“My God!” Nicole exclaimed, ignoring his comment. “I cannot believe it. I just cannot believe it. … I hqpe that this is not some kind of cruel trick.”
“I assure you that it is not.”
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“But how can Michael still be alive?” Nicole asked. “He must be at least a hundred and twenty years old.”
“We have helped him with our medical magic, as you call it.”
“Oh, Simone, Si-mone\n Nicole cried. “Can it be? Can it really be?”
Despite the pain in her hip and the unwieldy space helmet, Nicole almost jumped across the seat to give the Eagle a hug. “Thank you, oh, thank you,” she said. “I cannot tell you how much this means to me.”
The Eagle steadied Nicole’s wheelchair on the escalator as they descended into the center of the main transportation complex. She looked around briefly. The station was identical to the one she remembered from the Node near Sirius. It was about twenty meters tall and laid out in a circle. Half a dozen moving sidewalks surrounded the central display, each running into a different arched tunnel leading away from the complex. Above the tunnels, to the right, were a pair of multilevel structures.
“Do the intermodule trains depart from up there?” Nicole asked, remembering a ride with Katie and Simone when the girls were both young.
The Eagle nodded. He pushed her wheelchair onto one of the moving sidewalks and they left the center of the station. They traveled several hundred meters in a tunnel before the moving sidewalk stopped. “Our car should be just to the right, in the first corridor,” the Eagle said.
The small car, which opened from the top, had two seats. The Eagle lifted Nicole into the passenger seat and then folded the wheelchair into a compressed configuration no larger than a briefcase, which he stored in a pocket area inside the vehicle. Shortly thereafter, the car moved forward through the maze of light cream windowless passageways. Nicole was extraordinarily quiet. She was trying to convince herself that she was indeed about to see the daughter whom she had left in another star system years and years ago.
The ride through the Habitation Module seemed interminable. At one point they stopped and the Eagle told
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ARTHUR C. CLARKE AND GENTRY LEE
Nicole she could remove her helmet. “Are we close?” she asked.
“Not yet,” he answered, “but we are already in their atmospheric zone.”
Twice they encountered fascinating aliens in vehicles moving in the opposite direction, but Nicole was too excited to pay attention to anything except what was going on inside her head. She was barely even listening to the Eagle. Calm down, one of Nicole’s inner voices said. Don’t be absurd, another voice replied, I’m about to see a daughter I haven’t seen for forty years. There’s no way I could remain calm.
“In its own way,” the Eagle was saying, “their life has been as extraordinary as yours. Different, of course, altogether different. When we took Patrick over to see them very early this morning—”
“What did you say?” Nicole asked abruptly. “Did you say that Patrick saw them this morning? You took Patrick to see his father?”
“Yes,” said the Eagle. “We had always planned for this reunion, as long as everything went according to schedule. Ideally neither you nor Patrick would have seen Simone and Michael and their children—”
“Children!” Nicole exclaimed. “I have more grandchildren!”
“—until after you were settled at the Node, but when Patrick requested reconsideration . . . well, it would have been heartless to let him leave forever without ever seeing his natural father.”
Nicole could no longer contain herself. She reached over and kissed the Eagle on his feathered cheek. “And Max said you were nothing but a cold machine. How wrong he was! Thank you. . . . For Patrick’s sake, I thank you.”
She was trembling from excitement. A moment later Nicole could not breathe. The Eagle quickly stopped the small car.
“Where am I?” Nicole said, emerging from a de^ep fog.
“We are parked just inside the enclosed area where
Michael, Simone, and their family live,” the Eagle said.
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“We have been here for about four hours. You have been sleeping.”
“Did I have a heart attack?” Nicoie asked.
“Not exactly. . . . Just a significant malfunction. I considered taking you immediately back to the hospital, but I decided to wait until you awakened. Besides, I have most of the same medications here with me.”
The Eagle looked at her with his intense blue eyes. “What do you want to do, Nicole?” he said. “Visit with Simone and Michael as planned, or go back to the hospital? It’s your choice, but understand—”
“I know,” Nicole interrupted him with a sigh, “I must be careful not to become too excited.” She glanced at the Eagle. “I want to see Simone, even if it’s the last act of my life. Can you give me something that wil! calm me but will not make me goofy or put me to sieep?”
“A mild tranquilizer will only help,” the Eagle said, “if you consciously work to contain your excitement.”
“All right,” Nicole said. “I’ll do my best.”
The Eagle eased the car onto a paved road lined with tall trees. As they drove, Nicole was reminded of the autumn in New England she spent with her father when she was a teenager. The leaves on the trees were red, gold, and brown.
“It’s beautiful,” Nicole said.
The car rounded a curve and drove past a white fence enclosing a grassy area. There were four horses in the enclosure. A pair of human teenagers were walking among them. “The children are real,” the Eagle said. ‘The horses are simulations.”
At the top of a gentle hill was a large two-story white house with a sloped black roof. The Eagle pulled into the circular drive and stopped the car. The front door of the house opened an instant later and a tall, beautiful, jet-black woman with graying hair came outside.
“Mother!” Simone yelled as she raced for the car.
Nicole barely had time to open her door before Simone flung herself into her mother’s arms. The two women hugged and kissed, weeping profusely. Neither of them could speak.
8
11 was a bittersweet visit with I Patrick,” Simone said, putting down her coffee cup. “He was here for over two hours, but it seemed like only a few minutes.”
The three of them were sitting at a table that looked out on the rolling farmland that surrounded the house. Nicole was temporarily staring out the window at the bucolic scene. “It’s mostly an illusion, of course,” Michael said. “But a very good one. Unless you knew better, you would think you were in Massachusetts or southern Vermont.”
“This whole dinner has seemed like a dream,” Nicole said. “I have not yet accepted that any of this is really happening.”
“We felt that way last night,” Simone said, “when we were told that we were going to see Patrick this morning. Neither Michael nor I slept a wink.” She laughed. “At one point during the night we had convinced ourselves mat we were going to meet a ‘fake’ Patrick, and we thought of
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questions we could ask that nobody except the real Patrick could answer.”
“Their technological skills are awesome,” Michael said. “If they wanted to create a robot Patrick and pass him off as the genuine article, it would be very difficult for us to ascertain the truth.”
“But they didn’t,” Simone said. “I knew within minutes that it was really Patrick.”
“How did he seem to you?” Nicole asked. “In all the (confusion of the last day, I didn’t have a chance to talk to him very much.”
“Resigned, mostly,” Simone said, “but certain that he had made the correct decision. He said it would probably be weeks before he had sorted through all the emotions he had experienced in the last twenty-four hours.”
“That must be true for all of us,” Nicole said.
There was a brief silence at the table. “Are you tired, Mother?” Simone asked. “Patrick told us about your health problems, and when we received the message this afternoon that you had been delayed . . .”
“Yes, I’m a little tired,” Nicole said. “But I certainly couldn’t sleep. At least not immediately.” She backed her wheelchair away from the table and lowered her seat. “I would, however, like to use the powder room.”
“Certainly,” Simone said, jumping up. “I’ll come with you.”
Simone accompanied her mother down a long hall with a simulated wooden floor. “So you have six children living with you here,” Nicole said, “including three that you carried?”
‘That’s right,” Simone said. “Michael and I had two boys and two girls by the ‘natural method,’ as you called it. The first of the boys, Darren, died when he was seven. It’s a long story. If we have time, I’ll tell it to you tomorrow. All the rest of the children were developed from embryos in the laboratories.”