Rama: The Omnibus

by Arthur C. Clarke

  Richard smiled as he studied the mural. So both the Cylindrical Sea and New York are still here, he thought. He remembered what the Eagle had said about not making unnecessary changes to Rama. That means our lair may be there as well.

  There were many additional pictures surrounding Richard's escape sequence, some giving more details about the alien plants and animals in the green region, and others providing explicit instructions on how to operate the submarine. When Richard tried to copy what he thought was the most important of this information into his portable computer from the Newton, the myrmicat teacher suddenly seemed impatient. Richard wondered if the crisis situation had worsened.

  The next day, after a long nap, Richard was outfitted with his pack and ushered into the sessile chamber by his hosts. There the four manna melons he had watched growing two weeks previous were removed from the web by the myrmicats and placed in his pack. They were quite heavy. Richard estimated that they weighed twenty kilograms altogether. Another myrmicat then used an instrument similar to a large scissors to remove from the sessile a cylindrical volume containing four ganglia and their associated filaments. This sessile material was placed in a silver tube and inserted in one of Richard's smaller side pockets. The avian eggs were the last elements to be loaded.

  Richard took a deep breath. This must be good-bye, he thought as the myrmicats pointed down the corridor. For some reason he remembered Nai Watanabe's insistence that the Thai greeting called the wai, a small bow with hands clasped together in front of the upper chest, was a universal sign of respect. Smiling to himself, Richard performed a wai to the half dozen myrmicats surrounding him. To his astonishment, each of them placed its four forward legs together in pairs in front of its underbelly and made a slight bow in his direction.

  The deep basement of the brown cylinder was obviously uninhabited. After leaving the sessile chamber, Richard and his guide had first passed many other myrmicats, especially in the vicinity of the atrium. But once they had entered the ramp that descended to the basement, they had never encountered even a single myrmicat.

  Richard's guide dispatched a leggie in front of them. It raced along the final narrow tunnel and through the vaultlike emergency exit into the green region. When the leggie returned, it stood on the back of the myrmicat's head for several seconds and then scampered down to the floor. The guide motioned for Richard to proceed into the tunnel.

  Outside, in the green region, Richard was met by two large avians who immediately became airborne. One of them had an ugly scar on its wing, as if it had been hit by a spray of bullets. Richard was in a moderately dense forest, with growth around him up to three or four meters off the ground. Even though the light was dim, it was not difficult for Richard to find a pathway or to follow the avians above him. Occasionally he heard sporadic gunfire off in the distance.

  The first fifteen minutes passed without incident. The forest thickness lessened. Richard had just estimated that he should be at the moat for the rendezvous with the submarine in another ten minutes when, without any warning, a machine gun began to fire no more than a hundred meters away. One of the guide avians crashed to the ground. The other avian disappeared. Richard hid himself in a dark thicket when he heard the soldiers coming in his direction.

  "Two rings for certain," one of them said. "Maybe even three. That would give me twenty rings this week alone."

  "Shit, man, that was no contest. It shouldn't even count. The damn bird didn't even know you were there."

  "That's his problem, not mine. I still get to count his rings. Ah, here he is… Crap, he only has two."

  The men were only about fifteen meters away from Richard. He stood absolutely still, not daring to move, for more than five minutes. The soldiers, meanwhile, stayed in the vicinity of the avian corpse, smoking and talking about the war.

  Richard began to feel pain in his right foot. He shifted his weight ever so slightly, thinking he would relieve whatever muscle was being strained, but the pain only increased. At length he glanced down and discovered to his horror that one of the rodentlike creatures he had seen in the mural chamber had eaten through what was left of his shoe and was now chomping on his foot. Richard tried to shake his leg vigorously but noiselessly. He was not completely successful. Although the rodent released his foot, the soldiers heard the sound and started moving toward him.

  Richard could not run. Even if there had been an escape route, the extra weight he was carrying would have made him easy prey for the soldiers. Within a minute one of the men yelled, "Over here, Bruce, I think there's something in this thicket."

  The man was pointing his gun in Richard's direction. "Don't shoot," Richard said. "I'm a human."

  The second soldier had just joined his comrade. "What the fuck are you doing out here alone?"

  "I'm taking a hike," Richard answered.

  "Are you crazy?" the first soldier said. "Come on out of there. Let us take a look at you."

  Richard slowly walked out of the underbrush. Even in the dim light he must have been an astonishing sight with his long hair and beard plus the bulging blue jacket.

  "Jesus Christ. Who the hell are you? Where's your outfit positioned?"

  "This ain't no goddamn soldier," the other man said, still staring at Richard. "This here's a loony tune. He must have escaped from the facility in Avalon and wandered over here by mistake… Hey, asshole, don't you know this is dangerous territory? You could be killed—"

  "Look at his pockets," the first soldier interrupted. "He's carrying four huge goddamn melons—"

  Suddenly they struck from the sky. There must have been a dozen of the avians altogether, consumed by fury and shrieking as they attacked. The two human soldiers were knocked to the ground. Richard started to run. One of the avians landed on the face of the first soldier and began to tear it apart with its talons. Gunfire erupted as other soldiers in the vicinity, hearing the fracas, hurried into the area to help the patrol.

  Richard did not know how he was going to find the submarine. He raced downhill as fast as his feet and his load would allow him. The gunfire behind him increased. He heard the screams of pain of the soldiers and the death shrieks of the avians.

  He found the moat but there was no sign of the submarine. Richard could hear human voices coming down the slope behind him. Just when he was about to panic, he heard a short shriek from a large bush on his right. The leader avian with the four cobalt rings flew past his head, not far off the ground, and continued down the shore of the moat to the left.

  They located the small submarine in three more minutes. The ship had already submerged before the pursuing humans broke into the clear in the green region. Inside, Richard took off his pack and placed it behind him in the small control compartment. He looked at his avian companion and tried a couple of simple jabber phrases. The avian leader replied, very slowly and very clearly, with the jabber equivalent of "We all thank you very much."

  The journey took slightly more than an hour. Richard and the avian said very little to each other. During the early part of the voyage, Richard carefully watched the avian leader operating the submarine. He made notes in his computer and, during the second half of the trip, even took over the controls himself for a short period of time. When he was not too busy, Richard's mind was asking questions about everything he had experienced in the second habitat. Above all, he wanted to know why it was he in the submarine with the melons, the avian eggs, and the sessile slice, and not one of the myrmicats. I must be missing something, he mused to himself.

  Soon thereafter the submarine surfaced and Richard was in familiar territory. The skyscrapers of New York loomed above him. "Hallelujah," Richard said out loud, carrying his full pack onto the island.

  The avian leader anchored the submarine just offshore and quickly prepared to leave. He turned around in a circle, bowed slightly to Richard, and then took off toward the north. As he was watching the birdlike creature fly away, Richard realized that he was standing in the exact spot where he and Nicol
e had waited, many many years before in Rama II, for the three avians who would carry them across the Cylindrical Sea to freedom.

  7

  During the first second that Richard stood on the surface in New York, a hundred billion billion bits of data were acquired by the infinitesimal Raman sensors scattered throughout the giant cylindrical spacecraft. These data were transmitted in realtime to local data-handling centers, still microscopic in size, where they were stored until the allocated time for them to be relayed to the central telecommunications processor buried beneath the Southern Hemicylinder.

  Every second of every hour of every day the Raman sensors acquire these hundred quintillion data bits. At the telecommunications processor, the data are labeled, sifted, analyzed, compressed, and stored in recording devices whose individual components are smaller than an atom. After storage, the data are accessed by the dozens of distributed processors, each managing a separate function, that together control the Rama spacecraft. Thousands of algorithms spread among the processors then operate on the data, extracting trend and synthesis information in preparation for the regularly scheduled data bursts that transmit the mission status to the Nodal Intelligence.

  The data bursts contain a mixture of raw, compressed, and synthesized data, depending on the exact formats selected by the different processors. The most important part of each burst is the narrative report, in which the unified but distributed intelligence of Rama presents its prioritized summary of the progress of the mission. The rest of the burst is essentially supporting information, images or measurements or sensor outputs that either provide additional background data or directly support the conclusions contained in the summary.

  The language used for the narrative summary is mathematical in structure, precise in definition, and highly coded. It is also rich in footnotes, each equivalent phrase or sentence containing, as part of its transmission structure, the pointers to the actual data buttressing the particular statement being made. The report could not, in the truest sense, be translated into any language as primitive as the ones used by human beings. Nevertheless, what follows is a crude approximation of the summary report received by the Nodal Intelligence from Rama soon after Richard's arrival in New York.

  REPORT #298

  Time of Transmission: 156 307 872 491.5116

  Time Since First-Stage Alert: 29.2873

  References:

  Node 23-419

  Spacecraft

  947

  Spacefarers

  47 249

  (A & B)

  32 806

  2 666

  During the last interval the humans (Spacefarer #32 806) have continued to wage a successful war against the avian/sessile symbiotic pair (#47 249-A & B). The humans now control almost all the interior of the avian/sessile habitat, including the upper portion of the brown cylinder where the avians formerly lived. The avians have fought courageously but vainly against the human invasion. They have been killed unmercifully, and less than a hundred of them now remain.

  Thus far the humans have not breached the integrity of the sessile domain. They have, however, found the elevator shafts leading to the lower parts of the brown cylinder. The humans are currently developing plans for an attack on the sessile lair.

  The sessiles are a defenseless species. There are no weapons of any kind in their domain. Even their mobile form, which has the physical dexterity to use weapons, is essentially nonviolent. To protect themselves from what they fear will be an inevitable invasion by the humans, the sessiles have directed the mobile myrmicats to build fortresses surrounding the four oldest and most developed of their species. Meanwhile, no more manna melons are being allowed to germinate and those myrmicats not involved in the construction process are cocooning early. If the humans delay their attack several more intervals, as seems likely, it is possible they will encounter only a few myrmicats during their invasion.

  The human habitat continues to be dominated by individuals with characteristics decidedly different from the human contingent observed inside Rama II and at the Node. The focus of the current human leaders is the retention of personal power, without serious consideration of the welfare of the colony. Despite both the video message and the presence of messenger humans in their group, these leaders must not believe they are actually being watched, for their behavior in no way reflects the possible existence of a set of values or ethical laws that supersedes their own dominion.

  The humans have continued to prosecute the war against the avian/sessiles primarily because it distracts attention from the other problems in their colony, including the human-initiated environmental degradation and the recent precipitous decline in living standards. The human leaders, and indeed most of the colonists, have shown no remorse whatsoever over the destruction and possible extermination of the avians.

  The human family that remained for over a year at the Node no longer has any significant impact on the affairs of the colony. The woman who was the primary messenger is still imprisoned, essentially because she opposes the actions of the existing leaders, and is in danger of being executed. Her husband has been living with the avians and sessiles and is now a critical component in their attempt to survive the human onslaught. The children are not yet mature enough to be a major factor in the human colony.

  Very recently, the husband escaped from the sessile domain to the island in the middle of the spacecraft. He carried both avian and sessile embryos with him. He is currently located in a familiar environment, and therefore should be able both to survive and to nurture the young of the other species. His successful escape may have been at least partly due to the noninvasive intercession that began at the time of the first-stage alert. The intercession signals almost certainly played a role in the decision by the sessiles to trust their embryos to a human being.

  There is no evidence, however, that the intercession transmissions have affected the behavior of any of the humans. For the sessiles, information processing is a primary activity and, therefore, it is not surprising that they would be susceptible to intercessionary suggestions. The humans, however, especially the leaders, have their lives so filled with activity that there is very little, if any, time for cogitation.

  There is an additional problem with humans and non-invasive intercession. As a species they are so varied, from individual to individual, that a transmission package cannot be designed with broad applicability. A set of signals that might result in a positive behavior modification for one human will almost certainly have no impact on anyone else. Experiments with different types of intercession processes are currently being conducted, but it may well be that humans belong to that small group of spacefarers who are immune to noninvasive intercession.

  In the south of the spacecraft, the octospiders (#2 666) continue to thrive in a colony almost indistinguishable from any of their other isolated colonies in space.

  The full range of possible biological expression remains latent, primarily because of restricted territorial resources and no true competition. However, they are carrying with them the significant potential for expansion that has characterized their several successful transfers from one star system to another.

  Until the humans probed through the wall of their own habitat and broke the seal on their enclosure, the octospiders paid very little attention to the other two species in the spacecraft. Since the humans began to explore, however, the octospiders have watched the events in the north with increasing interest. Their existence is still unknown to the humans, but the octospiders have already started formulating a contingency plan to cover a possible interaction with their aggressive neighbors.

  The potential loss of the entire avian/sessile community greatly reduces the value of the mission. It is possible that the only sessile and avian survivors of the voyage will be those in the small octospider zoo and, perhaps, those raised by the human on the island. Even irrevocable loss of a single species does not call for a stage-two alert; nevertheless, the continued unpredictable and lif
e-negative behavior of the current human leaders provides an unmitigated worry that the mission may suffer additional serious losses. Intercessionary activity in the near future will be focused on those humans who both oppose the present leaders and have indicated, by their behavior, growth beyond territoriality and aggression.

  8

  "My country was called Thailand. It had a king, whose name was also Rama, like our spaceship. Your grandmother and grandfather—my mother and father—probably still live there, in a town called Lamphun… Here it is."

  Nai pointed at a spot on the faded map. The boys' attention had started to wander. They're still too young, she thought. Even for bright children it's too much to expect at four.

  "All right, now," she said, folding up the map, "you can go outside and play."

  Galileo and Kepler put on their heavy jackets, picked up a ball, and raced out the door into the street. Within seconds they were engaged in a one-on-one soccer match. Oh, Kenji Nai thought, watching the boys from the entryway. How they have missed you. There's just no way one parent can be both mother and father.

  She had begun the geography lesson, as she always did, by reminding the boys that all of the colonists in New Eden had come originally from a planet called Earth. Nai had then shown the boys a world map for their home planet, first discussing the basic concept of continents and oceans, and then identifying Japan, their father's native country. The activity had made Nai both homesick and lonely.

  Maybe these lessons aren't for you at all, she thought, still watching the soccer game under the dim streetlights of Avalon. Galileo dribbled around Kepler and fired at an imaginary goal. Maybe they're really for me.