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

When Richard and I were lying alone on our mat, we held hands and talked for over an hour. At one point I told him that I hoped this coming maneuver signaled the beginning of the end of our journey in Rama.

“Hope springs eternal in the human breast./ Man never is, but always to be blessed,” he replied. He sat up for a moment and looked at me, his eyes twinkling in the near darkness. “Alexander Pope,” he said. Then he laughed. “I bet he never thought he would be quoted sixty trillion kilometers away from Earth.”

“You seem better, darling,” I said, stroking his arm.

His brow furrowed. “Right now everything seems clear. But I don’t know when the fog will descend again. It could be any minute. And I still cannot remember more than the barest outline of what happened during the three years that I was gone.”

He lay back down. “What do you think will happen?” I asked.

“I’m guessing we’ll have a maneuver,” he replied. “And I hope it’s a big one. We are approaching Sinus very quickly and will need to slow down considerably if our target is anywhere in the Sinus system.” He reached over and took my hand. “For you,” he said, “and especially for the children, I hope this is not a false alarm.”

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8 July 2213

The maneuver began four days ago, right on schedule, as soon as the third and final light show was finished. We didn’t see or hear any avians or octospiders, as we haven’t for four years now. Katie was very disappointed. She wanted to see the octospiders all return to New York.

Yesterday a pair of the mantis biots came into our lair and went straight to the deceleration tank. They were carrying a large container, in which were the five new webbed beds (Simone, of course, needs a different size now) and all the helmets. We watched them from a distance while they installed the beds and checked out the tank system. The children were fascinated. The short visit from the mantises confirmed that we will soon be undergoing a major change in velocity.

Richard was apparently correct with his hypothesis about the connection between the main propulsion system and the overall thermal control of Rama. The temperature has already started to drop topside. In anticipation of a long maneuver, we have been busy using the keyboard to order cold-weather clothing for all the children.

The constant shaking is again disrupting our lives. At first it was amusing for the children, but they are already complaining about it. For myself, I am hoping that we are now near our ultimate destination. Although Michael has been praying “God’s will be done,” my few prayers have definitely been more selfish and specific.

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Something new is definitely happening. For the last ten days, ever since we finished in the tank and the maneuver ended, we have been approaching a solitary light source situated about thirty astronomical units away from the star Sirius. Richard has ingeniously manipulated the sensor list and the black screen so that this source is dead center on our monitor at all times, regardless of which particular Raman telescope is observing it.

Two nights ago we began to see some definition in the

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object. We speculated that perhaps it was an inhabited planet and Richard rushed around computing the heat input from Sirius on a planet whose distance was roughly equal to Neptune’s distance from our Sun. Even though Sirius is much larger, brighter, and hotter than the Sun, Richard concluded that our paradise, if this was indeed our destination, was still going to be very cold.

Last night we could see our target more clearly. It is an elongated construction (Richard says it therefore cannot be a planet—anything “that size” that is decidedly non-spherical “must be artificial”), shaped like a cigar, with two rows of lights along the top and bottom. Because we don’t know exactly how far away it is, we don’t know its size for certain. However, Richard has been making some “guesstimates,” based on our closing velocity, and he thinks the cigar is roughly a hundred and fifty kilometers long and fifty kilometers tall.

The entire family sits in our main room and stares at the monitor. This morning we had another surprise. Katie showed us that there were two other vehicles in the vicinity of our target. Richard had taught her last week how to change the Raman sensors providing input to the black screen and, while the rest of us were talking, she accessed the distant radar sensor that we had first used thirteen years ago to identify the nuclear missiles coming from Earth. The cigar-shaped object appeared at the edge of the radar field of view. Standing right hi front of the cigar, almost indistinguishable from it in the wide field, were the two other blips. If the giant cigar is indeed our destination, then perhaps we are about to have company.

8 September 2213

There is no way I can adequately describe the astounding events of the last five days. The language does not have adjectives superlative enough to capture what we have seen and experienced. Michael has even commented that heaven may pale by comparison beside the wonders that we have witnessed.

At this moment our family is onboard a driverless small

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shuttle craft, no larger than a city bus on Earth, that is whizzing us from the way station to an unknown destination. The cigar-shaped way station is still visible, but just barely, out the domed window at the rear of the craft. To our left, our home for thirteen years, the cylindrical spaceship we call Rama, is headed in a slightly different direction than we are. It departed from the way station a few hours after we did, lit like a Christmas tree on the outside, and we are presently separated from it by about two hundred kilometers.

Four days and eleven hours ago our Rama spacecraft came to a stop relative to the way station. We were the third vehicle in an amazing queue. In front of us was a spinning starfish about one tenth the size of Rama and a giant wheel, with a hub and spokes, that entered the way station within hours after we stopped.

The way station itself turned out to be hollow. When the giant wheel moved into the center of the way station, gantries and other deployable elements rolled out to meet the wheel and fix it in place. A suite of special vehicles in three unusual shapes (one looked like a balloon, another like a blimp, and the third resembled a bathysphere on Earth) then entered the wheel from the way station. Although we couldn’t see what was going on inside the wheel, we did see the special vehicles emerge, one by one, at odd intervals over the next two days. Each vehicle was met by a shuttle, like the one in which we are now flying but larger in size. These shuttles had all been parked in the dark in the right-hand side of the way station and had been moved into place thirty minutes or so before the rendezvous.

As soon as the shuttles were loaded, they always took off in a direction directly opposite our queue. About an hour after the final vehicle had emerged from the wheel and the last shuttle had departed, the many pieces of mechanical equipment attached to the wheel were retracted and the great circular spacecraft itself eased out of the way station.

The starfish in front of us had already entered the way station and was being handled by another set of gantries and attachments when a loud whistle summoned us topside

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in Rama. The whistle was followed by a light show in the southern bowl. However, this display was completely different from the ones that we had seen before. The Big Horn was the star of the new show. Circular rings of color formed near its tip and then sailed slowly north, centered along the spin axis of Rama. The rings were huge. Richard estimated they were at least a kilometer in diameter, with a ring thickness of forty meters.

The dark Raman night was illuminated by as many as eight of these rings at a time. The order remained the same—red, orange, yellow, green, blue, brown, pink, and purple—for three repetitions. As a ring would break up and disappear near the Alpha relay station at the northern bowl of Rama, a new ring of the same color would form back near the tip of the Big Horn.

We stood transfixed, our mouths agape, as this spectacle took place. As soon as the last ring disappeared from the third set, another astonishing event occurred. All the lights came on inside Rama! The Raman night had only begun three hours earlier—for thirteen years the sequence of night and day had been completely regular. Now, all of a sudden, it was changed. And it wasn’t just the lights. There was music as well; at least I guess you could call it music. It sounded like millions of tiny bells and it seemed to be coming from everywhere.