Arthur Clarke - Rama Revealed

“I believe so,” said Patrick, adjusting his pack.

“At least now he won’t be waiting for us old farts all the time,” Max said with a grin.

The three men stopped to admire the view from the landing at the top of the cylindrical stairs. “Sometimes,” Max said, as he took a long look at the magnificent colors of the rainbow strips in the dome only a few meters above him, “I think that everything that has happened to me since I boarded the Pinta is a dream. How do pigs, chicken’s, and even Arkansas fit into this picture? It’s just too much.”

“It must be difficult,” Patrick said while they were walking along the hallway, “to reconcile all this with your normal life on Earth. But consider my situation. I was born on an extraterrestrial spacecraft headed for an artificial world located near the star Sirius. I have spent more than half my life asleep. I have no idea what normal means.”

“Shit, Patrick,” Max said, putting his arm around the young man, “if I were you I would be as crazy as a bedbug.”

Later, when they were climbing the second stairs, Max stopped and turned to Richard below him. “I hope you realize, Wakefield,” he said in a warm tone, “that I’m just an ornery bastard and didn’t mean anything personal during our arguments the last few days.”

Richard smiled. “I understand, Max. I also know that I’m as arrogant as you are ornery. I will accept your oblique apology if you will accept mine.”

Max feigned indignation. “That wasn’t a damn apology,” he said, walking up to the next step.

The igloo hut was just as Patrick had described it. The three men pulled on their jackets and prepared to go outside. Richard, who was the first one out the door, saw the other igloo before Max and Patrick had even taken their first breath of the bracing Rama air.

“That other igloo wasn’t there, Uncle Richard,” Patrick insisted. “I walked completely around the area.”

The second igloo, which was almost exactly one-tenth the size of the larger hut, was about thirty meters farther away from the cliff bordering the Cylindrical Sea. It was glowing in the Rama dark. As the men started walking toward it, the door of the smaller igloo opened and two tiny human figures came out. The figures were about twenty centimeters high and were illuminated from the inside.

“What the hell…?” Max exclaimed.

“Look,” said Patrick excitedly, “it’s Mother and Uncle Richard!”

The two figures turned south in the darkness, away from the cliff and the sea. Richard, Max, and Patrick scrambled up beside them for a better view. The figures were dressed in exactly the same clothes that Richard and Nicole had worn the previous day. The attention to detail was extraordinary. The hair, faces, skin coloring, even the shape and color of Richard’s beard, were a perfect match for the Wakefields. The figures were also wearing backpacks.

Max stooped down to pick up the figure of Nicole but received an electrical jolt when he touched it. The figure turned in Max’s direction and shook her head emphatically. The men followed the pair for another hundred meters and then stopped.

“There’s not much doubt about what we’re supposed to do next,” Richard said.

“Nope,” said Max. “It looks as if you and Nicole are being summoned.”

The next afternoon Richard and Nicole packed several days worth of food and water into their packs and said good-bye to their extended family. Nikki had slept between them the night before and was especially tearful when her grandparents departed.

It was quite a climb up the staircase. “I should have taken the stairs more slowly,” Nicole said, breathing hard as she and Richard stood on the landing beneath the dome and waved one final time to everybody. Nicole could feel her heart beating arrhythmically in her chest. She waited patiently for the palpitations to subside.

Richard was also out of breath. “We’re not as young as we were those many years ago in New York,” he said after a short silence. He smiled and put his arms around Nicole. “Are you ready to continue our adventure?” he asked.

Nicole nodded. They walked slowly, hand in hand, down the long hallway. When they reached the second stairs, Nicole turned to Richard. “Darling,” she said with sudden intensity, “isn’t it great to be alone again, just the two of us, even if it’s only for a few hours? I love all the others, but it’s a pain being so damn responsible all the time.”

Richard laughed easily. “It’s a role you chose, Nicole,” he said, “not one that was forced on you.”

He leaned down to kiss her on the cheek. Nicole turned her face toward him and kissed him strongly on the lips.

“Were you suggesting with that kiss,” Richard asked immediately with a wide grin, “that we should spend tonight in the igloo and begin our journey tomorrow?”

“I think that you have been reading my mind, Mr. Wakefield,” Nicole said with a coquettish smile. “Actually, I was thinking how much fun it would be to imagine tonight that we were young lovers again.” She laughed. “At least our imaginations should still work all right.”

When they were three hundred meters south of the two igloos, Richard and Nicole could no longer see anything except whatever they illuminated with their flashlights. Although the floor beneath them, mostly dirt with an occasional collection of small rocks, was generally smooth, from time to time one or both of them would stumble when not paying careful attention.

“This may be a very long and tiring walk in the dark,” Nicole said when they stopped for some water.

“And cold too,” Richard said, taking a drink. “Are you warm enough?”

“As long as we’re moving,” Nicole said. She stretched out her arms and adjusted her backpack.

It was almost an hour before they saw a light in the sky to the south. The light was moving toward them and was growing larger.

“What do you think it is?” Nicole asked.

“Maybe the Blue Fairy?” Richard replied. “ “When you wish upon a star, makes no difference who you are…’“

Nicole laughed. “You’re impossible,” she said.

“After last night,” Richard said as the light continued to move in their direction, “I feel like a boy again.”

Nicole chuckled and shook her head. They held hands in silence while the ball of light continued to grow in size. A minute later it stopped twenty to thirty meters in front of them and about twenty meters above their heads. Richard and Nicole switched off their flashlights, for they could now see the terrain around them for a distance of more than a hundred meters.

Richard shaded his eyes and tried to determine the source of the illumination, but the light was too bright. He could not look directly at it. “Whatever it is,” Nicole said after they were walking again, “it appears to know where we’re supposed to go.”

Two hours later, Richard and Nicole encountered a path heading to the southwest, with fields of growing plants on either side of the path. When they stopped for lunch, they wandered into the fields and discovered that one of their staple foods under the dome, a vegetable with a taste similar to a green bean but with the physical appearance of a yellow squash, was the principal crop being grown. These vegetables were interspersed with rows of a short, bright red plant that they had never seen before. Richard pulled one of the red plants out of the ground and dropped it immediately when the green, leathery sphere that had been beneath the surface began to writhe at the bottom of its red stalk. When it hit the ground, the creature scooted the few centimeters back to its original hole and buried its green sphere again in the same place.

Richard laughed. “I guess I’ll think twice before I do something like that again.”