending. I just did not understand what it meant to be old.
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Nicole sighed, took a deep breath, and turned around. “Are you all right?” Dr. Blue asked. She nodded. “Thank you for this,” Nicole said* to the Eagle, her voice breaking. “I’m ready to go now.”
She saw the lights as soon as their small shuttle cleared the hangar. Even though the lights were still over a hundred kilometers away, they were already a magnificent sight against the background of blackness and distant stars.
‘This Node has an extra vertex,” the Eagle said, “forming a perfect tetrahedron. The Node you visited near Sinus did not have a Knowledge Module.”
Nicole stared out the window of their shuttle, holding her breath. It looked unreal, like a figment of her imagination, this illuminated construction turning slowly in the distance. There were four large spheres at the vertices, connected to each other by six linear transportation corridors. Each of the spheres was exactly the same size. Each of the six long thin lines connecting them was exactly the same length. At this distance, the individual lights inside the transparent Node blurred together, so the entire facility appeared to be a great tetrahedral torch in the darkness of space.
“It’s beautiful,” Nicole said, unable to find any other words to express the awe she was feeling.
“You should see it from the observation deck of our living quarters,” Dr. Blue said from beside her. “It is dazzling. We are close enough that we can see the different lights inside the spheres and even follow the vehicles zooming back and forth along the transportation corridors. Many of the residents at the Grand Hotel stay on deck for hours at a time, amusing themselves by making guesses about the activities represented by the movement of the lights inside.”
Nicole felt goose bumps rising on her arm as she stared silently at the Node. She heard a faraway voice, Fraqcesca Sabatini’s voice, and a poem that Nicole had first memorized as a schoolgirl.
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“Tyger! Tyger! burning bright, In the forests of the night, What immortal hand or eye Could frame thy fearful symmetry?”
“Did he who made the Lamb make thee?” Nicole thought as the tetrahedron of light continued to turn. She remembered a late-night conversation with Michael O’Toole while they were staying at the Node near Sinus. “We must unfetter God after this experience,” he had said. “And remove our homocentric limitations on Him. The God who created the architects of the Node must surely be amused by our pathetic attempts to define Him in terms we humans can readily understand.”
Nicole was fascinated by the Node. Even from this distance, as it turned slowly around, the different aspects presented by the tetrahedron were hypnotizing. As she watched, the facility moved into a position where one of the four equilateral triangles forming its empty faces was in a plane perpendicular to the flight path of the shuttle. The Node looked entirely different, as if it had no depth. The fourth vertex, which was in reality some thirty kilometers beyond the plane on the other side from Nicole, appeared to be a nexus of light in the center of the facing triangle.
When the shuttle abruptly changed direction, the Node was no longer visible. Instead, off in the distance, Nicole could see a solitary light yellow star. “That’s Tau Ceti,” the Eagle said to her, “a star very much like your sun.”
“And why, if I may ask,” Nicole said, “is this Node here, in the neighborhood of Tau Ceti?”
“It is an optimum temporary placement,” the Eagle answered, “to support our data-acquisition activities in this part of the galaxy.”
Nicole nudged Dr. Blue. “Do your engineers sometimes speak meaningless gobbledygook in color?” she said with a smile. “Our host just gave us a nonanswer.”
“We are more humble as a species than you are,” the octospider replied. “Again, it’s probably because of our
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relationship with the Precursors. We don’t pretend that we should be able to understand everything.”
“We have spoken very little about your species, during the time since I awakened,” Nicole said to Dr. Blue, suddenly feeling self-centered and apologetic, “although I do remember your telling me that your former Chief Optimizer, her staff, and all those who prosecuted the war had all been terminated in an orderly manner. Is the new leadership working out all right?”
“More or less,” Dr. Blue answered, “considering the difficulty of our living situation. Jamie works at the lower echelon of the new staff, and he is busy almost every waking hour. We have not really been able to reach anything like an equilibrium in our colony because there is constant outside friction.”
“Most of which is caused by the humans on board,” the Eagle added. “We haven’t discussed this subject before, Nicole,” he continued, “but now is probably a good time. We have been surprised by the failure of your fellow beings to adapt to interspecies living. Only a very few of them are comfortable with the idea that other species may be as important and capable as they are.”
“I told you that soon after we met years ago,” Nicole said. “I pointed out to you that for a variety of historical and sociological reasons, there is a vast range in the way that humans respond to new ideas and concepts.”
“I know you did,” the Eagle replied, “but our experience with you and your family misled us. Until we woke up all the survivors, we had reached the tentative conclusion that what happened in New Eden, with the aggressive and territorial humans seizing control, was an anomaly, to be explained by the particular composition of the colonists. Now, after watching a year of interactions at the Grand Hotel, we have concluded that we did indeed have a typical collection of humans inside Rama.”