Rama Revealed(Rama IV)

ESCAPE Chapter 6

The next morning, when Nicole opened her eyes, Richard was standing over her holding two full backpacks. "We're going to explore and look for octospiders," he said excitedly, "behind the black screen. I've left enough food and water to last Tammy and Timmy for two days and I've programmed Joan and Eleanor to find us if there is an emergency."

Nicole watched her husband closely while she was eating her breakfast. His eyes were full of energy and life. This is the Richard I remember the best, Nicole said to herself happily.

"I've been back here twice," Richard said as soon as they had ducked under the raised screen. "But I've never reached the end of this first passageway."

The screen had closed behind them, leaving Richard and Nicole in the dark. "There's no problem with being trapped here on this side, is there?" Nicole asked while they both checked their flashlights.

"Not at all," Richard replied. "The screen will not raise or lower more often than once every minute or so. But if anyone or anything is still in this general area a minute from now, the screen will automatically lift again."

"Now, I should warn you before we start walking," he continued a few seconds later, "this is a very long passageway. I have followed it before, for at least a kilometer, and I have never found anything. Not even a tumoff. And there is absolutely no fight. So the first part will be very boring-but it must eventually lead to something, for the biots bringing our supplies must be coming along this path."

Nicole took his hand in hers. "Just remember, Richard," she said easily. "We're not as young as we once were."

Richard shone his flashlight first on Nicole's hair, which was now completely gray, and then on his own gray beard. "We are a couple of old farts, aren't we?" he said gaily.

"Speak for yourself," Nicole rejoined, squeezing his hand.

The passageway was much longer than a kilometer. As Richard and Nicole trudged along, they talked mostly about his astonishing experiences in the second habitat. "I was absolutely terrified when the elevator door opened and I saw the myrmicats for the first time," Richard said.

He had already finished describing to Nicole his stay with the avians and had just reached the point in his chronology where he had descended to the bottom of the cylinder. "I was literally frozen with fear. They were only three or four meters away. Both of them were staring at me. The creamy fluid in their huge oval lower eyes was moving from side to side, and the pairs of eyes up on the stalks were bending around to see me from another point of view." Richard shuddered. "I will never forget that moment."

"Now, let me make certain I have the biology straight," Nicole said a few minutes later, as they approached what appeared to be a branching in the underground corridor. "The myrmicats develop in the manna melons, live fairly short but highly active lives, and then die inside a sessile, where their entire life experiences, you theorize, are somehow added to the neural net's base of knowledge. The life cycle completes when new manna melons grow in the interior of the sessiles. These fledgling creatures are then harvested at the appropriate time by the active myrmicat population."

Richard nodded. "That may not be exactly right," he said, "but it must be close."

"So what we're missing is only the necessary set of conditions for the manna melons to begin the germination process?"

"I was hoping you would help me with that puzzle," Richard said. "After all, Doctor, you are the only one of us with any formal biological training."

The corridor became a Y, each of the two continuations making a forty-five-degree angle with the long, straight passageway from their lair. "Which way, Cosmonaut des Jardins?" Richard asked with a smile, shining his flashlight in both directions. Neither of the two tunnels had a single distinguishing characteristic.

"Let's go to the left first," Nicole said a few seconds later after Richard had created an outline map in his portable computer. The left pathway started to change after only a few hundred meters. The corridor widened into a descending ramp that wound around an extremely thick pole and dropped at least a hundred meters deeper into the shell of Rama. As they climbed down, Richard and Nicole could see lights below them. At the bottom, they encountered a long, wide canal with broad, flat banks. To their left, they saw a pair of crab biots scuttling away from them on the opposite side of the canal, as well as a bridge in the distance, beyond the biots. To then- right, a barge was moving down the canal, carrying a full load of diverse but unknown objects, gray and black and white in color, to some ultimate destination in the underground world,

Richard and Nicole surveyed the scene around them and then looked at each other. "We're back in wonderland, Alice," Richard said with a short laugh. "Why don't we have a snack white I enter all this real estate in my trusty computer?"

While they were eating, a centipede biot approached on their side of the canal, stopped briefly as if to study them, and then passed on by. It climbed the ramp Richard and Nicole had just descended. "Did you see any crab or centipede biots in the second habitat?" Nicole asked.

"No," said Richard.

"And we purposely designed them out of the plans for New Eden, didn't we?"

Richard laughed. "Indeed we did. You convinced both the Eagle and me that ordinary humans would not be able to deal easily with them."

"So does their presence here imply the existence of a third habitat?" Nicole asked.

"Possibly. After all, we have no idea what's now in the Southern Hemicylinder. We have not seen it since Rama was refurbished. But there's another explanation as well. Suppose the crabs, centipedes, and other Raman biots just go with the territory, if you know what I mean. Maybe they are functioning in all parts of Rama, on all voyages, unless specifically proscribed by a given spacefarer."

As Richard and Nicole finished lunch, another barge came into view on their left. Like its predecessor, it was loaded with stacks of white, black, and gray objects. "These are different from the first ones," Nicole remarked. 'These piles remind me of the spare centipede biot parts that were stored in my pit."

"You could be right," Richard said, standing up. "Let's follow the canal and see where it leads us." He glanced around, first at the arched ceiling ten meters above their heads and then back at the ramp behind them. "Unless I have made an error in my computations, or the Cylindrical Sea is much deeper than I think, this canal runs from south to north under the sea itself."

"So following the barge will take us back under the Northern Hemicylinder?" Nicole asked.

"I believe so," Richard replied.

They followed the canal for more than two hours. Except for three spider biots, moving quickly as a team along the opposite bank, Richard and Nicole did not see anything else that was new. Two more barges passed them, carrying the same general kind of load downstream, and they intermittently encountered both centipede and crab biots without any interactions. They walked by one more bridge over the canal.

Richard and Nicole rested twice, drinking water or eating a snack while they talked. At the second rest stop Nicole suggested that perhaps they should turn back. Richard checked his watch. "Let's give it another hour," he said. "If my sense of position is correct, we should be under the Northern Hemicylinder already. Sooner or later we must find where the barges are taking all that stuff."

He was right. After another kilometer of hiking along the canal, Richard and Nicole saw a large pentagonal structure in the distance. As they drew closer, they could see that the canal flowed directly into the center of the pentagon. The building itself, which straddled the canal, was six meters tall. It had a flat roof, no windows, and a creamy white exterior. Each of its five sections or wings extended out twenty or thirty meters from the center of the structure.

The walkway along the canal ended in some stairs that rose to a perimeter lane that ran around the entire pentagon. There was a similar configuration on the other side of the canal; a centipede biot was at that moment using the perimeter lane as a bridge to change from one side of the canal to the other.

"Where do you suppose it's going?" Nicole asked as the two of them stood aside to permit the biot to trundle by.

"Maybe to New York," Richard answered. "On my long walks before the avians hatched I sometimes saw one of them in the distance."

They paused together outside the only door to the pentagon that was on the canal side of the building. "I guess we're going in?" Nicole said.

Richard nodded and pushed open the small door. Nicole bent down and entered the building. Surrounding them was a large room, well lit, perhaps a thousand cubic meters altogether, with a ceiling five meters above the floor. Their walkway was elevated above the floor by two or three meters, so Richard and Nicole could watch most of the activities taking place below them. Biot robot workers they had never seen before, each designed for a specialized task, were unloading the two barges in the room and separating the cargo according to some predefined plan. Many of the individual pieces from the stacks were loaded onto truck biots, which disappeared through one of the back doors once they were full.

After a few minutes of observation, Richard and Nicole continued along the walkway to where it intersected another path just above the center of the room. Richard stopped and made some notes in his computer. "I presume this layout is as simple as it looks," he said to Nicole. "We can go either left or right-each way we go into another wing of the pentagon."

Nicole chose the right walkway because the truck biots that she had thought were carrying parts for the centipede biot had gone in that direction. Her observations had been accurate. Soon after Richard and Nicole entered the second room, which was exactly the same size as the first, they realized that both a centipede and a crab biot were being manufactured on the floor below them. Richard and Nicole stopped to watch the process for several minutes.

"Absolutely fascinating," Richard said, finishing his computer diagram of the biot factory. "Are you ready to go?"

As Richard turned to face Nicole, she saw his eyes widen. "Don't look now," he said quietly a second later, "but we have company."

Nicole wheeled around and looked behind her. Across the room, forty meters behind them on the walkway, a pair of octospiders was slowly approaching them. Richard and Nicole had not heard their distinguishing sound, similar to dragging metallic brushes, because of the noise from the biot factory.

The octospiders stopped when they realized that the humans had noticed them. Nicole's heart was pumping furiously. She remembered clearly her last encounter with an octpspider, when she had rescued Katie from the octo lair in Rama II. Then, as now, her overwhelming impulse had been to run.

She grabbed Richard's hand as they both stared at the aliens. "Let's go," Nicole said under her breath.

"I'm as scared as you are," he replied, "but let's not leave just yet. They aren't moving. I want to see what they are going to do."

Richard concentrated on the lead octospider and drew a careful picture in his mind. Its nearly spherical main body was charcoal gray, with a diameter of about a meter, and was featureless except for a vertical slit twenty or twenty-five centimeters wide that ran from the top to the bottom, where the body broke into the eight black and gold tentacles, each two meters long, that spread out across the floor. Inside the vertical slit were many unknown knobs and wrinkles-Almost certainly sensors, Richard thought-the largest of which was a big rectangular lens structure containing some kind of fluid.

As the two pairs of beings gazed at each other across the room, a broad band of bright purple coloring swept around the "head" of the lead octospider. This band originated on one of the parallel edges of the vertical slit. It moved around the head, disappearing into the opposite edge of the slit almost three hundred and sixty degrees later. It was followed in a few seconds by a complicated sequence containing some red bands, some green, and some that were apparently blank. This sequence made an identical journey around the head of the octospider.

"That's exactly what happened when that octospider confronted Katie and me," Nicole said nervously to Richard. "She said it was talking to us."

"But we have no way of knowing what it's saying," Richard replied. "Just because it can talk does not mean that it won't hurt us." As the lead octospider continued to talk in color, Richard suddenly remembered an episode from years earlier, during his odyssey in Rama II. At the time he had been lying on a table, surrounded by five or six oqfos, all with colored patterns on their heads. Richard recalled clearly the powerful terror that he had felt as he had watched some very small creatures, apparently under the control of the octospiders, crawl into his nose.

Richard's head began to throb with pain. "They weren't all that nice to me before," he said to Nicole. "When they - "

At that moment the far door to the room opened and four more octospiders entered. "That's enough," said Richard, feeling Nicole tense beside him. "I think it's time for us to make an exit."

Richard and Nicole walked quickly to the center of the room, where the walkway, as in the previous room, joined with the path leading to the outside of the building. They turned toward the outside but stopped after taking a few steps. Four more octospiders were coming through this door as well.

They didn't need to confer. Richard and Nicole spun around, returned to the main interior walkway, and bolted in the direction of the third wing of the pentagon. This time they raced on, without turning to the outside, until they were inside the fourth wing. It was completely dark in this section. They slowed as Richard pulled out his flashlight to examine their surroundings. There was sophisticated-looking equipment on the floor below them, but no activity of any kind.

"Should we try the outside again?" Richard asked as he was putting his flashlight back in his shirt pocket. Seeing her nod, Richard took Nicole's hand and they ran together toward the intersection, where they turned right and headed out of the pentagon altogether.

A few minutes later they were jogging down a dark corridor in completely unknown territory. Both of them were fatigued. Nicole was having difficulty breathing. "Richard," she said, "I need to rest. I can't keep running like this."

Richard and Nicole walked down the empty corridor for another fifty meters. They saw a door on their left. Richard cautiously opened the door, peered in, and scanned the room with his flashlight. "It must be a storage room of some kind," he said. "But it's currently empty."

Richard walked into the room, glanced through its back door into another empty chamber, and then returned for Nicole. They sat down with their backs against the wall. "When we return to our lair, darling," Nicole said a few seconds later, "I want you to help me check my heart. I have been having some strange pains lately."

"Are you all right now?" Richard asked, concern reflected in his voice.

"Yes," Nicole replied. She smiled in the dark and kissed her husband. "As well as can be expected after narrowly escaping from a gaggle of octospiders."