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

That must have been three months ago, give or take a week, Richard said to himself one day as he began his twice-daily walk that was his primary regular exercise. The corridor outside his room was approximately two hun-

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dred meters long. He usually made eight complete laps, back and forth from the door at the end of the corridor to the rock wall just outside his room.

And during this entire period there has not been one single visit from the leaders. So the observation period must have been my trial—at least the avion equivalent. . . . And was I found guilty of something? Is that why I have been restricted to this dingy cell?

Richard’s shoes were wearing out and his clothes were already tattered. Since the temperature was comfortable (he conjectured that it must be twenty-six degrees Celsius everywhere in the avian habitat), he wasn’t worried about being cold. But for many reasons he wasn’t looking forward to being naked all the time after his clothes eventually disintegrated. He smiled to himself, remembering his modesty during the observation period. Taking a crap when three giant birds are watching your every move is certainty not an easy task.

He had grown tired of eating manna melon for every meal, but at least it was nourishing. The liquid at the center was refreshing and the moist meat had a pleasant taste. But Richard longed for something different to eat. Even that synthetic stuff from Rama II would be a welcome change, he had told himself several times.

In his solitude Richard’s greatest challenge had been to retain his mental acumen. He had begun by doing mathematical problems in his head. More recently, worried that the sharpness of his memory had already decayed measurably because of his age, he had started to pass the time by reconstructing events and even entire major chronological segments of his life.

Of particular interest to him during these memory exercises were the huge gaps associated with his odyssey in Rama II during the voyage from the Earth to the Node. Although it was difficult for Richard to recall many specific events from the odyssey, eating the manna melon always evoked memory fragments from his long stay with the avians during that journey.

Once, after a meal, he had suddenly recalled a large ceremony with many avians. He had remembered a fire in a domelike structure and all the avians wailing in unison

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after the fire was over. Richard had been puzzled. He had not been able to remember anything about the context of the memory. Where did that take place? Was that just before I was captured by the octospiders? he had wondered. But as usual, when he had tried to remember something about what he had experienced with the octospiders, he had ended up with a whopping headache.

Richard was thinking about his earlier odyssey again when, on the last lap of his daily walk, he passed underneath the solitary light in the corridor. He looked in front of him and saw that the door to his prison was open. That’s it, he said to himself, I’ve finally gone crazy. Now I’m seeing things.

But the door remained open as he approached it. Richard walked on through, stopping to touch the open door and to verify that he had not lost his sanity. He passed two more lights before he came to a small open storage room on the right. Eight or nine manna melons were neatly stacked on the shelves. Ah-ha, Richard thought. / get it. They’ve expanded my prison. From now on I’m allowed to obtain my own food. Now, if there’s just a bathroom somewhere. . . .

Farther down the hallway there was indeed running water in another small room on the left. Richard drank heartily, washed his face, and was sorely tempted to bathe. However, his curiosity was too strong. He wanted to know the extent of his new domain.

The corridor that ran just outside his cell ended at a perpendicular intersection. Richard could go either way. Thinking perhaps that he was in some kind of maze to test his mental capabilities, he dropped his outer shirt at the intersection and proceeded to the right. There were definitely more lights in that direction.

After he had walked for twenty meters or so, he saw a pair of avians approaching in the distance. Actually he heard their jabber first, for they were involved in an animated discussion. When they were only five meters away Richard stopped. The two avians glanced at him, acknowledged him with a short shriek at a different pitch, and then continued on down the corridor.

He next encountered a trio of avians with roughly the

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same interaction. What is going on here? Richard wondered as he continued to walk. Am I no longer in prison?

In the first large room that he passed, four avians were sitting together in a circle, passing a set of polished sticks back and forth and jabbering constantly. Later, just before the hallway widened into a major meeting room, Richard stood in the doorway of another chamber and watched with fascination as a pair of leggies did what appeared to be push-ups on the top of a square table. Half a dozen quiet avians studied the leggies intently.

There were twenty of the birdlike creatures in the meeting room. They were all gathered around a table, staring at a paperlike document that had been spread out in front of them. One of the avians had a pointer in its talon and was using it to indicate specific items on the document. There were strange squiggles on the paper that were totally incomprehensible, but Richard convinced himself that the avians were looking at a map.

When Richard tried to move closer to the table so that he could see better, the avians in front of him graciously moved aside. Once in the ensuing conversation, Richard even thought from the body language around the table that one of the questions had been directed at him. / really am losing my mind, he told himself, shaking his head.

But I still don’t know why I have been given all this freedom, Richard thought as he sat in his room and ate his manna melon. Six weeks had passed since he had found the door to his prison opened. Many changes had been made in his cell. Two of the lantemlike lights had been installed on his walls and Richard was now sleeping on a pile of material that reminded him of hay. There was even a constantly filled container of fresh water in the corner of his room.

Richard had felt certain, when his restrictions were initially lifted, that it was only a matter of hours or at most a day or two before something really significant happened. In a sense he had been correct, for the next morning two juvenile aliens had awakened him from his sleep and begun his avian language lessons. They had started with simple items, like the manna melon, water, and Richard

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himself, at which they would first point and then slowly repeat a sound, clearly the jabberword for that particular item. With some effort Richard had learned a great deal of vocabulary, although his ability to differentiate between closely related shrieks and jabbers was not too sharp. He was absolutely hopeless when it came to making the sounds on his own. He simply didn’t have the physical equipment to speak in the avian language.

But Richard had expected that somehow his knowledge of the bigger picture would become clearer, and that had not happened. Certainly the avians were trying to educate him, and they had given him freedom to roam anywhere he wanted in their cylinder—he even ate with them occasionally when he was in their midst and the manna melons showed up—but what was it all for? The way they looked at him, especially the leaders, suggested to Richard that they were expecting some kind of response. But what response? Richard asked himself for the hundredth time as he finished his manna melon.

As far as Richard could tell, the avians did not have a written language. He had seen no books and none of the creatures ever wrote anything. There were those strange maplike documents that they occasionally studied, or at least that was Richard’s interpretation of their activity, but they never created any of them … or marked on any of them. It was a puzzle.

And what about the leggies? Richard encountered the creatures two or three times a week and once had a pair in his room for several hours, but they would never sit still and let him analyze one of them. One time, when he had tried to grasp a leggie in his hand, Richard had received a rude shock, an electric current almost certainly, that had caused him to release the leggie immediately.