Rama 2 by Arthur C. Clarke and Gentry Lee

Richard had not been listening carefully to Nicole. He had been fiddling with the keys and surveying the collection of objects in the room. “Now what do all these things have in common?” he said, mostly to himself.

They both arrived at the same answer several seconds later. “They were all carried by the Norton crew,” Richard and Nicole said in unison.

“So the two Rama space vehicles must have some kind of communication linkup/’ Richard said.

“And these objects have been planted here on purpose, to show us that the visit to Rama I was observed and recorded.”

“The spider biots that inspected the Norton campsites and the equipment must have contained imaging sensors.”

“And all of these things were fabricated from pictures transmitted from Rama I to Rama II.”

After Nicole’s last comment both of them were silent, each following his own thought pattern. “But why do they want us to know all this? What is it we’re supposed to do now?” Richard stood up and began to pace around the room. Suddenly he started laughing. “Wouldn’t it be amazing,” he said, “if David Brown was right after all, if the Ramans really were completely disin­terested in anything they found, but programmed their space vehicles to act interested in any visitors? They could flatter whatever species they encoun­tered by making midcourse corrections and by fashioning simple objects. What an incredible irony. Since all immature species are probably hopelessly self-centered, the visitors to the Raman craft would be totally occupied try­ing to understand an assumed message—”

“I think you’re getting carried away,” Nicole interrupted. “All we know at this point is that this spacecraft apparently received pictures from Rama I, and that reproductions of small, everyday objects that were carried by the Norton crew have been placed here in this room for us to find.”

“I wonder if the keyboard is as useless as everything else/’ Richard said as he picked it up. He spelled the word “Rama” with the keys. Nothing hap­pened. He tried “Nicole.” Still nothing.

“Don’t you remember how the old models worked?” Nicole said with a grin. She took the keyboard. “They all had a separate power key.” She pressed the unmarked button in the upper right-hand comer of the key­board. A portion of the opposite wall slid away, revealing a large black square area about one meter on a side.

The small keyboard was based on the ones that had been attached to the portable computers on the first Rama mission. It had four rows of twelve characters, with an extra power button in the upper right-hand corner. The twenty-six Latin letters, ten Arabic numerals, and four mathematical oper­ands were marked on forty of the individual keys. The other eight keys contained either dots or geometrical figures on their surfaces and, in addi­tion, could be set in either an “up” or “down” position. Richard and Nicole quickly learned that these special keys were the true controls of the Raman system. By trial and error they also discovered that the result from striking any individual action key was a function of the positioning of the other seven keys. Thus, pressing any specific command key could produce as many as 128 different results. Altogether, then, the system provided for 1,024 separate actions that could be initiated from the keyboard.

Making a command dictionary was a laborious process. Richard volun­teered for the duty. Using their own computers to keep notes, he began the process of developing the rudiments of a language to translate the special keyboard commands. The initial goal was simple—to be able to use the Raman computer like one of their own. Once the translation was developed, any given input into the Newton portable computers would contain, as part of its output, what set of key impressions on the Raman board would pro­duce a similar response on the square black screen.

Even with Richard’s intelligence and computer expertise, the task was a formidable one. It was also not something that could easily be shared. At Richard’s suggestion, Nicole climbed out of the lair twice during the first Raman day they were in the White Room. Both times she took long walks around New York, casting her eyes to the sky from time to time to look for a helicopter. On the second excursion Nicole went back to the barn where she had fallen in the pit. Already so much had happened that her frightening experience at the bottom seemed like ancient history.

She thought often about Borzov, Wilson, and Takagishi. All the cosmo­nauts had known when they left the Earth that there were uncertainties in the mission. They had trained often to handle vehicle emergencies, problems with their own spacecraft that might prove to be life threatening … but none of them had actually believed that there would be any fatalities on the mission. // Richard and I perish here in New York, Nicole remarked to her­self, then almost half the crew will have died. That will be the worst disaster since we started flying piloted missions again.

She was standing outside the bam, in almost the exact spot where she and Francesca had talked to Richard on the communicator the last time. So why did you lie, Francesca? Nicole wondered. Did you think somehow my disap­pearance would silence all suspicion?

On the final morning at the Beta campsite, before she and the others had set out to look for Takagishi, Nicole had transmitted all the notes in her own portable computer in Rama through the networking system to the desktop in her room on the Newton. At the time Nicole had made the data transfer to give herself extra memory, if she should need it, in her traveling computer. But it’s all there, she recalled, if some diligent detective ever looks for it The drugs, Jason’s blood pressure, even a cryptic reference to the abortion. And of course Richard’s solution to the RoSur malfunction.

On her two walks Nicole saw several centipede biots, and even a bulldozer once, at the far limit of her vision. She didn’t see any avians and neither heard nor saw an octospider. Maybe they only come out at night, she mused as she returned to have dinner with Richard.

49 INTERACTION

We’re almost out of food,” Nicole said. They packed up what re­mained of the manna melon and stuffed it in Richard’s backpack.

“I know,” he replied. “I have a plan for you to obtain some more.”

“Me?” asked Nicole. “Why is it my job?”

“Well, first of all, it only requires one person. Working with graphics on the Raman computer gave me the idea. Second, I can’t spare the time. I think I’m on the verge of breaking into the operating system. There are about two hundred commands that I can’t explain unless they allow entry into another level, some kind of higher order space in the hierarchy.”

Richard had explained to Nicole during dinner that he had now figured out how to use the Raman computer like one on the Earth. He could store and retrieve data, perform mathematical computations, design graphics, even create new languages. “But I haven’t begun to tap its potential,” he had said. “Tonight and tomorrow I must discover more of its secrets. We’re running out of time.”

His plan for obtaining food was, indeed, deceptively simple. After the long Raman night (during which Richard could not have slept more than three hours), Nicole walked over to the central plaza to implement the plan. Based on his progressive matrix analysis, Richard gave her three possible locations for the panel to open the covering above the avian lair. He was so confident of his analysis that he wouldn’t even discuss what she should do if she didn’t find the plate. Richard was correct. Nicole found the panel easily. Then she opened the cover and shouted down the vertical corridor. There was no response.

She shone her flashlight into the darkness below her. The tank sentinel was on duty, going to and fro in front of the horizontal tunnel that led past the water room. Nicole shouted again. If she could avoid it, she did not want to descend even to the first ledge. Even though Richard had assured her he would come to her rescue if she was overdue, Nicole did not relish the prospect of being hemmed in with the avians again.

Was that a distant jabbering she heard? Nicole thought so. She took one of the coins that she had found in the White Room and dropped it into the vertical corridor. It sailed far down, hitting a ledge somewhere near the second main level. This time there was loud jabbering. One of the avians flew up into her flashlight beam and over the tank sentinel’s head. Moments later the cover began to close and Nicole had to move away.

She had discussed this contingency with Richard. Nicole waited several minutes and then pushed the panel again. When she yelled into the depths of the avian lair the second time, there was an immediate response. This time her friend, the black velvet avian, flew up to within five meters of the surface and jabbered at her. It was clear to Nicole that she was being told to go away. Before the avian turned around, however, Nicole pulled out her computer monitor and activated a stored program. Two manna melons ap­peared on the screen in graphic depiction. As the avian watched, the melons became colored and then a neat incision displayed the texture and color inside one of them.