Rama: The Omnibus

by Arthur C. Clarke

  "That's correct," said the Eagle. "Should I run the display forward again, at a slower rate?"

  "In a little while," Nicole said. "I want to appreciate this particular configuration first. Up until now everything has been happening in this display faster than I could possibly absorb it."

  She stared at the group of green lights. Its outer edge was no more than fifteen light-years from where the Eagle had marked the solar system. Nicole motioned for the Eagle to start the display again and he told her the rate would now be only two hundred thousand years a second.

  The green lights moved closer and closer to the Earth and then they suddenly disappeared. "Stop," yelled Nicole.

  The Eagle halted the display. He looked at Nicole with a quizzical expression.

  "What happened to those guys?" Nicole said.

  "I told you about them a couple of days ago," the Eagle said. "They genetically engineered themselves out of existence."

  They almost reached the Earth, Nicole thought. And how different all history would have been if they had. They would have recognized immediately the intellectual potential of the protohumans in Africa and would doubtless have done to them what the Precursors did to the octospiders. Then we…

  In her mind's eye, Nicole suddenly had an image of Saint Michael, calmly explaining the purpose of the universe in front of the fireplace in Michael and Simone's study.

  "Could I see the beginning?" Nicole asked the Eagle.

  "The beginning of what?" he replied.

  "The beginning of everything," Nicole said eagerly. "The instant when this universe began and the entire process of evolution was set in motion." She waved her hand toward the model below them.

  "We can do that," the Eagle said after a brief pause.

  "We have no knowledge about anything before this universe was created," the Eagle said a moment later as Nicole and he stood together on the platform in total darkness. "We do assume, however, that some kind of energy existed before the instant of creation, for we have been told that the matter of this universe resulted from a transformation of energy."

  Nicole looked around her. "Darkness everywhere," she said, almost to herself. "And somewhere in that darkness—if the word 'somewhere' even has any meaning—there was energy. And a Creator. Or might the energy have been part of the Creator?"

  "We don't know," the Eagle said after another short pause. "What we do know is that the fate of every single element in the universe was determined in that initial instant. The way in which that energy was transformed into matter defined eighty billion years of history."

  As the Eagle spoke, a blinding light filled the room.

  Nicole turned away from the source and covered her eyes. "Here," said the Eagle, reaching into his pouch. He handed Nicole a special pair of glasses.

  "Why did you make the simulation so bright?" Nicole asked after adjusting her glasses.

  'To indicate, at least in some measure, what those initial moments were like. Look," he said, pointing below them, "I have stopped the model at 10-40 seconds after the creation instant. The universe has existed for only an infinitesimal length of time, yet already it is rich in physical structure. This incredible amount of light is all coming from that tiny chunk of cosmic broth below us. All that 'stuff' forming the early universe is completely alien to anything we could recognize or understand. There are no atoms, no molecules. The density of the quarks, leptons, and their friends is so great that a pinch of the 'stuff' no larger than a hydrogen atom would weigh more than a large cluster of galaxies in our era."

  "Just out of curiosity," Nicole said, "where are you and I at this moment?"

  The Eagle hesitated. "Nowhere would be the best answer," he said eventually. "For illustrative purposes we are outside the model of the universe. But we could be in another dimension. The mathematics of the early universe do not work unless there were initially more than four dimensions. Of course everything in space-time that will later become our universe is contained in that small volume producing the awesome light. The temperature over there, incidentally, if the model were a true representation, would be ten trillion times hotter than the hottest star that will eventually evolve.

  "Our model here has also distorted the concepts of size and distance," the Eagle continued after a brief pause. "In a moment I will start the simulation of the early universe again, and we will be overpowered as that compact blob of radiation explodes outward at an astonishing rate. While the simulation of what the cosmologists call the Inflation Era is occurring, the assumed size of this room will also be increasing rapidly. If we did not change the scale, you would be unable now to see the structure of the universe at 10-40 seconds without a fantastic microscope."

  Nicole stared below her at the source of light. "So that minuscule warped globule of hot, heavy stuff was the seed of everything? From that tiny stew of subatomic particles came the great galaxies you showed me in the other domain? It doesn't seem possible."

  "Not just those galaxies," the Eagle said. "The potential for everything in the cosmos is stored in that peculiar superheated soup."

  The small globule suddenly began to expand at an enormous rate. Nicole had the feeling that the outside of the globule was going to touch her face at any moment. Millions of bizarre structures formed and disappeared in front of her eyes. Nicole watched in fascination as the material seemed to change its nature several times, moving through transitional states as peculiar and foreign as the earlier superheated globule.

  "I have ran time forward in the model," the Eagle said several seconds later. "What you see out there now, approximately one million years after creation, would be recognizable to any dedicated student of physics. Some simple atoms have formed—three kinds of hydrogen, two of helium, for example. Lithium is the heaviest known atom that is plentiful. The density of the universe is now roughly equivalent to the air on Earth, and the temperature has fallen to a comparatively comfortable one hundred million degrees, or twenty orders of magnitude less than it was at the time of the hot globule."

  He activated the platform and guided it among the lights and clumps and filaments. "If we were really smart," the Eagle said, "we would be able to look at all this early matter and predict which 'lumps' would eventually become galactic clusters. It was at about this time that the first Prime Monitor appeared, the only intruder into this otherwise natural evolution process. No monitoring could have been done earlier, because the process is so sensitive. Any kind of observation during the first second of creation, for example, would have completely distorted the resultant evolution."

  The Eagle pointed at a tiny metallic sphere in the center of several huge agglomerations of matter. "That first Prime Monitor," he said, "was sent by the Creator, from another dimension of the early universe, into our evolving space-time system. Its purpose was to observe what was occurring and to create, as necessary, with its own intelligence, the other observing systems that would together gather all the pertinent information on the overall process."

  "So the Sun, the Earth, and every human being," Nicole said slowly, "resulted from the unpredictable natural evolution of this cosmos. The Node, Rama, and even you and Saint Michael were produced from a directed development designed originally by that first Prime Monitor."

  She paused, glancing around her, and then turned to the Eagle. "You could have been predicted shortly after the moment of creation. I, and even the existence of humanity, came from a process so mathematically perverse that we could not even have been predicted a hundred million years ago, which is only one percent of the time since the beginning of the universe."

  Nicole shook her head and then waved her hand. "All right," she said, "that's enough. I'm overloaded with the infinite."

  The great room became dark again except for the small lights on the floor of the platform. "What is it?" the Eagle said, seeing a look of distress on Nicole's face.

  "I'm not certain," she said. "I feel a kind of sadness, as if I had experienced a deep personal loss. If I have un
derstood all this, then humans are far more special than you, or even Rama. The odds are very much against any creatures even nearly like us ever arising again, either in this universe or any other. We are one of the fluke products of chaos. You, or at least something like you, probably existed in all those other universes the Creator is supposedly observing."

  There was a momentary silence. "I guess I had imagined," Nicole continued, "after listening to Saint Michael, that there would be human voices in that harmony God was seeking. Now I realize that it is only on the planet Earth, in this particular universe, that our songs—"

  Nicole felt a sharp burst of pain in her chest. It remained intense. She struggled to breathe, convinced for several moments that the end was coming immediately.

  The Eagle said nothing, but watched her carefully. When Nicole finally caught her breath, she spoke in short, broken clauses. "You told me … at lunch …a personal place … where I could see family and friends…"

  They talked briefly in the car while the pain was momentarily bearable. Both the Eagle and Nicole knew, without either of them saying anything, that the next attack would be the last.

  They entered another of the exhibit areas in the Knowledge Module. This room was a perfect circle, with a space in a small floor section in the middle where the Eagle could stand next to Nicole's wheelchair. They crossed to their central location and watched as humanlike figures began to replay events from Nicole's adult life in each of the six separate theater settings that closely surrounded them.

  The verisimilitude of the replays was astonishing. Not only did all Nicole's family and friends look exactly as they had at the time that the events had taken place, but all the sets were perfect reconstructions as well. In one of the scenes Katie was water-skiing boldly near the shore of Lake Shakespeare, laughing and waving with the reckless abandon that was her trademark. In another Nicole watched a re-creation of the party the little troupe on Rama II had held to celebrate the one thousandth anniversary of the death of Eleanor of Aquitaine. Seeing Simone at age four and Katie at two, and both Richard and herself when they were still young and vigorous, brought tears to Nicole's eyes.

  It has been an astonishing life, Nicole thought. She rolled her wheelchair into the scene from Rama II and the action stopped. Nicole leaned over and picked up the robot TB that Richard had created to amuse the little girls. It felt properly weighted in her hands.

  "How in the world did you do this?" Nicole asked.

  "Advanced technology," the Eagle replied. "I couldn't explain it to you."

  "And if I went over there, where Katie is skiing, would the water feel wet to my touch?"

  "Absolutely."

  Nicole rolled out of the scene holding the pseudo-robot in her hands. When she was gone, another TB materialized and the scene continued. I had forgotten, Richard, Nicole said to herself, all your brilliant little creations.

  Her heart granted her a few more minutes to enjoy the vignettes taken from her life. Nicole thrilled again to the moment of Simone's birth, relived her first night of love with Richard not long after he found her in New York, and experienced for a second time the fantastic array of sights and creatures that had greeted Richard and her when the gates of me Emerald City had first opened to them.

  "Can you replay any event from my life that I might want?" Nicole asked, feeling a sudden constriction in her chest.

  "As long as it happened after you arrived at Rama and I can find it in the archives," the Eagle replied.

  Nicole gasped. The final heart attack was under way. "Please," she said, "may I see my last conversation with Richard before he left?"

  It won't be long, a voice inside Nicole said. She clenched her teeth and tried to concentrate on the scene that had suddenly appeared in front of her. Richard was explaining to pseudo-Nicole why he was the one who should accompany Archie back to New Eden.

  "I understand," pseudo-Nicole said in the scene.

  I understand, the real Nicole said to herself. That is the most important statement anyone can ever make. The whole key to life is understanding. And now I understand that I am a mortal creature whose time of death has come.

  Another surge of intense pain was accompanied by a fleeting memory of a Latin line from an old poem: Timor Mortis conturbat me. But I will not be afraid because I understand.

  The Eagle was watching her closely. "I would like to see Richard and Archie," she said, laboring, "their final moments … in the cell … just before the biots came."

  I will not be afraid because I understand.

  "And my children, if they can somehow be here. And Dr. Blue."

  The room became dark. Seconds ticked by. The pain was terrible. I will not be afraid…

  The lights came on again. Richard and Archie were in their cell immediately in front of Nicole's wheelchair. She heard the biots open the cellblock door down the hall.

  "Freeze it there, please," Nicole said with difficulty. Just to the left of the scene with Richard and Archie, her children and Dr. Blue were lined up in a tableau. Nicole struggled to her feet and walked the few meters to be among them. Tears poured from her eyes as she touched one final time the faces that she loved.

  The walls of her heart began to collapse. Nicole stumbled into the scene in Richard's cell and embraced the representation of her husband. "I understand, Richard," she said.

  Nicole dropped to her knees slowly. She turned to face the Eagle. "I understand," she said with a smile.

  And understanding is happiness, she thought.

  GENTRY LEE

  * * *

  BRIGHT

  MESSENGERS

  To Stacey, my wife

  and my best friend

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I would like to thank all those people who offered me support and encouragement during the writing of this novel, especially my wife, Stacey, and my editor, Jennifer Hershey, both of whom listened patiently to me on hundreds of occasions. I would also like to thank Stacey and my seven sons—Cooper, Austin, Robert, Patrick, Michael, Travis, and Hunter—for filling my life with love, joy, and richness, thereby making it easier for me to find the self-discipline necessary to immerse myself in the world of my imagination.

  Jennifer Hershey has played a major role in shaping this novel. Her outstanding insights have undoubtedly improved the quality of the book. Also, her unwavering belief in Bright Messengers has helped me over more than one tough hurdle.

  Thanks also go to Janis Dworkis, an enthusiastic friend whose comments on drafts of the novel were very much appreciated, and to Arlene Jacobs, with whom I discussed some of the medical issues associated with the birth of Maria.

  My final thanks go to my mentor and friend, Arthur C. Clarke, whose generosity made it possible for me to begin a writing career rather late in my life.

  INTRODUCTION

  When I finished reading Bright Messengers, I felt like an aviation instructor who had just sent a pupil up into the sky on his first solo flight, and then watched, openmouthed, as he performed a series of dazzling aerobatics. Congratulations, Gentry: I find it hard to believe that it’s less than a decade since we started exploring space together.

  Could it really only be eight years ago that my agent, the late Scott Meredith, insisted that I meet Gentry Lee? With a full roster of projects, I was hardly eager to be introduced to a new potential collaborator. But then Scott began reeling off credentials: Gentry worked at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and he was the chief engineer on Project Galileo. Before that, he was director of science analysis and mission planning for the Mars Viking landers. Because he was so passionate to educate the public about what was going on in space, he formed a television production company with Carl Sagan, and the result was Cosmos.

  This was a man I had to meet. Gentry boarded a plane for Sri Lanka, and the rest is history. The fruits of our collaboration are the three sequels to Rendezvous with Rama: Rama II, The Garden of Rama, and Rama Revealed.

  During the writing of the final volume, Rama Reve
aled, published in 1994, Gentry created so many fascinating characters and situations that it became clear that we had a whole new universe on our hands that begged further exploration. But I had neither the time nor the energy to help Gentry explore it. So I was more than happy to say “It’s all yours.” Herewith the result, which I assure you is 99.999 percent Gentry. (I was able to pick a few minor nits.)

  Even those unfamiliar with the Rama Quartet can fully enjoy Bright Messengers, though reading the earlier books will certainly give an added dimension. Perhaps Gentry’s most remarkable feat has been to achieve what Somerset Maugham once said was the hardest task in literature—creating a person who is almost wholly good. He has even succeeded in making so devout an agnostic as myself slightly more tolerant of such unalloyed sanctity.

  And I hope you will be as anxious as I am to discover what happens in the next volume, Double Full Moon Night.

  ARTHUR C. CLARKE

  Colombo, Sri Lanka

  October 20, 1994

  THE GREAT CHAOS

  1

  The barely audible sound of the watch alarm woke Beatrice instantly. She rose in the predawn dark, slipping quietly Out of her sleeping bag on the cot in the back corner of the large tent. Beatrice exhaled, saw her breath in the cold air, and shivered slightly. She rubbed her hands together and pressed them against the soft cotton of the long underwear that doubled as her pajamas.

  Beatrice reached under the cot and retrieved the blue robe of her order, as well as the blue headpiece with the small white stripe. A brush and a hairpin were wrapped inside the folded robe. After pulling the brush through her long blond hair several times, Beatrice wrapped her hair in a bun and pinned it tightly against her head. She finished dressing in less than a minute and tiptoed past her sleeping colleagues.