Rama II

52 FLIGHT 302

Richard pulled the harness tight around Nicole’s waist and buttocks. “Your feet will dangle,” he said, “and at first, when the lattice cord is stretching, you will have the feeling that you’re falling.”

“What if I hit the water?” Nicole asked.

“You have to trust the avians to By high enough that you won’t!” Richard replied. “I think they’re quite intelligent, especially the one with the red rings.”

“Do you think it’s the king?” Nicole asked, adjusting the harness for comfort.

“Probably their equivalent,” Richard answered. “He has made it clear from the beginning that he intends to fly in the middle of the formation.”

Richard walked up the steep incline to the wall, carrying all three harness lines in his hands. The avians were sitting quietly together, staring out at the sea. They acquiesced as he tied the harness around their midsections, just behind the backs of the wings. Then they watched his computer monitor as he again showed them the graphics of the takeoff. The avians were to lift off together, slowly, pull the harness lines taut directly over Nicole’s head, and then lift her straight up before flying north across the sea.

He checked that the knots were secure and then returned to Nicole’s side at the bottom of the incline. She was only about five meters from the water. “If, by some chance, the avians do not return for me,” Richard told her, “don’t wait forever. Once you find the rescue team, assemble the sailboat and come across. I will be down in the White Room.” He took a deep breath. “Be safe, my darling,” he added. “Remember that I love you.”

Nicole could tell from the pounding of her heart that the moment of takeoff had finally arrived. She kissed Richard slowly on the lips. “And I love you,” she murmured.

When they broke their embrace, Richard waved at the avians on the wall. The gray velvet avian cautiously rose in the air, followed immediately by its two companions. They hovered in formation directly over Nicole. She felt the three lines pull tight and was momentarily lifted into the air.

Seconds later, as the elastic cord began to stretch, Nicole was falling toward the ground again. The avians flew higher, heading out over the water, and Nicole felt as if she were a yo-yo, bouncing up and down as the cord would stretch and then contract with a jerk when the avians rose swiftly to a higher altitude.

!t was an exciting flight. She touched the water once, just barely, while she was still close to shore. She was temporarily frightened, but the avians lifted her quickly before anything more than her feet were wet. Once the lattice cord was at its full extension, the ride was fairly smooth. Nicole sat in her harness, her hands holding on to two of the three lines, her feet dangling below her about eight meters from the tops of the waves.

The middle of the sea was quite calm. About halfway across Nicole saw two great, dark figures swimming along beneath her, parallel to her course. She was certain they were shark biots. She also detected two or three other species in the water, including one, long and skinny like an eel, that reared itself out of the sea and watched her fly by. Whew, Nicole thought as she surveyed the water, I’m certainly glad that I didn’t swim.

The landing was easy. Nicole had been concerned that the avians might not realize there was a fifty-meter cliff on the opposite side of the sea. She needn’t have worried. As they approached landfall in the Northern Hemi-cylinder, the avians gently increased their altitude. Nicole was set down gingerly about ten meters from the edge.

The huge birds landed close by. Nicole climbed out of her harness and walked over to the avians. She thanked them profusely and tried to pat them on the backs of their heads, but they jerked away from her touch. The creatures rested for several minutes and then, at a signal from their leader, they flew off across the sea toward New York.

Nicole was surprised at the intensity of her emotions. She knelt down and kissed the ground. It was only then that she realized she had never really expected to escape safely from New York. For a moment, before she started searching for the rescue team with her binoculars, she reviewed everything that had happened to her since that fateful crossing in the icemobile. Before New York is a lifetime ago, she said to herself. Now everything has changed.

Richard untied the harness from the avian leader and dropped it on the ground. All the birds were now free. The creature with the gray velvet body craned its neck around to see if Richard was finished. The rich cherry red of its rings was even clearer in the full daylight. Richard wondered about the rings and what they signified, knowing there was a high likelihood he would never see these magnificent aliens again.

Nicole came over beside Richard. When he had landed she had embraced him passionately. The avians had boldly stared, signaling their curiosity. They too, Nicole thought, must be wondering about us. The linguist in her imagined what it would be like actually to talk to an extraterrestrial species, to begin to understand how an altogether different intelligence might oper­ate…

“I wonder how we say good-bye and thank you,” Richard was saying.

“I don’t know,” Nicole replied, “but it would be nice—”

She stopped to watch the avian leader. It had called the other two crea­tures to come beside it and the three birds were standing facing Richard and Nicole. On a signal they all spread their wings, to their full extent, and formed into a circle. They turned around one full revolution and then fell back into a straight line facing the humans.

“Come on,” Nicole said. “We can do that.”

Nicole and Richard stood side by side, their arms outstretched, and faced their avian friends. Nicole then put her arms on Richard’s shoulders and led him through a circular turn. Richard, who was sometimes not very graceful, stumbled once but managed to complete the movement. Nicole imagined that the avian leader was smiling when she and Richard straightened out after their revolution.

The three avians took off seconds later. Higher and higher in the sky they rose, until they were at the limit of Nicole’s vision. Then they flew south, across the sea toward home.

“Good luck,” Nicole whispered as they departed.

The rescue team was not in the vicinity of the Beta campsite. In fact, Richard and Nicole had not seen any sign of them during a thirty-minute drive in the rover along the coast of the Cylindrical Sea. “These guys must really be stupid,” Richard groused. “My message was in plain view there at Beta. Could it be that they haven’t even come down this far yet?”

“It’s less than three hours until dark,” Nicole replied. “They may have returned to the Newton already.”

“All right, then, to hell with them,” Richard said. “Let’s have a bite to eat and then head for the chairlift.”

“Do you think we should save any of the melon?” Nicole asked a few minutes later, while they were eating. Richard gave her a puzzled glance. “Just in case,” she added.

“Just in case what?” Richard rejoined. “Even if we don’t find that idiotic rescue bunch and must climb all the stairs ourselves, we’ll still be out of here right after dark. Remember, we become weightless again at the top of the stairway.”

Nicole smiled. “I guess I’m naturally more cautious,” she said. She put several bites of melon back into her pack.

They had driven three-fourths of the way toward the chairlift and the Alpha stairway when they spotted the four human figures in space suits. It looked as if they were leaving the conglomeration of buildings that had been designated as the Raman Paris. The figures were walking in the opposite direction from the rover.

“I told you the guys were idiots,” Richard exclaimed. “They don’t even have the sense to take off their space suits. It must be a special team, sent up in the spare Newton vehicle just to find us and bring us back.”

He steered the rover across the Central Plain in the direction of the humans. Richard and Nicole both started shouting when they were within a hundred meters, but the men in the space suits continued their slow proces­sion toward the west– “They probably can’t hear us,” Nicole offered. “They still have on their helmets and communication gear.”

A frustrated Richard drove up to within five meters of the single-file line, stopped the rover, and jumped out in a hurry. He ran quickly around to the leader, shouting all the way. “Hey, guys,” he yelled. “We’re here, behind you. All you have to do is turn around—”

Richard stopped cold as he stared at the blank expression of the man in the lead. He recognized the face. Jesus, it was Norton! He shuddered involuntarily as a tingle ran down his spine. Richard barely jumped out of the way as the four-man procession walked slowly past him. Numb from the shock, he quietly studied the other three faces, none of which changed expression as they marched past. They were three other cosmonauts from the Rama I crew.

Nicole was at his side only seconds after the final figure passed him. “What’s the matter?” she said. “Why didn’t they stop?” The blood had all drained out of Richard’s face. “Darling, are you all right?”

“They’re biots,” Richard mumbled. “Goddamn human biots.”

“Whaaat?” Nicole replied, a streak of terror in her voice. She ran quickly to the head of the line and stared at the face behind the helmet glass. It was definitely Norton. Every feature of the face, even the color of the eyes and the slight mustache, was absolutely perfect. But the eyes didn’t say anything.

The motion of the body, too, now that she noticed it, seemed artificial. Each pair of steps was a repeated pattern. There were only slight variations from figure to figure. Richard is right, Nicole thought. These are human biots. They must have been made from the images, just like the toothpaste and the brush. A momentary panic swelled in her chest. But we don’t need a rescue team, she told herself, calming her anxiety. The military ship is still docked at the top of the bowl.

Richard was stunned by the discovery of the human biots. He sat in the rover for several minutes, unwilling to drive, asking questions of Nicole and himself that he could not possibly have answered. “So what’s going on here?” he said over and over again. “Are all these biots based on real species, found somewhere in the universe? And why are they being fabricated in the first place?”

Before they drove over to the chairlift, Richard insisted that they both shoot many minutes of video footage of the human biots. “The avians and octospiders are fascinating,” he said as he took a special close-up of “Norton’s” leg motion, “but this tape will blow everyone away.”

Nicole reminded him that it was less than two hours until dark and that it still might be necessary for them to climb the Stairway of the Gods. Satisfied that he had recorded the bizarre procession for posterity, Richard slid into the driver’s seat of the rover and headed toward the Alpha stairway.

There was no need to perform any tests to see if the chairlift was working properly; it was running when they drove up beside it. Richard jumped out of the rover and ran into the control room.

“Someone’s coming down,” he said, pointing up the lift.

“Or something,” Nicole said grimly.

The five-minute wait seemed like an eternity. At first neither Richard nor Nicole said anything. Later, however, Richard suggested that maybe they should sit in the rover in case they needed to make a quick escape.

Each of them trained binoculars on the long cable stretching upward to the heavens. “It’s a man!” cried Nicole.

“It’s General O’Toole!” said Richard a few moments later.

Indeed it was. General Michael Ryan O’Toole, American air force officer, was descending in the chairlift. He was still several hundred meters above Richard and Nicole, but had not yet seen them. He was busy studying with his binoculars the beauty of the alien landscape around him.

General O’Toole had been preparing to leave Rama for the final time when, as he rode up in the chairlift, he had spotted what looked like three birds flying far to the south in the Rama sky. The general had decided to return to see if he could find those birds again. He was unprepared for the joyous greeting that awaited him when he reached the bottom of his ride.