Rama: The Omnibus

by Arthur C. Clarke

  "What an interesting idea, Patrick," Richard replied. "That's something we have never even considered. And of course they don't need to hear to communicate."

  "Creatures that have spent most of their evolutionary lives deep in the ocean are often deaf," Nicole offered. "Their primary sensory needs for survival are at other wavelengths, and with only a limited number of cells available for both the sensors and their processing, the ability to hear simply never develops."

  "I worked with the hearing impaired in Thailand," Nai added, "and I was fascinated by the fact that being unable to hear is not a significant drawback in an advanced culture. The sign language of the deaf has extraordinary range and is quite complex. Humans on Earth no longer need to hear to hunt or to escape animals that might prey on them. The octospider language of colors is more than adequate for communication."

  "Hold on just a minute," Robert said. "Aren't we overlooking some pretty strong evidence that the octospiders can hear? How could they have known that Max and I were going out to find Ellie and Eponine if they didn't overhear our conversation?"

  There was silence for several seconds. "They might have had the two women translate what was being said," Richard suggested.

  "But that would require two unlikely events," Patrick said. "First, if the octospiders are deaf, why would they have sophisticated miniaturized equipment available that would record sounds at all? Second, having Eponine and Ellie translate what we said for the octospiders implies a level of communication interaction that could hardly have developed in a month's time… No, in my opinion, the octos probably determined the purpose of Max and Robert's trip on the basis of visual evidence—the portraits of the two women on the portable computer monitors."

  "Bravo," shouted Richard. "That's excellent thinking."

  "Are you guys going to yak about this shit all night long?" Max said as he walked into the middle of the group.

  Everyone jumped up. "Are you all right?" Nicole asked.

  "Sure," said Max. "I even feel well rested."

  "Tell us what happened," Robert interrupted. "I heard your rifle fire, but by the time I came around the corner, a pair of octospiders was already carrying your body."

  "I don't know myself," Max said. "Just before I passed out I felt a stinging hot pain in the back of my neck… That was it. One of the octos behind me must have hit me with their equivalent of a tranquilizing dart."

  Max rubbed the back of his neck. Nicole came over to inspect. "I cannot even find a small hole now," she said. "They must use very thin darts."

  Max glanced at Robert. "I don't suppose you retrieved the rifle."

  "I'm sorry, Max," Robert said. "I never even thought about it until after we were on the train."

  Max looked at his friends. "Well, guys, I want you to know my rebellion is over. I'm convinced we cannot fight these creatures. So we might as well try to follow their plan."

  Nicole put a hand on her friend's shoulder. "This is the new Max Puckett," she said with a smile.

  "I may be stubborn," Max replied with a smile of his own, "but I don't believe I'm stupid."

  "I don't think we're all supposed to move into Patrick's igloo," Max said the next morning after another subway had come and replenished their food and water.

  "Why do you say that?" Richard asked. "Look at the evidence. The igloo was definitely designed for human habitation. Why else would they have built the staircase?"

  "It just doesn't make sense," Max replied. "Especially for the children. There's not enough room to live for any period of time. I think the igloo is some kind of way-station—a cabin in the woods, if you like."

  Nicole tried to imagine the ten of them living in the cramped quarters that Patrick had described. "I can see your point, Max," she said, "but what do you suggest?"

  "Why don't a few of us return to the igloo and look around carefully? Patrick's quick reconnoiter may have missed something. Anyway, whatever we're supposed to do should be obvious. It wouldn't be like the octospiders, or whatever is guiding us, to leave us in uncertainty."

  Richard, Max, and Patrick were selected for the scouting mission. Their departure was delayed, however, so that Patrick could keep his promise to Galileo. Patrick followed the five-year-old up the long, winding staircase and down the hallway to the bottom of the second stairs. The boy was too exhausted to climb any more. In fact, when they were coming down from the dome, the little boy's legs gave out and Patrick had to carry Galileo the final twelve meters of the descent.

  "Can you make it up a second time?" Richard asked Patrick.

  "I believe so," said Patrick, adjusting his pack.

  "At least now he won't be waiting for us old farts all the time," Max said with a grin.

  The three men stopped to admire the view from the landing at the top of the cylindrical stairs. "Sometimes," Max said, as he took a long look at the magnificent colors of the rainbow strips in the dome only a few meters above him, "I think that everything that has happened to me since I boarded the Pinta is a dream. How do pigs, chicken's, and even Arkansas fit into this picture? It's just too much."

  "It must be difficult," Patrick said while they were walking along the hallway, "to reconcile all this with your normal life on Earth. But consider my situation. I was born on an extraterrestrial spacecraft headed for an artificial world located near the star Sirius. I have spent more than half my life asleep. I have no idea what normal means."

  "Shit, Patrick," Max said, putting his arm around the young man, "if I were you I would be as crazy as a bedbug."

  Later, when they were climbing the second stairs, Max stopped and turned to Richard below him. "I hope you realize, Wakefield," he said in a warm tone, "that I'm just an ornery bastard and didn't mean anything personal during our arguments the last few days."

  Richard smiled. "I understand, Max. I also know that I'm as arrogant as you are ornery. I will accept your oblique apology if you will accept mine."

  Max feigned indignation. "That wasn't a damn apology," he said, walking up to the next step.

  The igloo hut was just as Patrick had described it. The three men pulled on their jackets and prepared to go outside. Richard, who was the first one out the door, saw the other igloo before Max and Patrick had even taken their first breath of the bracing Rama air.

  "That other igloo wasn't there, Uncle Richard," Patrick insisted. "I walked completely around the area."

  The second igloo, which was almost exactly one-tenth the size of the larger hut, was about thirty meters farther away from the cliff bordering the Cylindrical Sea. It was glowing in the Rama dark. As the men started walking toward it, the door of the smaller igloo opened and two tiny human figures came out. The figures were about twenty centimeters high and were illuminated from the inside.

  "What the hell…?" Max exclaimed.

  "Look," said Patrick excitedly, "it's Mother and Uncle Richard!"

  The two figures turned south in the darkness, away from the cliff and the sea. Richard, Max, and Patrick scrambled up beside them for a better view. The figures were dressed in exactly the same clothes that Richard and Nicole had worn the previous day. The attention to detail was extraordinary. The hair, faces, skin coloring, even the shape and color of Richard's beard, were a perfect match for the Wakefields. The figures were also wearing backpacks.

  Max stooped down to pick up the figure of Nicole but received an electrical jolt when he touched it. The figure turned in Max's direction and shook her head emphatically. The men followed the pair for another hundred meters and then stopped.

  "There's not much doubt about what we're supposed to do next," Richard said.

  "Nope," said Max. "It looks as if you and Nicole are being summoned."

  The next afternoon Richard and Nicole packed several days worth of food and water into their packs and said good-bye to their extended family. Nikki had slept between them the night before and was especially tearful when her grandparents departed.

  It was quite a climb up the staircase. "I
should have taken the stairs more slowly," Nicole said, breathing hard as she and Richard stood on the landing beneath the dome and waved one final time to everybody. Nicole could feel her heart beating arrhythmically in her chest. She waited patiently for the palpitations to subside.

  Richard was also out of breath. "We're not as young as we were those many years ago in New York," he said after a short silence. He smiled and put his arms around Nicole. "Are you ready to continue our adventure?" he asked.

  Nicole nodded. They walked slowly, hand in hand, down the long hallway. When they reached the second stairs, Nicole turned to Richard. "Darling," she said with sudden intensity, "isn't it great to be alone again, just the two of us, even if it's only for a few hours? I love all the others, but it's a pain being so damn responsible all the time."

  Richard laughed easily. "It's a role you chose, Nicole," he said, "not one that was forced on you."

  He leaned down to kiss her on the cheek. Nicole turned her face toward him and kissed him strongly on the lips.

  "Were you suggesting with that kiss," Richard asked immediately with a wide grin, "that we should spend tonight in the igloo and begin our journey tomorrow?"

  "I think that you have been reading my mind, Mr. Wakefield," Nicole said with a coquettish smile. "Actually, I was thinking how much fun it would be to imagine tonight that we were young lovers again." She laughed. "At least our imaginations should still work all right."

  When they were three hundred meters south of the two igloos, Richard and Nicole could no longer see anything except whatever they illuminated with their flashlights. Although the floor beneath them, mostly dirt with an occasional collection of small rocks, was generally smooth, from time to time one or both of them would stumble when not paying careful attention.

  "This may be a very long and tiring walk in the dark," Nicole said when they stopped for some water.

  "And cold too," Richard said, taking a drink. "Are you warm enough?"

  "As long as we're moving," Nicole said. She stretched out her arms and adjusted her backpack.

  It was almost an hour before they saw a light in the sky to the south. The light was moving toward them and was growing larger.

  "What do you think it is?" Nicole asked.

  "Maybe the Blue Fairy?" Richard replied. "'When you wish upon a star, makes no difference who you are…'"

  Nicole laughed. "You're impossible," she said.

  "After last night," Richard said as the light continued to move in their direction, "I feel like a boy again."

  Nicole chuckled and shook her head. They held hands in silence while the ball of light continued to grow in size. A minute later it stopped twenty to thirty meters in front of them and about twenty meters above their heads. Richard and Nicole switched off their flashlights, for they could now see the terrain around them for a distance of more than a hundred meters.

  Richard shaded his eyes and tried to determine the source of the illumination, but the light was too bright. He could not look directly at it. "Whatever it is," Nicole said after they were walking again, "it appears to know where we're supposed to go."

  Two hours later, Richard and Nicole encountered a path heading to the southwest, with fields of growing plants on either side of the path. When they stopped for lunch, they wandered into the fields and discovered that one of their staple foods under the dome, a vegetable with a taste similar to a green bean but with the physical appearance of a yellow squash, was the principal crop being grown. These vegetables were interspersed with rows of a short, bright red plant that they had never seen before. Richard pulled one of the red plants out of the ground and dropped it immediately when the green, leathery sphere that had been beneath the surface began to writhe at the bottom of its red stalk. When it hit the ground, the creature scooted the few centimeters back to its original hole and buried its green sphere again in the same place.

  Richard laughed. "I guess I'll think twice before I do something like that again."

  "Look over there," Nicole said a moment later. "Isn't that one of the animals that built the staircase?"

  They moved down the path and then back into the field itself for a better view. Coming toward them was indeed one of the large, antlike creatures with the six long arms. It was harvesting the vegetables with amazing efficiency, handling the three rows on either side of where its main body was located. Each arm, or trunk, was stripping the vegetables in a single row and stacking them in piles that were between the rows and about two meters apart. It was an astonishing sight, the six arms all operating simultaneously on different tasks, and at different distances from its main body.

  When the creature reached the path, its arms quickly recoiled. It then moved six rows down the line and entered the field going in the opposite direction. The field was being harvested from south to north, so when Richard and Nicole started walking again, they passed through the part of the field that the giant ant thing had already finished. There they saw swift rodentlike creatures picking up the scattered piles and scampering away with them to the west.

  Richard and Nicole came to several intersections while they were walking along the path among the fields, and each time the hovering light indicated which route they should take. The fields extended for many kilometers. They came upon several different crops, but Richard and Nicole, who were becoming hungry and weary, no longer stopped to examine each new vegetable.

  At length they reached a flat open area covered with soft dirt. The light above them circled three times and then hovered over the center of the area. "I'm guessing that this is where we're supposed to spend the night," Richard said.

  "Gladly," said Nicole, accepting Richard's help in removing her backpack. "I don't think I'll have any trouble sleeping, even on this hard ground."

  They ate dinner and found a comfortable spot where they could sleep nestled together. When Richard and Nicole were both in the twilight zone between waking and sleeping, the light above them began to dim a little and then drop in altitude.

  "Look," Richard whispered, "it's going to land."

  Nicole opened her eyes and watched as the light, continuing to dim, made a graceful arc and landed on the opposite side of the open area. It was still glowing slightly even after it was already on the ground. Although Richard and Nicole could not see the creature very well, they could tell that it was long and skinny and had wings more than twice as large as its body.

  "It's a giant firefly," Richard exclaimed when they could no longer see its outline.

  4

  "Biology for lights, biology for farm and construction equipment—do you have the impression that our octospider friends, or perhaps whatever is above them in some amazing symbiotic hierarchy, are the great biologists of the galaxy?"

  "I don't know, Richard," Nicole said as she finished her breakfast. "But it certainly looks as if their technological evolution has followed a markedly different path than ours."

  They had both watched with wonder as the giant firefly, upon hearing their first movements after sleeping, had ignited itself and taken its accustomed hovering position above them. A few minutes later, a second, similar creature had approached them from the south. The two lights now combined to provide local illumination that was equivalent to daylight in New Eden.

  Richard and Nicole had both slept well and were quite refreshed. Their two guides led them along paths through several more kilometers of fields, including one that was characterized by grasses over three meters tall. One hundred meters after making a sharp left turn in the tall grasses, Richard and Nicole found themselves at the edge of a vast array of shallow water tanks that stretched in front of them as far as they could see.

  They walked to the left for several minutes until they came to what Richard properly identified as the northeast corner of the array. The system consisted of a series of long, narrow, rectangular tanks that were metallic gray in color. Each of the individual tanks in the array was about twenty meters wide and as much as several hundred meters long. The
tanks were as tall as Nicole's waist and were three-quarters filled with a liquid that appeared to be water. At each tank corner was a thick, bright-red cylinder, twice as high as the tank, that was topped with a white sphere.

  Richard and Nicole walked beside the long edge of the array for several minutes, peering inside each individual tank and examining the thick cylindrical poles marking where adjacent tanks shared common sides. They saw nothing in the tanks except the water. "So is this some kind of purification plant?" Nicole asked.

  "I doubt it," Richard answered. They stopped at the western edge. "Look at that mass of small, detailed parts affixed to the inside wall of this tank, just in front of the cylinder. I would guess that those are complicated electronic components of some kind. There would be no need for all that in a simple water purification system."

  Nicole looked askance at her husband. "Come on, Richard, that's quite a leap of faith. How can you possibly claim to know the function of a bunch of three-dimensional squiggles on the inside of an alien water tank?"

  "I said I was guessing," Richard responded with a laugh. "I was only trying to make the point that it looks too complex to be a place to purify water."

  The guide lights above them were urging them to the south. The second bank of narrow tanks also contained nothing but water; however, when they reached the third set of rectangular tanks and cylindrical poles, Richard and Nicole discovered that the water was full of tiny fuzzy balls of many colors. Richard rolled up his sleeve and stuck his hand into the water, pulling out several hundred of the objects.

  'Those are eggs," Nicole said firmly. "I know that fact with the same certainty that you knew those little gadgets on the insides of the tank wall were electronic components."

  Richard laughed again. "Look," he said, putting his mound of little objects in front of Nicole's eyes, "there are really only five different kinds, if you study them closely."