Rama: The Omnibus

by Arthur C. Clarke

  “Of course, Brother Johann,” she said, “but it really makes no difference. Aliens or angels. Both are God’s creatures. And I would not presume to understand His methods.”

  Johann thought for a moment. “You have an answer for everything,” he said.

  “No,” said Beatrice teasingly. “But God does… Now, should we continue? Our guide appears to be agitated.”

  In front of them the ribbon was cavorting, twisting at the ends and dancing around in the air. They resumed the climb.

  They must have walked three or four kilometers before they finally reached the top of the slide. Johann and Beatrice were both tired. From what they could see, they assumed they were in a very large, open room. The floor was still white. They could not see any walls.

  After following the ribbon for another five or six minutes, they came to a canal that was about thirty meters wide. The ribbon stopped and hovered above the swiftly flowing water. Beside the canal, a few meters to their right, were two sleeping mats identical to those they had been using in the chamber, two vessels filled with water, and a half-dozen food cylinders.

  Sister Beatrice, weary from the long walk, plopped down on one of the mats and immediately had a drink of water. Johann explored a little first, going along the canal in both directions to the edge of the territory illuminated by the ribbon.

  “There are no bridges,” he said when he returned.

  Beatrice was already eating one of the cylinders. “Mmm,” she said. “This dark green one is new, Brother Johann. It almost tastes like chocolate.” She offered it to him.

  He was still standing, staring across the canal. “Will you sit down, please,” Beatrice continued. “You’re even starting to make me nervous… The other side looks exactly like this. Nothing new, no surprises. Meanwhile you must be hungry and thirsty.”

  Johann sat beside her on the mat. She handed him the water jug. “The ribbon has stopped, the sleeping mats are here, there is food and water,” she said. “Ergo, this is where we are spending the night.”

  He took a long drink. “And that’s all?” Johann said, wiping his mouth with his arm. “You don’t ask where are we now, or what’s the purpose of the canal, or why were we separated from the others?”

  “No,” she said, taking a bite from another cylinder. “Because I have already accepted that we cannot answer those questions. No matter how much time we spend discussing them. And I am comfortable with that fact.”

  “But where’s your curiosity, Sister Beatrice?” Johann asked. “If your faith is so strong it allows you to accept anything, then there is no motivation to learn—”

  “Not so fast, Brother Johann,” Beatrice interrupted. “You’re almost as bad as Mr. al-Kharif in your simplistic notions about modern religion.” She finished chewing the bite that was in her mouth. “Faith and curiosity are in fact good partners, not competitive attributes. As St. Michael said in one of his most famous lectures, ‘That which can be learned, should be learned. Man glorifies God by pushing one of His most spectacular creations, the human mind, to its absolute limit. But we should not therefore conclude that the total universe of knowledge will ever be accessible to us. Only God is omniscient. What He knows, and we have not yet learned, or can never know, belongs in the realm of faith.’”

  Johann had picked up a food cylinder and taken a bite while Beatrice was talking. When she was finished he continued to chew methodically for a few seconds. “How many of these pithy sayings by St. Michael have you memorized?” he then said. “I’ve been hearing them now for several days and I don’t believe you’ve repeated a single one.”

  Sister Beatrice smiled. “I don’t consciously memorize them,” she said. “But I’ve studied St. Michael’s sermons as much or more than the Bible, and since I actually heard some of them, and remember the impact they made on me, I retain them very easily in my memory.”

  “What was he like, your St. Michael?” Johann said. “Along with everyone else, I have seen the video of the moment of his death many times, and I once watched one of his televised lectures entitled ‘The New Evolution.’ His German was exceptionally good, I remember, and his ideas were quite provocative, but other than that one lecture, I didn’t follow his life.”

  Sister Beatrice gazed at Johann for several seconds. “St. Michael was the most unusual human being I ever met,” she said slowly. “He taught me how to live, how to give, how to be happy with myself.”

  She paused and reached over to touch Johann on the arm. “I cannot talk about my experiences with Michael without becoming very emotional. My days with him are the treasures of my life… Please don’t misunderstand me, Brother Johann, but I am not yet ready to share those treasures with you. Only when I am certain that my experiences will be very special to you as well can I open up my heart and talk about St. Michael.”

  When Johann awakened he could see Sister Beatrice sitting beside the canal in the lotus position. She was about five meters beyond the end of their mats. Her eyes were closed. She looked remarkably peaceful. And where does this meditation stuff come from? he asked himself. That’s not part of any Christianity I know.

  He was careful not to disturb her. He propped his head up on an elbow and continued to watch her. Her face reflected the light from the ribbon, which remained where it had been all night, hovering over the canal. She’s really a beautiful woman, Johann told himself. I wonder what she would look like without that awful robe and headpiece.

  Johann recalled all his memories of Sister Beatrice. He did not have a single image of her without her bishop’s habit. He had seen Sister Vivien, a couple of times in his apartment, without the prescribed clothing of the Order of St. Michael. But not Beatrice.

  He waited until she had finished her meditation before starting breakfast. Beatrice joined him. She was unusually quiet while they were eating. Johann asked her about her practice of meditation. Sister Beatrice was not forthcoming. All she said was that St. Michael had learned to meditate when he was in India and had included it in his recommended daily regimen because of its ability to “center” an individual.

  Johann was about to ask Beatrice if anything was bothering her when the small boat suddenly appeared in the canal. It emerged from behind them, coming downstream, and then stopped on their side of the canal no more than ten meters away. Sister Beatrice brightened immediately.

  “Look, Brother Johann,” she said. “God’s angels have sent us a boat. And it even has a picnic basket, and a pair of oars.”

  The boat was white, with a red stripe on its side. Inside were two white benches. A pair of wide, cushioned seats with low backrests were on each of the benches.

  Beatrice boarded the boat and began examining the picnic basket. “There’s plenty of food and water,” she said. “And even a big blanket on the bottom… Are you ready for another adventure?”

  Sister Beatrice laughed when Johann asked if he should bring the sleeping mats. “You should go through our training, Brother Johann,” she said. “Then you wouldn’t be so concerned about things… We don’t need the mats. There will either be some wherever we are when it’s time to sleep again, or we’ll do without. Come on, let’s see where this boat is going to take us.”

  Johann had expected he would have some difficulty balancing on the boat. He had forgotten that they were still in a weightless environment. He sat down on the right seat facing the back of the boat. Beatrice was on the right side of her seat also, so there was ample room for their legs. The picnic basket was behind her. The two oars were below the bench behind him.

  The boat started moving as soon as they were both seated. The ribbon remained where it was. As the light faded away Johann grew uncomfortable. “Is your faith strong today?” Beatrice said teasingly. “Or do you need some support from me?”

  “I can always use your support,” Johann replied.

  They rode in total blackness. Neither of them could see anything at all. The small boat seemed to be moving faster. At times Johann could hear the gurgle
of the rushing water.

  “This is really fun,” Beatrice said. “It reminds me of a water ride in the dark at Paul Bunyan Land.”

  “What’s Paul Bunyan Land?” Johann asked.

  “One of those huge family destination centers,” Beatrice answered. “It’s right outside Minneapolis. My father used to take us there when I deserved a special reward. You know, good grades in school, or an unusual commendation for one of my performances.”

  “When did you start singing?” Johann said.

  “At birth,” Beatrice replied. He could tell that she was laughing. Johann wished that be could see her.

  “There’s a light up ahead,” Beatrice announced.

  Johann turned around. They moved quickly into the light. Their canal had now become a river, surrounded on both sides by tall monoliths of brown rock. Above them, beyond the rocks, they could see what looked like blue sky. The vast scope of their spherical world was becoming clear.

  The river wound through several turns before the rocks beside them began to show any variation. After one turn the river widened and on Beatrice’s right side the rock walls slowly changed to terraced rock fields sprinkled with occasional large boulders. Farther on, there was a brown sand beach lining part of the riverbank. Behind the sand, up the sloping rocky terrain, a landscape of varied rock formations was reminiscent of the American southwest.

  It was a spectacular sight. A strong, solitary source, above them and in the direction of the back of the boat, was providing all the light. Johann shaded his eyes and tried to find the fake sun up in the pure blue sky, but he could not look at it directly.

  The huge brown cliffs remained on Beatrice’s left. After another bend in the river, their channel split into two parts and a solitary snowcapped mountain appeared in the far distance on her right. Behind it, a few kilometers later, an entire jagged range of breathtakingly tall mountains, their tops all painted by the same white brush, was a feast for their eyes. In the foreground the varied rock formations looked as if they had been shaped by artists.

  “I feel as if we should be listening to Dvorak’s New World Symphony,” Sister Beatrice said, breaking a long silence.

  “I can hear it in my head,” said Johann. He was watching the scenes on his left with a growing ache in his heart. The incomparable beauty of the sight reminded him of Earth, and he was aware of an acute yearning to see it once again.

  “They’ve done a great job, don’t you think?” Beatrice said.

  “Yes,” Johann said. “Whoever they are.”

  The river split into three more channels. Their boat followed the smallest, middle rivulet and entered a dark tunnel as soon as the other two channels were no longer in sight. “Are you thirsty?” Beatrice asked when they had been riding in the dark for five minutes.

  “A little,” Johann said.

  They fumbled clumsily, laughing at themselves, but she eventually managed to hand him one of the water vessels from the picnic basket. He sucked hard at the drinking tube and felt the refreshing water in his mouth. Several seconds later they emerged from the tunnel into an altogether different world.

  On Beatrice’s right was nothing but placid water for the few kilometers they could see, and darkness beyond that. To their left was a grass-covered bank, sloping gently down to the water’s edge. They could also see flowers and trees, and grassy knolls.

  “Listen,” said Beatrice. “Can you hear the birds?”

  The boat was moving more slowly now, hugging the left bank. Johann could indeed hear what sounded like birds. He could make out at least three or four distinct and different chirps and cries.

  “How in the world…”

  “Look, Johann, over there, at the bottom of those trees. Do you see the squirrels?”

  The boat pulled into a slight indentation in the left bank and came to a halt. Sister Beatrice reached behind her and gathered up the basket.

  “Well,” she said, pointing over at a small hill beside the trees, near where the squirrels were playing, “could you imagine a more heavenly place for a picnic?”

  “You took the words right out of my mouth,” Johann said.

  4

  Lying on the blanket, staring at the blue sky over his head and listening to the medley of songs from the unseen birds, Johann finally stopped torturing himself with questions he could not answer. They had both enjoyed the lunch. The conversation had been light. Sister Beatrice had asked him to talk about his childhood, his family, and his university days. She had been very interested in his competitive swimming career and had compared his feelings when he represented Germany in international meets to her emotions when she had appeared in her first musical on Broadway.

  She was sitting beside him on the blanket, trying to coax the squirrels to eat from her hand. Beatrice shredded part of one of the food cylinders, but the animals were not interested.

  “When I first joined the order,” she said, giving up on the squirrels and moving over closer to Johann, “I went through a peculiar antianimal phase… I was stuck on the idea that people were showering love on their pets that should have been saved for other humans.” She laughed. “I actually asked St. Michael about this issue one night, if you can believe it… He was so kind. He smiled at me and then said, ‘Sister Beatrice, is it your belief that people have only an allocated amount of love and affection to share? And if they give it to one special person, or even a pet, they won’t have any more left?’ Just two days before I had listened to Michael’s ‘Infinite Love’ sermon, so I was pretty embarrassed…”

  Johann loved to hear her talk. Her speech was rich with inflections and emphases, and there was almost a musical modality to the way she constructed her sentences. For some reason, as Beatrice continued to reminisce, Johann suddenly remembered a conversation he had had with his high-school chum Heike back when they were both sixteen. It had been a gray, damp, cold day in Potsdam, the third or fourth in a row, and Heike had been irritated at the weather.

  “I can’t wait to get to heaven,” she had said, “because the sun will shine every day. And there will be no mud, and no wet grass.”

  No mud and no wet grass, Johann thought. And thou beside me in the sunlight.

  “…I went to Lake Bemidji every summer from the time I was ten until I was seventeen,” Beatrice was saying. “There were a group of foreign-language camps scattered around the lake. My father wanted me to be fluent in at least two other languages. Because he was still hoping I would use my voice training to be an opera star, he thought I would choose to study Italian and German… But I fooled him. I learned French and Japanese instead.”

  “Japanese? Why did you decide?” said Johann. He had turned over on his side to look at Beatrice. He was not able to complete his question. She was running her fingers through the long blond hair that fell down to the small of her back. It looked like silk.

  “When,” he stammered eventually, “when did you take off your headpiece?”

  “A couple of minutes ago,” she said, “after I finished trying to feed the squirrels.” Beatrice laughed. “That’s right, you’ve never seen my hair down before.” She turned her head from side to side. “What do you think?”

  “It’s beautiful,” was all he could think of to say.

  Beatrice talked again about Lake Bemidji and Johann listened silently from beside her on the blanket. He carefully studied her long hair, her blue eyes, and her radiant face. You are beautiful, he thought.

  They had only been back in the moving boat for a few minutes when the first scattered houses appeared on the left bank. The large, handsome, and freshly painted homes were just beyond the thick forest that Johann and Beatrice had been able to see from their picnic site. Some of the houses were brick or stucco, but most looked as if they were made of wood. Each of them had trees and well-trimmed grass in the front yard, with either an orderly garden plot or more grass in the rear.

  The houses began to cluster. What was obviously a church stood on the top of a small hill. The boat pas
sed a school, a small factory, and then some office buildings. Everything was neat and clean.

  They entered another tunnel. Johann and Beatrice recognized many of the sounds they were hearing long before they came out into the light. A modern Western city was now on their left. Cars were driving on the boulevard along the bank of the river. Beyond the boulevard, trolleys climbed shop-lined streets up the gently sloping hills. Johann and Sister Beatrice were astonished that people were suddenly everywhere. Some were fishing in the river. Some were eating in restaurants along the shore. A hundred or so had gathered in an outdoor amphitheater to hear a man speak or sing. Nobody paid even the slightest attention to the two strangers in the white boat moving slowly down the river.

  Children were playing soccer on a large green field. Two boys and their dogs were flying kites nearby. A woman pushed a baby carriage on the walkway beside the river. Johann and Sister Beatrice stared at the diverse scene without comment. They were both dumbfounded.

  On the outskirts of the city a collection of palatial homes, each with its own private boathouse, lined the water. Through the open windows Johann and Beatrice could see luxurious furniture, fine art, and people dining at long tables. Fancy cars were in the garages. At a private dock near them, four teenagers, two boys and two girls, clambered into a small motorboat.

  The motorboat came right at them. Only when their boat swerved to avoid a collision did Johann and Beatrice look at the other side of the river. They had not glanced in that direction a single time since they had come out of the last tunnel.

  On the opposite bank of the river, about four hundred meters in front of them, was another city scene. Only this one was vastly different. Tumbledown clapboard shacks were strewn along the bank. Clothing was hanging everywhere, on porches, on trees, on lines stretched between the houses. Naked children of all colors were swimming in the garbage-infested water. Every conceivable kind of boat, most looking as if they might sink at any moment, was going to and fro in the portion of the river nearest the bank.