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

One day Richard suddenly began to remember details from his long odyssey in Rama II and a powerful headache almost blinded him. He saw himself in a strange room, lying on a floor surrounded by three or four octospiders. Dozens of probes and other instruments had been implanted in him and some kind of test was under way.

“Stop, stop,” Richard shouted, destroying the memory picture with his acute agitation. “My head is killing me.”

Miraculously his headache began to fade and Richard was again among the octospiders in his memory. He re-

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called the days and days of testing that he had experienced and the tiny living creatures that had been inserted into his body. He recalled also a peculiar set of sexual experiments in which he had been subjected to all kinds of external stimulation and rewarded when he ejaculated.

Richard was startled by these new memories that he had never accessed before, never once since he had awakened from the coma in which his family had found him in New York. Now I remember other things about the octo’spiders too, he thought excitedly. They talked to each other in colors that wrapped around their heads. They were basically friendly, but determined to learn everything they could about me. They—

The mental picture vanished and Richard’s headache returned. The threads from the net had just disconnected. Richard was exhausted and quickly fell asleep.

After days and days of one memory after another, the readout abruptly ceased. Richard’s mind was no longer driven by an external forcing function. The threads of the net remained unattached for long periods of time.

A week passed without incident. In the second week, however, an unusual spherical ganglion, far larger and more densely wrapped man the normal clumps in the living web, began to develop about twenty centimeters away from Richard’s head. The ganglion grew until it was about the size of a basketball. Soon thereafter the immense clump issued hundreds of filaments that inserted themselves into the skin around the circumference of Richard’s skull. At last, Richard thought, ignoring the pain caused by the invasion of the threads into his brain, now we will see what this has all been about.

He began immediately to see some kind of pictures, although they were so fuzzy that he could not identify anything specific. The quality of Richard’s mental images improved very quickly, however, for he cleverly devised a rudimentary way of communicating “with the web. As soon as the first image appeared in his mind, Richard concluded that the net, which had been reading his memory output for days, was now trying to write into his brain.

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But the web obviously had no way of measuring the quality of the images that Richard was receiving. Remembering his trips to the eye doctor as a boy and the communication pattern that resulted in the final specifications for his eyeglass lenses, Richard pointed his thumb up or down to indicate whether each change the net made in its transmission process made the picture better or worse. In that manner Richard was soon able to “see” what the alien was attempting to show him.

The first pictures were images of a planet taken from a spacecraft. The cloud-covered world with two smallish moons and a distant, solitary yellow star as its heat and light source was almost certainly the home planet of the sessile webs. The suite of pictures that followed showed Richard various landscapes from the planet.

Fog was ubiquitous on the home world of the sessiles. Below the fog in most of the images was a brown, rock-less, barren surface. Only in the littorals where the barren ‘ground encountered the waves of the green liquid lakes and oceans was there any suggestion of life. In one of these oases Richard saw not only several avians, but also a fascinating melange of other living things. Richard could have spent days examining just one or two of these pictures, but he was not in control of the image sequence. The net had some purpose for its communication, he was certain, and the first set of pictures was only an introduction.

All of the remaining images featured either an avian, a manna melon, a myrmicat, a sessile web, or some combination of the quartet. The scenes were all taken from what Richard assumed was “normal life” on their home planet, and expanded on the general theme of symbiosis among the species. In several pictures the aliens were shown defending the subterranean colonies of the myrmicats and sessiles from invasions by what appeared to be small animals and plants. Other images depicted the myrmicats ministering to avian hatchlings or transporting large quantities of manna melons to an avian mound.

Richard was puzzled when he saw several pictures that showed tiny manna melons embedded inside the sessile

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creatures. Why would the myrmicats lay their eggs in here? he wondered. For protection? Or are these weird webs a kind of thinking placenta?

One definite impression left upon Richard by the sequence of images was that the sessiles were, in a hierarchical sense, the dominant species of the three. The pictures all suggested that both the myrmicats and the avians paid homage to the web creatures. Do these nets, then, somehow do all the important thinking for the avians and rriyr-micats? Richard asked himself. What incredible symbiotic relationships. . . . How in the world could they possibly have evolved?

There were several thousand frames altogether in the sequence. After it repeated twice, the filaments detached themselves from Richard and returned to the giant ganglion. In the days that followed Richard was essentially left alone, the attachments to his host being limited to those necessary for him to survive.

When a lane formed in the web and Richard could see me door through which he had entered many weeks before, he thought that he was going to be released. His momentary excitement, however, was quickly dampened. At his first attempt to move, the sessile net tightened its grip on all parts of his body.

So what is the purpose of the lane? As Richard watched, a trio of myrmicats entered from the hallway. The creature in the middle had two broken legs, and its back segment was crushed, as if it had been run over by a heavy car or truck. Its two companions carried the disabled myrmicat into the web and then departed. Within seconds the sessile began to wrap itself around the new arrival.

Richard was about two meters away from the crippled myrmicat. The region between him and the injured creature emptied of all filaments and clumps. Richard had never before seen such a gap inside the sessile. So my education continues, he mused. What is it that I am supposed to learn now? That sessiles are doctors to the myrmicats, just as the myrmicats are doctors to the avians?

The web did not limit its attention to the injured portions

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of the myrmicat. In fact, during one long waking period Richard watched the net completely enclose the creature in a tight cocoon. At the same time, the large ganglion in Richard’s immediate vicinity migrated over to the cocoon.

Later, after a nap, Richard noticed that the ganglion had returned to his side. The cocoon across the gap had almost finished unraveling. Richard’s pulse rate doubled as the cocoon completely disappeared and there was no trace of the myrmicat.

Richard didn’t have much time to wonder what had happened to the myrmicat. Within minutes the filaments from the large ganglion were again attached to his skull and another picture show was playing inside his brain. In the very first image Richard saw five human soldiers camping on the shore of the moat inside the avian habitat. They were eating a meal. Beside them were an impressive array of weapons, including two machine guns.

The pictures that followed showed humans on the attack throughout the second habitat. Two of the early scenes were especially gruesome. In the first a juvenile avian had been decapitated in midair and was falling to the ground. A pair of satisfied humans congratulated each other in the lower left portion of the same frame. The second image depicted a large square hole in one of the grassland sectors of the green region. Inside the hole could be seen the remains of several dead avians. A human with a wheelbarrow containing another pair of avian corpses was approaching the mass grave from the left.

Richard was staggered by what he was seeing. What are these pictures anyway? he wondered. And why am I seeing them now? He quickly reviewed all the recent events in his sessile world and concluded, with considerable shock, that the disabled myrmicat must have actually seen everything Richard was being shown, and that the web creature had somehow removed the images from the mind of the myrmicat and transferred them into Richard’s brain.