Arthur Clarke - Rama Revealed

Below them an occasional light flickered, but in the entire first four minutes, no more than a few hundred scattered lights appeared, and only one endured for longer than three seconds. “Now we have reached the time of the formation of the Earth and the solar system,” the Eagle said, preparing to activate the display again.

“Wait a moment, please,” Nicole said. “I want to make certain I understand. Did you just show me that for the first half of galactic history, when there was no Earth and no Sun, comparatively few spacefarers evolved in the region around where the Sun would eventually form?… And that of those spacefarers, almost all of them had a species life span of less than twenty million years, and only one managed to survive for as long as sixty million years?”

“Very good,” the Eagle said. “Now I am going to add another parameter to the display. If a spacefarer has succeeded in traveling outside his own star system and has established a permanent presence in another-which you humans have of course not yet done-then the display acknowledges that expansion by illuminating the other star system as well, with the same color light. Therefore we can follow the spread of a specific spacefaring species. I am also now going to change the rate of the display by a factor of two, to ten million years per second.”

Only half a minute into the next period, a red light came on over in one corner of the room. Six to eight seconds later, it was surrounded by hundreds of other red lights. Together they shone with such intensity that the rest of the room, with its occasional solitary or pair of lights, seemed dark and uninteresting by comparison. The field of red lights then abruptly vanished in a fraction of a second. First the inner core of the red pattern went dark, leaving small groups of lights scattered at the edges of what had once been a gigantic region. A blink of the eye later and all the red lights were gone.

Nicole’s mind was operating at peak speed as she watched the lights flashing around her. That must be an interesting story, she thought, reflecting on the red lights. Imagine a civilization spread out over a region containing hundreds of stars. Then suddenly, pfff, that species is gone. The lesson is inescapable. For everything there is a beginning and an end. Immortality exists only as a concept, not as a reality.

She glanced around the room. A general recurring pattern was developing as more and more regions hosted an occasional passing light, indicating the emergence and disappearance of another spacefaring civilization. Because even those beings that spread out and colonized adjoining star systems lived for such a brief time, only rarely did they come into proximity with a companion spacefaring civilization.

There has been intelligence, and spacefaring, in our part of the galaxy since before there was an Earth, Nicole thought, but very few of these advanced creatures have ever had the thrill of sustained contact with their peers….So loneliness too is one of the underlying principles of the universe-at least of this universe.

Eight minutes later the Eagle again froze the display. “We have now reached a point in time ten million years before the present,” he said. “On the Earth, the dinosaurs have long since disappeared, destroyed by their inability to adapt to the climate changes caused by the impact of a great asteroid. Their disappearance, however, has allowed the mammals to flourish, and one of those mammalian evolutionary lines is starting to show the rudiments of intelligence.”

The Eagle stopped. Nicole was looking up at him with an intense, almost pained expression on her face. “What’s the matter?” the alien asked.

“Will our particular universe end in harmony?” Nicole asked. “Or will we be one of those data points that helps God define the region He is seeking by being outside the desired set?”

“What prompts you to ask that question right now?” the Eagle said.

“This whole display,” Nicole answered, waving with her hand, “is an amazing catalyst. My mind has dozens of questions.” She smiled. “But since I don’t have time to ask them all, I thought I would ask the most important one first.

“Just look at what has happened here,” she continued, “even now, after ten billion years of evolution, the lights are widely scattered. And none of the groupings that exist have become permanent or widespread, even in this relatively small portion of the galaxy. Surely if our universe is going to end in harmony, sooner or later lights indicating space-farers and intelligence should be illuminated at almost every star system in every galaxy. Or have I misinterpreted what Saint Michael meant by harmony?”

“I don’t think so,” the Eagle said.

“Where is our solar system in this current display?” Nicole now asked.

“Right there,” the Eagle said, using his light beam pointer.

Nicole glanced first at the area around the Earth and then quickly surveyed the rest of the room. “So ten million years ago, there were about sixty spacefaring species living among our closest ten thousand stellar neighborhoods. And one of these species, if I understand that cluster of dark green lights, originated not too far from us and had spread to include twenty or thirty star systems altogether.”

“That’s correct,” said the Eagle. “Should I run the display forward again, at a slower rate?”

“In a little while,” Nicole said. “I want to appreciate this particular configuration first. Up until now everything has been happening in this display faster than I could possibly absorb it.”

She stared at the group of green lights. Its outer edge was no more than fifteen light-years from where the Eagle had marked the solar system. Nicole motioned for the Eagle to start the display again and he told her the rate would now be only two hundred thousand years a second.

The green lights moved closer and closer to the Earth and then they suddenly disappeared. “Stop,” yelled Nicole.

The Eagle halted the display. He looked at Nicole with a quizzical expression.

“What happened to those guys?” Nicole said.

“I told you about them a couple of days ago,” the Eagle said. “They genetically engineered themselves out of existence.”

They almost reached the Earth, Nicole thought. And how different all history would have been if they had. They would have recognized immediately the intellectual potential of the protohumans in Africa and would doubtless have done to them what the Precursors did to the octospiders. Then we…

In her mind’s eye, Nicole suddenly had an image of Saint Michael, calmly explaining the purpose of the universe in front of the fireplace in Michael and Simone’s study.

“Could I see the beginning?” Nicole asked the Eagle.

“The beginning of what?” he replied.

“The beginning of everything,” Nicole said eagerly. “The instant when this universe began and the entire process of evolution was set in motion.” She waved her hand toward the model below them.

“We can do that,” the Eagle said after a brief pause.

“We have no knowledge about anything before this universe was created,” the Eagle said a moment later as Nicole and he stood together on the platform in total darkness. “We do assume, however, that some kind of energy existed before the instant of creation, for we have been told that the matter of this universe resulted from a transformation of energy.”

Nicole looked around her. “Darkness everywhere,” she said, almost to herself. “And somewhere in that darkness-if the word ‘somewhere’ even has any meaning-there was energy. And a Creator. Or might the energy have been part of the Creator?”

“We don’t know,” the Eagle said after another short pause. “What we do know is that the fate of every single element in the universe was determined in that initial instant. The way in which that energy was transformed into matter defined eighty billion years of history.”