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

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were knocked to the ground. Richard started to run. One of the avians landed on the face of the first soldier and began to tear it apart with its talons. Gunfire erupted as other soldiers in the vicinity, hearing the fracas, hurried into the area to help the patrol.

Richard did not know how he was going to find the submarine. He raced downhill as fast as his feet and his load would allow him. The gunfire behind him increased. He heard the screams of pain of the soldiers and the death shrieks of the avians.

He found the moat but there was no sign of the submarine. Richard could hear human voices coming down the slope behind him. Just when he was about to panic, he heard a short shriek from a large bush on his right. The leader avian with the four cobalt rings flew past his head, not far off the ground, and continued down the shore of the moat to the left.

They located the small submarine in three more minutes. The ship had already submerged before the pursuing humans broke into the clear in the green region. Inside, Richard took off his pack and placed it behind him in the small control compartment. He looked at his avian companion and tried a couple of simple jabber phrases. The avian leader replied, very slowly and very clearly, with the jabber equivalent of “We all thank you very much.”

The journey took slightly more than an hour. Richard and the avian said very little to each other. During the early part of the voyage, Richard carefully watched the avian leader operating the submarine. He made notes in his computer and, during the second half of the trip, even took over the controls himself for a short period of time. When he was not too busy, Richard’s mind was asking questions about everything he had experienced in the second habitat. Above all, he wanted to know why it was he in the submarine with the melons, the avian eggs, and the sessile slice, and not one of the myrmicats. / must be missing something, he mused to himself.

Soon thereafter the submarine surfaced and Richard was in familiar territory. The skyscrapers of New York loomed

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above him. “Hallelujah,” Richard said out loud, carrying his full pack onto the island.

The avian leader anchored the submarine just offshore and quickly prepared to leave. He turned around in a circle, bowed slightly to Richard, and then took off toward the north. As he was watching the birdlike creature fly away, Richard realized that he was standing in the exact spot where he and Nicole had waited, many many years before in Rama II, for the three avians who would-carry them across the Cylindrical Sea to freedom.

7

D:

Iuring the first second that Richard stood on the surface in New York, a hundred billion billion bits of data were acquired by the infinitesimal Raman sensors scattered throughout the giant cylindrical spacecraft. These data were transmitted in realtime to local data-handling centers, still microscopic in size, where they were stored until the allocated time for them to be relayed to the central telecommunications processor buried beneath the Southern Hemicylinder.

Every second of every hour of every day the Raman sensors acquire these hundred quintillion data bits. At the telecommunications processor, the data are labeled, sifted, analyzed, compressed, and stored in recording devices whose individual components are smaller than an atom. After storage, the data are accessed by the dozens of distributed processors, each managing a separate function, that together control the Rama spacecraft. Thousands of algorithms spread among the processors then operate on the data, extracting trend and synthesis information in preparation for the regularly scheduled

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data bursts that transmit the mission status to the Nodal Intelligence.

The data bursts contain a mixture of raw, compressed, and synthesized data, depending on the exact formats selected by the different processors. The most important part of each burst is the narrative report, in which the unified but distributed intelligence of Rama presents its prioritized summary of the progress of the mission. The rest of the burst is essentially supporting information, images pr measurements or sensor outputs that either provide additional background data or directly support the conclusions contained in the summary.

The language used for the narrative summary is mathematical in structure, precise in definition, and highly coded. It is also rich in footnotes, each equivalent phrase or sentence containing, as part of its transmission structure, the pointers to the actual data buttressing the particular statement being made. The report could not, in the truest sense, be translated into any language as primitive as the ones used by human beings. Nevertheless, what follows is a crude approximation of the summary report received by the Nodal Intelligence from Rama soon after Richard’s arrival in New York.

REPORT #298

Time of Transmission: 156 307 872 491.5116 Time Since First-Stage Alert: 29.2873 References: Node 23-419 Spacecraft 947 Spacefarers 47 249 (A & B) 32 806 2666

During the last interval the humans (Spacefarer #32 806) have continued to wage a successful war against the avian/sessile symbiotic pair (#47 249—A & B). The humans now control almost all the interior of the avian/sessile habitat, including the upper portion of the brown cylinder where the avians formerly lived. The avians have fought courageously but vainly against the human

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invasion. They have been killed unmercifully, and less than a hundred of them now remain.

Thus far the humans have not breached the integrity of the sessile domain. They have, however, found the elevator shafts leading to the lower parts of the brown cylinder. The humans are currently developing plans for an attack on the sessile lair.

The sessiles are a defenseless species. There are no weapons of any kind in their domain. Even their mobile form, which has the physical dexterity to use weapons, is essentially nonviolent. To protect themselves from what they fear will be an inevitable invasion by the humans, the sessiles have directed the mobile mvrmicats to build fortresses surrounding the four oldest and most developed of their species. Meanwhile, no more manna melons are being allowed to germinate and those myr-micats not involved in the construction process are co-cooning early. If the humans delay their attack several more intervals, as seems likely, it is possible they will encounter only a few myrmicats during their invasion.

The human habitat continues to be dominated by individuals with characteristics decidedly different from the human contingent observed inside Rama n and at the Node. The focus of the current human leaders is the retention of personal power, without serious consideration of the welfare of the colony. Despite both the video message and the presence of messenger humans in their group, these leaders must not believe they are actually being watched, for their behavior in no way reflects the possible existence of a set of values or ethical laws that supersedes their own dominion.

The humans have continued to prosecute the war against the avian/sessiles primarily because it distracts attention from the other problems in their colony, including the human-initiated environmental degradation and the recent precipitous decline in living standards. The human leaders, and indeed most of the colonists, have shown no remorse whatsoever over the destruction and possible extermination of the avians.

The human family that remained for over a year at the Node no longer has any significant impact on the

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affairs of the colony. The woman who was the primary messenger is still imprisoned, essentially because she opposes the actions of the existing leaders, and is in danger of being executed. Her husband has been living with the avians and sessiles and is now a critical component in their attempt to survive the human onslaught. The children are not yet mature enough to be a major factor in the human colony.

Very recently, the husband escaped from the sessile domain to the island in the middle of the spacecraft. He carried both avian and sessile embryos with him. He is currently located in a familiar environment, and therefore should be able both to survive and to nurture the young of the other species. His successful escape may have been at least partly due to the noninvasive intercession that began at the time of the first-stage alert. The intercession signals almost certainly played a role in the decision by the sessiles to trust their embryos to a human being.

There is no evidence, however, that the intercession transmissions have affected the behavior of any of the humans. For the sessiles, information processing is a primary activity and, therefore, it is not surprising that they would be susceptible to intercessionary suggestions. The humans, however, especially the leaders, have their lives so filled with activity that there is very little, if any, time for cogitation.