Arthur Clarke - Rama Revealed

“Look over there,” Nicole said a moment later. “Isn’t that one of the animals that built the staircase?”

They moved down the path and then back into the field itself for a better view. Coming toward them was indeed one of the large, antlike creatures with the six long arms. It was harvesting the vegetables with amazing efficiency, handling the three rows on either side of where its main body was located. Each arm, or trunk, was stripping the vegetables in a single row and stacking them in piles that were between the rows and about two meters apart. It was an astonishing sight, the six arms all operating simultaneously on different tasks, and at different distances from its main body.

When the creature reached the path, its arms quickly recoiled. It then moved six rows down the line and entered the field going in the opposite direction. The field was being harvested from south to north, so when Richard and Nicole started walking again, they passed through the part of the field that the giant ant thing had already finished. There they saw swift rodent like creatures picking up the scattered piles and scampering away with them to the west.

Richard and Nicole came to several intersections while they were walking along the path among the fields, and each time the hovering light indicated which route they should take. The fields extended for many kilometers. They came upon several different crops, but Richard and Nicole, who were becoming hungry and weary, no longer stopped to examine each new vegetable.

At length they reached a flat open area covered with soft dirt. The light above them circled three times and then hovered over the center of the area. “I’m guessing that this is where we’re supposed to spend the night,” Richard said.

“Gladly,” said Nicole, accepting Richard’s help in removing her backpack. “I don’t think I’ll have any trouble sleeping, even on this hard ground.”

They ate dinner and found a comfortable spot where they could sleep nestled together. When Richard and Nicole were both in the twilight zone between waking and sleeping, the light above them began to dim a little and then drop in altitude.

“Look,” Richard whispered, “it’s going to land.”

Nicole opened her eyes and watched as the light, continuing to dim, made a graceful arc and landed on the opposite side of the open area. It was still glowing slightly even after it was already on the ground. Although Richard and Nicole could not see the creature very well, they could tell that it was long and skinny and had wings more than twice as large as its body.

“It’s a giant firefly,” Richard exclaimed when they could no longer see its outline.

Biology for lights, biology for farm and construction equipment-do you have the impression that our octospider friends, or perhaps whatever is above them in some amazing symbiotic hierarchy, are the great biologists of the galaxy?”

“I don’t know, Richard,” Nicole said as she finished her breakfast. “But it certainly looks as if their technological evolution has followed a markedly different path than ours.”

They had both watched with wonder as the giant firefly, upon hearing their first movements after sleeping, had ignited itself and taken its accustomed hovering position above them. A few minutes later, a second, similar creature had approached them from the south. The two lights now combined to provide local illumination that was equivalent to daylight in New Eden.

Richard and Nicole had both slept well and were quite refreshed. Their two guides led them along paths through several more kilometers of fields, including one that was characterized by grasses over three meters tall. One hundred meters after making a sharp left turn in the tall grasses, Richard and Nicole found themselves at the edge of a vast array of shallow water tanks that stretched in front of them as far as they could see.

They walked to the left for several minutes until they came to what Richard properly identified as the northeast corner of the array. The system consisted of a series of long, narrow, rectangular tanks that were metallic gray in color. Each of the individual tanks in the array was about twenty meters wide and as much as several hundred meters long. The tanks were as tall as Nicole’s waist and were three-quarters filled with a liquid that appeared to be water. At each tank corner was a thick, bright-red cylinder, twice as high as the tank, that was topped with a white sphere.

Richard and Nicole walked beside the long edge of the array for several minutes, peering inside each individual tank and examining the thick cylindrical poles marking where adjacent tanks shared common sides. They saw nothing in the tanks except the water. “So is this some kind of purification plant?” Nicole asked.

“I doubt it,” Richard answered. They stopped at the western edge. “Look at that mass of small, detailed parts affixed to the inside wall of this tank, just in front of the cylinder. I would guess that those are complicated electronic components of some kind. There would be no need for all that in a simple water purification system.”

Nicole looked askance at her husband. “Come on, Richard, that’s quite a leap of faith. How can you possibly claim to know the function of a bunch of three-dimensional squiggles on the inside of an alien water tank?”

“I said I was guessing,” Richard responded with a laugh. “I was only trying to make the point- that it looks too complex to be a place to purify water.”

The guide lights above them were urging them to the source. The second bank of narrow tanks also contained nothing but water; however, when they reached the third set of rectangular tanks and cylindrical poles, Richard and Nicole discovered that the water was full of tiny fuzzy balls of many colors. Richard rolled up his sleeve and stuck his hand into the water, pulling out several hundred of the objects.

“Those are eggs,” Nicole said firmly. “I know that fact with the same certainty that you knew those little gadgets on the insides of the tank wall were electronic components.”

Richard laughed again. “Look,” he said, putting his mound of little objects in front of Nicole’s eyes, “there are really only five different kinds, if you study them closely.”

“Five different kinds of what!” Nicole asked. Richard shook his head and shrugged as he replaced the eggs in the tank.

The egglike things filled the entire length of the third set of tanks. By the time Richard and Nicole were approaching the fourth row of cylinders and another set of tanks, which were several more hundred meters to the south, both of them were growing tired. “If we don’t see anything new here,” she said, “how about lunch?”

“You’re on,” he answered.

But they could discern something new already when they were still fifty meters away from the fourth row of tanks. A square robot vehicle, perhaps thirty centimeters in length and width and another ten centimeters high, was moving swiftly back and forth between the cylindrical poles. “I knew those were tracks for some kind of vehicle,” Nicole said, kidding Richard,

Richard was too fascinated to respond. In addition to the scurrying robot, which made a full cycle across the array from east to west every three minutes or so, there were several more wonders to observe. Each of the individual tanks here was further subdivided into two long pieces by a mesh fence parallel to the walls that was only slightly higher than the water level. On one side of the mesh was an absolute swarm of tiny swimming creatures in five different colors. On the other side, gleaming circles, resembling sand dollars, were scattered the complete length of the tank. The fence was positioned so that three-fourths of the tank volume was available to the gleaming circles, giving them far more room to maneuver than the densely packed swimmers.