Rama: The Omnibus

by Arthur C. Clarke

  “I doubt it,” Johann replied. “We might have succumbed to their power, but I can’t imagine any of us deliberately helping alien creatures against members of our own species.”

  “Maybe he doesn’t see it that way,” Sister Nuba said. “Maybe Dr. Jailani believes he is actually making things less unpleasant for us. Imagine what might have happened if we had been confronted by the adoclynes without anyone to interpret.”

  The gory picture of Kwame and the nozzler with whom he struggled to the death appeared in Johann’s mind and he recoiled involuntarily. “You may be right, Nuba,” he said, “but I still think—”

  Johann was interrupted by a pair of bass blasts coming from the direction of the canal. “They always signal us first,” Vivien said. “That gives us a minute or two to move into our proper positions.”

  The children came over and sat next to the adults. Maria was the last to arrive. She looked at Johann with a quizzical expression, shrugged, and sat down casually between Sister Nuba and him.

  A whirring noise was heard. Before the cylindrical brown waste container actually appeared, dangling from the rope pulley, Sister Nuba had informed Maria in detail what was going to happen. By the time the adoclyne appeared in the opening between the rocks, every human eye in the room was turned in that direction. This particular nozzler was indeed smaller than most Johann had seen. As it entered its tentacles and claws were retracted and coiled against the turquoise front segment, beside and below the three linear bulbous eyes. The creature trundled awkwardly into the room, its forward motion coming from the flow of hundreds of reedlike cilia, twenty centimeters long, that maintained contact with the rock floor. The nozzler stopped for a moment, the fluid motion in its oval eyes suggesting that it was watching the humans, and then moved toward the brown container that was hanging from the pulley apparatus.

  A second pair of bass blasts shook the room a few seconds later. Both the first adoclyne, now holding the container aloft in one of its elevated claws, and all the humans turned toward the passageway where another, much larger nozzler was standing. Except for Maria, the children scrunched up closer to the adults as this second creature entered the room.

  “We’ve never had two of them before,” Sister Vivien leaned across and whispered to Johann. “This must be in your honor.”

  Or maybe Dr. Jailani didn’t want to show up anymore, Johann thought, now that he has been identified by me.

  The second adoclyne moved across the floor with less clumsiness. It took a position in the room halfway between the humans and the juvenile nozzler, who had by this time removed what looked like a large wooden scoop from the container and had started cleaning out the hole on the opposite side of their room. Johann watched the creature work with considerable fascination. It held the scoop in one of its claws and extended its tentacle deep into the hole. The scoop was slightly larger than a human hand and held a sizable quantity of material. The adoclyne worked continuously for five minutes or so, half filling the brown container. It had nearly finished its task when Maria announced that she was bored and suddenly stood up and walked away from the wall.

  The response was instantaneous. A loud blast from the larger nozzler caused the working adoclyne to drop the scoop on the rock floor and extend its tentacles and claws in a defensive posture. “Come back here, now,” Johann shouted at Maria, angry with himself for not having kept his arm around the girl. The adoclyne guard moved slowly in Maria’s direction. She ran into the corner where the children had been playing earlier, a peculiar smile on her face, and bent down to pick up the elevark figurine. The nozzler, meanwhile, rapidly uncoiled and raised its two tentacles with the fearsome claws as it altered its path to head for Maria.

  Her smile waning, Maria dodged over to another corner. The adoclyne came after her. Shortly she was trapped with her back against the wall. As the nozzler aimed its extended claws for her head and face, she put up her hands for protection and then bolted toward Johann and the others.

  Maria screamed as the blue tentacles suddenly surged forward and wrapped around her waist. In seconds she was lifted a meter into the air, her feet kicking uselessly, and then pulled toward the nozzler’s washboard mouth, which was now open with its knifelike teeth exposed.

  Johann shouted and stood up, but the adoclyne restrained him by placing its other tentacle, bent around so that Johann was not threatened by the claw, forcefully against his chest.

  Maria’s screams continued unabated. The nozzler brought her within a few centimeters of its mouth before lofting the tentacle holding her high in the air, almost up to the ceiling. The creature held her there for several seconds, shaking her from side to side, before depositing her gently on the rock floor near where she had been sitting next to Johann. Maria lay in a crumpled heap where she had been placed.

  The larger adoclyne returned to its position in the center of the room and emitted a pair of blasts. Its juvenile companion returned to its work. No more than two minutes later the two nozzlers connected the brown container to the pulley system and ambled through the opening in the rocks. Maria was still trembling when Johann came over to comfort her.

  AFTER THE EVENT everyone, including Maria, realized that the nozzler’s intention had only been to scare her. Nevertheless, the girl’s fright did not immediately subside after the incident. For several days she refused to sleep anywhere except with her mat pressed against Johann’s. She also had bad dreams several times, and woke up screaming. Each time she told Johann that a nozzler was tormenting her in her dreams.

  Johann tried unsuccessfully to understand what had prompted Maria to test the rules. Each time he confronted her with the question Maria simply shook her head and said, “I don’t know.” The third or fourth time that he tried to elicit some different answer from her, Vivien gently intervened.

  “You’re making yourself miserable,” she said to Johann, after leading him out of earshot of Maria. “She has no idea why she did it. And it’s not even pertinent anymore.”

  Johann argued that unless the reason for Maria’s untoward behavior could be understood, there was no certainty that another, similar incident might not occur. Vivien shook her head and gently caressed her husband’s cheeks. “Dear, dear Johann,” she said. “Even after all your experience you still can’t accept that human actions, especially those of children, cannot always be logically explained.”

  Her words struck a resonant chord in Johann’s memory. Beatrice had made similar comments to him years before, telling Johann that he was reducing his own enjoyment of the mysteries of life by subjecting everything, even complex emotions, to rigorous analysis.

  “Why would you expect that you could understand something like love?” Beatrice had said once. “After all, you’re not God. You’re only a single human being.”

  Johann heard what Vivien told him, and knew that she was convinced of its truth, yet his mind refused to accept most of what she was saying. The most outstanding attribute of a human being is the ability to think, he said stubbornly to himself. Logic and analysis are nothing but thought refined to its highest level. Surely we are meant to apply our greatest talent to all the problems we encounter.

  AS THE TIME for the next adoclyne cleaning neared, Maria’s anxieties became quite pronounced. Even Sister Nuba, who was usually optimistic about everything, was deeply concerned about what Maria might do when the nozzlers returned.

  “Even if Maria stays beside us the entire time,” Sister Nuba said, “simply seeing them again will surely bring back the terror of her last experience. And if she tries to run away, and we have a repetition of what happened before…” She didn’t finish her thought. All three of the adults knew that Maria’s fears would not diminish if she had frightening encounters with the nozzlers every eight days.

  “But what can we do?” Vivien asked. “We know they always come precisely on schedule… Maybe if we had some way to contact Dr. Jailani, he could explain—”

  “Suppose we empty the toilet ourselves,” Johan
n suddenly interrupted. “The waste container arrives in the room before the nozzlers. What if I just took the scoop and was already at work when they showed up? They are intelligent creatures. They would figure out what was going on.”

  Both Vivien and Sister Nuba thought Johann’s plan was dangerous and foolhardy, but they were unable to talk him out of it. When the bass blasts signaled the arrival of the adoclynes, the trembling Maria was seated between the two women against the wall. Johann was standing next to the terminus of the pulley system, waiting for the arrival of the brown container.

  Johann had already placed three huge scoopfuls of material in the container when the first nozzler came through the opening. With a smile and a flourish, Johann leaned over and stuck his long arm into the hole with the scoop in his hand. The alien did not hesitate. It immediately issued a triple blast, which was repeated by its companion farther back in the passageway. It was less than a minute before the shrill alarm whistle resounded through the grotto.

  “I think the police will be coming,” Johann said to the others, attempting to remain calm. “Just sit still, and let me do the talking.”

  The two adoclynes who had come to clean their quarters moved just inside the room and stood against a wall beside the passageway Soon the clanking of carapace segments from creatures hurrying through the narrow opening could be heard above the constant sounding of the alarm. Moments later, four of the largest nozzlers that Johann had ever seen poured into the room, one after another, their tentacles and claws all fully deployed. For maybe twenty seconds the four nozzler police discussed the situation with the two members of their species who had the cleanup duty.

  “Look,” Johann said during this time, pointing at the container and holding the scoop over his head. “I have been cleaning our toilet myself.”

  He dropped down on his knees and started to stick the scoop back into the hole, but his arm was seized by a tentacle and shaken with such force that Johann dropped the scoop. A tentacle from a second adoclyne pinned his other arm to his body. Across the room, the children began to cry.

  Upward pressure in the tentacle wrapped around his chest forced Johann to stand up. He was being pulled toward the passageway Two of the nozzler police were standing between Johann and the others. “Don’t worry,” he said bravely. “I’m sure—”

  He was silenced by the whack of an open claw against his cheek. The sting was sharp, and blood began to flow down his face. Johann stopped resisting the pressure and headed for the narrow pathway between the rocks.

  A new series of blasts from the direction of the canal preceded the relaxation of the tentacles wrapped around Johann’s upper body. “Ouch,” he heard Dr. Jailani say as the man tried to hurry from the canal to their room. When he entered their living area, he looked at Johann with a totally blank stare.

  Nevertheless, during the next hour Dr. Jailani, still without showing any emotion, patiently communicated with everyone in the room, both humans and nozzlers. When he understood the situation, Dr. Jailani informed Johann that the adoclynes had essentially convicted him of an egregious rules violation, punishable by a temporary exile from all members of his species. He, Dr. Jailani, had been able to explain to the nozzlers that there were some extenuating circumstances in this particular case, and that Johann’s action had been motivated by a desire to protect one of the human children. Johann would not be taken away from his family this time, Dr. Jailani said, but if there were any more similar violations of the rules, Johann would be removed from all human contact permanently.

  Without waiting for any questions that Johann might have, Dr. Jailani instructed him to sit down on the floor, next to his children. The man then walked immediately over to the opening between the rock walls and summarily disappeared. The four members of the nozzler police filed out behind him. As the emotionally exhausted humans watched, the juvenile adoclyne who had entered their room first cleaned out their toilet under the watchful eyes of the nozzler guard standing in the middle of their living quarters.

  FOUR

  THERE WERE NO more incidents with the nozzler visitors. When the aliens appeared, always at the expected time every eight days, the humans dutifully sat against the opposite wall as they had been instructed. After each visit, Maria’s fear of the adoclynes seemed to diminish a little more. By the time that six or seven cycles had passed, her behavior had returned to normal. Her recovery was undoubtedly aided by the love and care of Sister Nuba, whose patience and selflessness were remarkable.

  During this time Johann was not very helpful to Maria. He was enmeshed in his own private struggle against the constraints of their existence. Each morning after waking he would engage in a set of push-ups, sit-ups, and isometric exercises, hoping for the same release of physical tension that he had obtained from the relaxed morning swims that had been part of his life for nine years. The exercises in the room were a poor substitute, however, and rarely softened Johann’s increasing irritation with the world around him.

  Vivien attempted to improve Johann’s attitude by involving him more directly with the child growing inside her. She would hold his hand against her stomach during the baby’s more active periods, and describe for him in detail what she was feeling inside her womb when his fingers would sense the thrust and thump of the child’s elbow or knee. For a while, Johann’s interest in this newest phase of Vivien’s pregnancy pushed aside his gloom and depression, the negative feelings returned, stronger than ever, in the days before he had the first of what became a series of disturbing dreams.

  The dreams recurred in a predictable pattern, always just before he woke up. Suddenly whatever Johann had been dreaming would be interrupted and he would find himself in a labyrinth of dark tunnels. At first there would be no sound in this dream. Then he would hear a child cry, far off in the distance. Johann would weave his way among the tunnels, drawing closer and closer to the crying sound. When it seemed that the child must be just around the next corner, a nozzler would appear and block Johann’s progress. The creature would advance slowly, its tentacles and claws well forward of its body. Johann would turn around to retreat, the child’s cry still echoing through the dream, and discover that he was trapped. Behind him would be nothing but rock walls. He usually woke with a shudder when a threatening adoclyne claw was only a few centimeters away from his face.

  Johann never fell back to sleep after having the recurring nightmare. He would lie on his back on the seaweed mat, listening to the sounds of the other humans sleeping around him. Vivien was next to him on his right, Maria on his left. Vivien occasionally emitted a tiny snore that was almost imperceptible, but most of the time her breathing was rhythmic and very quiet. Maria, on the other hand, was a bundle of energy while she slept. She tossed and turned, changed positions frequently, sometimes ground her teeth, and even talked and cried out during the night. She told Johann that she dreamed almost every night, but she never seemed to be able to describe what she had dreamed.

  Johann shared his recurring nightmare with Vivien on a couple of occasions. Once he even attempted an explanation of what the dream meant, based on what he remembered from a book on the interpretation of dreams that he had read during his final year at the University of Berlin. Vivien was amused by Johann’s insistence that the nightmare would not go away until he made an attempt to find the child whose cry he had heard during his initial journey into the grotto.

  “What in the world could you possibly do?” she said, holding his hands lovingly. “We’re prisoners of the nozzlers, Johann, and we are not allowed out of our cell. That child is almost certainly also a prisoner. You don’t know where she is and you couldn’t help her even if you found her.”

  Johann continued to insist that he must do something. Every time the dream recurred, Johann concocted, and shared with Vivien, another possible plan for finding Serentha, or whoever the other child might turn out to be. Some of his plans were so farfetched that Vivien, in spite of her affection for Johann, would unwittingly laugh, causing him to
become angry.

  “You’re just frustrated by the inactivity, Johann,”

  Nevertheless, Johann remained resolute. Eventually Vivien, mostly because she was growing increasingly worried about his mental stability, allowed Johann to persuade her to participate in the first phase of his most logical plan. In return for helping him monitor the adoclyne patrol patterns in their region of the grotto, Vivien extracted from Johann a promise that if he were not able to find a schedule in these patterns, he would abandon, once and for all, his goal of discovering the location and identity of this mysterious child.

  Vivien was not unduly concerned about the deal she had made with Johann until she discussed the plan with Sister Nuba, who would of course need to know why either Johann or she was missing from their living area during these monitoring periods. Nuba, who was usually quite soft-spoken, minced no words.

  “How could you possibly agree to this?” Nuba replied immediately. “The consequences could be devastating for the children. Their lives are marginally acceptable now, for they don’t often think about the bigger picture. But if either of you is caught watching the canal, and removed from our presence, the children will suffer immeasurably.”

  Johann was furious when Vivien told him that she would not help him with the monitoring. It was the first serious quarrel that the couple had ever had. When the tension between them did not subside after several days (during which time life in their tiny world was unbearable for everyone), Vivien capitulated in the interests of group harmony. In her heart she hoped that they would quickly and unambiguously discover that the adoclyne patrols operated on a completely random schedule.

  Johann, on the other hand, had by this time convinced himself that the nozzlers must perform all their duties on a predetermined schedule. Their bringing of the food and water, and their visits to clean out the toilet, were as regular as clockwork. If Vivien helped him verify that the nozzler patrols also followed a predetermined schedule, and there was a significant time period between any pair of these visits, then Johann might be able to do some exploring in the canal system without being caught.