Rama: The Omnibus

by Arthur C. Clarke

  Nicole could remember the key events from that period as if they had happened only yesterday. No emotion in her life had ever quite matched the joy and exhilaration that she had felt when she was standing on the victory stand in Los Angeles, the gold medal around her neck and the cheers of a hundred thousand people echoing in her ears. It was her moment. For almost a week she was the darling of the world media. She was on the front page of every newspaper, highlighted in every major broadcast on sports.

  After her final interview in the television studio adjoining the Olympic stadium, a young Englishman with an engaging smile had introduced himself as Darren Higgins and handed her a card. Inside was a handwritten invitation to dinner from none other than the Prince of Wales, the man who would become Henry XI of Great Britain.

  The dinner was magical, Nicole recalled, her desperate situation in Rama temporarily forgotten. He was charming. The next two days were absolutely wonderful. But thirty-nine hours later, when she awakened in Henry's bedroom suite in Westwood, her fairy tale was suddenly over. Her prince who had been so attentive and affectionate was now frowning and fretful. As the inexperienced Nicole tried unsuccessfully to understand what had gone wrong, it slowly dawned on her that her flight of fantasy was over. I was just a conquest, she remembered, the celebrity of the moment. I was unsuitable for any permanent relationship.

  Nicole would never forget the last words the prince had said to her in Los Angeles. He had been circling her while she was hurriedly packing. He could not understand why she was so distraught. Nicole had not replied to any of his questions and had resisted his attempts to embrace her. "What did you expect?" he had asked finally, his frustration obvious. "That we would ride off into the sunset and live happily ever after? Come on, Nicole, this is the real world. You must know that the English people would never accept a half-black woman as their queen."

  Nicole had escaped before Henry saw her tears. And so, my darling Genevieve, Nicole said to herself in the bottom of the pit in Rama, I left Los Angeles with two new treasures. I had a gold medal and a wonderful baby girl within my body. Her thoughts quickly skipped across the following weeks of anxiety to the desperate, lonely moment when she finally summoned her courage to talk to her father.

  "I … I don't know what to do," Nicole had said tentatively to Pierre on that September morning in the living room of their villa at Beauvois. "I know that I have disappointed you terribly—I have disappointed myself—but I want to ask you if it's all right. I mean, if I want to, Papa, can I stay here and try—"

  "Of course, Nicole," her father had interrupted her. He was softly crying. It was the only time Nicole had seen him cry since the death of her mother. "We'll do whatever's right," he had said as he pulled her into his embrace.

  I was so lucky, Nicole thought. He was so accepting. He never faulted me. He never asked anything. When I told him that Henry was the father and that I never wanted anyone else to know, least of all Henry or the child, he promised he would keep my secret And he has.

  The lights came on suddenly and Nicole stood up to survey her prison under the new conditions. Only the center of the pit was fully lighted; both the ends were in shadow. Considering her situation, she was feeling amazingly cheerful and upbeat.

  She looked up to the roof of the barn and through it to the nondescript sky of Rama. Nicole thought about her last few hours and had a sudden impulse. She had not said a prayer in over twenty years but she dropped down on her knees in the full light in the middle of the pit. Dear God, she said, I know it's a little late, but thank you for my father, my mother, and my daughter. And all the wonders of life. Nicole glanced up at the ceiling. She was smiling and had a twinkle in her eye. And right now, dear God, I could use a little help.

  38

  VISITORS

  The tiny robot strode out into the light and unsheathed his sword. The English army had arrived at Harfleur.

  "Once more into the breach, dear friends, once more,

  Or close the wall up with our English dead.

  In peace there's nothing so becomes a man

  As modest stillness and humility:

  But when the blast of war blows in our ears,

  Then imitate the action of the tiger…"

  Henry V, new king of England, continued to exhort his imaginary soldiers. Nicole smiled as she listened. She had spent the better part of an hour following Wakefield's Prince Hal from the debauchery of his youth, onto the battlefields fighting against Hotspur and the other rebels, and thence to the throne of England. Nicole had only once read the three Henry plays, and that had been years before, but she was well aware of the historical period because of her lifelong fascination with Joan of Arc.

  "Shakespeare made you into something you never were," she said out loud to the little robot as she bent beside it to insert Richard's baton in the OFF slot. "You were a warrior, to be sure, nobody would argue with that. But you were also a cold and heartless conqueror. You made Normandy bleed under your powerful yoke. You almost crashed the life out of France."

  Nicole laughed nervously at herself. Here I am, she thought, talking to a senseless ceramic prince twenty centimeters high. She remembered her feelings of hopelessness an hour earlier after she had tried one more time to figure out a way to escape. The fact that her time was running out had been reinforced when she had drunk the next to last swig of water. Oh well, she mused, turning back to Prince Hal, at least this is better than feeling sorry for myself.

  "And what else can you do, my little prince?" Nicole said. "What happens if I insert this pin in the slot marked C?"

  The robot activated, walked a few steps, and finally approached her left foot. After a long silence Prince Hal spoke, not in the rich actor's voice he had used during his earlier recitals, but instead in Wakefield's British twang. "C stands for converse, my friend, and I have a considerable repertoire. But I don't speak until you say something first."

  Nicole laughed. "All right, Prince Hal," she said after a moment's thought, "tell me about Joan of Arc,"

  The robot hesitated and then frowned. "She was a witch, dear lady, burned at the stake in Rouen a decade after my death. During my reign the north of France had been subjugated by my armies. The French witch, claiming she was sent by God—"

  Nicole stopped listening and jerked her head up as a shadow crossed over them. She thought she saw something flying above the roof of the barn. Her heart pounded furiously. "Here. I'm here," she shouted at the top of her voice. Prince Hal droned on in the background about how Joan of Arc's success had sadly resulted in the return of his conquests to the realm of France. "So English. So typically English," Nicole said as she once again inserted the baton in Prince Hal's OFF button.

  Moments later the shadow was large and completely darkened the bottom of the pit. Nicole looked up and her heart caught in her throat. Hovering over the pit, its wings spread and flapping, was a gigantic birdlike creature. Nicole shrunk back and screamed involuntarily. The creature stuck its neck into the pit and uttered a set of noises. The sounds were harsh yet slightly musical. Nicole was paralyzed. The thing repeated almost the same set of noises and then tried, without success because its wings were too large, to lower itself slowly into the narrow pit.

  During this brief period Nicole, her traumatic terror giving way to normal fear, studied the great flying alien. Its face, except for two soft eyes that were a deep blue surrounded by a brown ring, reminded her of the pterodactyls that she had seen in the French museum of natural history. The beak was quite long and hooked. The mouth was toothless and the two talons, bilaterally symmetrical about the main body, each had four sharp digits.

  Nicole would have guessed the avian's mass at about a hundred kilograms. Its body, except for the face and beak, the ends of the wings, and the talons, was covered by a thick black material that resembled velvet. When it was clear to the avian that it would not be able to fly down to the bottom of the pit, it sounded two sharp notes, pulled itself up, and disappeared.

  Nico
le did not move at all during the first minute after the creature departed. Then she sat down and tried to collect her thoughts. The adrenaline from her fright was still coursing through her body. She tried to think rationally about what she had seen. Her first idea was that the thing was a biot, like all the rest of the mobile creatures that had been seen previously in Rama. If that's a biot, she said to herself, then it's extremely advanced. She pictured the other biots she had seen, both the crabs from the Southern Hemicylinder and the wide variety of weird creations filmed by the first Raman expedition. Nicole could not convince herself that the avian was a biot. There was something about the eyes…

  She heard wings flapping in the distance and her body tensed. Nicole cowered in the shadowy corner just as the light in the pit was again obscured by a huge hovering body. Actually it was two bodies. The first avian had returned with a companion, the second one considerably the larger. The new bird stuck its neck down and stared at Nicole with its blue eyes while it hovered over the pit. It made a sound, louder and less musical than the other, and then craned its neck around to look at its companion. While the two avians jabbered back and forth, Nicole noticed that this one was covered with a polished surface, like linoleum, but in all other respects except size was identical to her first visitor. At length the new bird ascended and the strange pair landed on the side of the pit, still jabbering. They observed Nicole quietly for a minute or two. Then, after a brief conversation, they were gone.

  Nicole was exhausted after her bout with fear. Within minutes after her flying visitors departed, she was curled up and asleep in the comer of the pit. She slept soundly for several hours. She was awakened by a loud noise, a crack that resounded through the barn like the report of a gun. She woke up quickly, but heard no more unexplained sounds. Her body reminded her that she was hungry and thirsty. She pulled out what was left of her food. Should I make two tiny meals out of this? she asked herself wearily, or should I eat it all now and accept whatever comes?

  With a deep sigh, Nicole decided to finish off her food and water with one last meal. She was thinking that the two combined might give her enough sustenance that she could temporarily forget about food. She was wrong. While Nicole was drinking the last sip of water from her water flask, her mind was bombarded with images of the bottled spring water that she and her family always had on the table at Beauvois.

  There was another loud crack in the distance after Nicole had finished her meal. She stopped to listen, but again there was silence. Her thoughts were dominated by escape ideas, all of them using the avians in some way to help her out of the pit. She was angry with herself for not having tried to communicate with them while she had the chance. Nicole laughed to herself. Of course, they might have decided to eat me. But who's to say starving to death is to be preferred over being eaten?

  Nicole was certain that the avians would come back. Perhaps her certainty was reinforced by the hopelessness of her situation, but nevertheless she started making plans for what she would do when they did return. Hello, she imagined herself saying. She would stand up with an outstretched palm and walk forcefully to the center of the pit, right under the hovering creature. Nicole would then use a special set of gestures to communicate her plight: Pointing repeatedly first at herself and then the pit would indicate that she couldn't escape; waving at both the avians and the barn roof would ask them for their help.

  Two loud sharp noises brought Nicole back to reality. After a brief pause she heard still another crack. Nicole searched through the "Environments" chapter in her computerized Atlas of Rama and then laughed at herself for not having recognized immediately what was occurring. The loud reports were the sound of the ice breaking up as the Cylindrical Sea melted from the bottom. Rama was still inside the orbit of Venus (although the last midcourse maneuver had placed it onto a trajectory whose distance from the sun was now increasing again), and the solar input had finally brought the temperature inside Rama to above the freezing point of water.

  The Atlas warned of fierce windstorms, hurricanes that would be created by the atmospheric thermal instabilities following the melting of the sea. Nicole walked to the center of the pit. "Come on, you birds, or whatever you are," she yelled. "Come get me now and let me have a chance to escape."

  But the avians did not come back. Nicole sat awake in the corner for ten hours, slowly growing weaker as the frequency of the loud reports reached a peak and then gradually diminished. The wind began to blow. At first it was just a breeze, but it became a gale by the time the cracks from the ice breaking up had stopped. Nicole was completely discouraged. When she fell asleep again she told herself that she would probably not be awake more than one or two more times.

  The winds pummeled New York as the hurricane raged for hours. Nicole huddled lifelessly in a corner. She listened to the howling wind and remembered sitting in a ski chalet during a blizzard in Colorado. She tried to remember the pleasures of skiing but she could not. Her hunger and fatigue had weakened her imagination as well. Nicole sat very still, her mind devoid of thoughts except for wondering occasionally what it would feel like to die.

  She couldn't remember falling asleep, but then she couldn't remember waking up either. She was very weak. Her mind was telling her that something had blown into her hole. It was dark again. Nicole crawled from her end of the pit toward the end with the jumbled metal. She did not switch on her flashlight. She bumped into something and started, then she felt it with her hands. The object was big, as large as a basketball. It had a smooth exterior and was oval in shape.

  Nicole became more alert. She found her flashlight in her flight suit and illuminated the object. It was off-white and shaped like an egg. She examined it thoroughly. When she pressed on it hard, it gave some under the pressure. Can I eat it? her mind asked, her hunger so severe that she had no worries about what it might do to her.

  Nicole pulled out her knife and was able to cut it with difficulty. She feverishly chopped off a chunk and forced it into her mouth. It was tasteless. Nicole spat it out and started to cry. She kicked the object angrily and it rolled over. She thought she heard something. Nicole reached out and pushed it hard, rolling it over again. Yes, she said to herself, yes. That was a sloshing sound.

  It was slow cutting through the outside with her knife. After several minutes Nicole retrieved her medical equipment and started working on the object with her power scalpel. Whatever it was, the object was made of three separate and distinct layers. The covering was tough, like the skin of a football, and relatively difficult to manipulate. The second layer was a soft, moist, royal blue compound the consistency of a melon. Inside, in the center, were several quarts of a greenish liquid. Trembling with anticipation, Nicole stuck a cupped hand into the incision and pulled the liquid to her lips. It had an odd, medicinal taste, but it was refreshing. She drank two hurried swallows and then her years of medical training interceded.

  Fighting against her desire to drink more, Nicole inserted the probe from her mass spectrometer into the liquid to analyze its chemical constituents. She was in such a hurry that she made a mistake with the first specimen and had to repeat the process. When the results of the analysis were displayed on the tiny modular monitor that could be affixed to any of her instruments, Nicole began to weep with joy. The liquid would not poison her. On the contrary, it was rich in proteins and minerals in the kinds of chemical combinations that the body could process.

  "All right, all right!" Nicole shouted out loud. She stood up quickly and nearly fainted. More cautious now, she sat back down on her knees and began the feast of her life. She drank the liquid and ate the moist meat until she was absolutely stuffed. Then she fell into a deep, satisfied sleep.

  Nicole's primary concern when she awakened was to determine the quantity of "manna melon," as she called it, that was available to her. She had been a glutton, and knew it, but that was in the past. What she needed to do now was to husband the manna melon until she could somehow enlist the aid of the avians.


  Nicole measured the melon carefully. Its gross weight had originally been almost ten kilograms, but only a little over eight remained. Her approximate assessment indicated that the inedible outer portion comprised roughly two kilograms, leaving her six kilograms of nourishment split roughly evenly between the liquid and the royal blue meat. Let's see, she was thinking, three liquid kilograms makes…

  Nicole's thought processes were interrupted as the lights came on again. Yessirree, she said to herself, checking her wristwatch, right on time, with the same secular drift She looked up from her watch and saw the egg-shaped object for the first time in the full light. Her recognition was immediate. Oh my God, Nicole thought as she walked over and traced with her fingers the brown lines wriggling on the creamy-white surface. I had almost forgotten. She reached into her flight suit and pulled out the polished stone that Omeh had given her on New Year's Eve in Rome. She stared at it and then glanced over at the oval object in the pit. Oh my God, Nicole repeated.

  She replaced the stone in her pocket and removed the small green vial, "Ronata will know the time to drink," she heard her great-grandfather say again. Nicole sat down in the comer and emptied the vial in one gulp.

  39

  WATERS OF WISDOM

  Immediately Nicole's vision began to blur. She closed her eyes for a second. When she opened them again she was blinded by a riot of bright colors, streaming by her in geometrical patterns as if she were moving very fast. In the center of her sight, way off in the distance, a black dot emerged from the background amid a brilliant set of alternating red and yellow forms. Nicole concentrated on the dot as it continued to grow. It rushed toward her and expanded to fill her vision. She saw a man, an old black man, running across the African savanna on a perfect starry night. Nicole clearly saw his face as he turned to climb a mountain of rocks. The man looked like Omeh but also, somewhat strangely, like her mother.