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| ISBN-13: | 9780795325458 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | RosettaBooks |
| Publication date: | 02/12/2019 |
| Series: | Rama , #3 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 530 |
| Sales rank: | 64,586 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
Date of Birth:
December 16, 1917Date of Death:
March 19, 2008Place of Birth:
Minehead, Somerset, EnglandPlace of Death:
Sri LankaEducation:
1948, King's College, London, first-class honors in Physics and Mathematics
CHAPTER 1
NICOLE'S JOURNAL
1
29 December 2200
Two nights ago, at 10:44 Greenwich time on the Earth, Simone Tiasso Wakefield greeted the universe. It was an incredible experience. I thought I had felt powerful emotions before, but nothing in my life — not the death of my mother, not the Olympic gold medal in Los Angeles, not my thirty-six hours with Prince Henry, and not even the birth of Genevieve under the watchful eyes of my father at the hospital in Tours — was as intense as my joy and relief when I finally heard Simone's first cry.
Michael had predicted that the baby would arrive on Christmas Day. In his usual lovable way, he told us that he believed God was going to "give us a sign" by having our spacechild born on Jesus' assumed birthday. Richard scoffed, as my husband always does when Michael's religious fervor gets carried away. But after I felt the first strong contractions on Christmas Eve, even Richard almost became a believer.
I slept fitfully the night before Christmas. Just before I awakened, I had a deep, vivid dream. I was walking beside our pond at Beauvois, playing with my pet duck Dunois and his wild mallard companions, when I heard a voice calling me. I could not identify the voice, but I definitely knew it was a woman speaking. She told me that the birth was going to be extremely difficult and that I would need every bit of my strength to bring my second child into the light.
On Christmas itself, after we exchanged the simple presents that each of us had clandestinely ordered from the Ramans, I began to train Michael and Richard for a range of possible emergencies. I think Simone would indeed have been born on Christmas Day if my conscious mind had not been so aware that neither of the two men was even remotely prepared to help me in case of a major problem. My will alone probably delayed the baby's birth those final two days.
One of the contingency procedures we discussed on Christmas was a breech baby. A couple of months ago, when my unborn baby girl still had some freedom of movement inside my womb, I was fairly certain that she was upside down. But I thought she had turned around during the last week before she dropped into the birth position. I was only partially correct. She did manage to come headfirst down the birth canal; however, her face was upward, toward my stomach, and after the first serious set of contractions, the top of her little head became awkwardly wedged against my pelvis.
In a hospital on Earth the physician would probably have performed a cesarean section. Certainly a doctor would have been on guard for fetal stress and at work early with all the robot instruments, striving to turn Simone's head around before she wedged into such an uncomfortable position.
Toward the end the pain was excruciating. In between the strong contractions driving her against my unyielding bones, I tried to yell out orders to Michael and Richard. Richard was almost useless. He could not deal with my pain (or "the mess," as he later called it), much less either assist with the episiotomy or use the makeshift forceps we had obtained from the Ramans. Michael, bless his heart, sweat pouring off his forehead despite the cool temperature in the room, struggled gallantly to follow my sometimes incoherent instructions. He used the scalpel from my kit to open me up wider and then, after only a moment's hesitation due to all the blood, he found Simone's head with the forceps. Somehow he managed, on his third attempt, both to force her backward in the birth canal and to turn her over so she could be born.
Both men screamed when she crowned. I kept concentrating on my breathing pattern, worried that I might not maintain consciousness. Despite the intense pain, I too bellowed when my next powerful contraction shot Simone forward into Michael's hands. As the father it was Richard's job to cut the umbilical cord. When Richard had finished, Michael lifted Simone up for me to see. "It's a girl," he said with tears in his eyes. He laid her softly on my stomach and I rose up slightly to look at her. My first impression was that she looked exactly like my mother.
I forced myself to stay alert until the placenta was removed and I had finished stitching, with Michael's assistance, the cuts he had made with the scalpel. Then I collapsed. I don't remember many details from the next twenty-four hours. I was so tired from the labor and delivery (my contractions were down to five minutes apart eleven hours before Simone was actually born) that I slept at every opportunity. My new daughter nursed readily, without any urging, and Michael insists that she even nursed once or twice while I was only partially awake. My milk now surges into my breasts immediately after Simone begins to suckle. She seems quite satisfied when she's finished. I'm delighted that my milk is adequate for her — I was worried that I might have the same problem that I had with Genevieve.
One of the two men is beside me every time I wake up. Richard's smiles always seem a little forced, but they are appreciated nevertheless. Michael is quick to place Simone in my arms or at my breasts when I am awake. He holds her comfortably, even when she is crying, and keeps mumbling, "She's beautiful."
At the moment Simone is sleeping beside me wrapped in the quasi-blanket manufactured by the Ramans (it is extremely difficult to define fabrics, particularly quality words like soft, in any of the quantitative terms that our hosts can understand). She does indeed look like my mother. Her skin is quite dark, maybe even darker than mine, and the thatch of hair on her head is jet black. Her eyes are a rich brown. With her head still coned and misshapen from the difficult birth, it is not easy to call Simone beautiful. But of course Michael is right. She is gorgeous. My eyes can readily see the beauty beyond the fragile, reddish creature breathing with such frantic rapidity. Welcome to the world, Simone Wakefield.
2
6 January 2201
I have been depressed now for two days. And tired, oh, so tired. Even though I am well aware that I have a typical case of postpartum syndrome, I have been unable to relieve my feelings of depression.
This morning was the worst. I woke before Richard and lay quietly on my portion of the mat. I looked over at Simone, who was sleeping peacefully in the Raman cradle against the wall. Despite my feelings of love for her, I could not manage any positive thoughts about her future. The glow of ecstasy that had surrounded her birth and lasted for seventy-two hours had completely vanished. An endless stream of hopeless observations and unanswerable questions kept running through my mind. What kind of life will you have, my little Simone? How can we, your parents, possibly provide for your happiness?
My darling daughter, you live with your parents and their good friend Michael O'Toole in an underground lair onboard a gargantuan spacecraft of extraterrestrial origin. The three adults in your life are all cosmonauts from the planet Earth, part of the crew of the Newton expedition sent to investigate a cylindrical worldlet called Rama almost a year ago. Your mother, father, and General O'Toole were the only human beings still onboard this alien craft when Rama abruptly changed its trajectory to avoid being annihilated by a nuclear phalanx launched from a paranoid Earth.
Above our lair is an island city of mysterious skyscrapers, which we call New York. It is surrounded by a frozen sea that completely circles this huge spacecraft and cuts it in half. At this moment, according to your father's calculations, we are just inside the orbit of Jupiter (although the great gasball itself is way over on the other side of the Sun), following a hyperbolic trajectory that will eventually leave the solar system altogether. We do not know where we are going. We do not know who built this spaceship or why they built it. We know there are other occupants onboard, but we have no idea where they came from and, in addition, have reason to suspect that at least some of them may be hostile.
Over and over my thoughts the last two days have continued in this same pattern. Each time I come to the same depressing conclusion: It is inexcusable that we, as supposedly mature adults, would bring such a helpless and innocent being into an environment about which we understand so little and over which we have absolutely no control.
Early this morning, as soon as I realized that today was my thirty-seventh birthday, I began to cry. At first the tears were soft and soundless, but as the memories of all my past birthdays flooded into my mind, deep sobs replaced the soft tears. I was feeling an acute, aching sorrow, not just for Simone, but also for myself. And as I remembered the magnificent blue planet of our origin and could not imagine it in Simone's future, I kept asking myself the same question. Why have I given birth to a child in the middle of this mess?
There's that word again. It's one of Richard's favorites. In his vocabulary, mess has virtually unlimited applications. Anything that is chaotic and/or out of control, whether it is a technical problem or a domestic crisis (like a wife sobbing in the grips of a fierce postpartum depression), is referred to as a mess.
The men were not much help earlier this morning. Their futile attempts to make me feel better only added to my gloom. A question: Why is it that almost every man, when confronted by an unhappy woman, immediately assumes that her unhappiness is somehow related to him? Actually I'm not being fair. Michael has had three children in his life and knows something about the feelings I'm experiencing. Mostly he just asked me what he could do to help. But Richard was absolutely devastated by my tears. He was frightened when he woke up and could hear my weeping. At first he thought that I was having some terrible physical pain. He was only minimally reassured when I explained to him that I was simply depressed.
After first establishing that he was not to blame for my mood, Richard listened silently while I expressed my concerns about Simone's future. I admit that I was slightly overwrought, but he didn't seem to grasp anything I was saying. He kept repeating the same phrase — that Simone's future was no more uncertain than our own — believing that since there was no logical reason for me to be so upset, my depression should immediately vanish. Eventually, after over an hour of miscommunication, Richard correctly concluded that he was not helping and decided to leave me alone.
* * *
(Six hours later.) I'm feeling better now. There are still three more hours before my birthday is over. We had a small party tonight. I just finished nursing Simone and she is again lying beside me. Michael left us about fifteen minutes ago to go to his room down the hall. Richard fell asleep within five minutes after his head was on the pillow. He had spent all day working on my request for some improved diapers.
Richard enjoys spending his time supervising and cataloging our interactions with the Ramans, or whoever it is that operates the computers we activate by using the keyboard in our room. We have never seen anyone or anything in the dark tunnel immediately behind the black screen. So we don't know for certain if there really are creatures back there responding to our requests and ordering their factories to manufacture our odd items, but it is convenient to refer to our hosts and benefactors as the Ramans.
Our communication process with them is both complicated and straightforward. It is complicated because we talk to them using pictures on the black screen and precise quantitative formulas in the language of mathematics, physics, and chemistry. It is straightforward because the actual sentences we input using the keyboard are amazingly simple in syntax. Our most often used sentence is "We would like" or "We want" (of course, we could not possibly know the exact translation of our requests and are just assuming that we are being polite — it could be the instructions we activate are in the form of rude commands beginning with "Give me"), followed by a detailed description of what we would like provided to us.
The hardest part is the chemistry. Simple everyday objects like soap, paper, and glass are very complex chemically and extremely difficult to specify exactly in terms of their number and kind of chemical compounds. Sometimes, as Richard discovered early in his work with the keyboard and black screen, we must also outline a manufacturing process, including thermal regimes, or what we receive does not bear any resemblance to what we ordered. The request process involves a lot of trial and error. In the beginning it was a very inefficient and frustrating interaction. All three of us kept wishing that we remembered more of our college chemistry. In fact, our inability to make satisfactory progress in equipping ourselves with everyday essentials was one of the catalysts for the Great Excursion, as Richard likes to call it, that occurred four months ago.
By then the ambient temperature, topside in New York as well as in the rest of Rama, was already five degrees below freezing and Richard had confirmed that the Cylindrical Sea was again solid ice. I was growing quite concerned that we were not going to be properly prepared for the baby's birth. It was taking us too long to accomplish everything. Procuring and installing a working toilet, for example, had turned out to be a month-long endeavor, and the result was still only marginally adequate. Most of the time our primary problem was that we kept providing incomplete specifications to our hosts. However, sometimes the difficulty was the Ramans themselves. Several times they informed us, using our mutual language of mathematical and chemical symbols, that they could not complete the manufacture of a specific item within our allocated time period.
Anyway, Richard announced one morning that he was going to leave our lair and try to reach the still-docked military ship from our Newton expedition. His expressed purpose was to retrieve the key components of the scientific data base stored on the ship's computers (this would help us immensely in formulating our requests to the Ramans), but he also acknowledged that he was terribly hungry for some decent food. We had been managing to stay healthy and alive with the chemical concoctions provided us by the Ramans. However, most of the food had been either tasteless or terrible.
In all fairness, our hosts had been responding correctly to our requests. Although we knew generally how to describe the essential chemical ingredients our bodies needed, none of us had ever studied in detail the complex biochemical process that takes place when we taste something. In those early days eating was a necessity, never a pleasure. Often the "goo" was difficult, if not impossible, to swallow. More than once nausea followed a meal.
The three of us spent most of a day debating the pros and cons of the Great Excursion. I was in the "heartburn" stage of my pregnancy and was feeling quite uncomfortable. Even though I did not relish the idea of remaining alone in our lair while the two men trekked across the ice, located the rover, drove across the Central Plain, and then rode or climbed the many kilometers to the Alpha relay station, I recognized that there were many ways in which they could help each other. I also agreed with them that a solo trip would be foolhardy.
Richard was quite certain the rover would still be operational but was less optimistic about the chairlift. We discussed at length the damage that might have been done to the Newton military ship, exposed as it was on the outside of Rama to the nuclear blasts that had occurred beyond the protective mesh shield. Richard conjectured that since there was no visible structural damage (using our access to the output of the Raman sensors, we had looked at images of the Newton military ship on the black screen several times during the intervening months), it was possible that Rama itself might have inadvertently protected the ship from all of the nuclear explosions and, as a result, there might not be any radiation damage inside either.
I was more sanguine about the prospects. I had worked with the environmental engineers on the designs for the spacecraft shielding and was aware of the radiation susceptibility of each of the subsystems of the Newton. Although I did think there was a high probability the scientific data base would be intact (both its processor and all its memories were made from radiation- hardened parts), I was virtually certain the food supply would be contaminated. We had always known that our packaged food was in a relatively unprotected location. Prior to launch, in fact, there had even been some concern that an unexpected solar flare might produce enough radiation to make the food unsafe to eat.
I was not afraid of staying alone for the few days or week that it might take for the men to make the round trip to the military ship. I was more worried about the possibility that one or both of them might not return. It wasn't just a question of the octospiders, or any other aliens that might be cohabiting this immense spaceship with us. There were environmental uncertainties to be considered as well. What if Rama suddenly started to maneuver? What if some other equally untoward event occurred and they couldn't make it back to New York?
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Garden of Rama"
by .
Copyright © 1991 Arthur C. Clarke and Gentry Lee.
Excerpted by permission of RosettaBooks.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Acknowledgments,
Nicole's Journal,
At the Node,
Rendezvous at Mars,
Epithalamion,
The Trial,
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