Rama: The Omnibus

by Arthur C. Clarke

  The vivid memory of Beatrice awakened powerful emotions that Johann usually suppressed. His mind turned away from his endless string of unanswerable questions and he replayed the last two eventful days of his life. He recalled the moment the elevark clump knocked him to the ground, and his instantaneous thought that he was about to be killed.

  Johann stood up quietly and walked over to where Scarface was sleeping. He bent down and stroked the fur on the masket’s head and back. I don’t know what you are, or where you came from, Johann said to himself. And certainly not why you risked your life for me. But Beatrice would not be puzzled. She would not torment herself with all these infinite questions. She would simply say again, as she did every night, thank you, God.

  WORD OF THEIR success reached the red and blue maskets before Johann and Scarface returned. A huge celebration was already under way in the assembly area outside the mound. A tumultuous masket cheer greeted their arrival, followed by a boisterous chant. The masket leader, along with three representatives of the yellow maskets, made room for Scarface and he was even allowed to hold the lustrous blue sphere during a special chant.

  Maria was brought out of the mound and freed of her masket escorts. She embraced Johann and told him that she wanted to go home immediately, but he informed her that they were going to stay at least until the end of the ceremony.

  Scarface was the star. Using all the props available (he again borrowed Maria’s Yasin figurine, which she relinquished without protest), the masket told the story of the death of the elevark. Johann suspected that perhaps Scarface was embellishing or exaggerating a fact or two, but since he was not able to interpret literally the masket’s complicated, mixed language, Johann couldn’t tell for certain. What he did know, however, was that at no point in his telling of the story did Scarface ever use the red and blue masket figurine. Had he omitted his role altogether? Was personal modesty another feature of these extraordinary creatures?

  Even though he knew he was violating the accepted protocol for a masket ceremony, Johann stepped into the central area following Scarface’s presentation and asked for the red and blue masket figurine. With hundreds of alien eyes upon him, Johann made an unsuccessful attempt to explain how Scarface had diverted the elevark and saved his life. Fortunately, one of the yellow maskets present had heard the complete story, and came forward at this juncture to extol Scarface’s courage and role in the death of the elevark. When the yellow masket was finished, the burst of masket noises was deafening. Scarface was allowed to hold the lustrous blue sphere again, as well as the smaller sacred stone of the yellow maskets.

  The assembly broke up and Johann left with Maria. They followed the path through the masket woods and arrived at the clearing beside the bank where Maria had originally been captured and Johann had first seen the maskets. They stopped to have a drink of water.

  While they were resting, Scarface, by himself came out of the woods. The masket tried to say something but Johann couldn’t understand. At length, Scarface extended a foreleg, which Johann took, and led his human friend downstream to a place where the brook formed a small pool. Maria followed them. With a great flourish, Scarface dove into the water, paddled for three or four strokes, submerged for a few seconds, and then climbed out of the water beside them.

  The dripping masket pointed at himself, then Johann, and extended its two forelegs as high in the air as it could reach. After Scarface repeated this action, Maria commented, “What in the world is it doing?”

  “You wouldn’t understand,” Johann said.

  He reached in his pocket and pulled out his knife. Carefully opening the blade, and holding it in his hand, Johann gave the knife to Scarface. Next he pointed directly at the masket, then at himself; and raised his two long arms as high as he could.

  The masket appeared to be stunned. Johann repeated the set of gestures, took Maria by the hand, and began walking upstream. When he turned around Scarface was still staring at the knife in his hands.

  IT WAS LESS than two hours by the shortest route from the masket woods to the cave area where Johann and Maria lived. He was eager to see Vivien, and several times Maria had to ask him to slow down. When they stopped for their last drink at the pool where Vivien and he had spent their wedding night, Johann was tempted to talk to Maria to make certain that she had drawn all the correct conclusions from her experience. As he looked at the girl, however, Johann thought he could already see a change in her demeanor. Now is not the right time for a parental lecture, he told himself.

  Johann started shouting before they came down the final slope behind their cave. “Hello, hello,” he yelled. “We’re back.”

  He was not disturbed that there was no immediate response. It was, after all, about midday, and it was entirely plausible that one of the two adult women might be out gathering food while the other was down at the beach supervising the children.

  All the mats were in the cave in their normal places. The fire was not burning, which was unusual, but it was still smoldering as if it had been used the previous day. Johann told himself that perhaps Vivien had been too busy that morning to rebuild the fire.

  Johann and Maria hurried down to the beach, both of them shouting. They didn’t find anyone. “Where could they be?” Maria asked innocently.

  “We’ve been gone so long,” Johann said, counting the days in his mind, “maybe they decided to come look for us.”

  “But would they have taken little Jomo with them?” Maria asked astutely. “It would be hard for them to go very far with him along.”

  Johann stood on the beach and gazed out at the bay. A chill started spreading through his system. He fought against the negative feeling and smiled at Maria.

  She was looking along the shoreline. “What’s that, over there?” she said, pointing at a portion of the beach on which the sand was compacted and covered with ridges. They both moved over to examine the area more carefully.

  “It looks as if a boat has been here,” Johann said.

  Neither of them said anything for several seconds. “Maybe the others came,” Maria said. “Ravi, Anna, and their children.”

  Johann brightened. “In that case,” he said, “they would have left a note… You look around here, while I go up and check the cave.”

  Questions were flooding into Johann’s mind as he started up the path. But why didn’t they wait for our return? And why would they leave the mats?

  He whirled around when he heard Maria scream. Johann raced down to the beach to find the girl nearly hysterical. “What is it, Maria?” he said. “What’s the matter?”

  She pointed over at some bushes to her left, just inland from one end of the beach. A long blue tentacle, its claw still intact, was lying on one of the bushes.

  THE

  GROTTO

  ONE

  AT FIRST, JOHANN counted the days. He kept the tally on a rock wall at the other end of the cave, opposite where the children used to sleep. Maria now slept close to him, near the fire, much as she had done during the years they were alone on their previous island.

  Johann clung desperately to the idea that Vivien and the others had been reunited with Ravi, Anna, and their children, and that soon someone would be coming back for them. At least once each day Johann would walk along the beach and stare out at the bay and the lake, searching for a boat. A few times he thought he saw something far off in the distance, but when he called Maria, and requested that she look with her younger eyes, she always told him that nothing was there.

  Maria didn’t seem to mind that Johann and she were alone again. When he asked her if she missed the other children, her immediate response was “not really.” Nevertheless, as the days passed Maria grew restive and moody. Johann knew that she was feeling lonely. Her face brightened immediately when he suggested that perhaps he might carve some figurines to represent all her former playmates.

  Using Sister Nuba’s knife, which had been among the personal articles that had been left behind when the others depa
rted, Johann made a new set of figurines for Maria. Along with all the humans, he included an elevark, a tusker, and the two different kinds of masket. Maria specifically asked him not to carve a nozzler.

  After Johann had finished all the new figurines, Maria was a different child. She threw herself wholeheartedly into her fantasy play, creating imaginative sagas that sometimes lasted for several days. She attempted to involve Johann in her stories, but he didn’t participate with any enthusiasm. To comfort her, Johann would sit on a rock, not far from where Maria was playing on the beach, and appear to be listening to her endless excited chatter. In actuality he spent most of this time thinking about Vivien and his unborn child, or Sister Beatrice, or even his youth and childhood in Germany.

  When the number of days since they left the maskets reached sixty, Johann stopped keeping the tally on the wall. With that act, he relinquished his belief that anyone would return for them. His depression deepened. I will never see Vivien again, he told himself. Or my child, if he or she exists. Johann’s only release came from his morning swims, which became longer and longer. After exercising, with his body in a state of peaceful exhaustion, Johann was no longer plagued by feelings of hopelessness.

  One morning, when he returned from an hour swim, Maria was waiting for him on the beach. She had taken off her necklace with the amulet and was holding it in her hands.

  “Johann,” she said cheerfully as he emerged from the water. “I’ve forgotten what you told me about this man on the amulet. I know that he was very special to my mother. But what was he like, as a person?”

  Johann took slow deep breaths, as he always did just after a swimming workout. He gave Maria a puzzled look.

  “I might want this Michael as one of the characters in my new game,” Maria explained earnestly. “So it’s important.”

  Johann sat down on the sand beside the girl and took the amulet. He stared for several seconds at the carving of the young man with the curly hair framed by nuclear flames above and behind him. “Back on Earth,” Johann said slowly, remembering his many conversations about Michael with Beatrice, “Michael Balatresi was a religious leader and a prophet. He believed that God wanted humanity to evolve into a higher organism, where each individual would subordinate his needs and desires to the common good of this higher, collective being. Michael formed a special order, of which your mother was a prominent member, to become what he called the circulation system of that higher organism, to distribute the resources…”

  He stopped. Maria was looking at Johann as if he were speaking a different language. “I don’t really understand any of that stuff,” she said. “What I wanted to know were simple things. Was this Michael guy tall or short, skinny or fat? Was his hair really this curly? Could he run fast, and did he have a good smile?”

  Johann shook his head and erupted in laughter. “Of course,” he said, pulling Maria to him and giving her a wet hug. “I’m sorry, Maria,” he added, “I once promised your mother…” He paused again. “But all that is probably irrelevant too… Yes, Michael’s hair was really curly, he was tall but not as tall as I am, his body was lean and lithe, and he had a magnificent smile… But Maria, I never once heard anybody discuss whether or not he could run fast. When we see Vivien and Nuba again, we’ll have to ask them.”

  “Thank you, Johann,” Maria said. “You’ve been a big help.”

  Johann turned the amulet over in his hands, to the back side where the name Maria was inscribed. “You do remember, don’t you, who carved your name here on this amulet?”

  “Of course,” she said, taking the necklace with the amulet and putting it over her neck, “it was you, Johann, just after Mother gave it to me.” She turned to go.

  For an instant Johann was transported back to that sorrowful moment over eight years earlier and a tumult of emotions threw him into confusion. Again he heard Beatrice’s voice saying, “Take care of her, Johann, as if she were your own.”

  The voice was so clear that Johann looked around quickly, hoping that perhaps the white Beatrice had miraculously returned. Nobody was there. The voice had been inside his head. Johann stared down at the sand beside his feet and felt the profound emptiness that usually signaled the onset of one of his depressions.

  “No,” Johann cried out loud, angry at himself for wallowing in loneliness and self-pity. He shouted at Maria.

  “What is it, Johann?” she said, stopping and turning around.

  “How would you like to do something different today?” he said with forced enthusiasm. “Why don’t you and I take a trip to visit Scarface and our other masket friends?”

  “That would be great,” she said.

  BEFORE THEY DEPARTED, Johann and Maria both left notes, explaining that they would be back by nightfall, on the back of pieces of bark. He left his near the fire in the cave; Maria placed her note on a tree sprig near the beach. As they climbed the slope behind their cave, Johann realized that they had not once been away from their cave and beach area for more than ten minutes since they had first returned and found the others missing.

  Johann was in a good mood when they stopped at the waterfall for a drink and some fruit. “I bet the maskets will be glad to see you,” Maria said. “You’re their hero.” Johann feigned embarrassment and walked hand in hand with her out into the meadow.

  Their next break came when they reached the clearing beside the brook. Maria refilled her pouch with the fresh water. “I was so angry with myself when I came here the first time,” she said. “How could I have been so stupid to run away without my water pouch?”

  They were making a lot of noise. Johann expected that at any moment a masket delegation would come out of the woods and greet them. After they had refreshed themselves, Johann and Maria headed into the trees along a small path.

  “Do you think you can find the mound?” she asked.

  “I’m not sure:’ Johann replied. “I paid more attention the second time I was here, when I came back from the yellow masket territory with Scarface, but there were so many twists and turns along the way.”

  After they had been walking in the woods for about five minutes, they turned right, onto a new path. Johann glanced around and stopped. “I have another concern,” he said. “What if we never find the mound, and lose ourselves here in the woods?” He pulled out Sister Nuba’s knife and made a mark on the tree. “I hate to injure a living thing, but I would not want to be lost here after dark.”

  When Johann turned back around to look at Maria, she was gone. She had wandered off the path a few meters into the undergrowth. “Look at this, Johann,” she said, bending down to pick up an oval brown fruit that was on the ground. “There’s something inside.”

  In the dim forest light they could barely see the white markings deep inside the fruit. Johann carefully cut around the shell, removing only a small piece at a time. Inside the oval was a tiny, dead baby masket.

  “I wonder what happened,” Johann said out loud. He turned around slowly with the fruit in his hand, anticipating the arrival of an adult masket.

  Maria had moved twenty meters to the right among the trees. “Here’s another, Johann,” she shouted. “And another.”

  During the next fifteen minutes Johann and Maria found eight more baby maskets, all dead, inside brown oval fruits lying on the ground. Some had barely formed and could not even be identified as maskets. Two of them, however, had matured fully and had all the characteristic features of the adults of the species. Johann and Maria did not find a single embryo that was alive.

  “Why do you think they’re all dead?” Maria asked as they walked along. “Do you think maybe they were sick?”

  Johann simply shook his head. He had no idea.

  They located the masket mound without undue difficulty. Both of them were surprised that there were no maskets working anywhere in the vicinity and that the assembly area was in a disordered state. But what convinced Johann that something was dreadfully wrong was the fact that the mound doors at the end of each of
the entrance paths were all standing wide open.

  “Hello there, you maskets,” Maria called, turning around to grin at Johann. “Hello, hello,” she repeated.

  “I don’t think there’s anyone in there,” Johann said after several seconds of silence.

  “How could that be?” Maria asked. “This is their permanent home. There must be someone inside.”

  They both yelled again but there was no reply. At Johann’s suggestion, Maria crawled into two of the entrances and examined some nearby rooms. From one she brought out a bowl and a ladle. “You’re right, she said. “Nobody’s home.”

  Johann and Maria retraced their route through the woods. By the time they reached the clearing, Maria had created in her mind a once-yearly ceremony where maskets of all colors came together, leaving their mounds empty; to celebrate something special. She liked her idea, especially since the maskets were so fond of pomp and circumstance. But that doesn’t explain all the dead embryos, Johann said to himself. He feared a less optimistic explanation for the empty mound.

  Thinking about the tiny maskets dead in their oval brown shells made Johann cringe. And my unborn son or daughter, he thought, noting to himself that he had never told Maria about Vivien’s pregnancy Where is he or she? Are Vivien and the child even alive?

  The gloom that had accompanied Johann for days was returning. He had thought that a visit to the maskets might give him a lift. Instead, he now had additional evidence that all was not right in their artificial world.

  JOHANN WAS FAIRLY certain what he would find, but wanted to confirm his expectations. He didn’t tell Maria the specific reason for their trek, only that they were going to take an overnight camping trip. Johann underestimated the girl’s memory. She knew they were in tusker territory before they reached the clearing where they had encountered a dozen of the animals a month before. Maria was thrilled at the prospect of seeing them again.