Rama: The Omnibus

by Arthur C. Clarke

  As he stood there Johann suddenly remembered a conversation he had had with Eva in the early days of their romance. She had been complaining that her father had never paid much attention to her when she was growing up, that he had only been interested in her brother. She had interrupted her complaint to ask Johann a question. “You know,” she had said, “I don’t think I have ever heard you talk about anything bad that happened to you when you were young. Did you have a perfect childhood?”

  It was nearly perfect, Johann thought, summoning his courage to approach the door. I raced home every day after school, eager to see my mother and tell her about my day. The two of us greeted my father with broad smiles when he came home from work He paused and took a deep breath. There was certainly nothing to prepare me for this.

  His mother answered the door and gave Johann a huge hug. He handed her the wine. “Max,” she shouted excitedly, “it’s Johann… And he’s brought a cold bottle of Piesporter with him.”

  Johann’s father, dressed in a rumpled shirt, blue slacks, and slippers, appeared in the atrium a few seconds later. “How are you, son?” he said with a slight smile. “It’s great to see you again.”

  His father did not hug him. The Eberhardt men never embraced. In fact, they hardly ever showed any kind of emotion.

  “I’m watching the news,” Max Eberhardt said to Johann. “Would you like to join me?”

  “He can talk to you after dinner,” Frau Eberhardt said. “I want him now… Come, Johann, let’s go in the kitchen. I want you to tell me about everything in your life.”

  For just a moment, as Johann crossed the dining room behind his mother and smelled the enticing aroma of Kartoffelsuppe, he thought about telling his mother about the double helix in the Tiergarten, Bakir, and even the sorry state of his relationship with Eva. But Johann realized that such a conversation was impossible. He had never talked with his mother about what he was really thinking and feeling. And it was too late to start now.

  Frau Eberhardt still cooked by hand, despite the automated equipment surrounding her in the kitchen. When they were in front of the stove, she took a small spoonful of soup from the huge pot and brought it over for Johann to taste.

  “Umm, delicious as usual,” Johann said.

  “I bet your Eva can’t make a pot of soup like this,” his mother said.

  “No, Ma,” Johann answered. “Really good potato soup cannot be made by machines.”

  Frau Eberhardt basked in his praise. For a few moments she gazed at her son, silently stirring the pot. “Thank you for coming, Johann,” she said. “Your father and I cherish your visits.”

  Johann looked over his shoulder and moved closer to his mother. “You said you had something ‘urgent’ to discuss with me,” he said in a low voice. “Why don’t we get it out of the way now so we can relax the rest of the evening?”

  His mother grimaced. “I had hoped we might wait,” she said. “At least until after we had had a pleasant dinner.”

  “Didn’t you want to discuss it with me alone?” Johann said. “As we usually do?”

  Frau Eberhardt handed Johann the large wooden spoon. “Keep stirring,” she said. “I’ll be back in a minute.”

  When she returned she was carrying an envelope. “Everything is in here,” she said, “although I guess you only need to read the last document.”

  She pulled out a letter and gave it to Johann. It was printed on the stationery of the tax collection office of the state of Brandenburg. Johann returned the spoon to his mother and began to read.

  The letter said that since the property taxes on the house were now three years overdue, and since past promises to pay them had never been kept, the state had reluctantly decided it had no choice except to seize the property, sell it at auction, and take the property taxes out of the proceeds. Any money remaining, after the payment of the delinquent taxes, plus the cost of the auction and some processing fees, would be given to the current owners of the house. The letter was signed by Herr Wilhelm Drommer, Tax Collector, and dated February 20, 2141.

  “Can you believe that?” Frau Eberhardt said nervously. “Herr Drommer and your father were friends at the university.”

  “Mother,” Johann said, after reading the letter a second time and starting to recover from the shock, “why didn’t you say something about this before?”

  “It’s ridiculous,” his mother said, stirring the soup and not looking at Johann. “We aren’t the only ones who are delinquent. Frau Hirsch told me that the Muellers haven’t paid their taxes since George died two years ago.” She suddenly started to cry. “Oh, Johann, what are we going to do? This will absolutely kill your father.”

  Johann moved over beside his mother. Tears were run-fling down her cheeks. “How much will it take, Ma?” Johann said quietly. “How much must we pay?”

  “The clerk at the collector’s office says we must pay at least six months’ worth of taxes in the next two weeks. And we must also agree to regular monthly payments for the rest.”

  Johann turned his mother so that she was facing him. “How much is it, Ma?” he repeated.

  “Over seven thousand marks,” she said, new tears spilling out of her eyes. She buried her face in Johann’s chest.

  He mechanically stroked his mother’s back as he thought about what she had told him. Over seven thousand marks, he said slowly to himself. In two weeks. How in the hell am I going to raise that kind of money?

  Only for a few seconds did Johann consider not helping his parents and letting the house be sold to pay the taxes. During those seconds he was filled with anger and resentment. But he did not allow those emotions to continue. That would be the wrong reaction, he told himself. My proper response is to help my parents.

  Max Eberhardt smacked his lips as he finished the last of the chocolate cake. “Well, Johann,” he said, “I must admit that there are many reasons why I enjoy your visits… Your mother never cooks like this for just the two of us.”

  Johann acknowledged his father’s comment with a smile but did not say anything. He was still thinking about the seven thousand marks. The dinner conversation had been polite and circumspect. Johann and his parents had discussed the weather, sports, Eva, Johann’s current job and future prospects, and the activities of a few of his childhood chums who had stayed in Potsdam. Never once had they mentioned either his father’s unemployment or the problem with the house. His mother had been especially interested in Johann’s job, and had been visibly relieved when he had informed them that Guntzel and Stern had already received a pair of firm offers for his services after his current contract was finished.

  “Now,” his father said, rising from his chair, “I think I have the perfect conclusion for this outstanding evening. Will you join me in the family room, Johann? I believe last summer’s production of Siegfried at Bayreuth is finally available on the system.”

  Max Eberhardt’s only real passion in life was the operas of Richard Wagner. He knew the stories and music for all of the operas, and often whistled one of the tunes while working or taking his morning walk. As a boy, Johann had been told repeatedly that Richard Wagner was the greatest German genius of all time, surpassing Beethoven, Bach, Bismarck, Frederick the Great, Martin Luther, Goethe, Mozart, and the others usually accorded a place in the German pantheon.

  “And why exactly was Wagner so great?” his father had often asked rhetorically, even if Johann showed no interest. “Because he alone captured the essence of the German spirit. No true German can watch the Ring Cycle without being stirred to the bottom of his soul.”

  Whenever Johann visited his parents and one of the pay television systems was accessed, he always inserted his own identity card so that the charges would go on his account. The Siegfried they were preparing to watch had won universal praise and was still comparatively expensive as home entertainment. His mother thanked Johann quietly while the program was beginning, before she slipped out to prepare the dishes for the robot washer.

  The giant sc
reen, a hundred centimeters square, nearly filled the wall of the family room. As the music swelled, the camera zoomed into a cave where the dwarf Mime, the young hero Siegfried’s caretaker since birth, was working to forge a new sword for his ward. The adventure had begun. For four hours the fearless Siegfried, the quintessential German hero, would overcome treachery, monsters, and even the gods on a predestined path to glory whose ultimate payoff would be a passionate liaison with the demigod Brunhild, the most beautiful woman in either heaven or earth.

  Once the opera had begun, Johann watched his father more than the program on the television screen. Johann was familiar with the story. He had seen Siegfried three times in his life, twice during the family’s annual summer pilgrimage to Bayreuth, and had probably discussed it with his father on a dozen other occasions. It was easy for him to follow the story simply by listening to the leitmotifs in the magnificent music.

  He was fascinated by his father’s complete absorption in the opera. He, Johann, was not able to forget for even a few minutes all the issues that were troubling him. Yet there was his father across the room, the nominal owner of a house about to be sold because of unpaid taxes, a man no longer able to support himself, totally immersed in a mythological musical story. How can he turn the rest of the world off so completely? Johann wondered enviously. But as he thought about his father he knew the answer. Because otherwise he could not go on living.

  Frau Eberhardt brought them huge stems of beer just after the second act began. She then stayed for her favorite part, where Siegfried slays the giant Father, who is in the guise of a dragon, with his enchanted sword. Soon thereafter Johann, exhausted from his long and emotional day, fell asleep on the couch, waking only during Siegfried’s final triumph with Brunhild. Max Eberhardt’s attention had obviously never wandered from the screen. Now, as Johann watched him from across the room, his father seemed far away from Potsdam and Germany. He was the warrior Siegfried, high on a mountaintop overlooking the earth, experiencing the joy of being in love with one of the most desirable females ever created. Johann saw true emotion on his father’s face for one of the few times in his life.

  Johann slept in the extra-long bed that his parents had bought when he was only fourteen. By that age his height had already reached two meters. But he did not sleep well in his adolescent bed. Throughout the night he was plagued by disturbing dreams.

  The longest dream began with Johann in his office at the Berlin Water Department. Bakir and he were reviewing the design for a system that would more efficiently monitor and control the city’s water purification plant. The proposed system did not require any human involvement at all unless a specific set of parameters were outside defined tolerance levels and the built-in fault analysis capabilities could not isolate and correct the problem in a reasonable amount of time. In the dream Bakir told him that the system had already been validated during three years of usage in Brussels, where it had a mean time between failures of seven months and had substantially reduced that city’s labor costs.

  Bakir said that five full-time positions in the Berlin Water Department would no longer be necessary once the new system was installed. Then the dream scene shifted abruptly. Johann was swimming four hundred meters in an important race. Although he was leading with only a single lap to go, through his goggles he could see the swimmers on both sides slowly but steadily catching him. His arms began to feel leaden as two competitors passed him in the last ten meters of the race.

  When he pulled himself out of the pool, Eva was waiting on the deck. “Come,” she said, “we must hurry.” Eva was naked, which embarrassed Johann, but none of the other swimmers or coaches seemed to notice. She was already walking swiftly toward the locker room. Johann had to hurry to keep up with her.

  Eva talked the entire time that Johann was dressing, but nothing that she said made any sense to him in the dream. It was as if she were talking gibberish. A commotion on the opposite side of the locker room disturbed them. Johann recognized the singer who had played Brunhild in Siegfried. She was dressed in a bizarre bikini made of armor, and was posing for the dozen or so men who were admiring her obvious attributes. One of the men, holding a dozen roses in the front row, was his father. As Johann and Eva came closer he noticed a forlorn, ragged figure standing in an alcove just off to the right. His mother was watching the adoration of Brunhild with tears in her eyes.

  Johann wanted to comfort his mother, but Eva pulled him out the door behind her. “We don’t have time for this foolishness,” she said in the dream.

  They rode together on the subway. Eva was now dressed. “Where are we going?” Johann asked.

  “You’ll see,” she replied.

  They disembarked at the Berlin Hauptbahnhof just as a train entered on the opposite side of the platform. The electronic voice in the station announced that the Istanbul Express would leave in five minutes. Johann glanced to his left and saw a long procession of Turks filing down the stairs to the platform. The women all had their heads covered in the traditional manner. Accompanying the Turks were a dozen NSP officers, headed by the young man who had accosted Johann in the park that morning. All were carrying nightsticks.

  Bakir, Sylvie, and Anna were in the middle of the procession. They came over to greet Johann. “So you have changed your mind?” Bakir asked with a warm smile.

  Johann turned to Eva, who was regarding him with scorn. “Move along,” the policeman said in a loud voice. When Johann turned back to his friend, Bakir had disappeared. A few moments later Johann saw him on the far side of the platform, standing with his family in front of one of the train doors that had just opened. The NSP officers ordered the Turks, who were arranged in orderly lines in front of each of the doors, to board the train. They refused. The Turkish women in Johann’s dream began to wail in unison. The sound was terrible.

  “Come on,” Eva said to him. “This is why we are here.” She dragged him toward the recalcitrant Turks.

  The platform was suddenly teeming with hundreds of different Germans, a cross section of the people that Johann encountered daily on the streets of Berlin. On a raised stage in the middle of the platform, Johann’s cousin Ludwig, looking sharp in his gray uniform with the captain’s insignia prominent on both shoulders, stepped up to a microphone. When Chancellor Freisinger, who was standing beside Ludwig, nodded his head, Johann’s cousin began to speak.

  “On the count of three,” he said, “you should all move forward and push.”

  Eva yanked on Johann. “We must move over here,” she said, “to be in a better position.”

  “One,” said Ludwig. The moiling crowd pressed toward the Turks. Since he was taller than everyone else, Johann could see the terror in Bakir’s eyes from far away. His friend was resisting the pushing.

  “Two,” said Ludwig.

  Johann looked up at the top of his dream screen and saw a double helix of sparkling particles shining just underneath the station lights. As he watched, the particles formed into the pattern of a gun pointed at one of the long lines of Turks.

  “No,” shouted Johann. “No,” he yelled again, freeing his arm from Eva.

  The dream scene faded and Johann realized that he was actually in his bed in Potsdam. For a long time the images from his dream stayed fresh in his mind. It was several minutes before his heart rate returned to normal. He glanced over at the digital clock beside his bed. It was four-thirty.

  Johann remained awake the rest of the night. At the first sign of light, he went over to his window, opened it, and stuck his head outside to check the weather.

  11

  Max Eberhardt was dressed in his overcoat, with a scarf wrapped around his neck and a driving cap upon his head. “Are you sure you don’t want to go with me?” he said to Johann. “It’s a beautiful morning for a walk.”

  “Thank you anyway,” Johann said, shaking his head. “I think I’ll stay here and talk with Mother.”

  “He goes out every morning after breakfast,” Frau Eberhardt said after they
had closed the front door.

  “Does he ever look for a job anymore?” Johann asked.

  “Sometimes,” she lied, “but it’s no use. The few bookkeeping jobs that are available are taken by the Turks and the Egyptians. Your father says they work at half price or less… He hopes the situation will change with this new law.”

  The boarder, dressed in a simple suit and tie, walked down the stairs. He greeted Johann and his mother. “Would you like some fresh coffee, Herr Heinrich?” she asked.

  “No, thank you kindly, Frau Eberhardt,” the man said. “I had some coffee and rolls in my room.” He smiled at his landlady. “I’ll be gone for the weekend,” he said. “I’m visiting a friend up in Lübeck.”

  “Your father doesn’t like Herr Heinrich,” Johann’s mother said a few minutes later, when they were sitting together at the table in the nook adjoining the kitchen. “Max thinks that he is gay … and you know your father’s opinion on that subject. From my point of view, however,” she added, “Herr Heinrich is a perfect tenant. He stays to himself and is very neat. The only time we even know he is there is when he plays his music too loud.”

  “What does he do?” Johann asked.

  “His current contract is with Kirsch Electronics. I think he told me that he repairs the robots that build automobiles and airplanes… Something like that.” Frau Eberhardt smiled wistfully. “I have suggested to your father that he might take some kind of a technical training course. There’s a new school along the Havel, just on the other side of the Lange Bridge, that claims most of their graduates find positions in less than three months. But Max just scoffs at the idea. He says that he is too old to learn something new.”

  Frau Eberhardt refilled Johann’s coffee cup and offered him another roll. “So have you and Eva set a date?” she asked.