Rama: The Omnibus

by Arthur C. Clarke

  Memories are very peculiar. This morning, in my depression, the flood of images from previous birthdays heightened my feelings of isolation and loss. Now, when I'm in a stronger mood, I savor those same recollections. I'm no longer terribly sad at this moment that Simone will not be able to experience what I have known. Her birthdays will be completely different from mine and unique to her life. It is my privilege and duty to make them as memorable and loving as I can.

  3

  26 May 2201

  Five hours ago a series of the extraordinary events began to occur inside Rama. We were sitting together at that time, eating our evening meal of roast beef, potatoes, and salad (in an effort to persuade ourselves that what we are eating is delicious, we have a code name for each of the chemical combinations that we obtain from the Ramans. The code names are roughly derived from the kind of nutrition provided—thus our "roast beef" is rich in protein, "potatoes" are primarily carbohydrates, etc.), when we heard a pure and distant whistle. All of us stopped eating and the two men bundled up to go topside. When the whistle persisted, I grabbed Simone and my heavy clothes, wrapped the baby in numerous blankets, and followed Michael and Richard up into the cold.

  The whistle was much louder on the surface. We were fairly certain that it was coming from the south, but since it was dark in Rama we were leery about wandering away from our lair. After a few minutes, however, we began to see splashes of light reflecting off the mirrored surfaces of the surrounding skyscrapers, and our curiosity could not be contained. We crept cautiously toward the southern shore of the island, where no buildings would be between us and the imposing horns of the southern bowl of Rama.

  When we arrived at the shore of the Cylindrical Sea, a fascinating light show was already in progress. The arcs of multicolored light flying around and illuminating the gigantic spires of the southern bowl continued for over an hour. Even baby Simone was mesmerized by the long streamers of yellow, blue, and red bouncing between the spires and making rainbow patterns in the dark. When the show abruptly ceased, we switched on our flashlights and beaded back toward our lair.

  After a few minutes of walking, our animated conversation was interrupted by a distant long shriek, unmistakably die sound of one of the avian creatures that had helped Richard and me to escape from New York last year. We stopped abruptly and listened. Since we have neither seen nor heard any avians since we returned to New York to warn the Ramans of the incoming nuclear missiles, both Richard and I were very excited. Richard has been over to their lair a few times, but has never had any response to his shouts down the great vertical corridor. Just a month ago Richard said that he thought the avians had left New York altogether. The shriek tonight clearly indicates that at least one of our friends is still around.

  Within seconds, before we had a chance to discuss whether or not one of us would go in the direction of the shriek, we heard another sound, also familiar, that was too loud for any of us to feel comfortable. Fortunately the dragging brushes were not between us and our lair. I put both of my arms around Simone and sprinted toward home, nearly running into buildings at least twice in my hurry in the dark. Michael was the last to arrive. By then I had finished opening both the cover and the grill. "There's several of them," Richard said breathlessly, as the sounds of the octospiders, growing louder, surrounded us. He cast his flashlight beam down the long lane leading east from our lair and we all saw two large, dark objects moving in our direction.

  Normally we go to sleep within two or three hours after dinner, but tonight was an exception. The light show, the avian shriek, and die close encounter with the octospiders had energized all three of us. We talked and talked. Richard was convinced that something really major was about to happen. He reminded us that the Earth impact maneuver by Rama had also been preceded by a small light show in the southern bowl. At that time, he recalled, the consensus of the Newton cosmonauts had been that the entire demonstration was intended as an announcement or possibly as some kind of an alert. What, Richard wondered, was the significance of tonight's dazzling display?

  For Michael, who was not inside Rama for any extended period of time before its close passage by the Earth and had never before had any direct contact with either the avians or the octospiders, tonight's events were of major proportions. The fleeting glance that he caught of the tentacled creatures coming toward us down the lane gave him some appreciation for the terror that Richard and I had felt when we were racing up those bizarre spikes and escaping from the octospider lair last year.

  "Are the octospiders the Ramans?" Michael asked tonight. "If so," he continued, "then why should we run from them? Their technology has advanced so far beyond ours that they can basically do with us as they see fit."

  "The octospiders are passengers on this vehicle," Richard responded quickly, "just as we are. So are the avians. The octos think we may be the Ramans, but they are not certain. The avians are a puzzle. Surely they cannot be a spacefaring species. How did they get onboard in the first place? Are they perhaps a part of the original Raman ecosystem?"

  I instinctively clutched Simone against my body. So many questions. So few answers. A memory of poor Dr. Takagishi, stuffed like a huge fish or tiger and standing in the octospider museum, shot through my mind and gave me the shivers. "If we are passengers," I said quietly, "then where are we going?"

  Richard sighed. "I've been doing some computations," he said. "And the results are not very encouraging. Even though we are traveling very fast with respect to the Sun, our speed is puny when the reference system is our local group of stars. If our trajectory does not change, we will exit the solar system in the general direction of Barnard's star. We will arrive in the Barnard system in several thousand years."

  Simone began to cry. It was late and she was very tired. I excused myself and went down to Michael's room to feed her while the men surveyed all the sensor outputs on the black screen to see if they could determine what might be happening. Simone nursed fretfully at my breasts, even hurting me once. Her disquiet was extremely unusual. Ordinarily she is such a mellow baby. "You feel our fear, don't you?" I said to her. I've read that babies can sense the emotions of the adults around them. Maybe it's true.

  I still could not rest, even after Simone was sleeping comfortably on her blanket on the floor. My premonitory senses were warning me that tonight's events signaled a transition into some new phase of our life onboard Rama. I had not been encouraged by Richard's calculation that Rama might sail through the interstellar void for several thousand years. I tried to imagine living in our current conditions for the rest of my life and my mind balked. It would certainly be a boring existence for Simone. I found myself formulating a prayer, to God, or the Ramans, or whoever had the power to alter the future. My prayer was very simple. I asked that the forthcoming changes would somehow enrich the future life of my baby daughter.

  28 May 2201

  Again tonight there was a long whistle followed by a spectacular light show in the southern bowl of Rama. I didn't go to see it. I stayed in the lair with Simone. Michael and Richard did not encounter any of the other occupants of New York. Richard said that the show was approximately the same length as the first one, but the individual displays were considerably different. Michael's impression was that the only major change in the show was in the colors. In his opinion the dominant color tonight was blue, whereas it had been yellow two days ago.

  Richard is certain that the Ramans are in love with the number three and that, therefore, there will be another light show when night falls again. Since the days and nights on Rama are now approximately equal at twenty-three hours—a time period Richard calls the Raman equinox, correctly predicted by my brilliant husband in the almanac he issued to Michael and me four months ago—the third display will begin in another two Earth days. We all expect that something unusual will occur soon after this third demonstration. Unless Simone's safety is in doubt, I will definitely watch.

  30 May 2201

  Our massive cylindri
cal home is now undergoing a rapid acceleration that began over four hours ago. Richard is so excited that he can hardly contain himself. He is convinced that underneath the elevated Southern Hemicylinder is a propulsion system operating on physical principles beyond the wildest imaginings of human scientists and engineers. He stares at the external sensor data on the black screen, his beloved portable computer in his hand, and makes occasional entries based on what he sees on the monitor. From time to time he mumbles to himself or to us about what he thinks the maneuver is doing to our trajectory.

  I was unconscious at the bottom of the pit at the time that Rama made the midcourse correction to achieve the Earth impact orbit, so I don't know how much the floor shook during that earlier maneuver. Richard says those vibrations were trivial compared to what we are experiencing now. Just walking around at present is difficult. The floor bounces up and down at a very high frequency, as if a jackhammer were operating only a few meters away. We have been holding Simone in our arms ever since the acceleration started. We cannot put her down on the floor or in her cradle, because the vibration frightens her. I am the only one who moves around with Simone, and I am exceptionally cautious. Losing my balance and falling is a real concern—Richard and Michael have each fallen twice already—and Simone could be seriously injured if I fell in the wrong position.

  At this moment Richard is sitting against the wall, holding our sleeping daughter against his chest. Our meager furniture is hopping all over the room. One of the chairs actually bounced out into the corridor and headed for the stairs half an hour ago. At first we replaced the furniture in its proper position every ten minutes or so, but now we just ignore it-unless it heads out the entryway into the hall.

  Altogether it has been an unbelievable time period, beginning with the third and final light show in the south. Richard went out first that night, by himself, just before dark. He rushed back excitedly a few minutes later and grabbed Michael. When the two of them returned, Michael looked as if he had seen a ghost. "Octospiders," Richard shouted. "Dozens of them are massed along the shoreline two kilometers to the east."

  "Now, you don't really know how many there are," Michael said. "We only saw them for ten seconds at most before the lights went out."

  "I watched them for longer when I was by myself," Richard continued. "I could see them very clearly with the binoculars. At first there were only a handful, but they suddenly started arriving in droves. I was just starting to count them when they organized themselves into some kind of an array. A giant octo with a red-and-blue-striped head appeared to be by itself at the front of their formation."

  "I didn't see the red and blue giant, or any 'formation,'" Michael added as I stared at the two of them with disbelief. "But I definitely saw many of the creatures with the dark heads and the black and gold tentacles. In my opinion they were looking to the south, waiting for the light show to begin."

  "We saw the avians too," Richard said to me. He turned to Michael. "How many would you say were airborne in that flock?"

  "Twenty-five, maybe thirty," Michael replied.

  "They soared high into the air over New York, shrieking as they rose, and then flew north, across the Cylindrical Sea." Richard paused for a moment. "I think those birds have been through this before. I think they know what is going to happen."

  I started wrapping Simone in her blankets. "What are you doing?" Richard asked. I explained that I wasn't about to miss the final light show. I also reminded Richard that he had sworn to me that the octospiders only ventured out at night. "This is a special occasion," he replied confidently just as the whistle began to sound.

  Tonight's show seemed more spectacular to me. Maybe it was my sense of anticipation. Red was definitely the color of the night. At one point a fiery red arc inscribed a full and continuous hexagon connecting the tips of the six smaller horns. But as spectacular as the Raman lights were, they were not the highlight of the evening. About thirty minutes into the display, Michael suddenly shouted "Look!" and pointed down the shoreline in the direction where he and Richard had seen the octospiders earlier.

  Several balls of light had ignited simultaneously in the sky above the frozen Cylindrical Sea. The "flares" were about fifty meters off the ground and illuminated an area of roughly one square kilometer on the ice below them. During the minute or so that we could see some detail, a large black mass moved south across the ice. Richard handed me his binoculars just as the light from the flares was fading away. I could see some individual creatures in the mass. A surprisingly large number of the octospiders had colored patterns on their heads, but most were dark charcoal gray, like the one that chased us in the lair. Both the black and gold tentacles and the shapes of their bodies confirmed that these creatures were the same species as the one we had seen climbing the spikes last year. And Richard was right. There were dozens of them.

  When the maneuver began, we returned quickly to our lair. It was dangerous being outside in Rama during the extreme vibrations. Occasionally small parts of the surrounding skyscrapers would break free and crash to the ground. Simone began to cry as soon as the shaking started.

  After a difficult descent into our lair, Richard began checking the external sensors, mostly looking at star and planet positions (Saturn is definitely identifiable in some of the Raman frames) and then making computations based on his observational data. Michael and I alternated holding Simone—eventually we sat in a corner of the room, where the two merging walls gave us some sense of stability—and talked about the amazing day.

  Almost an hour later Richard announced the results of his preliminary orbit determination. He gave first the orbital elements, with respect to the Sun, of our hyperbolic trajectory before the maneuver started. Then he dramatically presented the new, osculating elements (as he called them) of our instantaneous trajectory. Somewhere in the recesses of my mind I must have stored the information that defines the term osculating element, but I luckily didn't need to fetch it. I was able, from the context, to understand that Richard was using a shorthand way of telling us how much our hyperbola had changed during the first three hours of the maneuver. However, the full implication of a change in hyperbolic eccentricity escaped me.

  Michael remembered more of his celestial mechanics. "Are you certain?" he said almost immediately.

  "The quantitative results have wide error bars," Richard replied. "But there can be no doubt about the qualitative nature of the trajectory change."

  "Then our rate of escape from the solar system is increasing?" Michael asked.

  Richard nodded. "That's right. Our acceleration is virtually all going into the direction that increases our speed with respect to the Sun. The maneuver has already added many kilometers per second to our Sun-based velocity."

  "Whew," Michael replied. "That's staggering."

  I understood the gist of what Richard was saying. If we had retained any hope that we might be on a circuitous voyage that would magically return us to the Earth, those hopes were now being shattered. Rama was going to leave me solar system much faster than any of us had expected. While Richard waxed lyrical about the kind of propulsion system that could impart such a velocity change to this "behemoth of a spacecraft," I nursed Simone and found myself again thinking about her future. So we are definitely leaving the solar system, I thought, and going somewhere else. Will I ever see another world? Will Simone? Is it possible, my daughter, that Rama will be your home world for your entire lifetime?

  The floor continues to shake vigorously, but it comforts me. Richard says our escape velocity is still increasing rapidly. Good. As long as we are going someplace new, I want to travel there as fast as possible.

  4

  5 June 2201

  I awakened in the middle of last night after hearing a persistent knocking sound coming from the direction of the vertical corridor in our lair. Even though the normal noise level from the constant shaking is substantial, Richard and I could both clearly hear the pounding without any difficulty. After checki
ng Simone—she was still comfortably sleeping in her cradle now mounted on Richard's makeshift shock absorbers—we walked cautiously over to the vertical corridor.

  The knocking grew louder as we climbed the stairs toward the grill that protects us from unwanted visitors. At one landing Richard leaned over and whispered to me that it "must be MacDuff knocking at the gate" and that our "evil deed" would soon be discovered. I was too tense to laugh. When we were still several meters below the grill, we saw a large moving shadow projected on the wall in front of us. We stopped to study it. Both Richard and I realized immediately that our outside lair cover was open—there was daylight topside in Rama at the time—and that the Raman creature or biot responsible for the knocking was creating the bizarre shadow on the wall.

  I instinctively clutched Richard's hand. "What in the world is it?" I wondered out loud.

  "It must be something new," Richard said very softly.

  I told him that the shadow resembled an old-fashioned oil pump going up and down in the middle of a producing field. He grinned nervously and agreed.

  After waiting for what must have been five minutes and neither seeing nor hearing any change in the rhythmic knocking pattern of the visitor, Richard told me that he was going to climb to the grill, where he would be able to see something more definitive than a shadow. Of course that meant that whatever was outside beating on our door would also be able to see him, assuming that it had eyes or an approximate equivalent. For some reason I remembered Dr. Takagishi at that moment, and a wave of fear swept through me. I kissed Richard and told him not to take any chances.

  When Richard reached the final landing, just above where I was waiting, his body was partially in the light and blocked the moving shadow. The knocking suddenly stopped abruptly. "It's a biot, all right," Richard shouted. "It looks like a praying mantis with an extra hand in the middle of its face… And now it's opening the grill," he added a second later.