Rama: The Omnibus

by Arthur C. Clarke

  "Marius Clyde Puckett," Max said proudly.

  "Marius," Eponine added, "because he was the waif Eponine's dream lover in Les Misérables—I longed for a Marius during my long and lonely nights at the orphanage. And Clyde, after Max's brother back in Arkansas."

  "It's an excellent name," Nicole said, smiling to herself as she turned to leave. "An excellent name," she repeated.

  Richard could not contain his excitement when he came home later that afternoon. "I have just spent two absolutely fascinating hours over in the conference room with Archie and the other octospiders," he said to Nicole in his loudest voice. "They showed me the entire apparatus they used with you and Eponine earlier today. Amazing. What incredible genius! No, wizardry is a better term—I've said it from the beginning, the damn octospiders are biological wizards.

  "Just imagine. They have living creatures that are cameras, another set of microscopic bugs that read the images and carefully store each individual pixel, a special genetic warping of themselves that controls the process, and a limited amount of electronics, where necessary, to perform the mundane data management tasks. How many thousands of years did it take for all this to occur? Who engineered it in the first place? It is absolutely mind-boggling!"

  Nicole smiled at her husband. "Did you see Marius? What did you think?"

  "I saw all the pictures from this afternoon," Richard continued to shout. "Do you know how the midget morphs communicate with the image quadroids? They use a special wavelength range in the far ultraviolet part of the spectrum. That's right. Archie told me those little bugs and the midget octospiders actually have a common language. And that's not all. Some of the morphs know as many as eight different microspecies languages. Even Archie himself can communicate with forty other species, fifteen using their basic octospider colors and the rest in a range of languages that includes signs, chemicals, and other parts of the electromagnetic spectrum."

  Richard stood still for a moment in the middle of the room. 'This is incredible, Nicole, simply incredible."

  He was about to launch into another monologue when Nicole asked him how the regular octos and the midget morphs communicated. "I never saw any color patterns on the heads of the morphs today," she said.

  "All their conversation is in the ultraviolet," Richard said, starting to pace again. Suddenly he turned and pointed at the center of his forehead. "Nicole," he said, "that lens thing in the middle of their slit is a veritable telescope, able to receive information at practically any wavelength. It's staggering. Somehow they have organized all these life-forms into a grand symbiotic system of complexity far beyond anything we could ever conceive of."

  Richard sat down on the couch next to Nicole. "Look," he said, showing his arms to her, "I still have goose bumps. I am in absolute awe of these creatures… Jesus, it's a good thing they aren't hostile."

  Nicole looked at her husband with a furrowed brow. "Why do you say that?"

  "They could command an army of billions, maybe even trillions. I bet they even talk to their plants! You saw how quickly they scared off that thing in the forest. Imagine what it would be like if your enemy could control all the bacteria, even the viruses, and make them do their bidding. What a frightening concept!"

  Nicole laughed. "Don't you think you're getting carried away? Just because they have genetically engineered a set of living cameras, it does not follow—"

  "I know," said Richard, jumping up from the couch. "But I can't help thinking about the logical extension of what we have seen here today. Nicole, Archie admitted to me that the sole purpose of the midget morphs is to be able to deal with the world of the tiny. The midgets can see things as small as a micrometer—that's one-thousandth of a millimeter. Now extend that idea another several orders of magnitude. Imagine a species whose morphs span four or five relationships similar to the one between the normal octos and the midgets. Communication with bacteria might not be impossible after all."

  "Richard," Nicole said at this juncture, "don't you have anything at all to say about the fact that Max and Eponine are going to have a son? And that the boy looks perfectly healthy?"

  Richard stood silent for a few seconds. "It is wonderful," he said a little sheepishly. "I guess I should go next door and congratulate them."

  "You can probably wait until after dinner," Nicole said, glancing at one of the special watches Richard had made for them. The watch kept human time in an octospider frame of reference.

  "Patrick, Ellie, Nikki, and Benjy have been over at Max and Eponine's for the last hour," Nicole continued, "ever since Dr. Blue stopped by with some parchment photographs of little Marius in the womb." She smiled. "As you would say, they should be home in about a feng."

  3

  Nicole finished brushing her teeth and gazed at her reflection in the mirror. Galileo was right, she thought. I am an old woman.

  She began rubbing her face with her fingers, methodically massaging the wrinkles that seemed to be everywhere. She heard Benjy and the twins playing outside and then both Nai and Patrick calling them to school. I was not always old, she said to herself. There was a time when I too went to school.

  Nicole closed her eyes, attempting to remember what she had looked like as a young girl. She was unable to conjure up a clear picture of herself as a child. Too many other pictures from the intervening years blurred and distorted Nicole's image of herself as a schoolgirl.

  At length she reopened her eyes and stared at the image in the mirror. In her mind she painted out all the bags and wrinkles on her face. She changed the color of her hair and eyebrows from gray to a deep black. Finally she managed to see herself as a beautiful woman of twenty-one. Nicole felt a brief but intense yearning for those days of her youth. For we were young, and we knew that we would never die, she remembered.

  Richard stuck his head around the corner. "Ellie and I will be working with Hercules in the study," he said. "Why don't you join us?"

  "In a few minutes," Nicole answered. While she touched up her hair, Nicole reflected on the daily patterns of the human clan in the Emerald City. They usually all gathered for breakfast in the Wakefields' dining room. School ended before lunch. Then everyone except Richard napped, their accommodation to the eight-hour-longer day. Most afternoons Nicole and Ellie and Richard were with the octospiders, learning more about their hosts or sharing experiences from the planet Earth. The other four adults spent almost all their time with Benjy and the children in their enclave at the end of the cul-de-sac.

  And where does all this take us? Nicole suddenly wondered. For how many years will we be the guests of the octospiders? And what will happen if and when Rama reaches its destination?

  They were all questions for which Nicole had no answers. Even Richard had apparently stopped worrying about what was going on outside the Emerald City. He was completely absorbed by the octospiders and his translator project. Now he only asked Archie for celestial navigation data every two months or so. Each time Richard would report to the others, without editorial comment, that Rama was still headed in the general direction of the star Tau Ceti.

  Like little Marius, Nicole thought, we are content here in our womb. As long as the outside world does not force itself upon us, we do not ask the overwhelming questions.

  Nicole left the bathroom and walked down the hall to the study. Richard was sitting on the floor between Hercules and Ellie. "The easy part is tracking the color pattern and having the sequence stored in the processor," he was saying. "The hardest part of the translation is automatically converting that pattern into a recognizable English sentence."

  Richard faced Hercules and spoke very slowly. "Because your language is so mathematical, with every color having an acceptable angstrom range defined a priori, all the sensor has to do is identify the stream of colors and the widths of the bands. The entire information content has then been captured. Because the rules are so precise, it's not even difficult to code a simple fault protection algorithm, for use with juveniles or careless speakers, in
case any single color errs to the left or the right in the spectrum.

  "Changing what an octospider has said into our language, however, is a much more complex process. The dictionary for the translation is straightforward enough. Each word and the appropriate clarifiers can be readily identified. But it's damn near impossible to make the next step, into sentences, without some human intervention."

  "That's because the octospider language is fundamentally different from ours," Ellie commented. "Everything is specified and quantified, to minimize the possibility of misunderstanding. There is no subtlety or nuance. Look how they use the pronouns 'we,' 'they,' and 'you.' The pronouns are always marked with numerical clarifiers, including ranges when there are uncertainties. An octospider never says 'a few wodens' or 'several nillets'—always a number, or a numerical range, is used to specify the length of time more precisely."

  "From our point of view," Hercules said in color, "there are two aspects to human language that are extremely difficult. One is the lack of precise specification, which leads to a massive vocabulary. The other is your use of indirectness to communicate. I still have trouble understanding Max because often what he says is not literally what he means."

  "I don't know how to do this in your computer," Nicole now said to Richard, "but somehow all the quantitative information contained in each octospider statement must be reflected by the translation. Almost every verb or adjective they use has a connected numerical clarifier. How, for example, did Ellie just translate 'extremely difficult' and 'massive vocabulary'? What Hercules said, in octospider, was 'difficult,' with the number five used to clarify it, and 'big vocabulary,' with the number six as a clarifier for 'big.' All comparative clarifiers address the question of the strength of the adjective. Since their base number system is octal, the range for the comparatives is between one and seven. If Hercules had used a seven to clarify the word 'difficult,' Ellie would have translated the phrase as 'impossibly difficult.' If he had used a two as a clarifier in the same phrase, she might have said 'slightly difficult.'"

  "Mistakes in the strengths of the adjectives, although important," Richard said as he fiddled absentmindedly with a small processor, "almost never lead to misunderstandings. Failure to interpret properly the verb clarifiers, however, is another issue altogether … as I have learned recently from my preliminary tests. Take the simple octospider verb 'to go,' which means, as you know, to move unaided, without a transport. The maroon-purple-lemon yellow strip, each color the same width, covers several dozen words in English, everything from 'walk' to 'stroll,' 'saunter,' 'run,' and even 'sprint.'"

  "That's the same point I was just making," Ellie said. "There is no translation without full interpretation of the clarifiers. For that particular verb, the octos use a double clarifier to address the issue of 'how fast.' In a sense, there are sixty-three different speeds at which they 'go.' To make matters even more complex, they may use a range clarifier as well, so their statement 'Let's go' is subject to many, many possible translations."

  Richard grimaced and shook his head.

  "What's the matter, Father?" Ellie asked.

  "I'm just disappointed," he answered. "I had hoped to have a simplified version of the translator completed by now. But I made the assumption that the gist of what was being said could be determined without tracking all the clarifiers. To include all those short color strips will both increase the storage required and significantly slow down the translation. I may have trouble ever designing a translator that works in real time."

  "So what?" Hercules asked. "Why are you so concerned about this translator? Ellie and Nicole already understand our language very well."

  "Not really," Nicole said. "Ellie is the only one of us who is truly fluent with your colors. I am still learning daily."

  "Although I originally began this project both as a challenge and as a means to force myself to become familiar with your language," Richard replied to Hercules, "Nicole and I were talking last week about how important the translator has become. She says, and I agree with her, that our human clan here in the Emerald City is dividing into two groups. Ellie, Nicole, and I have made our life more interesting because of our increasing interactions with your species. The rest of the humans, including the children, remain essentially isolated. Eventually, if the others don't have some way of communicating with you, they will become dissatisfied and/or unhappy. A good automatic translator is the key that will open up their lives here."

  The map was wrinkled and torn in a few places. Patrick helped Nai unroll it slowly and tack it to the wall of her dining room, which doubled as the schoolroom for the children.

  "Nikki, do you remember what this is?" Nai asked.

  "Of course, Mrs. Watanabe," the little girl replied. "It's our map of the Earth."

  "Benjy, can you show us where your parents and grandparents were born?"

  "Not again," Galileo muttered audibly to Kepler. "He'll never get it right. He's too dumb."

  "Galileo Watanabe." The response was swift. "Go to your room and sit on your bed for fifteen minutes."

  "That's all right, Nai," Benjy said as he walked up to the map. "I'm used to it by now."

  Galileo, almost seven years old by human accounting, stopped at the door to see if his sentence would be reprieved. "What are you waiting for?" his mother scolded. "I said for you to go to your room."

  Benjy stood quietly in front of the map for about twenty seconds. "My mother," he said at length, "was born here in France." He backed away from the map briefly and located the United States on the opposite side of the Atlantic Ocean. "My father," Benjy said, "was born here in Boston, in America."

  Benjy started to sit down. "What about your grandparents?" Nai prompted. "Where were they born?"

  "My mother's mother, my grandmother," Benjy said slowly, "was born in Africa." He stared at the map for several seconds. "But I do not remember where that is."

  "I know, Mrs. Watanabe," said little Nikki immediately. "May I show Benjy?"

  Benjy turned and looked at the pretty girl with the jet-black hair. He smiled. "You can tell me, Nikki."

  The girl rose from her chair and crossed the room. She placed her finger on the western section of Africa. "Nonni's mother was born here," she said proudly, "in this green country. It's called the Ivory Coast."

  "That's very good, Nikki," Nai said.

  "I'm sorry, Nai," Benjy now said. "I've been working so hard on fractions I haven't had any time for geography." His eyes followed his three-year-old niece back to her seat. When he turned to face Nai again, Benjy's cheeks were wet with tears. "Nai," he said, "I don't feel like school today… I think I'll go back to my own house."

  "Okay, Benjy," Nai said softly. Benjy moved toward the door. Patrick started to come over to his brother, but Nai waved him away.

  The schoolroom was uncomfortably quiet for almost a minute. "Is it my turn now?" Kepler finally asked.

  Nai nodded and the boy walked up to the map. "My mother was born here, in Thailand, in the town of Lamphun. That's where her father was also born. My grandmother on my mother's side was also born in Thailand, but in another city called Chiang Saen. Here it is, next to the Chinese border."

  Kepler took one step to the east and pointed at Japan. "My father, Kenji Watanabe, and both his parents were born in the Japanese city of Kyoto."

  The boy backed away from the map. He seemed to be struggling to say something. "What is it, Kepler?" Nai 'asked.

  "Mother," the small boy said after an agonizing silence, "was Daddy a bad man?"

  "Whaat?" said Nai, completely stunned. She bent down to her son's level and looked him straight in the eyes. "Your father was a wonderful human being. He was intelligent, sensitive, loving, humorous—an absolute prince of a person. He…"

  Nai had to stop herself. She could feel her own emotions ready to erupt. She stood up, gazed at the ceiling for a brief moment, and regained her composure. "Kepler," she then said, "why are you asking such a question? You adored your father. H
ow could you have possibly—"

  "Uncle Max told us that Mr. Nakamura came from Japan. We know that he is a bad man. Galileo says that since Daddy came from the same place—"

  "Galileo," Nai's voice thundered, scaring all the children. "Come here immediately."

  The boy scampered into the room and gave his mother a puzzled look.

  "What have you been saying to your brother about your father?"

  "What do you mean?" Galileo said, trying to look innocent.

  "You told me that Daddy may have been a bad man, since he came from Japan like Mr. Nakamura."

  "Well, I don't remember Daddy very clearly. All I said was that maybe—"

  It took all of Nai's self-control to keep her from slapping Galileo. She grabbed the boy by both of his shoulders. "Young man," she said, "if I ever hear you say one word against your father again…"

  Nai could not finish her sentence. She did not know what to threaten, or even what to say next. She suddenly felt completely overwhelmed by everything in her life.

  "Sit down, please," she said at length to her twin sons, "and listen very carefully." Nai took a deep breath. "This map on the wall," she said, pointing, "shows all the countries on the planet Earth. In every nation there are all kinds of people, some good, some bad, most a complex mixture of good and bad. No country has only good people, or bad people. Your father grew up in Japan. So did Mr. Nakamura. I agree with Uncle Max that Mr. Nakamura is a very evil man. But the fact that he is bad has nothing to do with his being Japanese. Your father, Mr. Kenji Watanabe, who was also Japanese, was as good a man as ever lived. I'm sorry that you cannot remember him and never really knew what he was like…"

  Nai paused for a moment. "I will never forget your father," she said in a softer voice, almost to herself. "I can still see him returning to our home in New Eden in the late afternoon. The two of you always shouted together, 'Hi Daddy, Hi Daddy,' as he entered the house. He would kiss me, lift both of you in his arms, and take you out to the swing set in the backyard. Always, no matter how trying his day had been, he was patient and caring…"