Rama: The Omnibus

by Arthur C. Clarke

  "Their programming is done in firmware, at the time of their manufacture. What we did in the early days, using a kind of keyboard analogous to the one you had in your lair, was ask the Ramans to alter the programming for our specific uses. That's what all the biots are here for … to be turned into useful servants by the passengers on board."

  Well, Richard, Nicole thought, that's at least one concept we missed altogether. In fact, I don't think the idea ever even occurred to us.

  "We wanted our settlement here in Rama to be indistinguishable from any of our other colonies," Dr. Blue continued, "so as soon as we no longer needed the biots, we requested that they be removed from our domain in Rama."

  "And since then you have had no direct contact at all with the Ramans?"

  "Not much," Dr. Blue replied. "But we have maintained the capability to communicate with the high-technology factories underneath the surface, primarily so that we can request the manufacture of certain raw materials that we do not have in our warehouses."

  A door opened from the corridor and an octospider entered. It talked rapidly with Dr. Blue in their language, using very narrow color bands. Nicole recognized the words "permission" and "this afternoon," but very little else.

  After the visitor had departed, Dr. Blue told Nicole that she had a surprise for her. "Today one of our queens is going to have her egg rush. Her attendants are estimating it will take place in half a tert. The Chief Optimizer has approved my request for you to observe. To my knowledge, you are the only alien-except for the Precursors, of course—who has ever had the privilege of witnessing an egg rush. I think you will find it very interesting."

  During the transport ride to the Queen's Domain, which was in a part of the Emerald City that Nicole had never visited before, Dr. Blue reminded Nicole of some of the more unusual aspects of octospider reproduction. "In normal times, each of the three queens in our colony is fertilized once every three to five years, and only a small fraction of the fertilized eggs is permitted to grow to maturity. Because of the war preparations, however, the Chief Optimizer recently declared a Replenishment Event. All three of our queens are now producing a full set of eggs. They have been fertilized by the new warrior males, those octospiders selected for the war effort who have recently passed through sexual, transition. This activity is very important, for it ensures, at least symbolically, that each of these octospiders will have continued genetic involvement in the colony. Remember, they know, as soon as they are designated as warriors, that their termination time is not too far away."

  Whenever I think that we have a lot in common with the octospiders, Nicole was thinking, I see something so bizarre that I am reminded how very different we are. But, as Richard would say, how could it be otherwise? They are the product of a process totally alien to us.

  "Don't be alarmed at the size of the queen," Dr. Blue continued, "and please, under no circumstances should you express anything but delight at what you see. When I first suggested that you attend the egg rush, one of the Chief Optimizer's staff members objected, saying that there was no way you could fully appreciate what you were seeing. Some of the other staff members were worried that you might display discomfort or even disgust and thereby detract from the experience for the other octospiders in attendance."

  Nicole assured Dr. Blue that she would do nothing untoward during the ceremony. She was indeed flattered that she had been included in the activity, and was feeling considerable excitement when the transport deposited them outside the thick walls of the Queen's Domain.

  The building Nicole entered with Dr. Blue was dome-shaped and built of blocks of white rock. It was about ten meters tall inside and covered a ground area of roughly thirty-five hundred square meters. There was a large map just inside the door in the atrium area, and a written message in color identifying where the egg rush would take place. Nicole followed Dr. Blue and several other octospiders up a pair of ramps and then down a long corridor. At the end of the hallway they turned right and entered a balcony area that overlooked a rectangular floor fifteen meters long and five or six meters wide.

  Dr. Blue took Nicole to the front row, where a railing a meter high protected the audience from falling onto the floor four meters below. Behind them the five elevated rows filled up quickly. Across the way, there was another, similar viewing area that would hold about sixty octospiders.

  Looking down, Nicole could see a pool of water resembling a canal that ran the length of the floor and then disappeared under an arch on the right. There were narrow walkways on either side of the pool. On the opposite side, however, the walkway expanded into a broad platform three meters or so before it encountered the rock wall that formed the entire left side of the large room. This wall, painted with many different colors and designs, contained a hundred or so protruding silver rods or spikes, each standing out a meter from where it was embedded in the wall. Nicole noticed immediately the similarity between the wall and the vertical corridor, shaped like a barrel, that she and her friends had descended inside the octospider lair beneath New York.

  Less than ten minutes after the two balcony areas were filled, the Chief Optimizer shuffled through a doorway on the lower level, stood on the walkway beside the pool, and made a short speech. Dr. Blue helped Nicole translate as the Chief Optimizer reminded the onlookers that although the exact timing of an egg rush was never known, it was likely the queen would be ready to enter the room in several more fengs. After making a few comments about the critical importance of replenishment in the continuity of the colony, the Chief Optimizer made her exit.

  After what seemed like a long wait, the great doors at the left end of the far walkway opened and the massive queen lumbered in. She was huge, at least six meters tall, with a gigantic swollen body above her eight long tentacles. She stopped on the platform and said something to the audience. Bright colors spilled in profusion all over her body, creating a vivid spectacle. Nicole could not understand what the queen was saying because she could not follow the exact sequence of colors pouring out of the slit.

  The queen slowly turned toward the wall, extended her tentacles, and began the laborious process of pulling herself up onto the spikes. Throughout the climb, disordered bursts of color decorated her body. Nicole assumed these were emotional expressions of some kind, perhaps pain and fatigue. Looking around her, Nicole noticed that the octospiders in the audience were all silent, their heads dark and devoid of color.

  When the queen had finally positioned herself in the center of the wall, she wrapped all eight tentacles around the spikes and exposed her cream-colored underbelly. While she had been working in the hospital, Nicole had become quite familiar with octospider anatomy, but she had never imagined that the soft tissue underneath their bellies could be distended so much. As Nicole watched, the queen began rocking slightly, moving forward and backward, gently bouncing off the rock wall with each motion. The emotional color display continued. The colors reached their peak intensity when a geyser of greenish black fluid spewed forth from the queen's underside, followed immediately by an immense outpouring of white objects of different sizes contained in a thick, viscous fluid.

  Nicole was stupefied. Below her, a dozen or so octospiders on either side of the pool were hurriedly brushing into the water the eggs and fluid that had landed on the walkways. Another eight octos were pouring the unknown contents of huge containers into the pool. The water was now teeming with octospider blood, eggs, and the high-viscosity fluid that was ejected along with the eggs. In less than a minute the entire slurry in the pool moved under the arch to the right.

  The queen had not yet changed position. Once the pool below them was clear running water again, all lenses turned to watch the queen. Nicole was staggered by how much the octospider had already shrunk. She estimated that the queen must have lost half her body weight in the fraction of a second it took the egg mass and accompanying fluids to pour forth from her body. The queen was bleeding still, and two normal-sized octospiders had climbed up the wall
to minister to her. At this point Dr. Blue tapped Nicole on the shoulder, indicating it was time to leave.

  Sitting by herself in one of the small rooms in the octospider hospital, Nicole played the egg rush scene over and over in her mind. She had not expected that the event would affect her so emotionally. Nicole had only half watched while Dr. Blue explained to her, after they had returned to the hospital, that the containers emptied into the slurry were full of tiny animals that would seek out and kill specific embryos. In that way the octospiders controlled, she said, the exact composition of the next generation, including the number of queens, repletes, midget morphs, and all the other variations.

  The mother in Nicole was struggling to understand what it would feel like to be an octospider queen during an egg rush. In some undefinable way, Nicole felt deeply connected to that mammoth creature that had crawled up onto the spikes. During the instant of the egg rush, Nicole's loins had contracted, and she had recalled both the pain and the exhilaration of her own six births. What is there about the birth process, she wondered briefly, that unites all creatures who have ever experienced it?

  Nicole was overwhelmed by a desire to communicate with the queen octospider, to know what that other intelligent mother had been thinking and feeling just prior to and during the egg rush. Had the queen, amid the pain and wonder of the moment, felt an epiphanic serenity, a vision of her own offspring and their offspring continuing into the unforeseen future, the miraculous cycle of life? Had there been a deep and ineffable peace in the seconds just after the rush, a peace unlike any the creature had ever known at any time other than immediately after birth?

  Nicole knew that the imaginary conversation she was having with the queen could never take place. Again she closed her eyes, attempting to reconstruct the exact bursts of color she had seen on the queen's body immediately before and after the event. Had those surges of color told the other octospiders what the queen was feeling? Were they somehow able, Nicole wondered, with their rich language of color, to communicate complex feelings like ecstasy better than humans, with their, limited language of words?

  There were no answers. Nicole realized that there were tasks waiting for her outside the room, in the octospider hospital, but she was not ready for her solitude to end. She did not want the strong emotions she was feeling to be diminished by the demands of everyday life.

  Nicole had also begun to experience a profound loneliness. She did not at first connect her loneliness directly to the egg rush. Nicole was, however, quite aware that she was having a strong desire to talk to a close friend, preferably Richard. She wanted to share with someone what she had seen and felt in the Queen's Domain. In her isolation Nicole suddenly remembered a few lines from a relevant poem by Benita Garcia, She opened her portable computer and, after a short search, found the entire poem.

  In moments of deep doubt or intense pain,

  When I am overpowered by my life,

  I search around me everywhere I can

  For kindred souls who know what I know not,

  For those who have the strength to mitigate

  What makes me tremble, weep, and often brood.

  They tell me that I cannot live my way

  Where all my feelings rule my conscious mind.

  I must control myself before the act,

  Or else accept what I have long endured,

  The brutal days of feeling lost and blind.

  There have been times, not many but a few,

  When someone has possessed the soothing balm,

  Providing surcease for my angst or pain.

  But age has taught me now one simple rule.

  Inside myself I must the screams contain,

  Whatever devils must be wrestled there.

  The lessons learned will not be lost again.

  We walk alone upon our final trip.

  No hand can help us on that day of death,

  It's best we learn, while time is still our friend,

  To trust ourselves, and save our precious breath.

  Nicole read the words several times. Then, realizing that she was completely exhausted, she put her head down on the only table in the room and fell asleep.

  Dr. Blue tapped gently on Nicole's shoulder with one of her tentacles. Nicole stirred and opened her eyes. "You've been asleep for almost two hours," the octospider said. "They have been expecting you over at the administrative center."

  "What's going on?" Nicole asked, rubbing her eyes. "Why is anyone waiting for me?"

  "Nakamura has made a major speech in New Eden. The Chief Optimizer wants to discuss it with you."

  Nicole jumped up quickly and then reached out to touch the desk. In a few seconds her dizziness was gone. "Thank you again, Dr. Blue, for everything," she said. "I'll be on my way in another minute."

  7

  I really don't think Nikki should I be allowed to watch the speech," Robert said. "It will certainly scare her."

  "What Nakamura says will affect her life as much as it will ours," Ellie replied. "If she wants to watch, I think we should let her. After all, Robert, she has lived with the octospiders."

  "But she can't possibly understand what any of this really means," Robert argued. "She's not even four years old yet."

  The issue remained unresolved until a few minutes before the New Eden dictator was scheduled to appear on television. At that time Nikki approached her mother in the living room. "I'm not going to watch," the little girl said with astonishing insight, "because I don't want you and Daddy to fight."

  One of the rooms in Nakamura's palace had been converted into a television studio. It was from this studio that the tyrant usually addressed the citizens of New Eden. His last speech had been three months earlier, when he had announced that troops were going to be deployed in the Southern Hemicylinder to confront the "alien menace." Although the government-controlled newspapers and television had regularly been featuring news items from the front, many of them fabricating the "intense resistance" being offered by the octospiders, this would be Nakamura's first public comment on the progress and direction of the war in the south.

  For the address, Nakamura had ordered his tailors to make him a new shogun's outfit, complete with ornamented sword and dagger. He was appearing in Japanese martial dress, he told his aides, to stress his role as the "lead warrior and protector" of the colonists. On the day of the broadcast Nakamura's attendants helped him put on a pair of heavy, constraining girdles so that he would project the "powerful and menacing" look of the warrior.

  Mr. Nakamura spoke standing up, staring directly at the camera. His scowl never changed during his entire speech.

  "We have all sacrificed in recent months," he began, "to support our valiant soldiers doing battle south of the Cylindrical Sea with a heinous and ruthless alien enemy. Our intelligence now informs us that these octospiders, who were described to you in detail by Dr. Robert Turner after his brave escape, are planning a major attack against New Eden in the very near future. At this critical moment in our history, we must redouble our resolve and stand united against the alien aggressor.

  "Our generals at the front have recommended that we penetrate beyond the barrier forest protecting most of the octospider domain and interdict their supplies and war materiel before they can launch their attack. Our engineers, working night and day for the survival of the colony, have made modifications to our helicopter fleet that will permit this interdiction to take place. We will strike in the near future. We will convince the aliens that they cannot attack us with impunity.

  "Meanwhile, our warriors have finished securing the entire area of Rama between the Cylindrical Sea and the barrier forest. During the fierce battles, we have destroyed many hundreds of the enemy, as well as water and power facilities. Our casualties have been modest, primarily because of our superb battle plans and the heroism of our troops. But we must not become overconfident. On the contrary, we have every reason to believe that we have not yet even engaged the elite Death Corps that Dr. Tur
ner heard mentioned while he was being held captive. It is this Death Corps, we are certain, that will be in the alien vanguard if we do not move quickly to preclude an attack on New Eden. Remember, time is our enemy. We must strike now and totally demolish their war-making capability.

  "There is one other brief item I would like to report tonight. Recently the traitor Richard Wakefield and an octospider companion surrendered to our troops in the south. They say that they are representing the alien military command and have come forward to talk about peace. I suspect a trick here, a Trojan horse of some kind, but it is my duty as your leader to conduct a hearing into this matter in the next few days. Rest assured that I will not negotiate away our security. I will report the outcome of this hearing very soon after it is completed."

  "But Robert," Ellie said, "you know that much of what he is saying is a lie. There is no Death Corps, and the octospiders have not offered any resistance. How can you say nothing? How can you let him attribute statements to you that you never made?"

  "It's all politics, Ellie," Robert replied. "Everybody knows that. Nobody really believes—"

  "But that's even worse. Don't you see what is happening?"

  Robert started to leave the house. "Where are you going now?" Ellie asked.

  "Back to the hospital," Robert replied. "I have rounds to make."

  Ellie couldn't believe it. She stood there for a few seconds, staring at her husband. Then she erupted. "That's your response," she shouted. "Business as usual. A lunatic announces a plan that will most likely result in all of us being killed, and for you it's business as usual… Robert, who are you? Don't you care about anything?"

  Robert moved toward her angrily. "Don't start again with that 'holier than thou' attitude," he said. "You are not always right, Ellie, and you do not know for certain that we'll all be killed. Maybe Nakamura's plan will work."