Rama II

Nicole pounded on the cover and remembered her own feelings of frustra­tion when she had been locked in the avian lair. She quickly ran back over to the building and pressed the embedded flat panel. Nothing happened. Al­most a minute passed. Nicole became anxious. She ran back into the street and called for her colleague.

“I’m right here, under the cover,” he answered, bringing Nicole consider­able relief. “I found another plate near the first landing and pressed it. I think it toggles the cover closed or open, but it may have a timing delay constraint. Give me a few minutes. Don’t you try to open the cover. And don’t stand too near it.”

Nicole backed away and waited. Richard had been correct. Several minutes later the cover opened and he emerged from the hole with a big grin on his face. “See,” he said, “I told you not to worry… Now what’s for lunch?”

As they descended the ramp, Nicole heard the familiar sound of ru

Outside the room there were no horizontal tu

She followed his beam as it inscribed a long circular arc on the wall. “It looks as if there were at least two phases of construction.”

“Exactly,” he replied. “Maybe there were horizontal tu

They were fifty meters underneath the surface when the ceilings above them opened up and the ramps terminated in a large cavern. The circular floor of the cave was about twenty-five meters in diameter. There were four dark tu

“Eenie, Meenie, Mynie, Moe,” Richard said.

“I’ll take Moe,” Nicole said. She headed toward one of the tu

This time it was Richard’s turn to be hesitant. He stared cautiously into the tu

Nicole nodded. She looked over Richard’s shoulder to see what he was doing. “I’m making a map,” he said in response to her curiosity. “Theseus had string and Hansel and Gretel had bread. We have them both beat. Aren’t computers wonderful?”

She smiled. “So what’s your guess?” Nicole said while they were walking along in the near part of the tu

We should be so lucky, Nicole thought. Her fear was increasing as they penetrated deeper and deeper into the tu

She stopped. “Richard,” she said, “I don’t like this. We should turn back—”

They both heard the noise at the same time. It was definitely behind them, back in the vicinity of the circular cavern they had just left– It sounded like hard brushes dragging against metal.

Richard and Nicole huddled together. “That’s the same sound,” he whis­pered, “that I heard the first night in Rama, when we were at the walls of New York.”

The tu

Nicole bolted. She must have covered the next two hundred meters in thirty seconds, despite her Bight suit and backpack. She stopped and waited for Richard. Neither of them heard the sound again and no new lights were illuminated in the distant reaches of the tu

“I’m sorry,” Nicole said when Richard finally arrived. “I panicked. I think I’ve been in this alien wonderland too long.”

“Jesus,” Richard responded with a disapproving frown. “Ive never seen anybody run that fast.” His frown changed into a smile. “Don’t feel bad, Nikki,” he said. “I was scared shitless too. But I was frozen in place.”

Nicole continued taking deep breaths and stared at Richard. “What did you call me?” she asked, somewhat belligerently.

“Nikki,” he replied. “I thought it was time for me to have my own special name for you. Don’t you like it?”

Nicole was speechless for ten full seconds. Her mind was millions of kilometers and fifteen years away, in a hotel suite in Los Angeles, her body experiencing wave after wave of pleasure. “That was remarkable, Nikki, truly wonderful,” the prince had said several minutes later. She had told Henry on that night fifteen years before not to call her Nikki, that it sounded like a name for a buxom showgirl or a tart.

Richard was snapping his fingers in front of her face. “Hello, hello. Any­body home?”

Nicole smiled. “Sure, Richard,” she replied. “Nikki’s just fine — as long as you don’t use it all the time.”

They continued to walk slowly along the tu

Somewhere I can never tell you about, Nicole mused– Because each of us is the sum of all we have ever experienced. Only the very young have a clean slate. The rest of us must live forever with everything we have ever been. She slid her arm through Richard’s. And must have the good sense to know when to keep it private.

The tu

They held hands and walked to one end of the long narrow room. The objects on the wall were photographs, most of them recognizable as having been taken somewhere inside Rama. The great octahedron near the central plaza was featured in several of the photos. The remaining pictures were a balance between scenes of the buildings of New York and wide-angle shots of panoramas around the interior of Rama.

Three of the photographs were particularly fascinating to Richard. They depicted sleek, aerodynamically curved boats plying the Cylindrical Sea; in one of the photographs a great wave was about to crash over the top of a large boat. “Now there’s what we need,” Richard said to Nicole excitedly. “If we could find one of them, our troubles would be over.”

The squeaking above them continued with very little modulation. A spot­light moved from picture to picture at moments when there was a pause in the squeak. Nicole and Richard easily concluded that they were in a museum on some kind of tour, but there was nothing else they could know for certain. Nicole sat down against a side wall. “I’m having a lot of trouble with all this,” she said. “I feel totally out of control.”