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

“What do you mean?” he replied.

“Why here, why in the Sirius system, instead of some other place?”

The Eagle laughed. “This location is only temporary,” he said. “We’ll be moving again as soon as Rama departs.”

Richard was puzzled. “You mean the entire Node moves!” He turned around and glanced back at the triangle glowing faintly in the distance. “Where is the propulsion system?”

“There are small propulsion capabilities in each of the modules, but they are only used in case of an emergency. Transport between temporary holding sites is accomplished by what you would call tugs—they affix themselves to ports on the sides of the spheres and provide virtually all the trajectory change velocity.”

Nicole thought about Michael and Simone and became worried. “Where will the Node go?” she asked.

“It’s probably not specified exactly yeC’ the Eagle answered vaguely. “It’s always a stochastic function anyway, depending on how the various activities are proceeding.” He continued after a short silence. “When our work in a specific place is finished, the entire configu-

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ration — Node, Hangar, and Way Station — are moved to another region of interest.”

Richard and Nicole stared silently at each other in the backseat. They were having difficulty grasping the magnitude of what the Eagle was telling them. The entire Node moved\ It was too much to believe. Richard decided to change the subject.

“What is your definition of a spacefaring species?” he asked the Eagle.

“One that has ventured, either on its own or through its robot surrogates, outside the sensible atmosphere of its home planet. If its own planet has no atmosphere, or if the species has no home planet at all, then the definition is more complicated.”

“You mean there are intelligent creatures that have evolved in a vacuum? How can that be possible?”

“You’re an atmospheric chauvinist,” the Eagle replied. “Like all creatures, you limit the ways that life might express itself to environments similar to your own.”

“How many spacefaring species are there in our galaxy?” Richard asked a little later.

“That’s one of the objectives of our project — to answer that question exactly. Remember, there are more man a hundred billion stars in the Milky Way. Slightly more than a quarter of them have planetary systems surrounding them. If only one out of every million stars with planets was home to a spacefaring species, then there would still be twenty-five thousand spacefarers in our galaxy alone.”

The Eagle turned around and looked at Richard and Nicole. “The estimated number of spacefarers in the galaxy, as well as the spacefarer density in any specified zone, is Level III information. But I can tell you one thing. There are Life Dense Zones in the galaxy where the average number of spacefarers is greater than one per thousand stars.”

Richard whistled. “This is staggering stuff,” he said to Nicole excitedly. “It means that the local evolutionary miracle that produced us is a common paradigm in the universe. We are unique, to be sure, for nowhere else would the process that produced us have been duplicated exactly. But the characteristic that is truly special about

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our species—namely our ability to model our world and understand both it and where we fit into its overall scheme—that capability must belong to thousands of creatures! For without that ability they could not have become spacefarers.”

Nicole was overwhelmed. She recalled a similar moment, years before when she was with Richard in the photograph room of the octospider lair in Rama, when she had struggled to grasp the immensity of the universe in terms of total information content. Again now she realized that the entire set of knowledge in the human domain, everything that any member of the human species had ever learned or experienced, was no more than a single grain of sand on the great beach representing everything that had ever been known by all the sentient creatures of the universe.

5

T!

•heir shuttle stopped several hundred kilometers from the Hangar. The facility had a strange shape, completely flat on the bottom but with rounded sides and top. The three factories in the Hangar—one at each end and another in the middle—each looked from the outside like geodesic domes. They rose sixty or seventy kilometers above the bottom of the structure. Between these factories the roof was much lower, only eight or ten kilometers above the flat plane, so the overall appearance of the top of the Hangar was what might have been expected from the back of a three-humped camel, if such a creature had ever existed.

The Eagle, Nicole, and Richard had stopped to watch a starfish craft which, according to the Eagle, had been reconditioned and was now ready for its next voyage. The starfish had come out of the left hump. Although small compared to either the Hangar or Rama, the starfish was still almost ten kilometers from its center to die end of a ray. It had begun to spin as soon as it was free of the Hangar. As the shuttle remained “parked” some fifteen

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kilometers away, the starfish increased its spin rate to ten revolutions per minute. Once its spin rate was stabilized, the starfish zoomed away to the left.

“That leaves only Rama out of this set,” the Eagle said. “The giant wheel, which was first in your queue at the Way Station, left four months ago. It required only minimal refurbishing.”

Richard wanted to ask a question, but he restrained himself. He had already learned during the flight from the Node that the Eagle voluntarily gave them virtually all the information he was allowed to share. “Rama has been quite a challenge,” the Eagle continued. “And we’re still not certain exactly when we will finish.”

The shuttle approached the right dome of the Hangar and lights began to shine at the five o’clock position on the dome’s face. Upon closer inspection Richard and Nicole could see that some small doors had opened. “You’ll need your suits,” the Eagle said. “It would have been a major engineering feat to have designed this huge place with a variable environment.”

Nicole and Richard dressed while the shuttle docked in a berth very similar to the one at their transportation center. “Can you hear me all right?” the Eagle said, testing the communication system.

“Roger,” Richard replied from inside his’helmet. He and Nicole glanced at each other and laughed as they remembered their days as Newton cosmonauts.

The Eagle led them down a long, wide corridor. At the end they turned right through a door and came out on a broad balcony ten kilometers above a factory floor larger than anyone could possibly imagine. Nicole felt her knees weaken as she stared into the giant abyss. Despite the weightlessness, waves of vertigo swept through both Richard and Nicole. They both turned away at the same moment. They focused their eyes on each other while they tried to comprehend what they had just seen.

“It’s quite a sight,” the Eagle commented.

What a colossal understatement, Nicole thought. She very slowly lowered her eyes again to the awesome spectacle. This time she held on to the rail with both hands to help her equilibrium.

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The factory below them contained the entire Northern Hemicylinder of Rama, from the port end where they had docked the Newton andtentered, down to the end of the Central Plain at the banks of die Cylindrical Sea. There was no sea, and no Raman city of New York, but there was almost as much real estate in this one enclosed factory as in the entire American state of Rhode Island.

The crater and bowl of the north end of Rama were still completely intact, including the outer shell. These ‘segments of Rama were positioned to the right of Richard, Nicole, and the Eagle, almost behind them as they stood on the platform. Mounted in front of them on the railings were a dozen telescopes, each with a different resolution, through which the three of them could see the familiar ladders and stairways, resembling three ribs of an umbrella, that took thirty thousand steps to descend (or ascend) to the Central Plain of Rama.

The rest of the Northern Hemicylinder was split open and lying beneath them in parts, not directly connected to the bowl or to each other, but nevertheless lying with adjacent sectors in the proper alignment. Each part was roughly six to eight square kilometers and its edges rose, due to the curvature, substantially off the floor.

“It’s easier to do the early work in this configuration,” the Eagle explained. “Once we’ve closed the cylinder it’s harder to get in and out with all the equipment.”

Through the telescopes Richard and Nicole could see that two different areas of the Central Plain were teeming with activity. They could not begin to count the number of robots going to and fro on the floor of the factory below them. Nor could they determine exactly what was being done in many cases. It was engineering on a scale never dreamed of by humans.