Rama: The Omnibus

by Arthur C. Clarke

  It embarrassed me a little, in the pit, that my memories of Henry were on a level equal to my memories of my father, mother, and daughter. But I have since realized that I am not unique in cherishing my recollections of those hours with Henry. Each person has very special moments or events that are uniquely hers and are zealously protected by the heart.

  My only close friend at the university, Gabrielle Moreau, spent a night with Genevieve and me at Beauvois the year before the Newton expedition was launched. We had not seen each other for seven years and spent most of the night talking, primarily about the major emotional events of our lives. Gabrielle was extremely happy. She had a handsome, sensitive, successful husband, three healthy, gorgeous children, and a beautiful manor house near Chinon, But Gabrielle's "most wonderful" moment, she confided to me after midnight with a girlish smile, had occurred before she met her husband. She had had a powerful schoolgirl crush on a famous movie star who one day happened to be on location in Tours. Gabrielle somehow managed to meet him in his hotel room and talk to him privately for almost an hour. She kissed him a single time on the lips before she left. That was her most precious memory.

  Oh, my prince, it was ten years ago yesterday that I saw you for the last time. Are you happy? Are you a good king? Do you ever think of the black Olympic champion who gave herself to you, her first love, with such reckless abandon?

  You asked me an indirect question, that day on the ski mountain, about the father of my daughter. I denied you the answer, not realizing that my denial meant I had still not forgiven you completely. If you were to ask me today, my prince, I would gladly tell you. Yes, Henry Rex, King of England, you are the father of Genevieve des Jardins. Go to her, know her, love her children. I cannot. I am more than fifty trillion kilometers away.

  13

  30 June 2213

  Everyone was too excited to sleep last night. Except for Benjy, bless his heart, who simply could not, grasp what we were telling him. Simone has explained to him many times that our home is inside a giant cylindrical spacecraft-she has even shown him on the black screen the different views of Rama from the external sensors—but the concept continues to elude him.

  When the whistle sounded yesterday Richard, Michael, and I stared at each other for several seconds. It had been so long since we last heard it. Then we all started talking at once. The children, including little Ellie, were full of questions and could feel our excitement. The eight of us went topside immediately. Richard and Katie ran over to the sea without waiting for the rest of the family. Simone walked with Benjy, Michael with Patrick. I carried Ellie because her little legs just wouldn't move fast enough.

  Katie was bursting with enthusiasm when she ran back to greet us. "Come on, come on," she said, grabbing Simone by the hand. "You've got to see it. It's amazing. The colors are fantastic."

  Indeed they were. The rainbow arcs of light crackled from horn to horn, filling the Raman night with an awesome display. Benjy stared southward with his mouth open. After many seconds he smiled and turned to Simone. "It's beau-ti-ful," he said slowly, proud of his use of the word.

  "Yes, it is, Benjy," Simone replied. "Very beautiful."

  "Ve-ry beau-ti-ful," Benjy repeated, turning back to look at the lights.

  None of us said very much during the show itself. But after we returned to the lair the conversation was nonstop for hours. Of course, someone had to explain everything to the children. Simone was the only one born at the time of the last maneuver, and she was just an infant. Richard was the chief explainer. The whistle and light show really energized him—he seemed more like himself last night than he has at any time since he returned—and he was both entertaining and informative as he recounted everything we knew about whistles, light shows, and Raman maneuvers.

  "Do you think the octospiders are going to return to New York?" Katie asked expectantly.

  "I don't know," Richard said. "But that's definitely a possibility."

  Katie spent the next fifteen minutes telling everyone, for the umpteenth time, about our encounter with the octospider four years ago. As usual, she embellished and exaggerated some of the details, especially from the solo part of the story before she saw me in the museum.

  Patrick loves the tale. He wants Katie to tell it all the time. "There I was," Katie said last night, "lying on my stomach, my head peering over the edge of a gigantic round cylinder that dropped into the black gloom. Silver spikes were sticking out of the sides of the cylinder, and I could see them flashing in the dim light. 'Hey,' I shouted, 'anybody down there?'

  "I heard a sound like dragging metal brushes together with a whine. Lights came on below me. At the bottom of the cylinder, beginning to climb the spikes, was a black thing with a round head and eight tentacles of black and gold. The tentacles wrapped around the spikes as it climbed swiftly in my direction…"

  "Oc-to-spi-der," Benjy said.

  When Katie was finished with her story, Richard told the children that in four more days the floor was probably going to start shaking. He stressed that everything should be carefully anchored to the ground and that each of us should be prepared for another set of sessions in the deceleration tank. Michael pointed out that we needed at least one new toy box for the children, and several sturdy boxes for our stuff as well. We have accumulated so much junk over the years that it will be quite a task to secure everything in the next few days.

  When Richard and I were lying alone on our mat, we held hands and talked for over an hour. At one point I told him that I hoped this coming maneuver signaled the beginning of the end of our journey in Rama.

  "Hope springs eternal in the human breast./ Man never is, but always to be blessed," he replied. He sat up for a moment and looked at me, his eyes twinkling in the near darkness. "Alexander Pope," he said. Then he laughed. "I bet he never thought he would be quoted sixty trillion kilometers away from Earth."

  "You seem better, darling," I said, stroking his arm.

  His brow furrowed. "Right now everything seems clear. But I don't know when the fog will descend again. It could be any minute. And I still cannot remember more than the barest outline of what happened during the three years that I was gone."

  He lay back down. "What do you think will happen?" I asked.

  "I'm guessing we'll have a maneuver," he replied. "And I hope it's a big one. We are approaching Sirius very quickly and will need to slow down considerably if our target is anywhere in the Sirius system." He reached over and took my hand. "For you," he said, "and especially for the children, I hope this is not a false alarm."

  8 July 2213

  The maneuver began four days ago, right on schedule, as soon as the third and final light show was finished. We didn't see or hear any avians or octospiders, as we haven't for four years now. Katie was very disappointed. She wanted to see the octospiders all return to New York.

  Yesterday a pair of the mantis biots came into our lair and went straight to the deceleration tank. They were carrying a large container, in which were the five new webbed beds (Simone, of course, needs a different size now) and all the helmets. We watched them from a distance while they installed the beds and checked out the tank system. The children were fascinated. The short visit from the mantises confirmed that we will soon be undergoing a major change in velocity.

  Richard was apparently correct with his hypothesis about the connection between the main propulsion system and the overall thermal control of Rama. The temperature has already started to drop topside. In anticipation of a long maneuver, we have been busy using the keyboard to order cold-weather clothing for all the children.

  The constant shaking is again disrupting our lives. At first it was amusing for the children, but they are already complaining about it. For myself, I am hoping that we are now near our ultimate destination. Although Michael has been praying "God's will be done," my few prayers have definitely been more selfish and specific.

  1 September 2213

  Something new is definitely happening. For the
last ten days, ever since we finished in the tank and the maneuver ended, we have been approaching a solitary light source situated about thirty astronomical units away from the star Sirius. Richard has ingeniously manipulated the sensor list and the black screen so that this source is dead center on our monitor at all times, regardless of which particular Raman telescope is observing it.

  Two nights ago we began to see some definition in the object. We speculated that perhaps it was an inhabited planet and Richard rushed around computing the heat input from Sirius on a planet whose distance was roughly equal to Neptune's distance from our Sun. Even though Sirius is much larger, brighter, and hotter than the Sun, Richard concluded that our paradise, if this was indeed our destination, was still going to be very cold.

  Last night we could see our target more clearly. It is an elongated construction (Richard says it therefore cannot be a planet—anything "that size" that is decidedly non-spherical "must be artificial"), shaped like a cigar, with two rows of lights along the top and bottom. Because we don't know exactly how far away it is, we don't know its size for certain. However, Richard has been making some "guesstimates," based on our closing velocity, and he thinks the cigar is roughly a hundred and fifty kilometers long and fifty kilometers tall.

  The entire family sits in our main room and stares at the monitor. This morning we had another surprise. Katie showed us that there were two other vehicles in the vicinity of our target. Richard had taught her last week how to change the Raman sensors providing input to the black screen and, while the rest of us were talking, she accessed the distant radar sensor that we had first used thirteen years ago to identify the nuclear missiles coming from Earth. The cigar-shaped object appeared at the edge of the radar field of view. Standing right in front of the cigar, almost indistinguishable from it in the wide field, were the two other blips. If the giant cigar is indeed our destination, then perhaps we are about to have company.

  8 September 2213

  There is no way I can adequately describe the astounding events of the last five days. The language does not have adjectives superlative enough to capture what we have seen and experienced. Michael has even commented that heaven may pale by comparison beside the wonders that we have witnessed.

  At this moment our family is onboard a driverless small shuttle craft, no larger than a city bus on Earth, that is whizzing us from the way station to an unknown destination. The cigar-shaped way station is still visible, but just barely, out the domed window at the rear of the craft. To our left, our home for thirteen years, the cylindrical spaceship we call Rama, is headed in a slightly different direction than we are. It departed from the way station a few hours after we did, lit like a Christmas tree on the outside, and we are presently separated from it by about two hundred kilometers.

  Four days and eleven hours ago our Rama spacecraft came to a stop relative to the way station. We were the third vehicle in an amazing queue. In front of us was a spinning starfish about one tenth the size of Rama and a giant wheel, with a hub and spokes, that entered the way station within hours after we stopped.

  The way station itself turned out to be hollow. When the giant wheel moved into the center of the way station, gantries and other deployable elements rolled out to meet the wheel and fix it in place. A suite of special vehicles in three unusual shapes (one looked like a balloon, another like a blimp, and the third resembled a bathysphere on Earth) then entered the wheel from the way station. Although we couldn't see what was going on inside the wheel, we did see the special vehicles emerge, one by one, at odd intervals over the next two days. Each vehicle was met by a shuttle, like the one in which we are now flying but larger in size. These shuttles had all been parked in the dark in the right-hand side of the way station and had been moved into place thirty minutes or so before the rendezvous.

  As soon as the shuttles were loaded, they always took off in a direction directly opposite our queue. About an hour after the final vehicle had emerged from the wheel and the last shuttle had departed, the many pieces of mechanical equipment attached to the wheel were retracted and the great circular spacecraft itself eased out of the way station.

  The starfish in front of us had already entered the way station and was being handled by another set of gantries and attachments when a loud whistle summoned us topside in Rama. The whistle was followed by a light show in the southern bowl. However, this display was completely different from the ones that we had seen before. The Big Horn was the star of the new show. Circular rings of color formed near its tip and then sailed slowly north, centered along the spin axis of Rama. The rings were huge. Richard estimated they were at least a kilometer in diameter, with a ring thickness of forty meters.

  The dark Raman night was illuminated by as many as eight of these rings at a time. The order remained the same—red, orange, yellow, green, blue, brown, pink, and purple—for three repetitions. As a ring would break up and disappear near the Alpha relay station at the northern bowl of Rama, a new ring of the same color would form back near the tip of the Big Horn.

  We stood transfixed, our mouths agape, as this spectacle took place. As soon as the last ring disappeared from the third set, another astonishing event occurred. All the lights came on inside Rama! The Raman night had only begun three hours earlier—for thirteen years the sequence of night and day had been completely regular. Now, all of a sudden, it was changed. And it wasn't just the lights. There was music as well; at least I guess you could call it music. It sounded like millions of tiny bells and it seemed to be coming from everywhere.

  None of us moved for many seconds. Then Richard, who had the best pair of binoculars, spied something flying toward us. "It's the avians," he shouted, jumping up and down and pointing at the sky. "I just remembered something. I visited them in their new home in the north while I was on my odyssey."

  One at a time we each looked through his binoculars. At first it wasn't certain that Richard was correct in his identification, but as they came closer the fifty or sixty specks resolved themselves into the great birdlike creatures we know as the avians. They headed straight for New York. Half the avians hovered in the sky, maybe three hundred meters above their lair, as the other half dove down to the surface.

  "Come on, Daddy," Katie yelled. "Let's go."

  Before I could raise any objection, father and daughter were off at a sprint. I watched Katie run. She is already very fast. In my mind's eye I could see my mother's graceful stride across the grass in the park at Chilly-Mazarin—Katie has definitely inherited some characteristics from her mother's side of the family, even though she is first and foremost her father's daughter.

  Simone and Benjy had already started toward our lair. Patrick was concerned about the avians. "Will they hurt Uncle Richard and Katie?" he asked.

  I smiled at my handsome five-year-old son. "No, darling," I answered, "not if they're careful." Michael, Patrick, Ellie, and I returned to the lair to watch the starfish being processed in the way station.

  We couldn't see much because all the ports of entry to the starfish were on the opposite side, away from the Raman cameras. But we assumed some kind of unloading activity was occurring, because eventually five shuttles departed for some new location. The starfish was finished with its processing very quickly. It had already left the way station before Richard and Katie returned.

  "Start packing," Richard said breathlessly as soon as he arrived. "We're leaving. We're all leaving."

  "You should have seen them," Katie said to Simone almost simultaneously. "They were huge. And ugly. They went down in their lair—"

  "The avians returned to get some special things from their lair," Richard interrupted her. "Maybe they were mementos of some kind. Anyway, everything fits. We're getting out of here."

  As I raced around trying to put our essentials into a few of the sturdy boxes, I criticized myself for not having figured everything out sooner. We had watched both the wheel and the starfish "unload" at the way station. But it had not occurred to us th
at we might be the cargo to be unloaded by Rama,

  It was impossible to decide what to pack. We had been living in those six rooms (including the two we had fixed up for storage) for thirteen years. We had probably requested an average of five items a day using the keyboard.

  Granted, most of the objects had long since been thrown away, but still… We didn't know where we were going. How could we know what to take?

  "Do you have any idea what's going to happen to us?" I asked Richard.

  My husband was beside himself trying to figure out how to take his large computer. "Our history, our science—all that remains of our knowledge is there," he said, pointing at the computer in agitation. "What if it's irretrievably lost?"

  It weighed only eighty kilograms altogether. I told him we could all help him carry the computer after we had packed clothing, personal items, and some food and water.

  "Do you have any idea where we're going?" I repeated.

  Richard shrugged his shoulders. "Not the slightest," he replied. "But wherever it is, I bet it will be amazing."

  Katie came into our room. She was holding a small pouch and her eyes were alive with energy. "I'm packed and ready," she said. "Can I go topside and wait?"

  Her father's affirmative nod was barely in motion when Katie bolted out the door. I shook my head, giving Richard a disapproving look, and went down the hall to help Simone with the other children. The process of packing for the boys was an ordeal. Benjy was cranky and confused. Even Patrick was irritable, Simone and I had just finished (the job was impossible until we forced the boys to take a nap) when Richard and Katie returned from topside.