Rama II (Rama, #2)

by Arthur C. Clarke

“No, my son,” he finally said softly, as much to himself as to General O’Toole. “I do not have the answers to your questions. Only God has them. You must pray that He will provide the answers when you need them.”

St. Michael of Siena

O’Toole was full of anticipation. What an incredible day, he was thinking. First I have an audience with the pope. And now I finally visit the shrine of St. Michael. I definitely saved the best day for last.

Ramans and Romans

Happy New Year

Nicole left the gala as soon as she was able to arrange her transportation back to Rome. Francesca unbelievably tried to escort her out to the limousine as if nothing had happened. Nicole curtly rejected her fellow cosmonaut’s offer and walked out alone. It started to snow during the ride back to the hotel. Nicole concentrated on the falling snowflakes and was eventually able to clear her mind enough to assess the evening. Of one thing she was absolutely certain. There had been something unusual and very powerful in that chocolate ball she had eaten. Nicole had never before come so close to losing complete control of her emotions. Maybe she gave one to Wilson too, Nicole thought. And that partially explains his eruption. But why? she asked herself again. What is she trying to accomplish?

“The water from the Lake of Wisdom can help Ronata,” Omeh said. “Ronata will know the time to drink.”

Good-Bye, Henry

“Sorry for the last-minute notice. Must see you tomorrow. Noon exactly. Warming hut #8 on the Weissfluhjoch. Come alone. Henry.”

She reminded herself that she was now a professional, as accomplished in her own way as this king she was about to see. Nicole then strode forcefully into the chalet.

“Hello, Nicole,” the king said finally. His voice was soft and tender. “Hello, Henry,” she replied.

Henry walked toward the corner of the room. “I brought you a present,” he said as he bent down with his back to Nicole, “in honor of your thirty-sixth birthday.”

He extended a data cube toward her. “This is the most valuable gift I could find for you,” he said seriously, “and it has taken many marks from the royal treasury to compile it.”

“Here,” he said, “take this cube. I had my intelligence agents put together full and complete dossiers on every member of the Newton dozen, including you.”

“I assure you my motives were all good. Look,” he added, “you probably won’t even need all this information, but I thought that maybe it could be useful. Take it. Throw it away if you like. You’re the life science officer. You can treat it however you want.”

“There was some data that eluded even my investigators,” he said in a low voice. “One fact in particular in which I was extremely interested.”

“Good-bye, Henry,” she said.

Encounter

Valeriy Borzov nodded. A small flying craft, like a bat or a hummingbird, zoomed past the viewport in the near field and headed off in the direction of Rama. “The exterior drones will confirm the similarities. Each of them has a stored set of images from Rama I. Any variations will be logged and reported within three hours.” “And if there are no unexplained variations?” “Then we proceed as planned,” General Borzov answered with a smile. “We dock, open up Rama, and release the interior drones.”

Nicole said after some reflection. “I can give my opinions now and then officially document them later tonight.” She hesitated several more seconds before continuing. “I wouldn’t put Wilson and Brown together as crew members on any subteam, at least not in the first sortie. And I’d even have some qualms, although this opinion is certainly not as strong, about combining Francesca in a group with either of the two men. I would place no other limitations of any kind on this crew.”

To Nicole, the problem between Wilson and Brown was straightforward: jealousy, pure and simple, the ancient green-eyed monster itself.

That’s strange, she thought, straining her eyes in the dim light. It looks as if I left the supply room door open. Nicole walked across the lobby. The supply door was indeed ajar.

“Oh, hello, Nicole,” Francesca said nonchalantly, as if it were normal for her to be sitting in the dark at the computer in the medical supply room.

From the coded headings, Nicole could tell that Francesca had requested the inventory subroutine to list the birth control devices available onboard the spacecraft.

Nicole suddenly reached over and grabbed the bottle out of Francesca’s hand. While Nicole was reading the label, Francesca pushed her way through the narrow space and headed for the door. Nicole discovered that the liquid in her hand was for inducing abortions and quickly followed Francesca into the lobby. “Are you going to explain this?” Nicole asked. “Just give me the bottle, please,” Francesca said finally. “I can’t do that,” answered Nicole, shaking her head. “This is a very strong medicine with serious side effects. What did you think you were going to do? Steal it and have it pass unnoticed? As soon as I completed an inventory comparison I would have known that it was gone.”

“Will you stop with the bureaucratic lecture,” Francesca interrupted sharply. “I’m really not interested in the goddamn rules. A man has made me pregnant and I intend to remove the fetus. Now, are you going to give me the bottle, or must I find another way?”

The father of this baby purposely stopped taking his pills, thinking my being pregnant would rekindle my love for him. He was wrong. This baby is unwanted.

The fetus had been growing inside Francesca for five days. Who might you be? Nicole thought as she looked on the monitor at the microscopic image of the tiny sac embedded in the walls of the uterus.

Francesca drank the liquid without hesitation.

Nicole did not reply. “So tomorrow the little bastard will be gone,” Francesca said coldly, her eyes tired and angry. “It’s a damn good thing. The world doesn’t need another half-black baby.”

Rama Rama Burning Bright

“Let us all drink to a successful mission,” he said. “For each of us, these next few days and weeks will be the greatest adventure of our lives. In a real sense, we dozen are human ambassadors to an alien culture. Let us each resolve to do our best to properly represent our species.”

Death of a Soldier

In Nicole’s mind there was little or no probability that RoSur’s fault protection algorithms had a design flaw; they wouldn’t have passed all the rigorous prelaunch testing if they contained errors. So somewhere there must have been a human error, either negligence (had she and Janos, in their haste, forgotten to initialize some key fault protection parameter?) or an accident during those chaotic seconds following the unexpected torque.

To her, one part of the equation was very clear. A man had died and she had been responsible.

Postmortem

“Look,” she exclaimed at one point, “I have now explained four times that I had two glasses of wine and one glass of vodka three hours before the operation. I have admitted that I would not have drunk any alcohol prior to surgery, if I had known that I was going to operate. I have even acknowledged, in retrospect, that perhaps one of the two life science officers should have remained completely sober. But that’s all hindsight. I repeat what I said earlier. Neither my judgment nor my physical abilities was in any way impaired by alcohol at the time of the operation.”

Back in her room, Nicole focused her attention on the issue of why the robot surgeon proceeded with the operation when its own internal fault protection should have aborted all activities. Based on the RoSur User’s Guide, it was evident that at least two separate sensor systems should have sent error messages to the central processor in the robot surgeon. The accelerometer package should have informed the processor that the environmental conditions were outside acceptable limits because of the untoward lateral force. And the stereo cameras should have transmitted a message indicating that the observed images were at variance with the predicted images. But for some reason neither sensor set was successful in interrupting the ongoing operation. What had happened?

The only possible explanation was that the software had been changed by manual command between the time of loading and the performance of the appendectomy.

!redruM

She asked a statistical routine to compute the likely cause of the symptoms, given the fact that it could not be an appendicitis. The results flashed up on the monitor in seconds. Nicole was astonished. According to the data, if the biometry information input from Borzov’s probe set was analyzed under the assumption that the cause for the abnormalities could not be an appendicitis, then there was a 62 percent chance that it was due to a drug reaction.

!REDRUM

It was obvious to her that Janos did not want to discuss the subject. After waiting a few seconds, Nicole spoke again. “I’m sorry, Janos. I’m imposing on you. I’ll come back another time.” “No. No,” he said. “Let’s get this over with now.” That’s a curious way of putting it, Nicole was thinking as she formulated her question. “Janos,” she said, “nowhere in your report did you mention reaching for RoSur’s control box right before the maneuver. And I could have sworn I saw your fingers on the keyboard panel as I was being swept over against the wall.” Nicole stopped. There was no expression of any kind on Cosmonaut Tabori’s face. It was almost as if he were thinking of something else. “I don’t remember,” he said at length, without emotion. “You may be right. Perhaps my hitting my head erased part of my memory.”

Stop now, Nicole said to herself as she studied her colleague. There’s nothing more you can learn here.

Rite of P...

“The hide contains everything that is needed except for wisdom, courage, and curiosity. The tuber is something very special. Eating the fleshy root will terrify the child, but may also give abnormal powers of strength and vision.”

Blessed Slumber

Pandora’s Cube

General Borzov’s office had been warm and personal. This room was definitely sterile and intimidating. Dr. Brown had hung laminated replicas of two of his most prestigious international scientific awards on the wall behind his desk. He had also raised the height of his chair so that he looked down on anyone else in the room who might be sitting.

“Give all those memos to me,” Dr. Brown interrupted her. “Admiral Heilmann is not concerned with personnel matters.” The American scientist looked directly at Nicole. “But you don’t need to prepare new reports for the first sortie. I’ve read all the documents you wrote for General Borzov. They are quite adequate.” Nicole did not let herself be cowed by the man’s penetrating gaze. So you know what I wrote about you and Wilson, she thought, and you think I should feel guilty or embarrassed. Well, I don’t. My opinions have not changed just because you are now nominally in charge.

Could there be a connection between Janos and the drugs in Borzov? Is it possible that his death was not completely accidental?

Janos’ score of +3.37 placed him in the middle of the upper one tenth of one percent of the population in intelligence.