Rama: The Omnibus

by Arthur C. Clarke

  "Why, why, why?" Robert had suddenly shouted. "Why did I let you talk me into coming to New York in the first place? I should have stayed behind, where I was surrounded by things I understood."

  Despite her pleas, Robert had been adamant He was not going to the Emerald City. He had even seemed strangely pleased that his short-term memory would be blocked by the octospiders. "Perhaps," he had said, laughing harshly, "I will have no memory at all of your return. I will not recall that my wife and daughter are both hybrids and that my closest friends have no respect for my professional abilities. Yes," he had continued, "I will be able to forget this nightmare of the last few weeks and remember only that you were stolen away from me, as my first wife was, while I still loved you desperately."

  Robert had stalked around the room in anger. Ellie had tried to soothe and comfort him. "No, no," he had shouted, recoiling from her touch. "It's too late. There is too much pain. I can't stand any more."

  In the early hours of the evening Ellie had sought counsel from her mother. Nicole had not been able to provide Ellie with any relief. Nicole had agreed that Ellie should not give up, but had cautioned her daughter that nothing in Robert's behavior suggested that he might change his mind.

  At Nicole's suggestion, Ellie approached Archie and asked a favor of the octospider. If Robert insisted on not going with them, Ellie entreated, would it be possible for Archie, or one of the other octospiders, to take Robert back to the lair, where he would be found quickly by the other humans? Archie had reluctantly agreed.

  I love you, Robert, Ellie said to herself as she finally stood up. And Nikki does too. We want you to come with us, for you are my husband and her father. Ellie took a deep breath and entered her bedroom.

  Even Richard had tears in his eyes as a mumbling Robert Turner, after exchanging a final hug with his wife and daughter, walked off haltingly behind Archie toward the subway only twenty meters away. Nikki was crying softly, but the girl couldn't have realized fully what was occurring. She was still too young.

  Robert turned, waved slightly, and entered the train. In a few seconds it accelerated into the tunnel. Less than a minute later the somber mood was broken by cries of joy from the landing above them.

  "All right, down there," Max shouted, "you'd better be ready for a big party."

  Nicole looked up under the dome, and even at that distance, in the dim light, she could see the radiant smiles of the newlyweds. And so it is, she thought, her heart still heavy from her daughter's loss. Sorrow and joy. Joy and sorrow. Wherever there are humans. On Earth. In new worlds beyond the stars. Now and forever.

  THE EMERALD CITY

  1

  The small driverless transport stopped at a circular plaza from which streets extended in five directions. A dark woman with gray hair and her octospider companion descended together from the car, leaving it empty. As the octospider and the human walked slowly away from the plaza, the transport departed with its interior lights now extinguished.

  A solitary giant firefly preceded Nicole and Dr. Blue as they continued their conversation in the near darkness. Nicole was careful to exaggerate each word so that her alien friend would have no difficulty reading her lips. Dr. Blue replied in broad swaths of color, using simple sentences that he knew Nicole understood.

  When they reached the first of four cream-white, single-story dwellings at the end of the cul-de-sac, the octospider lifted one of his tentacles from the street and shook hands with Nicole. "Good night," she replied with a wan smile. "It was quite a day… Thank you for everything."

  After Dr. Blue went inside his house, Nicole walked over to the decorative fountain forming an island in the center of the street and drank from one of the four spigots jetting forth a continuous stream of water at waist level. Some of the water that touched Nicole's face fell back into the basin, causing a flurry of activity in the shallow pool. Even in the dim light Nicole could see the swimming creatures darting to and fro. The cleaners are everywhere, she thought, especially when we're around. The water that touched my face will be purified seconds.

  She turned and approached the largest of the three remaining dwellings in the cul-de-sac. When Nicole crossed the threshold of her house, the outside firefly flew quickly down the street to the plaza. In the atrium, Nicole tapped the wall lightly one time, and in a few seconds a smaller firefly, barely glowing, appeared in the hallway in front of her. She stopped in one of the family's two bathrooms and then paused at the doorway of Benjy's room. He was snoring loudly. Nicole watched her son sleep for almost a full minute and then continued down the hallway to the master bedroom she shared with her husband.

  Richard was also asleep. He did not respond to Nicole's soft greeting. She took off her shoes and left the bedroom. When she reached the study, Nicole tapped on the wall twice more and the illumination increased. The study was cluttered with Richard's electronic components, which he had had the octospiders gather for him over a period of several months. Nicole laughed to herself as she picked her way through the mess to her desk. He always has a project, she thought. At least the translator will be very useful.

  Nicole sat in the chair at her desk and opened the middle drawer. She pulled out her portable computer, for which the octospiders had finally provided acceptable new power and storage subsystems. After calling up her journal from the menu, Nicole began typing on the keyboard, intermittently glancing at the small monitor to read what she was writing.

  Day 221

  I have arrived at home very late and, as I expected, everyone is asleep. I was tempted to take off my clothes and snuggle into bed beside Richard, but this day has been so extraordinary that I feel compelled to write while my thoughts and feelings are still fresh in my mind.

  I had breakfast, as always, with our entire human clan here about one hour after dawn. Nai talked about what the children were going to do in school before their long nap, Eponine reported that both her heartburn and morning sickness had abated, and Richard complained that the "biological wizards" (our octospider hosts, of course) were mediocre electrical engineers. I tried to participate in the conversation, but my growing anticipation and anxiety about this morning's meetings with the octospider doctors kept occupying my thoughts.

  My stomach was full of butterflies when I arrived at the conference room in the pyramid just after breakfast. Dr. Blue and his medical colleagues were prompt, and the octos launched immediately into a lengthy discussion of what they had learned from Benjy's tests. Medical jargon is hard enough to understand in one's own native language—it was nearly impossible for me at times to follow what they were saying with their colors. Often I had to ask them to repeat.

  It did not take long for their answer to be apparent. Yes, the octospiders could definitely see, by comparison, where Benjy's genome was different from everyone else's. Yes, they agreed that the specific string of genes on chromosome 14 was almost certainly the source of Whittingham's syndrome. But no, they were sorry, they didn't see any way—not even using something I interpreted as a gene transplant—that they could cure his problem. It was too complex, the octospiders said, involving too many amino acid chains, they had not had enough experience with human beings, there were too many chances that something might go terribly wrong…

  I cried when I understood what they were telling me. Had I expected otherwise? Had I thought that somehow the same miraculous medical capability that had freed Eponine from the curse of the RV-41 virus might be successful in curing Benjy's birth defect? I realized, in my despair, that I had indeed been hoping for a miracle, even though my brain recognized very clearly the significant difference between a congenital ailment and an acquired virus. Dr. Blue tried his best to console me. I let my mother's tears flow there, in front of the octospiders, knowing that I would need my strength when I returned home to tell the others.

  Nai and Eponine both knew the results as soon as they saw my face. Nai adores Benjy and never stops praising his determination to learn in spite of the obstacles. Benjy is amazin
g. He spends hours and hours in his room, working laboriously through all his lessons, struggling for days to grasp a concept in fractions or decimals that a gifted nine-year-old might learn in half an hour. Only last week Benjy beamed with pride when he showed me he could find the least common denominator to add the fractions 1/4, 1/5, and 1/6.

  Nai has been his main teacher. Eponine has been Benjy's pal. Ep probably felt worse than anybody this morning. She had been certain, because the octospiders had healed her so quickly, that Benjy's problem as well would succumb to their medical magic. It was not to be. Eponine sobbed so hard and so long this morning that I became concerned about the welfare of her baby. She patted her swollen belly and told me not to worry. Ep laughed and said, through her tears, that her reaction was probably mostly due to her overactive hormones.

  All three of the men were clearly upset, but they didn't show much emotion. Patrick left the room quickly without saying anything. Max expressed his disappointment with an unusually colorful set of four-letter words. Richard just grimaced and shook his head.

  We had all agreed, before the examination began, not to say anything to Benjy about the actual purpose of all the tests the octospiders were conducting. Could he have known? Might he have surmised what was going on? Perhaps. But this morning, when I told him that the octospiders had concluded that he was a healthy young man, I saw nothing in Benjy's eyes that even hinted he was aware of what had taken place. After I hugged him hard, fighting against another set of tears threatening to destroy my facade, I returned to my room and allowed the sorrow of my son's handicap to overcome me one more time.

  I'm certain that Richard and Dr. Blue conspired together to keep my mind busy the rest of the day. I had not been in my room for more than twenty minutes when there was a soft knock on the door. Richard explained that Dr. Blue was in the atrium and that two other octospider scientists were waiting for me in the conference room. Had I forgotten that a detailed presentation on the octospider digestive system had been scheduled for me today?

  The discussion with the octospiders turned out to be so fascinating that I was indeed able temporarily to forget that my son's handicap was beyond their medical magic. Dr. Blue's colleagues showed me complex anatomical drawings of octospider insides, identifying all the major organs of their digestive sequence. The drawings were made on some kind of parchment or hide and were spread out across the large table. The octospiders explained to me, in their wonderful language of colors, absolutely everything that happens to food inside their body.

  The most unusual feature of the octospider digestive process is the two large sacs, or buffers, at both ends of the system. Everything they eat goes directly into an intake buffer, where it can sit for as long as thirty days. The octospider's body itself, based on the activity level of the individual, automatically determines the rate at which the food in the bottom of the sac is accessed, broken down chemically, and distributed to the cells for energy.

  At the other end is a waste buffer, into which is discharged all the material that cannot be converted into useful energy by the octospider's body. Every healthy octospider, I learned, has a small animal permanently living in this buffer. They showed me one of the tiny, centipedelike creatures that begins life as a minuscule egg deposited by its predecessor inside the host octospider. The "waster" is essentially omnivorous. It consumes ninety-nine percent of the waste deposited in the buffer during the two human months that it takes to grow to maturity. When the waster reaches adulthood, it deposits a pair of new eggs, only one of which will germinate, and then leaves forever the octospider in which it has been living.

  The intake buffer is located just behind and below the mouth. The octospiders eat very rarely; however, they absolutely gorge themselves when they do have meals. We had a long discussion about their eating habits. Two of the facts that Dr. Blue told me were extremely surprising—first, that an empty octo intake buffer leads to immediate death, in less than a minute, and second, that a baby octospider must be taught to monitor the status of its food supply. Imagine! It does not know instinctively when it is hungry! When Dr. Blue saw the astonishment on my face, he laughed—a jumbled-up sequence of short color bursts—and then hastened to assure me that unexpected starvation is not a leading cause of death among the octospiders.

  After my three-hour nap (I still cannot make it through the long octospider day without some sleep—of our group only Richard is capable of forgoing the nap on a regular basis), Dr. Blue informed me that, because of my keen interest in their digestive process, the octospiders had decided to show me a couple of other unusual characteristics of their biology.

  I boarded a transport with the three octos, passed through one of the two gates out of our zone, and crossed the Emerald City. I suspect that this field trip was also planned to mitigate my disappointment about Benjy. Dr. Blue reminded me while we were traveling (it was hard for me to pay close attention to what he was saying—once we were outside our zone, there were all kinds of fascinating creatures beside our car and along the street, including many of the same species that I saw briefly during my first few moments in the Emerald City) that the octospiders were a polymorphic genus and that there were six separate adult manifestations of the particular octo species that had colonized our Rama spacecraft. "Remember," he told me in color, "that one of the possible parameter variations is size."

  There is no way that I could have been prepared for what I saw about twenty minutes later. We descended from the transport outside a large warehouse. At each end of the windowless building were two mammoth, drooling octospiders, with heads at least ten meters in diameter, bodies that looked like small blimps, and long tentacles that were slate-gray instead of the usual black and gold. Dr. Blue informed me that this particular morph had one, and only one, function: to serve as a food repository for the colony.

  "Each 'replete' [my translation of Dr. Blue's colors] can store up to several hundred full buffers worth of food for a regular adult octospider," Dr. Blue said. "Since our individual intake buffers hold thirty days worth of normal sustenance, forty-five on a reduced-energy diet, you can see what a vast storehouse a dozen of these repletes represent."

  As I watched, five octospiders approached one of their huge brothers and said something in color. Within seconds the creature leaned forward, bent its head down almost to the ground, and ejected a thick slurry from the enlarged mouth just below its milky lens. The five normal-sized octos gathered around the mound of slurry and fed themselves with their tentacles.

  "We practice this several times every day, with every replete," Dr. Blue said. "These morphs must have practice, for they are not very smart. You might have noticed that none of them spoke in color. They do not have any language transmission capability, and their mobility is extremely limited. Their genomes have been designed so that they can efficiently store food, preserve it for long periods of time, and regurgitate it to feed the colony upon request."

  I was still thinking about the huge repletes when our transport arrived at what I was told was an octospider school. I commented, while we were crossing the grounds, that the large facility seemed deserted. One of the other doctors said something about the colony not having had a "recent replenishment," if I interpreted the colors correctly, but I never received a clear explanation of just what was meant by his remark.

  At one end of the school facility, we entered a small building that had no furnishings. Inside were two adult octospiders and about twenty juveniles, maybe one-half the size of their larger companions. From the activity it was obvious that a repetitive drill of some kind was under way. I could not, however, follow the conversation between the juveniles and their teachers, both because the octospiders were using their full alphabet, including the ultraviolet and the infrared, and because the juvenile "talk" did not flow in the neat, regular bands that I have learned to read.

  Dr. Blue explained that we were witnessing part of a "measuring class," where the juveniles were being trained to perform assessments of their
own health, including estimating the magnitude of food contained in their intake buffers. After Dr. Blue told me that "measuring" was an integral part of the early learning curriculum for their juveniles, I inquired about the irregularity of the juvenile colors. Dr. Blue informed me that these particular octos were very young, not much past "first color," and were barely able to communicate distinct ideas.

  After we returned to the conference room, I was asked a set of questions about human digestive systems. The questions were extremely sophisticated (we went through the Krebs citric acid cycle step by step, for example, and discussed other elements of human biochemistry that I could barely remember), and I was struck again by how much more the octospiders know about us than we know about them. As always, it was never necessary for me to repeat an answer.

  What a day! It began with the pain of discovering that the octospiders were not going to be able to help Benjy. Later on I was reminded of how resilient the human psyche is when I was actually lifted out of my despondency by the stimulation of learning more about the octospiders. I remain astonished by the range of emotions we humans possess—and how very quickly we can change and adapt.

  Eponine and I were talking last night about our life here in the Emerald City and how our unusual living conditions will affect the attitudes of the child she is carrying. At one point Ep shook her head and smiled. "You know what's so amazing?" she said. "Here we are, an isolated human contingent living in an alien domain inside a gargantuan spacecraft hurtling toward an unknown destination… Yet our days here are full of laughter, elation, sadness, and disappointment, just as they would be if we were still back on Earth."

  "This may look like a waffle," Max said, "and it may feel like a waffle when you first put it in your mouth, but it damn sure doesn't taste like a waffle."