Arthur Clarke - Rama Revealed

A few seconds later what looked like a young human priest in his early twenties, dressed in a dark blue robe, entered the room and crossed to Nicole’s wheelchair. “I am delighted,” Saint Michael said, with a beatific smile. “I have heard about you for years.”

Nicole extended her hand and studied the alien intently. There was absolutely nothing she could see that would identify this individual as anything other than a human being. My God, Nicole thought quickly, not only is their technology fantastic, but also their rate of learning is staggering.

“Now let’s get one thing straight at the outset,” she said to Saint Michael with a wry smile, “there are too many Michaels here. I do not intend to address you regularly as Saint Michael. It’s not my style. Do I just call you Saint, or Mike, or even Mikey — what do you prefer?”

“When they’re both around I call my husband Big Michael,” Simone said. “That seems to work fine.”

“All right,” Nicole said. “As Richard always said, ‘When in Rome…’ Sit down, Michael, here close to my wheelchair. Big Michael has praised you so highly I don’t want my bad hearing to cause me to miss any of your pearls of wisdom.”

“Thank you, Nicole,” Saint Michael said with a smile of his own. “Michael and Simone have extolled your virtues as well, but they clearly understated the cleverness of your wit.”

He has a personality too, Nicole thought. Will wonders never cease?

An hour later, after Simone had helped her to bed in the guest room at the end of the hall, Nicole was lying on her side staring toward the windows. Although she was very tired, she could not sleep. Her mind was too active, going over and over the events of the day.

Maybe I should ring for something to help me sleep, Nicole thought, her hand automatically feeling for the button on the table beside her bed. Simone said Saint Michael would come if I called. And that he could do anything the Eagle could. Having assured herself that she could indeed summon help if her insomnia persisted, Nicole turned back to her most comfortable sleeping position and allowed her mind to float freely.

Her thoughts focused on what she had seen and heard since she had arrived at this isolated enclave in which Michael, Simone, and their family lived. Saint Michael had explained that this pseudo-New England was a small section inside the Habitation Module of the Node and that there were several hundred other species who were semipermanent residents in the near vicinity. Why, Nicole had asked, had Big Michael and Simone chosen an everyday existence separate from all the others?

“For years,” Nicole remembered Michael O’Toole responding, “we lived in a multispecies environment. In fact, both during and after our four natural children were born, we were whisked, or so it seemed, from place to place, testing both our adaptability and compatibility with a wide range of other plant and animal species. Saint Michael confirmed at the time what we suspected, namely that our hosts were purposely exposing us to a variety of environments to gamer more information about us. Each new venue was another challenge.”

Big Michael paused for a moment, as if he were struggling emotionally. “The psychological hardships were immense in those early days. As soon as we adapted to a given set of living conditions, they were abruptly changed. I still believe that Darren’s death would not have occurred if everything hadn’t been so strange in that underground world. And we nearly lost Katya when she was only two or so and her curiosity was mistaken by a squidlike sea creature as an act of aggression.”

“After we were put to sleep the second time,” Simone said, “and transported to this Node, both Michael and I were exhausted from the years of tests. The children were grown by then and starting to have families of their own. We requested, and were granted, some privacy.”

“We still go out into the other world,” Michael added, “but we interact with the exotic beings from distant star systems because we want to, not because it is a necessity. Saint Michael briefs us regularly on the comings and goings of the basketball creatures, the sky-hoppers, and the flying turtles. He is our information window to the rest of the Node.”

Saint Michael is extraordinary, Nicole thought, and much more advanced even than the Eagle. He answers all questions with such certitude. But there’s something about him that makes me wonder. Are all those crisp answers about God and the origin and destiny of the universe really correct? Or has Saint Michael somehow been programmed, based on Michael’s love of catechismal processes, to be his perfect alien companion?

Nicole rolled over in bed and considered her own relationship with the Eagle. Maybe I’m just jealous, she thought, because Michael seems to have learned so much… and the Eagle has been unwilling or unable to answer my questions. But who is better off, the child with a mentor who knows and tells everything or the one whose teacher helps the child find her own answers? I don’t know… I don’t know. But that was one hell of an impressive performance by Saint Michael at the easel.

“Don’t you see, Nicole?” Big Michael had jumped up from his chair for the umpteenth time. “We’re all participating in God’s great experiment. This entire universe, not just our own galaxy, but all the galaxies that stretch to the end of the heavens, will provide one single data point for God. He, She, or It is searching for perfection, for that small range of initial parameters which, once the universe is set into motion by the transformation of energy into matter, will evolve, over billions of years, into one perfect harmony, a testimony to the Creator’s consummate skill.”

Nicole had had some difficulty following the higher mathematics, but she had certainly understood the gist of the diagrams that Saint Michael had drawn on the easel in the study. “So at this moment,” Nicole had said to the alien with the curly hair and the blue eyes, “there are countless other universes evolving, each having been started by God with different initial conditions, and God has somehow slipped you, the Eagle, the Node, and Rama inside this particular evolution process to acquire information? And the purpose of all this is so that God can define some mathematical construct associated with creation that will always produce a harmonious result?”

“Exactly,” Saint Michael had responded. Again he had pointed at the diagram on the easel. “Imagine that this coordinate system I have drawn is a symbolic, two-dimensional representation of the available hypersurface of parameters defining the creation instant, the moment that energy is first transformed into matter. Any arrangement or vector representing a specific set of initial conditions for the universe may be depicted as a single point in my diagram. What God is, and has been, searching for is a very special closed dense set located on this mathematical hypersurface. This special set He is seeking has the property that any of its elements-that is, any arrangement of conditions for the instant of creation chosen from within this set-will produce a universe that will eventually end in harmony.”

“It’s a nearly impossible problem,” Big Michael said, “to create a universe that will end up with all living beings proclaiming the glory of God. If there is not enough matter, the explosion and inflation of the creation instant results in a universe that expands forever, without sufficient interaction of the individual components during evolution to I produce and sustain life. If there is too much matter, then there is insufficient time for life and intelligence to develop fully before gravity causes the Great Crunch that ends the universe.”

“Chaos confounds God as well,” Saint Michael explained. “Chaos is an outgrowth of all the physical laws governing the evolution of any created universe. It prevents the accurate prediction of the outcomes of large-scale processes, so God cannot, a priori, simply calculate what is going to happen in the future and therefore, by analytical techniques, isolate the zones of harmony. Experimentation is the only possible way for Him to discover what He is seeking.”