Rama: The Omnibus

by Arthur C. Clarke

  Johann’s debate with himself was over in a couple of strokes. If his fears were meaningless—as they probably were, he told himself—he could always take a longer swim tomorrow. It was compulsive to remain too rigorously tied to his schedule. He turned around and started swimming back toward the caves.

  He heard Sister Beatrice yelling when he was still thirty or forty meters out in the lake. Fueled by a burst of adrenaline, Johann surged out of the water, across the beach, and up to the large cave in a matter of seconds.

  “Stop, Yasin, stop,” Johann heard Sister Beatrice say just before he rounded the corner and entered the front of the cave.

  “Relax, Sister,” Yasin replied in a strangely calm tone. “This will all be over in a minute.”

  Yasin was astride Sister Beatrice on her sleeping mat. His left hand was pressing against her chest while his right hand was tugging on her long underwear. Beatrice’s robe had been ripped off and was lying beside them. She was flailing with both her free hands, striking Yasin with useless blows.

  Johann raced across the cave and grabbed the startled Yasin from behind. Lifting him over his head with superhuman strength, he carried Yasin to the nearest cave wall and hurled the smaller man against it with all his might. Yasin, dazed by the force of the impact, fell on the floor and was momentarily motionless. Johann was upon him in an instant. His rage uncontrollable, he picked Yasin up under the shoulders and began banging him against the wall with terrible force.

  Blood began to gush from Yasin’s many wounds and from his mouth. His eyes showed that he was about to lose consciousness.

  “No, Johann, no,” Sister Beatrice was screaming from behind him. Johann did not know how long her arms had been around his chest, trying to restrain him. He finally let go of Yasin, who collapsed in a heap on the cave floor. Johann bent down and shouted in Yasin’s bloody face.

  “If you ever, ever touch her again, you are a dead man, Yasin al-Kharif. Do you understand? A dead man!”

  Yasin started to say something, but the blood in his mouth made him cough. Sister Beatrice tried to move around Johann to help him.

  “NO,” Johann shouted, grabbing her arm fiercely. “You will not help him. Not after what he tried to do to you.”

  Sister Beatrice saw the wild look in Johann’s eyes and decided not to argue. Still holding on to Beatrice, Johann turned back to Yasin.

  “We are going to return to the caves on the other side of the island,” he said. “You are not to come near us under any circumstances. Is that clear?”

  Both Sister Beatrice and Johann thought they saw Yasin nod before his eyes closed and he became unconscious. When they faced each other, Beatrice buried her head against Johann’s chest and allowed herself to sob for a long time.

  14

  Twice during the next few days Sister Beatrice implored Johann to accompany her across the island to make certain that Yasin was all right. The first time Johann refused angrily. The second time, six days after the incident, he reluctantly agreed to check on Yasin himself so that Beatrice would stop worrying about the possibility that he might have died from the injuries he received during the fight.

  Johann decided to go in the middle of the night to minimize the likelihood that Yasin would see him. His reconnaissance trip was successful. He found Yasin fast asleep on a mat in one of the smaller caves. A new basket of food was not far from his mat, near a collection of the same medicinal plants with which Sister Beatrice had treated Yasin’s wounds when he first arrived on the island. An odd array of tools and other objects from the storehouse was stacked just outside the entrance to the cave.

  Sister Beatrice was reassured that Yasin had not died. As the days passed, however, she started to feel anxious again about their tenuous situation.

  “Sooner or later,” she said to Johann one evening around the fire, “we are going to run into Yasin again. This island is just too small for us to avoid each other forever… Wouldn’t it be better if we went to him, and tried to reach some kind of understanding? Otherwise, I fear…”

  Johann was adamant. He did not want any kind of accommodation with Yasin. He was still angry with himself for not having protected Sister Beatrice better. In spite of her repeated entreaties, Johann refused even to consider forgiving Yasin for having attacked her. Beatrice’s occasional pleas for what she called a peace conference always fell on deaf ears.

  Johann cut down one of the larger trees and made two clubs from the sturdy wood. The smaller one he gave to Sister Beatrice, insisting that she keep it within range whenever the two of them were separated. The larger club he carried with him at all times.

  He stopped swimming in the mornings altogether. Johann was not going to give Yasin an opportunity to sneak up and attack Beatrice while he was gone. In place of his swim, he rose early each day and climbed up the mountain, stopping at one of several locations from which he could spy on Yasin.

  He became completely familiar with Yasin’s morning routine. Soon after waking, Johann’s adversary would douse the pair of torches that had stood outside his cave as sentinels throughout the night. Next he would say his morning prayers facing the beach, prepare and eat a large breakfast, and then begin work on one of his many construction projects.

  Over a several-day period Johann watched Yasin build a small boat, much like a canoe, and test it in the lake not far from his cave. Early one morning Yasin set out across the lake. Johann stayed at his observation post until he could no longer see the boat on the horizon. That night Sister Beatrice and he rejoiced, thinking that the cause of the tension in their lives had disappeared.

  The next morning, however, Johann saw the canoe pulled up on the beach near Yasin’s cave. Yasin himself did not appear until well after the middle of the day. Johann and Sister Beatrice spent their evening beside the fire speculating about what might have happened to cause him to return to the island.

  “Maybe there was no place for him to go,” Sister Beatrice said. “Perhaps there are physical barriers around the distant edges of the lake.”

  Johann was deep in thought. “All three of us ‘fell’ into this lake,” he said, “if that is the right word. So there must be a passageway between this region and the rest of the spacecraft.”

  “Unless it’s been sealed by our hosts,” she said.

  “That’s what is bothering me,” Johann said in a serious tone. “I watched Yasin’s preparations. He was carrying a lot of stuff with him in that canoe. He definitely intended to leave our island forever… That he had no choice except to come back adds more strength to my conviction that the aliens purposely brought him here to this island in the first place—”

  “That again, Brother Johann?” she interrupted sharply. “Can’t you just leave it alone? Especially now, when we have enough to worry about?”

  “All right,” Johann said. “But I do want you to remember one thing. I have no intention of forgiving Yasin for what he did to you. He is the lowest kind of scum…”

  Sister Beatrice listened to Johann’s diatribe. It was clear that his feelings about Yasin, instead of softening in time as she had hoped, had turned into an implacable hatred.

  Yasin was building a house on the widest part of the beach, around a curve in the island that was almost a kilometer away from his cave. Every morning after breakfast he would load supplies and tools in his new, larger wagon and carry them over to the house construction site. There he would work all day, sometimes continuing into the night by torchlight.

  Johann had found several excellent vantage points from which he could watch Yasin working on the house. He coaxed Sister Beatrice into joining him on the mountain for a peek at Yasin’s creation the morning after the framing on the house was finally completed.

  “Yasin is certainly industrious, isn’t he, Brother Johann?” she said.

  “Nobody ever said that the man was not talented,” Johann grudgingly replied. “At Valhalla he often accomplished in a single day what would have taken an ordinary engineer at least two weeks�
� But, on a larger scale, his abilities cannot begin to compensate for the fundamental flaws in his nature. Yasin may be a genius, but he is still a dangerous sociopath.”

  Sister Beatrice was quiet for several minutes. Johann launched into another tirade about Yasin. This morning he was talking about how peculiar it was that neither of them had ever seen any sign of Yasin’s presence on their side of the island. “The man is either extremely clever,” Johann said, “or he is completely ignoring us. He has probably convinced himself that we will come forward with an olive branch eventually. That’s where he is dead wrong.”

  “Brother Johann,” Beatrice said during a break in Johann’s monologue, “please don’t be offended by my question, but since you knew about Yasin’s convictions for sexual offenses ahead of time, why in the world did you hire him to work at Valhalla in the first place?”

  Johann shrugged. “Mea culpa,” he said. “At the time I thought Yasin’s engineering talent, and the outpost’s need for it, was more important than his criminal record… Now I realize that I made a terrible mistake.” He smiled. “I’m not too old to learn new things, am I?”

  No, you’re not, Sister Beatrice said to herself. And I’m hoping that soon you will learn the most difficult tenet of Christianity. Everyone, no matter what heinous deed he or she may have committed, is entitled to forgiveness.

  The smell awakened Johann about an hour before dawn. It was unmistakable. There was a fire on their island.

  He walked outside the cave and stood on a tall boulder. Johann could see a glow in the distance. He inhaled deeply, verifying the smell of smoke, and then returned to the cave to awaken Sister Beatrice.

  “There’s a fire somewhere,” he said. “I’m going to climb the mountain and see if I can locate it.”

  Beatrice took .a whiff of the air. “I smell it too,” she said. “If you’ll wait just a minute for me to wash up, I’ll come with you.”

  Johann led Sister Beatrice slowly up the path toward the top of the mountain. As they climbed in altitude the raging fire became visible. It was already quite large, covering at least five percent of the island. The fire was mostly at the lower elevations, although it was creeping slowly up the slopes of the mountain. It appeared to be centered near where Yasin had been building his house.

  Johann and Sister Beatrice both saw the long ribbon at the same time. It first appeared as a distant glow, far out over the lake. The bright ribbon flew toward the island at an enormous velocity, swooping down low over the fire, circling it a couple of times, and then zooming back out across the water.

  They watched the ribbon until it disappeared into the darkness beyond the lake. Sister Beatrice crossed herself and said a silent prayer. “I forget sometimes,” she then said, “that you, Yasin, and I are not alone in this world of ours. Our angels are obviously still present, even if they appear only occasionally.”

  Johann was studying the fire. Because the wind on the island was steady and very light, the fire was not moving very fast. However, the vegetation was so thick everywhere except near the two cave formations that there was nothing to stop the fire from burning the entire island.

  The artificial daylight came abruptly, as it always did, forcing Johann and Sister Beatrice to close their eyes to adjust to the sudden surge of light. The fire did not look so ominous in the daylight. Johann and Sister Beatrice could now tell that the fire had started in the vegetation immediately behind Yasin’s unfinished house, and then spread in three directions, both up the slope and up and down the beach. Yasin’s house on the beach was untouched by the fire; however, there was now only a blackened wasteland at the edge of the beach behind the house.

  Johann and Sister Beatrice spent a few minutes standing on the side of the mountain, searching carefully for Yasin. They looked around the edge of the fire, along the beaches, and near the cave where he lived. They did not see him.

  “I hope he escaped safely,” Beatrice said.

  “I’m sure he did,” Johann said. “He probably tripped or stumbled, carrying one of his torches, and started the fire inadvertently. Unless he was seriously injured, he could easily have outrun the fire… At this moment, however, I’m not worried about Yasin. I’m concerned about what we’re going to eat if—”

  Johann did not finish his sentence. Feeling the ground moving underneath his feet, he reached out and grabbed Sister Beatrice’s arm. “It’s an earthquake,” he said in astonishment.

  The shaking in the ground intensified. It became impossible to stand up. Johann and Sister Beatrice sat down, holding hands. Without warning, a powerful force thrust them to the side, throwing each of them against the ground. Johann’s face was scratched by the branches of a nearby shrub. He tried to regain his sitting position, but it was impossible. He could not overcome the unknown force.

  Both Johann and Sister Beatrice began to slide down the slope. They were not able to hold on to each other any longer. “Are you all right?” Johann yelled as he rolled into a bush that temporarily stopped his descent.

  “I’m okay for now,” Beatrice shouted back. “But I won’t be if we slide down the whole mountain.”

  The force jerked Johann free from the bush. He tumbled into Sister Beatrice just before the force pushing them down the hill suddenly stopped. They scrambled toward each other and stood up, laughing.

  Before Johann could say anything, Sister Beatrice pointed behind him, a look of disbelief in her eyes. “Look, Brother Johann, look what’s happened to the lake!” she exclaimed.

  He turned around. “Oh, my God!” was all Johann could say. Before the earthquake and the strange force, Yasin’s house had been thirty meters from the water. Now the lake had retreated at least three hundred meters from the house, exposing an enormous expanse of sand beach. Johann scanned around the perimeter of the lake. The amount of new beach dropped off steadily on either side of Yasin’s house. On the other side of the island, near Johann and Sister Beatrice’s caves, the lakeshore had hardly changed at all.

  “This is very peculiar,” Johann said. “The lake has receded in a symmetrical pattern around the area where the fire started, as if someone deliberately designed the change.”

  The fire had not been affected by the earthquake. While Johann was studying its extent, Sister Beatrice noticed a strange ripple on the lake far in the distance. It seemed to be headed toward them. She pointed out the ripple to Johann.

  As they watched, the ripple grew and grew into a wave of staggering size. It hurtled toward the island, still building, taller and taller, until Johann guessed that it was at least a hundred meters high.

  Raw fear gripped them both as they stared at the immense wall of water about to smash into their island. Johann tried to calculate the size of the wave. Forcing himself to be calm, he told Sister Beatrice that he was certain they were safe near the top of the mountain. “Of course,” he then said, as much to himself as to her, “what a perfect way to put out the fire.”

  The gigantic wave bearing down upon them was an awesome, breathtaking sight. When it hit the island, it broke with a thundering roar. Water rushed inland up the mountain slope, bringing destruction to everything in its path. Where there had once been fire, there were now floods of water.

  Johann and Sister Beatrice were speechless. They held hands and watched the water slowly retreat down the slopes of the mountain. The terrain had been transformed in an instant. The vegetation was now a hopeless jumble of uprooted plants, intermixed and intertwined, spread across the large area that had borne the brunt of the wave. After ten minutes most of the water was gone. The dimensions of the lake were again what they had been before the earthquake had begun, although some of the beaches were now littered with plants carried down the slopes by the retreating water.

  Yasin’s house had utterly vanished. “What we have just witnessed, Brother Johann,” Sister Beatrice said emphatically, “was one of God’s miracles.”

  The wave had decimated the lower elevations of the island between where Johann and Sister
Beatrice had originally landed on the beach and the cave formations where Yasin had been living. From the mountain it was easy to ascertain the extent of the wave. Johann assured Sister Beatrice that Yasin would have survived if he had been inside his cave at the time of the impact.

  “As long as he was sleeping, which is very likely, he would not have been in any danger,” Johann said.

  “But what if he was trying to fight the fire, or was around his house for some reason?” Sister Beatrice asked.

  “We would have seen him,” Johann said. “Besides, in that case, there’s nothing we can possibly do for him anyway.”

  They were eating lunch. Beatrice had suggested at the beginning of the meal that they might carry a basket of food across the island to Yasin as a goodwill gesture, since the wave had destroyed virtually all the food supply in the vicinity of his cave. She also wanted to make certain that Yasin was okay.

  Johann was opposed even to a humanitarian call upon Yasin. He reminded Sister Beatrice that the man was very resourceful and almost certainly did not need any help from them. That Yasin was all right, Johann said, he would personally verify the following morning from his mountain observation post.

  “God has certainly blessed me in many ways,” Sister Beatrice said then, abruptly changing the subject. “I remember hearing as a little girl the story of the parting of the Red Sea when Moses led the Jews out of Egypt. Our Bible-school teacher showed us a painting of the waters being parted while the people, tiny in comparison to the walls of water on either side of them, walked across the dry bottom of the sea. I remember yearning to have been there, to have seen one of God’s miracles with my own eyes… Now I know how Moses and the Jews must have felt. When I realized that God had sent that towering wave of water to save us from the fire, my body tingled all over with His presence. It was incredible.”