Rama: The Omnibus

by Arthur C. Clarke

  “But how is it possible,” Maria said, still gawking at her companion in utter amazement, “that you are so human? You smile, you frown, you show compassion and excitement—how can all those qualities have been built into a machine?”

  Johann laughed. “Technological magic, Maria,” he answered. “This culture is so much more advanced than humanity that virtually their entire civilization, including their very existence, would be incomprehensible to all except a few members of the human species.”

  As Maria took another drink from the water vessel, Johann stood up and extended his hand to her. “You re in luck, young lady,” he said. “By the time I finish the story I’m going to tell, you will know more about your ancestors than you could possibly have imagined. But for reasons that will become obvious soon enough, I want to tell the tale over there, near the vats.”

  They walked back across the room. Pseudo-Johann stopped near where the other objects in the cylinder had been neatly arranged on the floor and picked up the seven white spheres. “I’ll start with a quick summary of my childhood, adolescence, and early adult years in Germany on the planet Earth,” he said, dropping the white spheres in the vat on the right, which Maria noticed for the first time was slightly separated from the rest. “In a way, my background is a prologue, because the real story of your ancestors starts on Mars, where I had gone to manage a large processing plant that converted the polar ice into water…”

  “WITH THE ENTIRE Martian infrastructure rapidly falling apart, there was every reason to believe that a fierce global dust storm might be the final blow in the destruction of human civilization on Mars…”

  Maria had listened attentively to Johann. His story had been fascinating. She had temporarily forgotten about the white spheres developing in the vat behind her. The last few times she had looked, they had not substantially changed. Each of the spheres had grown to the size of a softball, without any definitive form she could recognize, and had then apparently stopped growing.

  “Never for a moment, as I drove out to the plateau in the rover that Martian morning,” Johann continued, “did I think that I would myself become a passenger on that alien spacecraft that had been constructed on Mars. Needless to say, my life was about to undergo what a mathematician would call a gigantic step discontinuity.”

  Johann laughed. “There is always change, Maria,” he said. “But sometimes change is so profound that it separates our lives into distinct phases, with almost no connection between the two parts. That’s the kind of change that took place when I boarded what looked like a large hatbox sitting on the Martian plain.”

  He glanced over his shoulder at the vat behind them. “Ah,” the Johann said with a smile, “nearly perfect timing.” Maria also looked at the vat. Inside were seven human figurines, roughly twenty centimeters tall, fully dressed, with extraordinary detail in their faces.

  “Don’t you try this,” Johann said, sticking his arm into the vat and retrieving the figurines, “or you will feel terrible pain. The liquid in this particular vat would eat through most biological cells from the Earth in a matter of seconds. But it’s perfect for this particular purpose.”

  He dried the figures on his shorts and then stood them upright. “Here,” he said to Maria, “are seven of your ancestors, just as they looked on the morning we departed from Mars. From right to left, we have Sister Vivien in her Michaelite robes, Anna Kasper—”

  “Wait a minute.” Maria interrupted him. “I’m lost. I thought you said eleven people left Mars on that spacecraft.”

  “That’s correct,” Johann said. “For reasons I can’t explain, only re-creations of your relatives were included in the silver cylinder that was inserted in your mother. There are no representations of Brother Jose or Sister Nuba, the two Michaelites in our contingent who remained celibate.”

  “So that makes nine,” Maria said, thinking out loud.

  “Plus me, plus Sister Beatrice,” pseudo-Johann added, “for a total of eleven” He took a few steps and picked up the powder-blue cylinder. “This is Sister Beatrice,” he said, “always a special case, just as she was in real life.”

  “All right,” Maria said. “Now I understand the arithmetic.” She bent down and examined the figurines one by one. “From what you have told me,” she said, “this must be Fernando and Satoko, the other Michaelite is Brother Ravi, and these two are Kwame and Yasin…”

  FOUR

  INITIALLY JOHANN HAD difficulty making any progress in his story because of Maria’s frequent interruptions. She was continually asking questions about exactly how she was related to each of the individuals represented by the figurines.

  “If you’ll just wait,” the resurrected Johann said, displaying a surprisingly authentic irritation, “all your questions will be answered. You can’t possibly appreciate how unique you are, the sole survivor of all these people represented here, as well as both Beatrice and Johann, unless you hear the story of what happened.”

  “All right,” Maria said, realizing that her impatience was once again out of control. “I’ll try to listen better.”

  “Now,” Johann continued, “none of us had the slightest idea what was going to happen after that gigantic sphere, exactly like this one, swallowed the spacecraft that had carried us away from the surface of Mars. We might have all panicked had it not been for the calm certitude of Sister Beatrice, who was completely convinced that God’s angels were our rescuers and therefore nothing untoward could possibly occur…”

  Maria restrained herself as Johann explained how Beatrice and the actual human from whom he was reconstructed were separated from the others. He summarized the main events of the next eight years fairly quickly, drawing liberally from what Vivien had told him after they had been reunited. He limited himself to describing the key milestones in everyone’s lives and omitted almost all the details of his passionate love relationship with Beatrice. Each time Johann would talk about a specific character, Maria would reach down and pick up the figurine for that person, adding to the verisimilitude of the images she was forming in her mind while Johann was telling the story.

  Maria found Yasin both fascinating and repugnant at the same time. “So you believe,” she said during a short hiatus in Johann’s tale, “that the ribbons purposely brought him to your island because Sister Beatrice and you had not mated? Why would they do that? They must have observed him, and known what he was like.”

  “My resurrection has added to my knowledge only a tiny set of information about the beings who have brought me back to life,” Johann said. “I know nothing of their value systems, or of their motivations. What I do know, however, is that the actual Johann was certain that Yasin’s appearance was not coincidental. He definitely believed that Yasin was sent to the island by the extraterrestrials governing the sphere as part of an additional experiment they were conducting on the humans they had rescued.”

  Pseudo-Johann paused and sighed in a very human manner. “But I was never able to convince Beatrice of that fact,” he said wistfully, “not even after Yasin raped and impregnated her. She was still sure that God’s angels were responsible for everything and there was some purpose for even the most heinous deeds. Beatrice was as incapable of pessimism as she was of guile.”

  Johann fell silent for a few seconds. As Maria looked at the emotions registering on his face, she found it impossible to believe that she was listening to a machine and not a real human.

  He suddenly stood up. “That reminds me,” the Johann said. “I’d better start Beatrice on her development. She takes longer than the others. And while I’m at it, since you clearly have more interest in who your ancestors were than the story of their lives, I might as well fill out the cast of characters and the alien menagerie that accompany the rest of my tale.”

  He scooped up all the rest of the spheres, both the black ones and the striped ones, and tossed them in the right vat where the first group of white spheres had been placed. Then Johann walked down to the fourth vat from the end
of the array and gently dropped the powder-blue cylinder inside.

  “This is probably a good place for a short break,” Johann said to Maria upon his return. “After these have developed, you’ll be able to meet all your ancestors and we can construct your family tree.” He smiled. “Then maybe you’ll let me tell the rest of the story.”

  MARIA LAY DOWN on her mat while the spheres in the vat underwent their billions of chemical reactions that would change them into the figurines the Johann would use to illustrate the rest of his story. As she lay there, Maria kept telling herself over and over, that what was happening to her was real, and not some bizarre dream or hallucination. Even in her extraordinary life, nothing had occurred that was even remotely as amazing as everything she had experienced from the moment she had arrived at this sphere.

  I am having a conversation with a resurrection of my grandfather or great -grandfather, she told herself. These particle beings, for some unknown reason, using an advanced technology no human could ever understand, have chosen to preserve him for posterity. They also have compressed additional data to expand into figures that represent the people and creatures who played key roles in Johann’s life. Maria smiled. And this is either all true or I have become completely crazy.

  She must have dozed off, for when she heard Johann calling, it seemed as if only a few minutes had passed.

  “Come over here,” he said, “and you can meet your whole family. I’ve set up an alignment that will make everything easier for you to understand.”

  On the floor across the room, Johann had arranged all the human figurines, including the ten that had developed from the black spheres, into rows and columns. “Although I still believe it’s putting the cart before the horse, I’m going to introduce you to everyone first,” he said. “Then later on, as the story unfolds, you will learn more about the personalities and characters of each of your ancestors.”

  He motioned for Maria to come over beside him. “Back there, in the first row,” Johann said, “are the original group of your relatives that left Mars, minus Beatrice and Johann, each of whom are represented in this schematic matrix by a small piece of fabric torn from my shorts. The piece next to Yasin is, of course, Beatrice. The fabric on the right side of Vivien is Johann.

  “On the far left in the top row are Fernando and Satoko. Coming forward from them, in the next row, is their daughter, Keiko. Moving across from Fernando and Satoko we find Kwame, then Vivien, then the piece of fabric representing me when I was alive. One row in front, on Kwame’s side of Vivien, is their son, Jomo, who married Keiko…”

  It took Johann almost an hour to explain to Maria all the complicated interrelationships that made up her family tree. Of course, part of the time was spent answering her questions, to which Johann inevitably replied, “If I had told you the whole story first, as I suggested, then these questions wouldn’t be necessary.”

  Eventually Maria had everyone straight and Johann continued with his tale by handing her a figurine of a nozzler, which had developed in the vat from one of the striped spheres. “This is the creature,” he said, “that frightened the wits out of your namesake, the first Maria, when we were crossing the lake. It’s a shame that it doesn’t move, for only then would you have a true picture of how terrifying it and its friends were when they surrounded our little boat.”

  Each time that an alien animal played a major role in the story, Johann handed that particular figurine to Maria. Understating his own heroism, he told of his battle with the elevark that prompted the maskets to release the first Maria. Since each of the developed replicas were exactly one-tenth scale, Maria had some sense of the enormous size of the elevark.

  “So you would have been killed by this creature,” she said, holding the elevark in her hand, “if that masket friend you called Scarface had not diverted it at the last minute?”

  “Yes,” said Johann. “It was an astonishing act of selfless bravery by Scarface. Partially because of that event, in subsequent years the actual Johann often reflected philosophically on the similarities and differences among the many alien creatures he had encountered during the odyssey that was his life. We human beings, from my point of view, are chemicals evolved into consciousness by a unique process. Yet other chemicals have evolved into similar consciousness along entirely separate paths, and share some of our basic values. Is it possible that there are some overarching maxims governing the entire process? Do life and intelligence occur a certain percentage of the time due to high-level truths or natural laws that we human beings have not yet discovered?”

  The Johann was suddenly silent. Maria did not say anything for a while. “Was the real Johann as deep a thinker as are?” she asked at length.

  Johann laughed. “I believe I am a resurrection of the real Johann,” he said, “or at least a very close approximation thereof. Of course I have no way of knowing if the actual Johann had thoughts like those I just expressed. But judging from his life and varied experiences, it would make sense that he would have developed an extraordinarily broad view of the universe.”

  THE JOHANN TOLD the story of the family’s stay in the grotto and their subsequent transport to the planet with the twin moons. While he was building dramatically to the description of the branker attacks on double full moon night, he gave Maria the nepp, ackyong, and sperden figurines.

  “Yipes,” she said, placing the newest creatures beside the nozzler, the masket, and the elevark. “Now I understand why you referred to this group as the menagerie.”

  “And here is the most fearsome alien of all, the branker, the animal that was responsible for the death of almost all your ancestors, including me. Imagine if you can,” he said, holding the branker figure over her head, “thousands of these filling the sky, terrifying every living creature with their piercing calls, brank brank brank.”

  It was not difficult for Maria to imagine the fear that the brankers must have engendered. But based upon Johann’s story, she could not understand why anyone ever stayed behind and did not swim with him to the offshore island.

  “To be fair to them,” the Johann said, “I should point out that the others had serious reservations about whether the apparitions of Beatrice that I reported really took place. After all, nobody else ever saw her, not even her daughter. ‘Why does she come to you alone,’ Ravi asked me several times, ‘and not to all of us? Then it would be much easier to verify that the apparition did indeed occur, and is not some kind of yearning hallucination that exists only in your mind.’”

  When Johann finished the story of the final double full moon night, including his being eaten by the queen branker, Maria felt a powerful sadness. “And I am the only one left,” she said softly. “After all these years, and all the incredible adventures, I am the only remaining member of this extraordinary family.”

  “That is correct,” Johann said.

  A flood of emotions, most of which she could not understand, engulfed Maria. “Could you leave me here alone for a little while?” she asked the Johann. “I would like to think about everything you have told me.”

  Johann crossed behind her to the other vats. As Maria looked at the faces spread out on the floor, and heard again in her mind the stories from their lives, she felt amazingly small. “Thank you all,” she whispered humbly. “For your perseverance, your courage, your unwillingness to accept defeat. Without your heroic efforts, I would not exist.”

  It was then that the epiphanic thought burst into her mind. I am an absolute miracle, she thought.

  “THIS,” THE JOHANN said, handing to Maria a beautiful female figurine dressed in a blue flowing robe with white stripes down the side, “is Sister Beatrice, dressed in her bishop’s attire just as she was the first time I met her on Mars.”

  “She’s beautiful,” Maria said, examining her carefully before placing her gently on the floor among the others.

  “Ah, but her external beauty was only the beginning,” Johann said. “She had an internal beauty that far surpassed what c
ould be seen on the outside. Never did I, or Vivien either for that matter, ever meet another human being who was so fundamentally good.

  “She was the perfect Michaelite priestess. Sister Beatrice never thought of herself even before she was ordained. And after she joined the order, she was an example for everyone else. She was a wonder to behold.”

  Maria looked at the admiring smile on Johann’s face as he gazed down at the figurine. “You loved her very much, didn’t you?” she said.

  The Johann looked up slowly. “That would be an understatement,” he said, his emotion reflecting in his voice. “I adored her, both as a friend, and as a woman. She was by far the most significant person in my life.”

  “And did she love you?” Maria asked.

  Johann hesitated before answering. “Yes,” he said, “as much as she could. But her love for me was subordinate to her love for God and the family of man.”

  The Johann fell silent. As Maria watched him, his eyes staring at the faraway walls as if he were a normal human being remembering special moments from his life, she was again overwhelmed by the awesome capability of the technology that had resurrected him.

  “So did the two of you ever decide who was right?” Maria asked.

  “What do you mean?” Johann asked.

  Maria pointed at the ribbon that had just appeared in the room and was flying slowly toward them. “Is that one of God’s angels, or simply an advanced extraterrestrial creature?”

  Johann didn’t answer for a while. “From a true human perspective,” he said finally, “I guess Sister Beatrice and I were both right. The ribbons, in their different manifestations, have all the attributes that people normally ascribe to angels. But they are also extraterrestrials in the literal sense.”

  He shrugged. “You know, maybe it doesn’t really make any difference what they are. That they exist at all is what is important.”