Rama: The Omnibus

by Arthur C. Clarke

  "Five different kinds of what!" Nicole asked. Richard shook his head and shrugged as he replaced the eggs in the tank.

  The egglike things filled the entire length of the third set of tanks. By the time Richard and Nicole were approaching the fourth row of cylinders and another set of tanks, which were several more hundred meters to the south, both of them were growing tired. "If we don't see anything new here," she said, "how about lunch?"

  "You're on," he answered.

  But they could discern something new already when they were still fifty meters away from the fourth row of tanks. A square robot vehicle, perhaps thirty centimeters in length and width and another ten centimeters high, was moving swiftly back and forth between the cylindrical poles. "I knew those were tracks for some kind of vehicle," Nicole said, kidding Richard,

  Richard was too fascinated to respond. In addition to the scurrying robot, which made a full cycle across the array from east to west every three minutes or so, there were several more wonders to observe. Each of the individual tanks here was further subdivided into two long pieces by a mesh fence parallel to the walls that was only slightly higher than the water level. On one side of the mesh was an absolute swarm of tiny swimming creatures in five different colors. On the other side, gleaming circles, resembling sand dollars, were scattered the complete length of the tank. The fence was positioned so that three-fourths of the tank volume was available to the gleaming circles, giving them far more room to maneuver than the densely packed swimmers.

  Richard and Nicole bent over to study the activity. The sand dollars were moving in all directions. Because the water was teeming with so many creatures and so much activity, it took several minutes for Richard and Nicole to perceive the common pattern. At irregular intervals each of the sand dollars would propel itself over to the mesh fence using the whiplike cilia underneath its flat body and then, while anchored to the fence, would use another pair of cilia to capture a tiny swimmer and pull it through one of the holes in the mesh. While the sand dollar was against the fence, its light would dim. If it stayed long enough and caught several of the swimmers to eat, then its gleam would fade altogether.

  "Watch what happens now when it leaves the fence," Richard said to Nicole, pointing out one specific sand dollar just underneath them. "As it swims along with its companions, its light will be slowly replenished."

  Richard hurried back to the nearest cylindrical pole and bent down on his knees on the ground. He dug into the soil with one of the tools from his pack. "There's much more to this system underground," he said excitedly. "I bet this entire array is part of a gigantic power generator."

  He took three large, measured steps to the south, noted his position carefully, and leaned over the tank to count the sand dollars in the region between the cylindrical pole and him. It was a difficult count because of the constant motion of the gleaming circles.

  "Roughly three hundred of them in three meters of tank length, making approximately twenty-five thousand per complete tank, or two hundred thousand in a complete row," Richard said.

  "Are you assuming, then," Nicole asked, "that these cylindrical poles are some sort of storage system? Like batteries?"

  "Probably," said Richard. "What a fabulous idea! Find a living creature that generates electricity internally. Force it to give up its accumulated charge in order to eat. What could be better?"

  "And that robot vehicle, moving back and forth between the poles, what is its purpose?"

  "I would guess it's a monitor of some kind," Richard replied.

  Richard and Nicole ate their lunch and then finished their inspection of the putative power plant. Altogether there were eight columns and eight rows in the array, for a total of sixty-four tanks. Only twenty were active at the time. "Plenty of excess capacity," Richard commented. "Their engineers clearly understand the concepts of growth and margin."

  The giant fireflies now headed due east, along what appeared to be some kind of major highway. Twice Richard and Nicole encountered small herds of the large antlike creatures going in the opposite direction, but there were no interactions. "Are those creatures intelligent enough to operate without supervision?" Nicole asked Richard. "Or are we just not being allowed to see whatever beings give them instructions?"

  'That's an interesting question," Richard said. "Remember how quickly the octospider came over to the ant thing when it was struck by the ball? Perhaps they have some limited intelligence, but cannot function well in new or unknown environments."

  "Like some people we have known," Nicole said with a laugh.

  Their long march to the east ended when their two guiding lights hovered over a large dirt field just off the road. The field was empty except for what looked at a distance like forty football goalposts covered with ivy, arranged in five rows of eight posts each.

  "Will you check the guidebook, please?" Richard said. "It's easier to understand what we're seeing if we read about it first."

  Nicole smiled. "We really are being given some kind of tour, aren't we? Why do you suppose our hosts want us to see all this?"

  Richard was silent for a moment. "I'm fairly certain that it's the octospiders who are the lords of all this territory," he said finally, "or at least they are the dominant species in a complicated hierarchy. Whoever it was that picked us personally for this tour must believe that informing us about their capabilities will make future interactions easier."

  "But if it really is the octospiders," Nicole said, "why didn't they simply kidnap all of us as they did Ellie and Eponine?"

  "I don't know," Richard replied. "Maybe their sense of morality is far more complicated than we have imagined."

  Both of the giant fireflies were dancing in the air over the collection of ivy-covered goalposts. "I think our tour guides are becoming impatient," Nicole said.

  If Richard and Nicole had not been so fatigued from their two days of arduous hiking, and if they had not already seen so many fabulous sights in this alien world that existed in the Southern Hemicylinder of Rama, they would have been both captivated and overwhelmed by the complex symbiosis they discovered in the next several hours.

  What was all over the goalposts was not ivy at all. What appeared to be individual leaves from a distance were in reality little cone-shaped nests, made of thousands of tiny creatures that resembled aphids. The creatures were glued together to form the nest by the sweet, sticky, honeylike substance the humans had enjoyed eating under the dome. The alien aphids manufactured large quantities of the substance as part of their normal activity.

  During the time that Richard and Nicole were watching, convoys of snout-nosed beetles, who lived in mounds several meters high surrounding the entire enclave, burst from their homes every forty minutes or so and crawled all over the posts, harvesting the excess goo from the nests. The beetle creatures, which were about ten centimeters long when empty, swelled to three or four times their normal size before completing their harvest cycle and regurgitating the contents of their swollen bodies in sunken vats at the base of the posts.

  Richard and Nicole did not talk much while they were watching the activity. The overall biological system displayed in front of them was both intricate and wonderful—another example of the astonishing advancements in symbiosis that had been made by their hosts. "I bet," said a weary Richard as he and Nicole prepared to sleep not far from one of the beetle mounds, "that if we wait long enough, some beast of burden will show up to lift the vats of this honey, or whatever it is, out of the ground and then carry them to another site."

  As they were lying side by side on the dirt, they observed the two fireflies landing in the distance. Then it was suddenly dark. "I don't believe all this just happened," Nicole said. "Not on another planet. Not anywhere. Natural evolution simply does not result in the kind of interspecies harmony we have witnessed the last two days."

  "What are you suggesting?" Richard asked. 'That all these creatures were somehow designed, like machines, to perform their functions?"


  "It is the only explanation I can accept," Nicole said, "The octospiders, or somebody, must have reached the level of advancement where they can manipulate the genes to produce a plant or animal that does exactly what they want, Why do those beetle things deposit the honey substance in the vats? What is their biological payoff for that action?"

  "They must be compensated in some way that we have not yet discovered," Richard said.

  "Of course," Nicole said. "And behind that compensation is some incredible biological systems architect or engineer who is tuning all the interrelationships, not only so that each species is happy, however we choose to define that word, but also so that the architects themselves reap some profit-namely, food in the form of excess honey. Now, do you believe that kind of optimization could possibly take place without some sophisticated genetic engineering involved?"

  Richard was silent for almost a minute. "Imagine," he finally said slowly, "a master biological engineer sitting at a keyboard, designing a living organism to meet certain system specifications. It is a mind-boggling concept."

  Once more the beetles swarmed out of their mounds, barely missing the sleeping humans as they rushed for the goalposts and their harvesting task. Nicole watched the beetles until they disappeared in the dark. Then she yawned and curled up on her side. We humans have entered a new era, she thought before she fell asleep. In the future all history will be noted as BC, before contact, and AC, after contact. For from that first moment when we knew unambiguously that simple chemicals had risen to consciousness and intelligence somewhere else in the vastness of our universe, the past history of our species became only an isolated paradigm, one small and relatively insignificant fragment in the infinite tapestry that depicts the astonishing variety of sentient life.

  After breakfast the next morning Richard and Nicole had a brief discussion about their dwindling food supply and then decided to take some of the honey substance from one of the vats. "I guess if we're not supposed to do this," Nicole said, glancing around while she was filling a small container, "then some alien policeman will come along and stop us."

  Their guide lights moved directly south at first, leading Richard and Nicole toward a thick forest of very tall trees that extended as far as they could see in the east-west direction. The fireflies turned to the right and moved parallel to the edge of the trees. The forest on their left was dark and foreboding. From time to time Richard and Nicole heard strange, loud sounds coming from its interior.

  Once Richard stopped and walked over to where the thick growth began. Between the trees were many smaller plants, with large leaves in green, red, and brown, as well as several different kinds of vine that laced together the middle and upper branches of the trees. Richard jumped back when he heard a sharp howl that sounded as if it were only a few meters away. His eyes searched the forest, but he could not find the source of the howl.

  "There's something weird about this forest," he said, turning back to Nicole. "It feels out of place, as if it doesn't belong here."

  For over an hour the fireflies continued in a westerly direction. The bizarre sounds became more frequent as Richard and Nicole trudged slowly along in silence. Nicole agreed with Richard about the forest. Its undisciplined growth, especially when compared to the order of the fields on her right, was both surprising and disquieting.

  They took a brief rest in the middle of the morning. Richard calculated that they had already walked more than five kilometers since waking. Nicole asked for some of the fresh honey that was in Richard's backpack.

  "My feet hurt," she said, after eating and then taking a long drink of water. "And my legs never stopped aching last night. I hope we reach wherever we're going before too much longer."

  "I'm tired too," Richard said. "But we're not doing badly for a couple in their early sixties."

  "I feel older than that right now," Nicole said. She stood up and stretched. "You know, our hearts must be almost ninety. They may not have done much work all those years we were asleep, but they had to keep pumping nevertheless."

  As they were talking, a strange little spherical animal with a solitary eye, white fuzzy hair, and a dozen spindly legs darted out of the nearby forest and snatched the container of honey. The creature and the food were gone in an instant.

  "What was that?" Nicole asked, startled.

  "Something with a sweet tooth," Richard said. He stared off into the forest, where the animal had disappeared. 'That is definitely another world over there."

  Half an hour later, the pair of fireflies moved off to the left and hovered over a path leading into the forest. The path was five meters wide and was lined on both sides by dense growth. Nicole's intuition told her not to follow the fireflies, but she said nothing. Her apprehension increased when, after Richard and she had taken a couple of steps into the forest, noises erupted from the trees all around them. They stopped, held hands, and listened.

  "It sounds like birds, monkeys, and frogs," Richard said.

  "They must be signaling our presence," Nicole said. She turned around and looked behind her. "Are you sure we're doing the right thing?"

  Richard pointed at the lights in front of them. "We've been following those big bugs for two and a half days. It doesn't make much sense to lose faith in them now."

  They started walking down the path again. The caws, howls, and croaking sounds accompanied them. From time to time the kind of foliage on both sides of them would change a little, but it always remained dense and dark.

  "There must be a group of alien gardeners," Richard said at one point, "who work the area around this path several times a week. Look how perfectly trimmed all the bushes and trees are. They don't protrude one iota into the air space above our heads."

  "Richard," Nicole said a little later, "if the sounds we are hearing are coming from alien animals, why don't we ever see one? Not a single creature has ever come out on the path." She bent down and examined the dirt at her feet. "And there is no visible evidence here of any life, not now and not ever. Not even an ant."

  "We must be walking on a magical path," Richard said with a grin. "Perhaps it leads to a gingerbread house and a wicked old witch… Let us sing, Gretel, and perhaps we will feel better."

  The path, which had been absolutely straight for the first kilometer or so, began to meander. Because of its wandering, the sounds of the forest creatures surrounded Richard and Nicole. Richard sang popular songs from his adolescent years in England. Nicole joined him some of the time, when she knew the song, but mostly she spent her energy trying to contain her growing anxiety. She told herself not to think about what an easy target they would be for any large alien animal that might be lurking in the forest.

  Richard suddenly stopped. He pulled two deep breaths of air through his nose into his lungs. "Do you smell that?" he asked Nicole.

  She sniffed the air. "Yes," she said, "I do. It's a little like gardenias."

  "Only much much better," Richard said. "It's positively divine."

  Ahead of them, the path turned abruptly to the right. At the turn there was a large bush beside the path that was covered with huge yellow flowers, the first flowers they had seen since they entered the forest. Each individual flower was the size of a basketball. As Richard and Nicole drew nearer to the bush, the enticing smell intensified.

  Richard could not restrain himself. Before Nicole could say anything, he stepped the few meters off the path, stuck his face in one of the huge flowers, and inhaled deeply. The smell was magnificent. Meanwhile, one of the two fireflies flew back in their direction and began zigging and zagging in the sky over their heads.

  "I don't think our guides approved of your sortie," Nicole said.

  "Probably not," Richard replied, returning to the path. "But it was worth it."

  As they continued to walk, more flowers, of all shapes, sizes, and colors, surrounded them on both sides. Neither of them had ever seen such a profusion of color. At the same time, the sounds they had been hearing abated. A little later, wh
en Richard and Nicole were in the middle of the flower region, the noises disappeared altogether.

  The path narrowed to a couple of meters, barely wide enough for them to walk side by side and not brush the plants on which the flowers were growing. Richard left the trail several times to inspect and smell one of the amazing flowers. Each excursion caused the fireflies to swoop back in their direction. Despite Richard's enthusiasm for his trips into the forest, Nicole heeded the guides and remained on the path.

  Richard was about eight meters off to the left, trying to obtain a closer look at a gigantic flower that looked like an Oriental carpet, when he disappeared suddenly from view. "Ouch," Nicole heard him yell as he fell to the ground.

  "Are you all right?" she said immediately.

  "Yes," he said. "I just tripped over some vines and fell into a bunch of thorns. The bush surrounding me has red leaves as well as tiny, bizarre flowers that look like bullets. They smell like cinnamon, incidentally."

  "Do you need any help?" Nicole asked.

  "Nope. I'll just climb out of here in a jiffy."

  Nicole glanced up and noticed that one of the two fireflies was racing off in the distance. Now, what's that all about? she was wondering when she heard Richard again.

  "I may need some help after all," he said. "I seem to be stuck."

  Nicole took a cautious step off the path. The remaining firefly went crazy, zooming down almost into her face. Nicole was temporarily blinded.

  "Don't come over here, Nicole," Richard said abruptly a few seconds later. "Unless I am losing my mind, I believe this plant is preparing to eat me."

  "What?" Nicole said, now frightened. "Are you serious?" She waited impatiently for her eyes to recover from the overdose of light.

  "Yes, I am," Richard said. "Get back on the path. This bizarre bush has wrapped yellow tendrils around my arms and legs … some crawling bugs are already drinking the blood caused by the thorns … and there is an opening in the bush, toward which I am slowly being pulled, that looks like a distant cousin of some of the more unpleasant mouths I have seen in zoos. I can even see some teeth."