Rama 3 – The Garden of Rama by Clarke, Arthur C.

Richard slept in a small room not far from the mural chamber. His lessons lasted three to four hours each, after which he would be fed or allowed to sleep. Sometimes, when he entered the chamber, Richard would glance over at the paintings, some still incomplete, in the second half of the mural. If that happened, the lights in the chamber

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would immediately be extinguished. The myrmicats wanted to be certain that Richard learned his biology first.

After about ten days the second half of the mural was finished. Richard was stunned when he was finally allowed to study it. The renderings of the many human beings and avians were exceptionally accurate. Richard himself appeared half a dozen times in the paintings. With his long hair and beard, both of them more than half white, he almost didn’t recognize himself. / could pass for Christ in these pictures, he joked as he wandered around the chamber.

Part of the remaining mural was a historical summary of the invasion of the alien habitat by the humans. There was more detail than Richard had seen in his mental picture show while he was inside the sessile, but he did not learn anything substantively new. He was, however, again disturbed emotionally by the horrible details of the continuing massacre.

The pictures also triggered an interesting question in his mind. Why had the contents of this mural not been transferred directly to him by the sessile, thereby obviating the entire effort by the myrmicat artists? Perhaps, Richard mused, the sessile is a recording device only, and is incapable of imagination. Maybe it can only show me what has already been seen by one of the myrmicats.

What was left of the mural explicitly defined what the myrmicat/sessile creatures were asking Richard to do. In each of his portraits he was wearing a large blue pack over his shoulders. The pack had two large pockets in the front, and two more in the back, each containing a manna melon. There were two additional, smaller pockets on the sides of the pack. One was stuffed with a silver cylindrical tube about fifteen centimeters long and the other contained two small, leathery avian eggs.

The mural showed Richard’s suggested activity in an orderly sequence. He would leave the brown cylinder through an exit below the ground level, and come out in the green region on the other side of both the ring of white buildings and the thin canal. There, guided by a pair of avians, he would descend to .the shore of the moat, where he would be picked up by a small submarine. The subma-

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rine would dive under the module wall, enter a large body of water, and then surface on the shore of an island with many skyscrapers.

Richard smiled as he studied the mural. So both the Cylindrical Sea and New York are still here, he thought. He remembered what the Eagle had said about not making unnecessary changes to Rama. That means our lair may be there as well.

There were many additional pictures surrounding’Richard’s escape sequence, some giving more details about the alien plants and animals in the green region, and others providing explicit instructions on how to operate the submarine. When Richard tried to copy what he thought was the most important of this information into his portable computer from the Newton, the myrmicat teacher suddenly seemed impatient. Richard wondered if the crisis situation had worsened.

The next day, after a long nap, Richard was outfitted with his pack and ushered into the sessile chamber by his hosts. There the four manna melons he had watched growing two weeks previous were removed from the web by the myrmicats and placed in his pack. They were quite heavy. Richard estimated that they weighed twenty kilograms altogether. Another myrmicat then used an instrument similar to a large scissors to remove from the sessile a cylindrical volume containing four ganglia and their associated filaments. This sessile material was placed in a silver tube and inserted in one of Richard’s smaller side pockets. The avian eggs were the last elements to be loaded.

Richard took a deep breath. This must be good-tye, he thought as the myrmicats pointed down the corridor. For some reason he remembered Nai Watanabe’s insistence that the Thai greeting called the wai, a small bow with hands clasped together in front of the upper chest, was a universal sign of respect. Smiling to himself, Richard performed a wai to the half dozen myrmicats surrounding him. To his astonishment, each of them placed its four forward legs together in pairs in front of its underbelly and made a slight bow in his direction.

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The deep basement of the brown cylinder was obviously uninhabited. After leaving the sessile chamber, Richard and his guide had first passed many other myrmicats, especially in the vicinity of the atrium. But once they had entered the ramp that descended to the basement, they had never encountered even a single myrmicat.

Richard’s guide dispatched a leggie in front of them. It raced along the final narrow tunnel and through the vault-like emergency exit into the green region. When the leggie returned, it stood on the back of the myrmicat’s head for several seconds and then scampered down to the floor. The guide motioned for Richard to proceed into the tunnel.

Outside, in the green region, Richard was met by two large avians who immediately became airborne. One of them had an ugly scar on its wing, as if it had been hit by a spray of bullets. Richard was in a moderately dense forest, with growth around him up to three or four meters off the ground. Even though the light was dim, it was not difficult for Richard to find a pathway or to follow the avians above him. Occasionally he heard sporadic gunfire off in the distance.

The first fifteen minutes passed without incident. The forest thickness lessened. Richard had just estimated that he should be at the moat for the rendezvous with the submarine in another ten minutes when, without any warn- * ing, a machine gun began to fire no more than a hundred meters away. One of the guide avians crashed to the ground. The other avian disappeared. Richard hid himself in a dark thicket when he heard the soldiers coming in his direction.

“Two rings for certain,” one of them said. “Maybe even three. That would give me twenty rings this week alone.”

“Shit, man, that was no contest. It shouldn’t even count. The damn bird didn’t even know you were there.”

“That’s his problem, not mine. I still get to count his rings. Ah, here he is. … Crap, he only has two.”

The men were only about fifteen meters away from Richard. He stood absolutely still, not daring to move, for

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more than five minutes. The soldiers, meanwhile, stayed in the vicinity of the avian corpse, smoking and talking about the war.

Richard began to feel pain in his right foot. He shifted his weight ever so slightly, thinking he would relieve whatever muscle was being strained, but the pain only increased. At length he glanced down and discovered to his horror that one of the rodentlike creatures he had seen in the mural chamber had eaten through what was left of his shoe and was now chomping on his foot. Richard tried to shake his leg vigorously but noiselessly. He was not completely successful. Although the rodent released his foot, the soldiers heard the sound and started moving toward him.

Richard could not run. Even if there had been an escape route, the extra weight he was carrying would have made him easy prey for the soldiers. Within a minute one of the men yelled, “Over here, Bruce, I think there’s something in this thicket.”

The man was pointing his gun in Richard’s direction. “Don’t shoot,” Richard said. “I’m a human.”

The second soldier had just joined his comrade. “What the fuck are you doing out here alone?”

“I’m taking a hike,” Richard answered.

“Are you crazy?” the first soldier said. “Come on out of there. Let us take a look at you.”

Richard slowly walked out of the underbrush. Even in the dim light he must have been an astonishing sight with his long hair and beard plus the bulging blue jacket.

“Jesus Christ. Who the hell are you? Where’s your outfit positioned?”

“This ain’t no goddamn soldier,” the other man said, still staring at Richard. “This here’s a loony tune. He must have escaped from the facility in Avalon and wandered over here by mistake. . . . Hey, asshole, don’t you know this is dangerous territory? You could be killed—”

“Look at his pockets,” the first soldier interrupted. “He’s carrying four huge goddamn melons—”

Suddenly they struck from the sky. There must have been a dozen of the avians altogether, consumed by fury and shrieking as they attacked. The two human soldiers