Rama: The Omnibus

by Arthur C. Clarke

  He began to experience extended periods of abject depression. During these periods Johann did not eat, he did not swim, and he did not really sleep. He would sit and stare for hours at the same spot on the wall, unaware of any thoughts except a longing for his emotional pain to be over. At the end of one such episode Johann was surprised to discover that he had been crying. He could not remember what had prompted the tears, or when they had begun.

  Johann knew that he would wither away and die if he did not break the cycle of depression. Yet he was powerless against its pervasive grip on him. He tried thinking about Vivien and his unborn child, but his momentary pleasure in conjuring up images of his first son or daughter was destroyed by the realization that he would probably never even see the child.

  Johann’s bouts of depression did not diminish until after the third nozzler cleaning visit. By this time he estimated that he had been living in his cell for about two human months. Forcing himself to be interested in some element of his life, Johann stared fixedly at the adoclyne, following its every action during its brief stay. From the far side of the room, sitting with his back against the rock wall, Johann carefully examined the undulating motion of its cilia as it walked, the dexterity of the tentacle-and-claw combination as they scooped up the wastes and placed them in a brown container, and the movement in the three linear eyes as the creature worked. Its stance while it was emptying the hole was with its turquoise head mostly facing Johann. The middle eye always seemed to be watching him; the forward eye paid attention to the progress of the work.

  When Johann stood up near the end of the alien’s activity, the clustered pearls on the side of its head immediately pulsated and two short blasts came through tiny holes that had formed among the pearls. The nozzler temporarily stopped what it was doing and both front eyes focused on Johann. After he sat down again, the creature returned to its task.

  Once his visitor was finished, it trundled across the cell with its right tentacle and claw carrying the container by a seaweed handle. The container was placed in a short canoe and the adoclyne slipped into the water. It issued a sequence of blasts and the seaweed gate was raised. The nozzler and the canoe passed under the gate, which closed immediately, and Johann was left by himself again.

  Johann’s curiosity and fascination with the nozzler had lifted his spirits. During those few minutes he had been watching the alien, he bad been glad that he was alive. Johann stood up and paced around his cell. I do not want to lose this feeling, he told himself, and sink again into an abyss of gloom. What can I do to fight against my feelings of purposelessness?

  He entered the water and began swimming laps between the gate and the wall at the back of the cul-de-sac. During this long, lazy swim Johann concluded that the only way he could infuse his current life with any sense of meaning was to create some kind of project or task for himself, the completion of which would become his goal and temporary reason for living.

  While eating strips of seaweed from the new food that had been delivered, Johann, fully aware of all the limitations of his circumstances, considered what kinds of projects he might undertake. Somehow I must make it meaningful, he thought, otherwise I run the risk of deluding myself. The best project would be something both interesting in itself and useful if I were ever to be released from this cell.

  He listed several options for himself, including reviewing all he had ever learned about science and engineering, conducting a geographical survey by making mental maps of Mars and Earth, and creating an autobiographical chronology with all the major highlights of each phase of his life. Although the last activity had promise, Johann realized quickly that his memory had not stored data with time tags, or other chronological references, and that there was really no way he could accomplish the task. At length he decided that he would assess all the major relationships in his life and see what he could learn from reflecting upon his past interactions with other people.

  He spent a few hours the next morning thinking about the proper order for his assessments. Should he review the relationships based on their significance in his life (and how do I decide, he wondered, if Sister Beatrice or my mother was more important in my life?)? In chronological order? According to some other arrangement? He eventually concluded that since he had no time constraints, the order was irrelevant.

  Johann’s decision to undertake this project dramatically changed his perspective on his solitary life. In his own mind, he now had something meaningful to do each day. He enjoyed his food again, felt invigorated after swimming, and even laughed out loud at times when recalling specific vignettes from his life. As the days passed, and Johann realized how close he had come to capitulating to his most pessimistic feelings, he repeatedly thanked the nozzler who had cleaned his cell for having rekindled his passion for life.

  Johann’s immersion in the nuances of his involvement with other people was a new experience for him. An engineer by training and predilection, most of his thinking energy had always been directed toward understanding concepts and working out solutions to problems. People and feelings, both theirs and his, had usually been just variables or parameters in what he was trying to comprehend. Unfettered by time constraints or a directed search for answers and solutions, Johann found himself for the first time, occupied with what he and others had done and felt in a given situation, instead of why.

  One of his earliest realizations was how utterly devastated his father must have been by the family’s financial failures during the Great Chaos. Previously he had understood that the collapse of his father’s accounting business had irrevocably transformed Johann’s relationship with his parents, and that almost overnight he had become the parent and they the children. But he had never taken the time to try to imagine what his father must have felt during this transformation, and how hard it must have been for him to have become financially dependent upon his only son. For the first time in his life, Johann shed tears of empathy for his father, and chastised himself for all the cruel and unkind things that he had said about him.

  He saw new facets in every relationship he examined. Now, with no certainty that he would ever again have any association with another human being, Johann treasured these memories from the past. His uncle Hermann’s nobility seemed almost legendary from this distance. Banished from his sister’s and nephew’s life for his sexual orientation, Johann’s uncle had nevertheless come to his family’s rescue when their lives were in dire straits.

  Johann winced when he thought about his friend and coworker Bakir. How he had let him down! If Johann had only taken a moment, all those years ago, to imagine what Bakir was feeling during those terrible days of persecution, and to think about how difficult it must have been for the proud Turk to ask Johann for help, the result would have been completely different. There was no guarantee that Johann could have ultimately prevented the deportation of Bakir and his family, but at least Bakir would not have undergone all that additional horror believing that his best German friend had deserted him.

  Of all the people on his list, only Maria’s father, Yasin al Kharif produced memories that were overwhelmingly negative. Johann now saw quite clearly what a mistake it had been for him to bring Yasin to work at Valhalla in the first place. Even though Yasin’s intelligence and engineering skills were superb, they should have been irrelevant when weighed against his sociopathic behavior. Johann realized now that he had made a devil’s bargain for which he had later paid a terrible price. Without Johann’s decision to employ Yasin at Valhalla, it would not have been possible for Yasin to appear later as the interloper who transformed Johann and Beatrice’s extraterrestrial island paradise into an unmitigated hell.

  Johann could not spend much time thinking about Yasin. Feelings of raw hatred for the man, emotions Johann had purposely suppressed for Maria’s sake, boiled out of Johann when he recalled the events that had led to Beatrice’s humiliation and death. He deserved to be murdered, Johann thought, surprised that after all these years he felt no contrition for
his action.

  For a long period Johann focused on the three women who had been his intimate companions for extended intervals in his life. His girlfriend in Berlin, Eva, had been tremendous in bed, inventive, uninhibited, and possessed with an overwhelming desire to please. Johann had thought that their sexual rapport might have been a strong enough basis upon which to build a marriage. Fortunately, the circumstances in Johann’s life bad allowed him to postpone the wedding until it became apparent that Eva and he had little else in common.

  Vivien was a marvelous friend and companion, and as good a lover as Eva. Vivien’s sense of humor and her general positive attitude were her strongest attributes—it was virtually impossible to be grumpy or gloomy around Vivien. Johann’s love for Vivien was steady unwavering, and comfortable. It had never consumed or possessed him. Only once in his lifetime had he experienced that kind of passion.

  Whenever Johann started thinking about Beatrice, his heart always skipped a beat. He recalled reading somewhere that in each person’s life there is never more than one “grand and passionate romance.” In Johann’s mind there was no doubt that Sister Beatrice, raised as Kristin Larsen in Edina, Minnesota, the United States of America, was the grand and passionate romance of his life. From the moment that he first heard her magnificent voice, practicing “O Holy Night” in the new Michaelite church on Mars, until she died in his arms in a cave inside this bizarre and still unexplained alien worldlet, Beatrice had fascinated Johann and touched him in ways that no other human had.

  It had certainly not been love at first sight. In fact their early encounters, when she was the Michaelite bishop of Mars and he the director of the Valhalla facility that supplied water to the human colonies on the red planet, had been tinged with friction. Sister Beatrice’s certitude had annoyed Johann. Her declaration that the strange, glowing ribbons of particles both of them had seen were angels sent from God, and her unwillingness to consider any other possible explanation, had irritated him.

  Yet even then, in those early days on Mars, Johann said to himself as he walked around his cell, there was a definite electricity in the air every time we were together. I didn’t recognize it at the time, and she was so consumed by her devotion to God and her work that she never would have admitted it.

  Then suddenly they were a pair, a man and a woman separated from all other human contact, living on an island paradise inside a spacecraft created either by God’s angels or by some advanced extraterrestrial species. Johann experienced a love beyond anything he had ever imagined. And it was not unrequited. Beatrice loved him too, as a woman loves a man, but she was not yet far enough removed from her Michaelite vows of chastity to allow herself to consummate their very human love affair.

  Alone in his cell, reliving the memory of the happiness of that first hundred days with Beatrice was too much for Johann. A flood of tears burst from his eyes. “Oh, Beatrice,” he said out loud. “How I miss you! How I adored you!”

  Johann sat down on his mat, put his face in his hands, and sobbed. He could not have told anyone exactly why he was crying. As a montage of poignant images poured into his mind—Beatrice singing to him on the beach, Beatrice finally kissing him like a woman and not a priestess, Beatrice forlorn and dejected after having been raped by , Beatrice radiant and expectant, patting her stomach swollen with Maria, and Beatrice wan and dying, entreating Johann to take care of her child—Johann’s sobs continued unabated.

  When his eyes were nearly swollen shut from weeping, Johann jumped up and ran to the front of his cell. “Beatrice,” he shouted in his loudest voice. Her name echoed off the walls. “Beatrice,” Johann shouted again. “I need you. I still love you. Please help me.”

  He listened until the final echo was gone. Then he collapsed upon his mat and fell asleep.

  JOHANN EXTENDED HIS project of assessing the relationships in his life until it included almost everyone of any significance that he had ever known. As he reflected on his interactions with others, he began to discern definite patterns in his own behavior and to construct a composite portrait of himself. There were elements of this portrait that Johann did not like. He resolved that if he ever had the opportunity again to enjoy the company of other human beings, he would pay more attention to what was important to them, he would not so quickly discount their feelings and opinions, and he would allow himself to experience a fill range of emotions without subjecting every inchoate feeling in himself to rigorous analytic scrutiny.

  By this time six more adoclyne cleanings had occurred and Johann was certain that the time for the birth of his child had passed. He wondered if the baby was a boy or a girl, and remembering Beatrice’s plight, he hoped that Vivien had had an easy childbirth. Beatrice’s voice in Johann’s head told him that he could pray for the well-being of his wife and child, but Johann told the voice, out loud, that he couldn’t “be a hypocrite.”

  In fact Johann now talked out loud most of the time he was awake. He didn’t feel as lonely when he heard the sound of his voice. He even spoke to the nozzlers when they came to clean his cell. At first the aliens suspended their work when Johann said anything, and made threatening gestures with their tentacles and claws. But eventually they learned to accept the rambling of the giant human with the long beard, now naked because his original shorts had become shreds, who paced about his cell during their visits.

  As time passed Johann created other projects to fill his waking hours. He usually selected two or three people from his earlier life to be his imaginary associates. His colleagues were allocated space in his cell where they could work on the assignments he had given them. During his geography project, for example, Sister Beatrice was assigned responsibility for the Americas, Yasin for the Middle East, and Narong for Southeast Asia. Johann gave each person’s report when the assignments were complete, altering his voice and delivery to be consistent with the speaking style of the person who had performed the task.

  He learned early in his confinement that if he ate a lot of food and drank gulps of canal water just before sleeping that he was much more likely to have dreams. Johann cherished these dreams, for they were usually full of other people, some familiar and some unknown. As the length of time he had been alone passed one human year, it became his regular practice first to swim vigorously to tire himself, and then to eat a big meal before stretching out on his seaweed mat. That sequence produced the most vivid dreams.

  Beatrice was often present in these dreams. Johann saw her in many forms, in the blue robe with the white stripes that she had worn as the Michaelite bishop of Mars, in her glowing whiteness as she had been during his brief sojourn in Whiteland after Maria’s birth, in the simple island costumes she made by hand (both from the period when they were chaste companions and later, after Yasin’s death, when they were lovers), and in several new manifestations. Beatrice and he had extensive conversations during the dreams. Often Johann would continue to converse with her after waking. He would walk around his cell, gesticulating with his arms to buttress a particular point he was making, or alternatively he would sit reflectively on his mat, nodding from time to time, listening to her voice inside his head discoursing on some subject.

  Johann used these conversations with the ghosts of his past and his many projects to chase away the demons of depression. “I will endure:’ he said quietly to the adoclyne cleaning his cell one day. The alien did not even look at him. It simply retracted the scoop from the hole in the rock floor and emptied the contents into the container. Johann took three steps away from the wall, toward the nozzler. It stopped what it was doing, without dropping the scoop it was holding in its elevated claw, and both the two forward eyes looked at Johann.

  “Do you understand?” Johann said passionately. “No matter how long you keep me here, I will continue to survive.”

  Satisfied that he had at least captured the creature’s attention, Johann stepped back and sat down against the wall on his mat. The adoclyne continued to watch him for several seconds, then shifted
its body weight and plunged the scoop back into the hole.

  SISTER BEATRICE WAS dressed in her bishop’s robe and headpiece. She was lecturing Johann on some arcane religious subject. Even in his dream, Johann was not listening to her words that closely He was watching her eyes and the expressions on her face, thinking to himself how very beautiful she was.

  Then, suddenly, he could no longer understand anything she was saying. It was if she were speaking some strange new language. Johann tried to interrupt her, but Beatrice continued to smile and speak in the weird tongue he had never heard before.

  In the dream Johann stood up and walked toward her. As he did so, Beatrice began to change color. The blue in her robe and headpiece, and even her skin, became a pure glowing white. Johann raised his hands to protect his eyes from the overwhelming light.

  “Johann,” he heard her voice in his dream, “wake up. I am here beside you.”

  He thought he was hallucinating when he opened his eyes. Standing beside his mat in the cell, no more than a meter away, was the glowing white Beatrice who had been his companion in Whiteland.

  Johann closed his eyes again. The background glow was still present when he turned his head in her direction. Could I possibly still be dreaming? he asked himself. He sat up on the mat and opened his eyes hesitantly, his body trembling from all the adrenaline that was flooding his system.

  “Is it really you?” he said. “I’m not simply imagining that you’re here with me?”

  The white Beatrice smiled. “I am here, Brother Johann,” she said, extending her hand toward him. Warily he leaned forward and took her hand. The shock of the touch overwhelmed him. Johann closed his eyes and tried to remember what human touch felt like. Was it like this? Johann didn’t think so, but he couldn’t be certain. He turned her hand over in his. This is similar to human touch, he told himself; but not quite the same. Unless I have forgotten.