“Ellie also told me that Maria and Nikki are inseparable,” Dr. Blue continued. “They study together, eat together, and talk incessantly about everything. Nikki has told Maria all about you.”
“How is that possible?” Nicole said with a smile. “Nikki was not yet four years old the last time that I saw her. Human children don’t retain memories from that early.”
“They definitely do if they sleep through the next fifteen years,” the Eagle said. “Kepler and Galileo also have very clear recollections of their early days… But we can talk while we travel. It’s time for us to leave now.”
The Eagle helped Nicole and Dr. Blue put on their space suits. Then he picked up the suitcase of Nicole’s belongings. “I’ve put your medical bag in here with your clothes, as well as the cosmetics you’ve been using these last several days,” he said.
“My medical bag?” Nicole said. She laughed. “Goodness, I had almost forgotten. I had it with me, didn’t I, when I found Maria? Thank you.”
The trio walked out of the room, which was on the bottom floor of the large pyramid. A few minutes later they moved through the great arched entrance to the building. Outside, in the bright light of the factory, the rover was waiting for them. “It will take us about half an hour to reach the high-speed elevators,” the Eagle said. “Our shuttle is parked at the Dock, on the uppermost level.”
As the rover moved away, Nicole turned around and looked behind her. Beyond the pyramid was the tall mountain they had climbed three days before. “So you really have no idea why the butterfly biots are there?” Nicole said into the microphone in her space helmet.
“No,” said the Eagle. “My assignment covers only your cycle.”
Nicole continued to stare behind her. The rover passed a set of tall poles, ten or twelve altogether, connected by wires at the top, middle, and bottom. All this will be pan of the new Rama, Nicole thought. Suddenly it occurred to her that she was about to leave the world of Rama for the very last time. A powerful feeling of sadness swept over her. This has been my home, she said to herself, and I am going away forever.
“Would it be possible,” Nicole said to the Eagle without turning around, “for me to see any of the other parts of Rama before we leave for good?”
“What for?” the Eagle asked.
“I’m not exactly certain,” Nicole answered. “Maybe just so I can linger for an extra hour in my memories.”
“The two bowls and the Southern Hemicylinder have already been completely remodeled. You would not recognize them. The Cylindrical Sea has been drained and removed. Even New York is in the process of being dismantled.”
“But it’s not completely destroyed yet, is it?” Nicole asked.
“No, not yet,” replied the Eagle.
“Then can we go there, please, just for a short while?”
Please indulge an old woman, Nicole thought. Even though she doesn’t understand why herself.
“All right,” the Eagle said, “but we’ll be delayed. New York is in another part of the factory.”
They were standing on a parapet near the top of one of the tall skyscrapers. Most of New York was gone, the buildings bulldozed into heaps by the awesome power of the large biots. What was left was twenty or thirty buildings around one plaza.
“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.
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 Grandpa 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.
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, Francesca Sabatini’s voice, and a poem that Nicole had first memorized as a schoolgirl.
“Tyger! Tyger! burning bright,In the forests of the night,What immortal hand or eyeCould 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
