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

All this rapid velocity change, according to Richard, is speeding our escape from the Sun. If the current maneuver remains consistent in both magnitude and direction, and continues for as long as a month, we will then be traveling at half the speed of light with respect to our solar system.

“Where are we going?” Michael asked yesterday.

“It’s still too early to tell,” Richard responded. “All we know is that we’re blasting away at a fantastic rate.”

The temperature and density of the liquid inside the tank have been carefully adjusted each period until they are now exactly equal to ours. As a result, when I lie there in the dark, I can feel nothing at all except a barely perceptible downward force. My mind always tells me that I am inside an acceleration tank, surrounded by some kind of fluid cushioning my body against the powerful force, but the absence of sensation eventually causes me to lose my sense of body altogether. That’s when the hallucinations begin. It’s almost as if some normal sensory input to the brain is necessary to keep me properly functioning. If no sounds, no sights, no tastes, no smells, and no pain reach my brain, then its activity becomes unregulated.

I tried to discuss this phenomenon with Richard two days ago, but he just looked at me as if I were crazy. He has had no hallucinations. He spends his time in the “twilight zone” (his name for the period of no sensory input prior to deep sleep) doing mathematical calculations, conjuring up a wide variety of maps of the Earth, or even reliving his most outstanding sexual moments. He definitely manages his brain, even in the absence of sensory

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input. That is why we are so different. My mind wants to find a direction of its own when it is not being used for chores such as processing the billions of pieces of data coming from all the other cells in my body.

The hallucinations usually begin with a colored speck of red or green that appears in the total dark surrounding me. As the speck enlarges, it is joined by other colors, often yellow, blue, and purple. Each of the colors rapidly forms into its own irregular pattern and spreads across my vision screen. What I am seeing becomes a kaleidoscope of bright colors. The movement in the field accelerates until hundreds of strips and splotches fuse into one raging explosion.

In the middle of this riot of color a coherent image always forms. At first I cannot tell exactly what it is, for the figure or figures are very small, as if they are far, far away. As the image moves closer, it changes colors several times, adding both to the surreal overtone of the vision and to my inner sense of dread. More than half the time the image that eventually resolves itself contains my mother, or some animal like a cheetah or a lioness that I intuitively recognize as my mother in disguise. As long as I just watch, and make no volitional attempt to interact with my mother, she remains a character in the changing image. However, if I try to contact Mother in any way, she, or the animal representing her, immediately disappears, leaving me with an overwhelming feeling of having been abandoned.

During one of my recent hallucinations the waves of color broke into geometric patterns and these in turn changed to human silhouettes marching single file across my field of view. Omen was leading the procession in a bright green robe. The two figures at the rear of the group were both women, the heroines of my adolescence, Joan of Arc and Eleanor of Aquitaine. When I first heard their voices the procession dissolved and the scene instantly shifted. Suddenly I was in a small rowboat in the early morning fog on the small duck pond near our villa at Beauvois. I shivered with fear and began to weep uncontrollably. Joan and Eleanor appeared in the fog and mist

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to assure me that my father was not going to marry Helena, the English duchess with whom he had gone to Turkey on a vacation.

Another night the overture of color was followed by a bizarre theatrical performance somewhere in Japan. There were only two characters in the hallucinatory play, both of whom were wearing brilliant, expressive masks. The man who was dressed in the Western suit and tie recited poetry and had magnificently clear, open eyes that could be seen through his friendly mask. The other man looked like a seventeenth century samurai warrior. His mask was a perpetual scowl. He began to threaten both me and his more modern colleague. I screamed at the end of this hallucination because the two men met in the middle of the stage and merged into a single character.

Some of my most powerful hallucinatory images have only lasted for a few seconds. On the second or third night, a naked Prince Henry, engorged with desire, his body a vibrant purple in color, appeared for two or three seconds in the middle of another vision in which I was riding on a giant green octospider.

During yesterday’s sleep period there were no colors for hours. Then, as I became aware of being incredibly hungry, a giant pink manna melon appeared in the darkness. When I attempted to eat the melon in my vision, it grew legs and scampered away, disappearing into unresolved colors.

Does any of this mean anything at all? Can I learn something about myself or my life from these apparently random outpourings of my undirected mind?

The debate about the significance of dreams has raged now for almost three centuries and is still unresolved. These hallucinations of mine, it seems to me, are even more removed from reality than normal dreams. In a sense they are distant cousins of the two psychedelic trips that I took earlier in my life, and any attempt to interpret them logically would be absurd. However, for some reason I still believe some fundamental truths are contained in these wild and seemingly unconnected rampagings of my mind. Maybe that’s because I cannot accept that the human brain ever operates in a purely random manner.

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Yesterday the floor finally stopped shaking. Richard had predicted it. When we didn’t go back into the tank two days ago at the customary time, Richard correctly conjectured that the maneuver was almost over.

So we enter still another phase of our incredible odys-sey. My husband informs us that we are now traveling at a velocity of more than half the speed of light. That means we are covering the Earth-Moon distance approximately every two seconds. We are headed, more or less, in the direction of the star Sirius, the brightest true star in the night sky of our home planet. If there are no more maneuvers, we will arrive in the vicinity of Sirius in another twelve years.

I am relieved that our life may now return to some kind of local equilibrium. Simone seems to have weathered the long periods in the tank without any noticeable difficulties, but I can’t believe that such an experience will leave an infant totally unscathed. It is important for her that we now reestablish a daily routine.

In my moments alone I still think often about those vivid hallucinations during the first ten days in the tank. I must admit that I was delighted when I finally endured several “twilight zones” of total sensory deprivation without the wild, colored patterns and disjointed images flooding my mind. By that time J was starting to worry about my sanity and, quite frankly, was already way past “overwhelm.” Even though the hallucinations abruptly stopped, my recollection of the strength of those visions still made me wary each time the fights in the top of the tank were extinguished during the fast several weeks.

I had only one additional vision after those first ten days—and it may actually just have been an extremely vivid dream during a normal period of sleep. Despite the fact that this particular image was not as sharp as the earlier ones, I have nevertheless retained all the details because of its similarity to one of the hallucinatory segments while I was at the bottom of the pit last year.

In my final dream or vision I was sitting with my father at an outdoor concert in an unknown place. An old Orien-

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tal gentleman with a long white beard was by himself on the stage, playing music on some kind of strange stringed instrument. Unlike my vision at the bottom of the pit, however, my father and I did not turn into little birds and fly away to Chinon in France. Instead, my father’s body disappeared completely, leaving only his eyes. Within a few seconds there were five other pairs of eyes forming a hexagon in the air above me. I recognized Omeh’s eyes immediately, and my mother’s, but the other three were unknown. The eyes at the vertices of the hexagon all stared at me, unblinking, as if they were trying to communicate something. Just before the music stopped I heard a single distinct sound. Several voices simultaneously uttered the word “Danger.”