Rama: The Omnibus

by Arthur C. Clarke

  Nicole smiled. A planet full of alternates, she thought. Now, that would be quite a sight.

  "This particular city is the home for more than eighteen million octospiders, if we count all the different morphological variations," the Eagle said. "It is also the administrative capital for this planet. Within the gates of the city live close to ten billion individual creatures, representing fifty thousand species. The extent of the city is roughly equivalent to Los Angeles or any of the great urban areas on your Earth."

  The Eagle continued to tell her facts and statistics about the octospider city beneath their platform. Nicole, however, was thinking about something else. "Did Archie live here?" she said, interrupting her alien companion's encyclopedic monologue. "Or Dr. Blue, or any of the octospiders that we met?"

  "No," the Eagle replied. "In fact, they did not even come from this planet or star system. The octospiders in Rama came from what is known as a 'frontier colony,' one especially designed genetically for interaction with other intelligent life-forms."

  Nicole shook her head and smiled. Of course, she said to herself, I should have suspected that they were special.

  She was growing tired. After another few minutes Nicole thanked the Eagle and said that she had seen enough of the octospider city. In an instant the domes, the brown lattice structure, and the deep green sea vanished. The Eagle returned the platform to the top of the large chamber.

  Below Nicole the Milky Way was confined to a small space in the center of the room. "The universe is an ever-expanding sequence of neighborhoods and voids," the Eagle was saying. "Look how empty it is around the Milky Way. Except for the two Magellanic Clouds, which really don't qualify as galaxies, Andromeda is our nearest galactic neighbor. But it is very far away. The distance across the greatest dimension of the Milky Way is only one-twentieth of the distance to Andromeda."

  Nicole was not thinking about Andromeda. She was absorbed in delightful philosophical musings about life on different worlds, about cities, and about the likely range of creatures made from simple atoms who had evolved, with or without help from superior beings, into consciousness. She savored the moment, knowing that very soon there would be no more of the flights of imagination that had enriched her life so much.

  12

  We spent so much time in that exhibit," the Eagle said after he finished the scan, "that I think maybe we should revise our tour."

  They were sitting side by side in the car. "Is that your diplomatic way of telling me that my heart is failing more rapidly than you expected?" Nicole asked, forcing a smile.

  "No, not really," the Eagle said. "We really did spend almost twice as much time as I had planned. I hadn't even considered the overflight of France, for example, or the visit to the octospider city."

  "That part was wonderful," Nicole said. "I wish I could go there again, with Dr. Blue as my guide, and find out more about the way they live."

  "So you liked the octospider city better than the spectacular views of the stars?"

  "I wouldn't say that," Nicole replied. "It was all fantastic. What I have seen already has reconfirmed that I chose the right place to…" She did not finish the sentence. "I realized while I was on the platform that death is not just the end of thinking and being aware," she said, "it is also the end of feeling. I don't know why that wasn't obvious to me before."

  There was a short silence. "So, my friend," Nicole said brightly, "where do we go from here?"

  "I thought we'd go next to engineering, where you can see models of Nodes, Carriers, and other spacecraft, after which, if we still have enough time, I plan to lake you to the biology section. Some of your ex-utero grandchildren are living in that region, in one of our better Earthlike habitats. Nearby is another compound housing a community of those intriguing aquatic eels or snakes that we encountered once together at the Node. And there is a taxonomic display that compares and contrasts, physically, all the spacefarers that have been studied in this region."

  "It all sounds great," Nicole said. She laughed suddenly. "The human brain is amazing. Guess what just popped into my mind? The first line of Andrew Marvell's poem 'To His Coy Mistress': 'Had we but world enough, and time, This coyness, lady, were no crime…' Anyway, I was going to say that since we do not have forever, let's go first to the Carrier display. I would like to see the spacecraft in which Patrick, Nai, Galileo, and the others will be living. After that, we'll see how much time is left."

  The car began to move. Nicole noted to herself that the Eagle had not said anything about the results of his scan. The fear came back, stronger now. "The grave's a fine and private place," she recalled. "But none, I think, do there embrace."

  They were together on the flat surface of the Carrier model. "This is a one sixty-fourth scale model," the Eagle said, "so you have some sense of how large the Carrier really is."

  Nicole stared off into the distance from her wheelchair. "Goodness," she said, "this plane must be almost one kilometer long."

  "That's a decent guess," the Eagle said. "The top of the actual Carrier is roughly forty kilometers long and fifteen kilometers wide."

  "And each of these bubbles encloses a different environment?"

  "Yes," the Eagle said. "The atmosphere and other conditions are controlled by the equipment that is here on the surface, as well as the additional engineering systems down below in the main volume of the spacecraft. Each of the habitats has its own spin rate to create the proper gravity. Partitions are available to separate species, if necessary, inside one of the bubbles. The residents from the starfish have been placed in the same domain because they are Comfortable in more or less the same ambient conditions. However, they do not have any access to each other."

  They were moving down a path among the equipment emplacements and the bubbles. "Some of these habitats," Nicole said, examining a small oval protrusion rising above the plane no more than five meters, "seem too small and confining to hold more than just a few individuals."

  'There are some very small spacefarers," the Eagle said. "One species, from a star system not too far from yours, is only about a millimeter in length. Their largest spacecraft are not even as big as this car."

  Nicole tried to imagine an intelligent group of ants, or aphids, working together to build a spacecraft. She smiled at her mental picture.

  "And all these Carriers just travel from Node to Node?" she asked, changing the subject;

  "Primarily," the Eagle said. "When there are no longer any living creatures in a particular bubble, that habitat is reconditioned at one of the Nodes."

  "Like Rama," Nicole said.

  "In a way," the Eagle said, "but with many significant differences. We are always intently studying whatever species are inside a Rama-class spacecraft. We try to place them in as realistic an environment as possible, so that we can observe them under 'natural conditions.' By contrast, we do not need any more data about the creatures assigned to the Carrier fleet. That's why we don't intercede in their affairs."

  "Except to preclude reproduction. By the way, in the structure of your ethics, is preventing reproduction somehow more humane, or whatever your equivalent word is, than terminating the creatures directly?"

  "We think so," the Eagle replied.

  They had reached a location on the top of the Carrier model where a pathway branched off to the left back to the ramps and hallways of the Knowledge Module. "I think I've accomplished what I wanted here," Nicole said. She hesitated for a moment. "But I do have a couple of other questions."

  "Go ahead," the Eagle said.

  "Assuming Saint Michael's description of the purpose of Rama and the Node and everything else is correct, aren't you yourself disturbing and changing the very process you're observing? It seems to me that just by being here and interacting—"

  "You're right, of course," the Eagle said. "Our presence here does slightly impact the course of evolution. It's a situation analogous to the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle from physics. We cannot observe without influencin
g. Nevertheless, our interactions can be considered by the Prime Monitor and taken into account in the overall modeling of the process. And we do have rules that minimize the ways in which we perturb the natural evolution."

  "I wish that Richard could have been with me to hear Saint Michael's explanation of everything," Nicole said. "He would have been fascinated, and, I am sure, would have had some excellent questions."

  The Eagle did not reply. Nicole sighed. "So what's next, Monsieur le Tour Director?" she said.

  "Lunch," said the Eagle. "There are a couple of sandwiches, some water, and a delicious piece of your favorite octospider fruit in the car."

  Nicole laughed and turned her wheelchair onto the pathway. "You think of everything," she said.

  "Richard didn't believe in heaven," Nicole said as the Eagle completed another scan. "But if he could have constructed his own perfect afterlife, it would definitely have included a place like this."

  The Eagle was studying the weird squiggles on the monitor in his hand. "I think it would be a good idea," he said, looking up at Nicole, "to skip some of the tour … and go directly to the most important exhibits in the next domain."

  "That bad, huh?" Nicole said. She was not surprised. The occasional pain she had been feeling in her chest before the visits to France and the octospider city had now become continuous.

  The fear was constant now as well. In between every word, every thought, she was acutely aware that her death was not very far away. So what are you afraid of? Nicole asked herself. How can nothingness be that bad? Still the fear persisted.

  The Eagle explained that there was not enough time for an orientation to the second domain. They passed through the gates into the second of the concentric spheres and drove for about ten minutes. "The emphasis in this domain," the Eagle said while driving, "is on the way everything changes in time. There is a separate section for every conceivable element in the galaxy that is affected by, or affects, the galaxy's overall evolution. I thought you'd be especially interested in this first exhibit."

  The room was similar to the one where the Eagle and Nicole had first seen the Milky Way, except that it was considerably smaller. Again they boarded a moving platform that allowed them to move around in the dark room.

  "What you are going to watch," the Eagle said, "requires some explanation. It is essentially a time-lapse summary of the evolution of spacefaring civilizations in a galactic region containing your Sun and about ten million other star systems. This is approximately one ten-thousandth of the entire galaxy, but what you will see is representative of the galaxy as a whole.

  "You will not see any stars or planets or other physical structures in this display, although their locations are assumed in developing the model. What you will see, once we begin, are lights, each representing a star system in which a biological species has become a spacefarer by at least putting a spacecraft in orbit around its own planet. As long as the star system remains a living center for active spacefarers, the light in that particular location will stay illuminated.

  "I am going to start the display about ten billion years ago, soon after what has evolved into the current Milky Way Galaxy was initially formed. Since there was so much instability and rapid change at the beginning, no spacefarers emerged for a long time. Therefore, for the first five billion years or so, up until the formation of your solar system, I will run the display rapidly, at a rate of twenty million years per second. For reference purposes, the Earth will begin to accrete roughly four minutes into this process. I will stop the display at that time."

  They were together on the platform in the large chamber. The Eagle was standing and Nicole was sitting beside him in her wheelchair. The only light was a small one on the platform that allowed the two of them to see each other. After staring around her at the total darkness for more than thirty seconds, Nicole broke the silence. "Did you start the process?" she asked. "Nothing's happening."

  "Exactly," the Eagle replied. "What we have observed, from watching other galaxies, some much older than the Milky Way, is that no life emerges until the galaxy settles down and develops stable zones. Life requires both a few steady stars in a relatively benign environment and stellar evolution, resulting in the creation of the critical elements on the periodic chart that are so important in all biochemical processes. If all the matter is subatomic particles and the simplest atoms, the likelihood of the origin of life of any kind, much less spacefaring life, is very very small. Not until large stars go through their complete life Cycles and manufacture the more complex elements like nitrogen, carbon, iron, and magnesium do the probabilities for the emergence of life become reasonable."

  Below them an occasional light flickered, but in the entire first four minutes, no more than a few hundred scattered lights appeared, and only one endured for longer than three seconds. "Now we have reached the time of the formation of the Earth and the solar system," the Eagle said, preparing to activate the display again.

  "Wait a moment, please," Nicole said. "I want to make certain I understand. Did you just show me that for the first half of galactic history, when there was no Earth and no Sun, comparatively few spacefarers evolved in the region around where the Sun would eventually form?… And that of those spacefarers, almost all of them had a species life span of less than twenty million years, and only one managed to survive for as long as sixty million years?"

  "Very good," the Eagle said. "Now I am going to add another parameter to the display. If a spacefarer has succeeded in traveling outside his own star system and has established a permanent presence in another—which you humans have of course not yet done—then the display acknowledges that expansion by illuminating the other star system as well, with the same color light. Therefore we can follow the spread of a specific spacefaring species. I am also now going to change the rate of the display by a factor of two, to ten million years per second."

  Only half a minute into the next period, a red light came on over in one corner of the room. Six to eight seconds later, it was surrounded by hundreds of other red lights. Together they shone with such intensity that the rest of the room, with its occasional solitary or pair of lights, seemed dark and uninteresting by comparison. The field of red lights then abruptly vanished in a fraction of a second. First the inner core of the red pattern went dark, leaving small groups of lights scattered at the edges of what had once been a gigantic region. A blink of the eye later and all the red lights were gone.

  Nicole's mind was operating at peak speed as she watched the lights flashing around her. That must be an interesting story, she thought, reflecting on the red lights. Imagine a civilization spread out over a region containing hundreds of stars. Then suddenly, pfft, that species is gone. The lesson is inescapable. For everything there is a beginning and an end. Immortality exists only as a concept, not as a reality.

  She glanced around the room. A general recurring pattern was developing as more and more regions hosted an occasional passing light, indicating the emergence and disappearance of another spacefaring civilization. Because even those beings that spread out and colonized adjoining star systems lived for such a brief time, only rarely did they come into proximity with a companion spacefaring civilization.

  There has been intelligence, and spacefaring, in our part of the galaxy since before there was an Earth, Nicole thought, but very few of these advanced creatures have ever had the thrill of sustained contact with their peers… So loneliness too is one of the underlying principles of the universe—at least of this universe.

  Eight minutes later the Eagle again froze the display. "We have now reached a point in time ten million years before the present," he said. "On the Earth, the dinosaurs have long since disappeared, destroyed by their inability to adapt to the climate changes caused by the impact of a great asteroid. Their disappearance, however, has allowed the mammals to flourish, and one of those mammalian evolutionary lines is starting to show the rudiments of intelligence."

  The Eagle stopped. Nicole was lo
oking up at him with an intense, almost pained expression on her face. "What's the matter?" the alien asked.

  "Will our particular universe end in harmony?" Nicole asked. "Or will we be one of those data points that helps God define the region He is seeking by being outside the desired set?"

  "What prompts you to ask that question right now?" the Eagle said.

  "This whole display," Nicole answered, waving with her hand, "is an amazing catalyst. My mind has dozens of questions." She smiled. "But since I don't have time to ask them all, I thought I would ask the most important one first.

  "Just look at what has happened here," she continued, "even now, after ten billion years of evolution, the lights are widely scattered. And none of the groupings that exist have become permanent or widespread, even in this relatively small portion of the galaxy. Surely if our universe is going to end in harmony, sooner or later lights indicating spacefarers and intelligence should be illuminated at almost every star system in every galaxy. Or have I misinterpreted what Saint Michael meant by harmony?"

  "I don't think so," the Eagle said.

  "Where is our solar system in this current display?" Nicole now asked.

  "Right there," the Eagle said, using his light beam pointer.

  Nicole glanced first at the area around the Earth and then quickly surveyed the rest of the room. "So ten million years ago, there were about sixty spacefaring species living among our closest ten thousand stellar neighborhoods. And one of these species, if I understand that cluster of dark green lights, originated not too far from us and had spread to include twenty or thirty star systems altogether."