face. They interrupted their jabbers and shrieks only to rub the undersides of their beaks softly against Richard’s bearded cheek. The avians were still small, about seventy centimeters tall when standing on their legs, but their necks were so long that they appeared to be much larger.
Nicole watched with admiration as her husband tended to his alien wards. He cleaned up their wastes, made certain that they had fresh food and water, and even checked the softness of their haylike beds in the corner of the nursery. You have come a long, long way, Richard Wakefield, Nicole thought, remembering his reluctance years earlier to deal with any of the more mundane duties associated with parenting. She was deeply touched by his obvious affection for the gangly hatchlings. Is it possible, Nicole asked herself, that each of us has inside this kind of selfless love? And that we must somehow work through all the problems that both heredity and environment, have created before we can find it?
Richard had stored the four manna melons and the slice from the sessile in one corner of the White Room. He explained to Nicole that he hadn’t noticed any changes in either the melons or the sessile material since he had arrived in New York. “Maybe the melons can rest dormant for a long time, like seeds,” Nicole offered after listening to Richard’s explanation of the complex life cycle of the sessile species.
“That’s what I was thinking,” Richard said. “Of course I have no idea at all under what conditions the melons might germinate. The species is so strange and so complicated, I wouldn’t be surprised if the process is controlled somehow by that small piece of the sessile.”
On their first evening together, Richard had difficulty getting the hatchlings to go to sleep. “They’re afraid I’m going to leave them again,” Richard explained when he returned to the White Room after the third time that Tammy’s and Timmy’s furious squawks had interrupted his dinner with Nicole. At length, Richard programmed Joan and Eleanor to amuse the avians. It was the only way he could keep his alien wards quiet so that he could have some time alone with Nicole.
They made love slowly and tenderly. Richard had admitted while he was undressing that he wasn’t certain how well… But Nicole had informed him that his performance, or lack thereof, was of absolutely no consequence. She insisted that it would be a delight just to hold his body next to hers and that any actual sexual stimulation would be a marvelous bonus. They were, of course, compatible, as they had been since the first time they had slept together.
After their easy lovemaking, Richard and Nicole held hands and said nothing. Nicole fell asleep gloriously happy.
For the first time ever, there was no hurry in their lives. Every night they talked easily, sometimes even while they were making love. Richard told Nicole more about his childhood and adolescence than he ever had before. He included his most painful memories of his father’s abuse, as well as the harrowing details of his disastrous first marriage to Sarah Tydings.
“I now realize that Sarah and Dad had something fundamental in common,” Richard said late one evening. “They were both incapable of granting me the approval I so desperately sought-and somehow they both knew that I would continue to try to obtain that approval, even if it meant abandoning everything else in my life.”
Nicole shared with Richard for the first time all the drama of her forty-eight-hour affair with the Prince of Wales right after she had won her Olympic gold medal. She even admitted to Richard that she had yearned to marry Henry and that she had been completely devastated when she had realized that the prince had excluded Nicole as a candidate to be the queen of England primarily because of her skin color. Richard was fascinated by the story that Nicole told. But never once did he seem even the least bit threatened or jealous.
He has become more mature, Nicole was thinking several nights later, while her husband was finishing his nightly task of tucking the hatchlings into bed. “Darling,” Nicole said when Richard joined her in their bedroom in the lair, “there’s something that I want to tell you. I have been wailing for the right time…”
“Uh-oh.” Richard feigned a frown. “This sounds serious… I hope it won’t take long, for I had some plans of my own for us this evening.”
He crossed the room and started to kiss her. “Please, Richard, not now,” she said, pushing him away gently. “This is very important to me.”
Richard backed up a couple of steps. “When I thought I was going to be executed,” Nicole said slowly, “I realized that all my personal affairs were in order, except for two. There were still things that I wanted to say, both to you and to Katie. I even asked the policeman who explained the execution procedure to me if he would give me pen and paper so that I could write two final letters.”
Nicole paused a moment, as if she were searching for exactly the right words. “During those terrifying days, I couldn’t remember, Richard,” she continued, “if I had ever told you, explicitly, how glad I was that we had been husband and wife… I also didn’t want to die without…”
She paused a second time, glanced briefly around the room, and then looked directly into Richard’s eyes again. “There was one more thing I wanted to accomplish with that last letter,” Nicole said. “I believed at the time that it was 0 necessary to make my life complete, so that I could depart from this world without any loose ends… Richard, I wanted to apologize for my insensitivity back when you and Michael and I… I made a mistake then by going to Michael’s bed too soon when I feared…” Nicole took a deep breath. “I should have had more faith,” she said. “Not that I would for a minute remove either Patrick or Benjy from the world, but I realize now that I surrendered too quickly to my loneliness. I wish…”
Richard touched his ringer to her lips. “No apology is necessary, Nicole,” he said softly. “I know that you have loved me well.”
They settled into an easy rhythm in their simple existence. In the mornings they would walk around New York, usually arm in arm, exploring anew every comer of the island domain they had called home once before. Because it was always dark, the city looked different now. Only their flashlight beams illuminated the enigmatic skyscrapers whose details were indelibly imprinted in their memories.
Often they walked along the ramparts of the city, looking out at the waters of the Cylindrical Sea. One morning they spent several hours standing in one place, the very spot where they had entrusted their lives to the three avians years and years before. Together they recalled both their fear and their excitement at the moment when the great bird creatures had lifted them off the ground to carry them across the sea.
Every day after lunch Nicole, who had always needed more sleep than her husband, would take a short nap. Richard would use the keyboard to order more food or supplies from the Romans, or take the hatchlings topside for some exercise, or work on one of his myriad projects scattered around the lair. In the evening, after a leisurely dinner, they would lie together, side by side, and talk for hours before making love or just falling asleep. They talked about everything: the Eagle, the Ramans, the existence of God, the politics in New Eden, books of all kinds, and most of all, their children.
Although they could converse enthusiastically about Ellie, Patrick, Benjy, or even Simone, whom they had not seen for many years, it was difficult for Richard to talk about Katie for any length of time. He regularly castigated himself for not having been stricter with his favorite daughter during her childhood, and blamed her irresponsible behavior as an adult on his permissiveness. Nicole tried to console and reassure him, reminding Richard that their circumstances in Rama had been unusual and that, after all, nothing in his background had prepared him for the proper discipline required of a parent.
One afternoon when Nicole awakened from her nap, she could hear Richard mumbling to himself down the hall. Curious, she stood up quietly and walked down to the room mat had once been Michael O’Toole’s bedroom. Nicole stood at the door and watched Richard put the final touches on a large model that occupied most of the room.
“Voila,” he said, turning around to acknowledge that he had heard Nicole’s footsteps. “It won’t win any aesthetic awards,” Richard said with a grin, motioning in the direction of the model, “but it’s a reasonable representation of our part of the universe, and it certainly has provided me with plenty of food for thought.”
A flat rectangular platform covered most of the floor. Thin vertical rods of varying heights had been inserted at twenty locations around the platform. At the top end of each rod was at least one colored sphere, representing a star.
The vertical rod in the center of the model, which had a yellow sphere attached to its top, rose about a meter and a half off the platform. “This, of course,” Richard said to Nicole, “is our Sun. And here we are-or I should say Rama is-over in this quadrant, about one-fourth of the way between the Sun and our closest similar star, Tau Ceti. Sinus, where we were when we stayed at the Node, is back over there…”
Nicole walked around in the model depicting the stellar neighborhood of the Sun. ‘There are twenty star
