Rama: The Omnibus

by Arthur C. Clarke

  Richard had felt certain, when his restrictions were initially lifted, that it was only a matter of hours or at most a day or two before something really significant happened. In a sense he had been correct, for the next morning two juvenile aliens had awakened him from his sleep and begun his avian language lessons. They had started with simple items, like the manna melon, water, and Richard himself, at which they would first point and then slowly repeat a sound, clearly the jabberword for that particular item. With some effort Richard had learned a great deal of vocabulary, although his ability to differentiate between closely related shrieks and jabbers was not too sharp. He was absolutely hopeless when it came to making the sounds on his own. He simply didn't have the physical equipment to speak in the avian language.

  But Richard had expected that somehow his knowledge of the bigger picture would become clearer, and that had not happened. Certainly the avians were trying to educate him, and they had given him freedom to roam anywhere he wanted in their cylinder—he even ate with them occasionally when he was in their midst and the manna melons showed up—but what was it all for? The way they looked at him, especially the leaders, suggested to Richard that they were expecting some kind of response. But what response? Richard asked himself for the hundredth time as he finished his manna melon.

  As far as Richard could tell, the avians did not have a written language. He had seen no books and none of the creatures ever wrote anything. There were those strange maplike documents that they occasionally studied, or at least that was Richard's interpretation of their activity, but they never created any of them … or marked on any of them. It was a puzzle.

  And what about the leggies? Richard encountered the creatures two or three times a week and once had a pair in his room for several hours, but they would never sit still and let him analyze one of them. One time, when he had tried to grasp a leggie in his hand, Richard had received a rude shock, an electric current almost certainly, that had caused him to release the leggie immediately.

  Richard's mind jumped from image to image as he tried to ascertain some sensible pattern to his life in avianland. He was extremely frustrated. Yet he would not accept for a minute that there was no plan behind his capture and then subsequent increased freedom. He continued to search for an answer by reviewing all his experiences in their domain.

  There was only one major area of the avian living quarters that was off limits to Richard, and he probably could not have reached it anyway since he was unable to fly. Occasionally he would see one or two avians descend in the great vertical corridor and go below the levels that he normally frequented. Once Richard even saw a pair of hatchlings, no larger than a human hand, being carried up from the dark regions below. On another occasion Richard had pointed down at the darkness and his accompanying avian had shaken its head. Most of the creatures had learned the simple head motions of yes and no in Richard's language.

  But somewhere, Richard thought, there must be additional information. I must be missing some clues. He vowed to conduct an exhaustive survey of the entire avian living area, including not only the dense apartments on the opposite side of the vertical corridor, where he usually felt unwanted, but also the large manna melon storehouses on the bottom level. I will make a thorough map, he said to himself, to make certain that I haven't neglected something critical.

  As soon as Richard had rendered the avian living area in his three-dimensional graphics, he knew what he had been overlooking. The often disorganized passageways in the cylinder, including horizontal and vertical corridors for both walking and flight, had never been synthesized by Richard into one coherent picture. Of course, he said to himself as he projected different views of his complex map onto his computer monitor. How could I have been so stupid? More than seventy percent of the cylinder is still unaccounted for.

  Richard resolved to take his computer pictures to one of the avian leaders and request, somehow, to see the rest of the cylinder. It was not an easy task. Some kind of crisis was disturbing the avians that particular day, as the corridors were full of jabbers, shrieks, and avians rushing to and fro. Out in the great vertical corridor Richard watched thirty or forty of the largest creatures fly up and out of the cylinder in some kind of organized formation.

  Finally Richard managed to obtain the attention of one of the three-ringed giants. It was fascinated by the detail it saw on the computer monitor and by all the different geometrical representations of its home. But Richard was unable to convey his primary message—that he wanted to see the rest of the cylinder.

  The leader called in some colleagues to watch the demonstration and Richard was treated to appreciative avian jabber. He was dismissed, however, when another bird broke into their meeting with what must have been important news about their ongoing crisis.

  Richard returned to his cell. He was dejected. He lay on his hay mat and thought of the family that he had left behind in New Eden. Maybe it's time for me to leave, he thought, wondering what the protocol was in avianland for obtaining permission to depart. While he was lying down a visitor came into his room.

  Richard had never seen this particular avian before. It had four cobalt blue rings around its neck and the velvet covering of its body was a deep black with occasional white tufts. Its eyes were astonishingly clear and—or so Richard surmised—very sad. The avian waited for Richard to stand and then started speaking, very slowly. Richard understood some of the words, most importantly the oft-repeated combination "follow me."

  Outside his cell three other avians were respectfully standing. They walked behind Richard and his important visitor. The group left Richard's cell area, crossed the single bridge that spanned the great vertical corridor, and entered the section of the cylinder where the manna melons were stored.

  At the back of one of the manna melon storehouses were indentations in the wall that Richard had not noticed when he had conducted his survey. When Richard and the avians approached within a few meters of the indentations, the wall slid to the side and revealed what appeared to be an enormous elevator. The avian superleader gestured for him to enter.

  Once he was inside, the four avians each jabbered goodbye and formed into a circle to formalize their parting with a turn and a bow. Richard tried his best to imitate their jabber for good-bye before he also bowed and backed into the elevator. The wall closed seconds later.

  4

  The elevator ride was painfully slow. The immense car had a square floor approximately twenty meters on a side, with a ceiling that was another eight to ten meters above Richard's head. The floor of the car was flat everywhere except for two pairs of parallel grooves, one pair on either side of Richard, that ran from the door to the back of the elevator. They can certainly transport huge loads in this, Richard thought, staring at the ceiling far above him.

  He tried to estimate the rate of descent of the elevator, but it was impossible. He had no frame of reference. According to Richard's map of the cylinder, the manna melon storehouses should have been about eleven hundred meters above the base. So if we're going all the way to the bottom, at what would be a normal elevator speed on Earth, then this trip may take several minutes.

  It was the longest three minutes of his life. Richard had absolutely no idea what he would find when the elevator doors opened. Maybe I'll be outside, he thought suddenly.

  Maybe I'll be on the edge of that region with the white structures… Could they be sending me home?

  He had just begun to wonder how life might have changed in New Eden when the elevator came to a stop. The large doors opened and for several seconds Richard was certain that his heart had jumped out of his body. Standing directly in front of him, and obviously staring at him with all their eyes, were two creatures far stranger than any he had ever imagined.

  Richard could not move. What he was seeing was so unbelievable that he was physically paralyzed while his mind struggled with the bizarre inputs it was receiving from his senses. Each of the beings in front of him had four eyes on its "head.
" In addition to the two large, milky ovals on either side of an invisible line of symmetry that bisected the head, each creature had two additional eyes attached to stalks raised ten to twelve centimeters above the top of its forehead. Behind the large head, their bodies had three segments, with a pair of appendages for each segment, giving them six legs altogether. The aliens were standing upright on their two back legs, their front four appendages neatly tucked against their smooth, cream-colored underbellies.

  They moved toward him in the elevator and Richard backed away, frightened. The two creatures turned to each other and communicated in a high-frequency noise that originated from a small circular orifice below the oval eyes. Richard blinked, felt dizzy, and dropped down on one knee to steady himself. His heart was still pumping furiously.

  The aliens also changed position, putting their middle legs on the floor. In that posture they resembled giant ants with their front two legs off the ground and their heads raised high. The entire time the black spheres at the end of the eye stalks continued to pivot, scanning the full three hundred and sixty degrees, and the milky material in the dark brown ovals moved from side to side.

  For several minutes they sat more or less stationary, as if they were encouraging Richard to examine them. Fighting against his fear, he tried to study them in an objective, scientific fashion. The creatures were roughly the size of medium-sized dogs, but they certainly weighed much less. Their bodies were thin and quite trim. The front and back segments were larger than the middle one, and all three body divisions displayed a polished carapace on top that was made of some kind of hard material.

  Richard would have classified them as very large insects except for their extraordinary appendages, which were thick, perhaps even muscled, and covered with a short, very dense, black-and-white-striped "hair" that made it appear as if the creatures were wearing panty hose. Their hands, if that was the proper appellation, were free of the , hairy covering and had four fingers each, including an opposing thumb on the front pair.

  Richard had just summoned enough courage to look again at their incredible heads when there was a high-pitched, sirenlike noise behind the two aliens. They turned around. Richard stood up and saw a third creature approaching at a rapid clip. Its motion was marvelous to watch. It ran like a cat with six legs, stretching out parallel to the ground and pushing off with a different pair of legs at each point in its stride.

  The three engaged in a quick conversation and the newcomer, lifting up its head and front legs, motioned unambiguously for Richard to leave the elevator. He walked out behind the trio and entered a very large chamber.

  This room was a manna melon storehouse also, but that was its only similarity to the one in the avian portion of the cylinder. High technology and automated equipment were everywhere. In the ceiling ten meters above them, a mechanical cherry picker was moving on a rail system. It would grasp individual melons and load them in freight cars on grooves at one end of the room. While Richard and his hosts watched, a freight car moved down the groove and came to a stop in the elevator.

  The creatures bounced off down one of the aisles in the room and Richard hastened to follow. They waited for him at the door, then raced to their left, looking backward to see if he was still in sight. Richard ran after them for most of the next two minutes, until they reached a wide open atrium, many meters high, with a transportation device in its center.

  The device was a remote cousin of the escalator. Actually there were two of them, one going up and another down, that spiraled around the two thick poles in the center of the atrium. The escalators moved very quickly at quite a steep angle. Every five meters or so they reached the next level, or floor, and the passengers then walked a meter to the spiral escalator around the other pole. What passed for a railing on the side of the escalator was a barrier only thirty centimeters high. The alien creatures rode in the horizontal position, with all six legs on the moving ramp. Richard, who was standing originally, quickly dropped down to all fours to keep from falling out.

  During the ride a dozen or so other aliens, riding on the down half of the escalator, passed Richard and gawked at him with their amazing faces. But how do they eat? Richard wondered, noting that the circular hole they used for communication was certainly not large enough for much food. There were no other orifices on their heads, although there were some small knobs and wrinkles whose purposes were unknown.

  Where they were taking Richard was on the eighth or ninth level. All three of the creatures waited for him until he reached the appointed platform. Richard followed them into a hexagonal building with bright red markings on the front. That's funny, Richard thought, staring at the strange squiggles. I've seen that writing before… Of course, on the map or whatever document it was the avians were reading.

  Richard was placed in a room that was well lit and tastefully decorated in black and white with geometric patterns. There were objects around him of all shapes and sizes, but Richard had no idea what any of them were. The aliens used sign language to inform Richard that this was where he was going to stay. Then they departed. A weary Richard studied the furniture, trying to figure out which thing might be the bed, and then stretched out on the floor to sleep.

  Myrmicats. That's what I'll call them. Richard had awakened after sleeping for four hours and could not stop thinking about the alien creatures. He wanted to give them a good name. After dismissing both cat-ant and catsect, he remembered that someone who studies ants is called a myrmecologist. He chose myrmicat because it looked better in his mind when spelled with an i instead of an e.

  Richard looked around him. Every place he had been in the myrmicat habitat had had good illumination, which was in marked contrast to the dark, catacomblike corridors of the upper portions of the brown cylinder. I have not seen any of the avians since the elevator ride, Richard was thinking. So apparently these two species do not live together. At least not completely. But they both use manna melons… What exactly is their connection?

  A pair of myrmicats bounded through the entry, placed a neatly sectioned melon and a cup of water in front of him, and then disappeared. Richard was both hungry and thirsty. Several seconds after he had finished with his breakfast, the pair of creatures returned. Using the hands on their front legs, the myrmicats gestured for him to stand up. Richard stared at them. Are these the same creatures as yesterday? he wondered. And are they the same pair that brought the melon and the water? He thought back over all the myrmicats he had seen, including those who had passed him going down the escalator. He could not recall a single distinguishing or identifying characteristic in any individual. So they all look the same? he thought. Then how do they tell each other apart?

  The myrmicats led him out into the corridor and bolted away to the right. This is great, Richard said to himself, starting to jog after spending a few seconds admiring the beauty of their gait. They must think humans are all athletes. One of the myrmicats stopped about forty meters in front of him. It did not turn around, but Richard could tell it was watching him because both of its stalk eyes were bent back in his direction. "I'm coming," Richard shouted. "But I can't run that fast."

  It wasn't long before Richard figured out that the pair of aliens was giving him a guided tour of the myrmicat domain. The tour was very logically planned. The first stop, a very brief one, was at a manna melon storehouse. Richard watched two freight cars filled with melons slide down grooves into an elevator similar to (or identical with) the one in which he had descended the day before.

  After another five-minute jog, Richard entered an entirely different section of the myrmicat den. Whereas the walls in the other section had been mostly metallic gray or white, except in his room, here the rooms and corridors were all decorated profusely, either with colors or geometric patterns or both. One vast chamber was about the size of a theater and had three liquid pools in its floor. About a hundred myrmicats were in this room, half apparently swimming in the pools (with only their stalk eyes and the top half of their carapa
ces above the water line), and the other half either sitting on the ridges dividing the three pools from each other, or milling around in a weird building on the far side of the room.

  But were they actually swimming? On closer inspection Richard noticed that the creatures did not move around in the pool—they just submerged in a given spot and stayed under the water for several minutes. Two of the pools were quite thick, roughly the consistency of a rich, creamy soup on Earth, and the third, clear pool was almost certainly water. Richard followed a single myrmicat as it moved from one of the thick pools to the water, then over to the other thick pool. What are they doing? Richard wondered. And why have they brought me here?

  As if on cue he was tapped on the back by one of the myrmicats. It pointed to Richard, then to the pools, and then to Richard's mouth. He had no idea what it was telling him. The guide myrmicat next walked down the slope toward the pools and submerged itself in one of the thicker pools. When it returned it stood on its back pair of legs and pointed to the grooves between the segments of its soft, cream-colored underbelly.

  It was clearly important to the myrmicats that Richard understand what was going on at the pools. At the next stop he watched a combination of myrmicats and some high-technology machines grinding up fibrous material and then mixing it with water and other liquids to create a thin slurry that looked like what was in one of the pools. At length one of the aliens put its ringer into the slurry and then touched the material to Richard's lips. They must be telling me that the pools are for feeding, Richard thought. So they don't eat manna melon after all? Or at least they have a more varied diet? This is all fascinating.

  Soon they were off on another jog to another distant comer of the den. Here Richard saw thirty or forty smaller creatures, obviously juvenile myrmicats, engaged in activities with supervisory adults. In physical appearance the little ones resembled their elders except for one major difference—they had no carapace. Richard concluded that the hard top covering was probably not exuded by the creature until its growth was complete. Although Richard imagined that what he saw occurring with the juveniles was a rough approximation of school, or perhaps a nursery, he of course had no way of knowing for certain. But at one point he was sure that he heard the juveniles repeating in unison a sequence of sounds made by an adult myrmicat.