Rama II Part 1

RAMA II.

by Arthur C Clarke and Gentry Lee.

RAMA REVISITED.

I never imagined, until a few years ago, that I would ever collaborate with another writer on a work of fiction. Nonfiction was different: I've been involved in no less than fourteen multi-author projects (two with the editors of Life, and you don't get more multiplex than that). But fiction-no way! I was quite sure I would never let any outsider tamper with my unique brand of creativity. . . .

Well, a funny thing happened on the way to the word processor. Early in 1986 my agent, Scott Meredith, called me in his most persuasive "Don't-say-no-until-I've-finished" mode. There was, it seemed, this young genius of a movie producer who was determined to film something-anything-of mine. Though I'd never heard of Peter Guber, as it happened I had seen two of his movies (Midnight Express, The Deep), and been quite impressed by them. I was even more impressed when Scott told me that Peter's latest, The Color Purple, had been nominated for half a dozen Oscars. However, I groaned inwardly when Scott went on to say that Peter had a friend with a brilliant idea he'd like me to develop into a screenplay. I groaned, because there are no new ideas in s.f, and if it really was brilliant I'd have thought of it already.

Then Scott explained who the friend was, and I did a double-take. The project suddenly looked very exciting indeed, for reasons that had nothing to do with Peter Guber, but a lot to do with Stanley Kubrick.

Flashback. Twenty years earlier, in 2007: A s.p.a.ce Odyssey, Stanley and I had visited the moons of Jupiter, never dreaming that these completely unknown worlds would, in fact, be reconnoitered by robots long before the date of our movie. In March and July 1979, the two Voyager probes revealed that lo, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto were stranger places than we'd dared to imagine. The stunning views of Jupiter's giant satellites made it possible-no, imperative-for me to write 2070: Odyssey Two. This time around, the Jovian sequences could be based on reality, not imagination; and when Peter Hyams filmed the book in 1984, he was able to use actual images from the Voyager s.p.a.cecraft as backgrounds for much of the action.

Spectacular though the results of the 1979 missions were, it was confidently hoped that they would be quite surpa.s.sed within a decade. The Voyager s.p.a.cecraft spent only a few hours in the vicinity of Jupiter, hurtling past the giant planet and its moons on the way to Saturn. But in May 1986, NASA planned to launch Galileo, an even more ambitious s.p.a.ce probe. This would make not a brief fly-by, but a rendezvous; Galileo would spend two years, starting in December 1988, on a detailed survey of Jupiter and its major moons. By 1990, if all went well, there would be such a flood of new information about these exotic worlds that a third s.p.a.ce Odyssey would be inevitable. That was what I was planning to write; I'd hitched my wagon to Galileo, and could hardly care less about some amateur science fiction author's ideas. How to turn him down politely? I was still pondering this when Scott continued: "Peter Guber wants to fly out to Sri Lanka, just for thirty-six hours, to introduce this guy to you. His name is Gentry Lee, and let me explain who he is. He works at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and he's the chief engineer on Project Galileo. Have you heard of that?"

"Yes," I said faintly.

"And before that, he was director of mission planning for the Viking landers, that sent back those wonderful pictures from Mars. Because he felt the public didn't appreciate what was going on in s.p.a.ce, he formed a company with your friend Carl Sagan to make Cosmos-he was manager of the whole TV series-"

''Enough!" I cried. "This man I have to meet. Tell Mr. Gabor to bring him here right away."

"The name," said Scott, "is Guber. Peter Guber." Well, it was agreed that the two of them would fly out to Sri Lanka, and if I liked Gentry's idea (and, equally important, Gentry) I'd develop an outline -perhaps a dozen pageswhich would give characters, locations, plot, and all the basic elements from which any competent script writer could generate a screenplay.

They arrived in Colombo on February 12, 1986-just two weeks after the Challenger disaster. 1986 was going to be the Big Year for s.p.a.ce, but now the entire NASA program was in total disarray. In particular, Galileo would be delayed for years. It would be 1995 before there could be any further news from the moons of Jupiter. I could forget about Odyssey Three-just as Gentry could forget about doing anything with Galileo except getting it back from the Cape and putting it in mothb.a.l.l.s.

Happily, the Guber-Lee-Clarke Summit went well, and for the next few weeks I filled floppy disks with concepts, characters, backgrounds, plots-anything which seemed even remotely useful to the story we'd decided to call Cradle. Gentry liked my four-thousand-word outline and flew out to Sri Lanka again so that we could fill in the details. From then onward, we were able to collaborate by making frequent phone calls and flying yards of printout across the Pacific.

The writing took the best part of a year, though of course we were both involved in other projects as well. When I discovered that Gentry had a considerably better background in English and French literature than I did (by now I was immune to such surprises) I heroically resisted all attempts to impose my own style on him. This upset some longtime ACC readers, who when Cradle appeared under our joint names were put out by pa.s.sages where I should have done a little more sanitizing. The earthier bits of dialogue, 1 explained, were the result of Gentry's years with the hairyknuckled, hard-drinking engineers and mathematicians of JPL's Astrodynamics Division, where the Pasadena cops often have to be called in to settle bare-fisted fights over Bessel Functions and nonlinear partial differential equations. Though I'd greatly enjoyed working with Gentry, when we'd finished rocking Cradle I had no plans for further collaboration-because Halley's Comet was now dominating my life, as it had failed to dominate terrestrial skies. I realized that its next appearance, in 2061, would provide a splendid opportunity for a third s.p.a.ce Odyssey. (If the much-delayed Galileo does perform as hoped in 1995 and beams back megabytes of new information from the Jovian system, there may be a Final Odyssey. But I make no promises.) By the summer of 1987, 2061: Odyssey Three was doing very nicely in the bookstores, thank you, and I was once again beginning to feel those nagging guilt pains that a.s.sail an author when he's not Working On A Project. Suddenly, I realized that one was staring me right in the face. Fifteen years earlier, the very last sentence of Rendezvous With Rama had read: "The Ramans do everything in threes." Now, those words were a last-minute afterthought when I was doing the final revision. I had not-cross my heart-any idea of a sequel in mind; it just seemed the correct, openended way of finishing the book. (In real life, of course, no story ever ends.) Many readers-and reviewers-jumped to the conclusion that I had planned a trilogy from the beginning. Well, I hadn't-but now I realized it was a splendid idea. And Gentry was just the man for the job: He had all the background in celestial mechanics and s.p.a.ce hardware to deal with the next appearance of the Ramans.

I quickly outlined a spectrum of possibilities, very much as I had done with Cradle, and in a remarkably short time Scott had sold a whole package to Bantam's Lou Aronica. Rama II, The Garden of Rama, and Rama Revealed would be written and delivered during the 1989-91 period.

So once again Gentry Lee is commuting across the Pacific for brainstorming sessions in the Sri Lankan hills, and the postman is complaining about the bulky printouts he has to balance on his bicycle. This time around, however, technology has speeded up our intercontinental operations. The fax machine now allows us to exchange ideas almost in real time; it's far more convenient than the Electronic Mail link Peter Hyams and I used when scripting 20/0 (see The Odyssey File), There is much to be said for this kind of long-distance collaboration; if they are too close together, co-authors may waste a lot of time on trivia. Even a solitary writer can think of endless excuses for not working; with two, the possibilities are at least squared.

However, there is no way of demonstrating that a writer is neglecting his job; even if his snores are deafening, his subconscious may be hard at work. And Gentry and I knew that our wildest excursions into literature, science, art, or history might yield useful story elements.

For example, during the writing of Rama II it became obvious that Gentry was in love with Eleanor of Aquitainedon't worry, Stacey, she's been dead for 785 years-and I had to tactfully dissuade him from devoting pages to her amazing career. (If you wonder how E of A could have the remotest connection with interstellar adventures, you have pleasures in store.) I certainly learned a lot of French and English history from Gentry that they never taught me at school. The occasion when Queen Eleanor berated her son, the intrepid warriorking Richard the Lion Heart in front of his troops for failing to produce an heir to the throne must have been one of the more piquant moments in British military history. Alas, there was no way we could work in this gallant but gay Corleone, who was often a G.o.dfather, never a father . . . very unlike Gentry, whose fifth son arrived toward the end of Rama II. But you will meet Gentry's most cherished creation, the yetto-be-born St. Michael of Siena. One day, I am sure, you'll encounter him again, in books that Gentry will publish under his own name, with the minimum of help or hindrance from me.

As I write these words, we're just coming up to the midway point of our four-volume partnership. And though we think we know what's going to happen next, I'm sure the Ramans have quite a few surprises in store for us. ...

-Arthur C. Clarke 1 RAMA RETURNS.

The great radar pulse generator Excalibur, powered by nuclear explosions, had been out of service for almost half a century. It had been designed and developed in a frantic effort during the months following the transit of Rama through the solar system. When it was first declared operational in 2132, Excalibur's announced purpose was to give Earth ample warning of any future alien visitors: one as gigantic as Rama could be detected at interstellar distancesyears, it was hoped, before it could have any effect on human affairs.

That original commitment to build Excalibur had been made even before Rama had pa.s.sed perihelion. As the first extraterrestrial visitor rounded the sun and headed out toward the stars, armies of scientists studied the data from the only mission that had been able to rendezvous with the intruder.

Rama, they announced, was an intelligent robot with absolutely no interest in our solar system or its inhabitants. The official report offered no explanations for the many mysteries encountered by the investigators; however, the experts did convince themselves that they understood one basic principle of Raman engineering. Since most of the major systems and subsystems encountered inside Rama by the human explorers had two functional backups, it appeared that the aliens engineered everything in threes. Therefore, since the entire giant vehicle was a.s.sumed to be a machine, it was considered highly likely that two more Rama s.p.a.cecraft would be following the first visitor. But no new s.p.a.ceships entered the solar neighborhood from the empty reaches of interstellar s.p.a.ce. As the years pa.s.sed the people on Earth confronted more pressing problems. Concern about the Ramans, or whoever it was that had created that drab cylinder fifty kilometers long, abated as the lone alien incursion pa.s.sed into history. The visit of Rama continued to intrigue many scholars, but most members of the human species were forced to pay attention to other issues. By the early 2140s the world was in the grip of a severe economic crisis. There was no money left to maintain Excalibur. Its few scientific discoveries could not justify the enormous expense of a.s.suring the safety of its operation. The great nuclear pulse generator was abandoned.

Forty-five years later it took thirty-three months to return Excalibur to operational status. The primary justification for the refurbishment of Excalibur was scientific. During the intervening years radar science had flourished and produced new methods of data interpretation that had greatly enhanced the value of the Excalibur observations. As the generator again took images of the distant heavens, almost n.o.body on Earth was expecting the arrival of another Rama s.p.a.cecraft.

The operations manager at Excalibur Station did not even inform his supervisor the first time the strange blip appeared on his data processing display. He thought it was an artifact, a bogey created by an anomalous processing algorithm. When the signature repeated several times, however, he paid closer attention. The manager called in the chief Excalibur scientist, who a.n.a.lyzed the data and decided the new object was a long period comet. It was another two months before a graduate student proved that the signature belonged to a smooth body at least forty kilometers in its longest dimension.

By 2179 the world knew that the object hurtling through the solar system toward the inner planets was a second extraterrestrial s.p.a.cecraft. The International s.p.a.ce Agency (ISA) concentrated its resources to prepare a mission that would intercept the intruder just inside the orbit of Venus in late February of 2200. Again the eyes of humanity looked outward, toward the stars, and the deep philosophical questions raised by the first Rama were again debated by the populace on Earth. As the new visitor drew nearer and its physical characteristics were more carefully resolved by the host of sensors aimed in its direction, it was confirmed that this alien s.p.a.cecraft, at least from the outside, was identical to its predecessor. Rama had returned. Mankind had a second appointment with destiny.

2 TEST AND TRAINING.

The bizarre metallic creature inched along the wall, crawling up toward the overhang. It resembled a skinny armadillo, its jointed snail body covered by a thin sh.e.l.l that curled over and around a compact grouping of electronic gadgetry astride the middle of its three sections. A helicopter hovered about two meters away from the wall. A long flexible arm with a pincer on the end extended from the nose of the helicopter and just missed closing its jaws around the odd creature.

"Dammit," muttered Janos Tabori, "this is almost impossible with the 'copter bouncing around. Even in perfect conditions it's hard to do precision work with these claws at full extension." He glanced over at the pilot. "And why can't this fantastic flying machine keep its alt.i.tude and att.i.tude constant?"

"Move the helicopter closer to the wall," ordered Dr. David Brown.

Hiro Yamanaka looked at Brown without expression and entered a command into the control console. The screen in front of him flashed red and printed out the message, COMMAND UNACCEPTABLE. INSUFFICIENT TOLERANCES.

Yamanaka said nothing. The helicopter continued to hover in the same spot.

"We have fifty centimeters, maybe seventy-five, between the blades and the wall," Brown thought out loud. "In another two or three minutes the biot will be safe under the overhang. Let's go to manual and grab it. Now. No mistakes this time, Tabori."

For an instant a dubious Hire Yamanaka stared at the balding, bespectacled scientist sitting in the seat behind him. Then the pilot turned, entered another command into the console, and switched the large black lever to the left position. The monitor flashed, IN MANUAL MODE. NO AUTOMATIC PROTECTION. Yamanaka gingerly eased the helicopter closer to the wall.

Engineer Tabori was ready. He inserted his hands in the instrumented gloves and practiced opening and closing the jaws at the end of the flexible arm. Again the arm extended and the two mechanical mandibles deftly closed around the jointed snail and its sh.e.l.l. The feedback loops from the sensors on the claws told Tabori, through his gloves, that he had successfully captured his prey. "I've got it," he shouted exultantly. He began the slow process of bringing the quarry back into the helicopter.

A sudden draft of wind rolled the helicopter to the left and the arm with the biot banged against the wall. Tabori felt his grip loosening. "Straighten it up," he cried, continuing to retract the arm. While Yamanaka was struggling to null the rolling motion of the helicopter, he inadvertently tipped the nose down just slightly. The three crew members heard the sickening sound of the metal rotor blades crashing against the wall.

The j.a.panese pilot immediately pushed the emergency b.u.t.ton and the craft returned to automatic control. In less than a second, a whining alarm sounded and the c.o.c.kpit monitor flashed red. EXCESSIVE DAMAGE. HIGH PROBABILITY OF FAILURE. EJECT CREW. Yamanaka did not hesitate. Within moments he blasted out of the c.o.c.kpit and had his parachute deployed. Tabori and Brown followed. As soon as the Hungarian engineer removed his hands from the special gloves, the claws at the end of the mechanical arm relaxed and the armadillo creature fell the hundred meters to the flat plain below, smashing into thousands of tiny pieces.

The pilotless helicopter descended erratically toward the plain. Even with its...o...b..ard automatic landing algorithm active and in complete control, the damaged flying machine bounced hard on its struts when it hit the ground and tipped over on its side. Not far from the helicopter's landing site, a portly man, wearing a brown military suit covered with ribbons, jumped down from an open elevator. He had just descended from the mission control center and was clearly agitated as he walked briskly to a waiting rover. He was followed by a scrambling lithe blond woman in an ISA flight suit with camera equipment hanging over both her shoulders. The military man was General Valeriy Borzov, commander-in-chief of Project Newton. "Anyone hurt?" he asked the occupant of the rover, electrical engineer Richard Wakefield.

"Janos apparently banged his shoulder pretty hard during the ejection. But Nicole just radioed that he had no broken bones or separations, only a lot of bruises." General Borzov climbed into the front seat of the rover beside Wakefield, who was sitting behind the vehicle control panel. The blond woman, video journalist Francesca Sabatini, stopped recording the scene and started to open the back door of the rover. Borzov abruptly waved her away. "Go check on des Jardins and Tabori," he said, pointing across the level plain. "Wilson's probably there already."

Borzov and Wakefield headed in the opposite direction in the rover. They traveled about four hundred meters before they pulled alongside a slight man, about fifty, in a new flight suit. David Brown was busy folding up his parachute and replacing it in a stuff bag. General Borzov stepped down from the rover and approached the American scientist.

"Are you all right, Dr. Brown?" the general asked, obviously impatient to dispense with the preliminaries.

Brown nodded but did not reply. "In that case," General Borzov continued in a measured tone, "perhaps you could tell me what you were thinking about when you ordered Yamanaka to go to manual. It might be better if we discussed it here, away from the rest of the crew."

"Did you even see the warning lights?" Borzov added after a lengthy silence. "Did you consider, even for a moment, that the safety of the other cosmonauts might be jeopardized by the maneuver?"

Dr. David Brown eventually looked over at Borzov with a sullen, baleful stare. When he finally spoke in his own defense, his speech was clipped and strained, belying the emotion he was suppressing. "It seemed reasonable to move the helicopter just a little closer to the target. We had some clearance left and it was the only way that we could have captured the biot. Our mission, after all, is to bring home-"

"You don't need to tell me what our mission is," Borzov interrupted with pa.s.sion. "Remember, I helped write the policies myself. And I will remind you again that the number one priority, at all times, is the safety of the crew. Especially during these simulations. ... I must tell you that I am absolutely flabbergasted by this crazy stunt of yours. The helicopter is damaged, Tabori is injured, you're lucky that n.o.body was killed."

David Brown was no longer paying attention to General Borzov. He had turned around to finish stuffing his parachute into its transparent package. From the set of his shoulders and the energy he was expending on this routine task, it was obvious that he was very angry.

Borzov returned to the rover. After waiting for several seconds he offered Dr. Brown a ride back to the base. The American shook his head without saying anything, hoisted his pack onto his back, and walked off in the direction of the helicopter and the elevator.

3 CREW CONFERENCE.

Outside the meeting room in the training facility, Janos Tabori was sitting on an auditorium chair underneath an array of small but powerful portable lights. "The distance to the simulated biot was at the limit of the reach of the mechanical arm," he explained to the tiny camera that Francesca Sabatini was holding. "Twice 1 tried to grab it and failed. Dr. Brown then decided to put the helicopter on manual and take it a little closer to the wall. We caught some wind . .

The door from the conference room opened and a smiling, ruddy face appeared. "We're all here waiting for you/' said General O'Toole pleasantly. "I think Borzov's becoming a little impatient."

Francesca switched off the lights and put her video camera back in the pocket ">f her flight suit. "All right, my Hungarian hero," she said with a laugh, "we'd better stop for now. You know how our leader dislikes waiting." She walked over and put her arms gently around the small man. She patted him on his bandaged shoulder. "But we're really glad you're all right."

A handsome black man in his early forties had been sitting just out of the camera frame during the interview, taking notes on a flat, rectangular keyboard about a foot square. He followed Francesca and Janos into the conference room.

"I want to do a feature this week on the new design concepts in the teleoperation of the arm and the glove," Reggie Wilson whispered to Tabori as they sat down. "There are a bunch of my readers out there who find all this technical c.r.a.p absolutely fascinating."

"I'm glad that the three of you could join us," Borzov's sarcastic voice boomed across the conference room. "I was starting to think that perhaps a crew meeting was an imposition on all of you, an activity that interrupted the far more important tasks of reporting our misadventures or writing erudite scientific and engineering papers." He pointed at Reggie Wilson, whose ubiquitous flat keyboard was on the table in front of him. "Wilson, believe it or not, you're supposed to be a member of this crew first and a journalist second. Just one time do you think you can put that d.a.m.n thing away and listen? I have a few things to say and I want them to be off the record."

Wilson removed the keyboard and put it in his briefcase. Borzov stood up and walked around the room as he talked. The table in the crew conference room was a long oval about two meters across at its widest point. There were twelve places around the table (guests and observers, when they attended, sat in the extra chairs over against the walls), each one equipped with a computer keyboard and monitor slightly inset into the surface and covered, when not being used, by a polished grain top that matched the quality simulated wood on the rest of the table. As always, the other two military men on the expedition, European admiral Otto Heilmann (the hero of the Council of Governments intercession in the Caracas crisis) and American air force general Michael Ryan O'Toole, flanked Borzov at one end of the oval. The other nine Newton crew members did not always sit in the same seats, a fact that particularly frustrated the compulsively orderly Admiral Heilmann and, to a lesser extent, his commanding officer Borzov.

Sometimes the four "nonprofessionals" in the crew would cl.u.s.ter together around the other end of the table, leaving the "s.p.a.ce cadets," as the five cosmonaut graduates of the s.p.a.ce Academy were known, to create a buffer zone in the middle. After almost a year of constant media attention, the public had relegated each member of the Newton dozen to one of three subgroups-the nonpros, consisting of the two scientists and two journalists; the military troika; and the five cosmonauts who did most of the skilled work during the mission.

On this particular day, however, the two nonmilitary groups were thoroughly mixed. The famed j.a.panese interdisciplinary scientist Shigeru Takagishi, widely regarded as the foremost expert in the world on the first Raman expedition seventy years earlier (and also the author of the Atlas of Rama that was required reading for all of the crew), was sitting in the middle of the oval between Soviet pilot Irina Turgenyev and the brilliant but often zany British cosmonaut/electrical engineer Richard Wakefield. Opposite them were life science officer Nicole des Jardins, a statuesque copper brown woman with a fascinating French and African lineage, the quiet, almost mechanical j.a.panese pilot Yamanaka, and the stunning Signora Sabatini. The final three positions at the "south" end of the oval, facing the large maps and diagrams of Rama on the opposite wall, were occupied by American journalist Wilson, the inimitable and garrulous Tabori (a Soviet cosmonaut from Budapest), and Dr. David Brown. Brown looked very businesslike and serious; he had a set of papers spread out in front of him as the meeting began.

"It is inconceivable to me," Borzov was saying while he strode purposefully around the room, "that any of you could ever forget, even for a moment, that you have been selected to go on what could be the most important human mission of all time. But on the basis of this last set of simulations, I must admit that I am beginning to have my doubts about some of you.

"There are those who believe that this Rama craft will be a copy of its predecessor," Borzov continued, "and that it will be equally disinterested and uninvolved with whatever trifling creatures come to survey it. I admit it certainly appears to be at least the same size and same configuration, based on the radar data that we have been processing for the past three years. But even if it does turn out to be another dead ship built by aliens that vanished thousands of years ago, this mission is still the most important one of our lifetime. And I would think that it demands the very best effort from each of you." The Soviet general paused to collect his thoughts. Janos Tabori started to ask a question but Borzov interrupted him and launched again into his monologue. "Our performance as a crew on this last set of training exercises has been absolutely abominable. Some of you have been outstandingyou know who you are-but just as many of you have acted as if you had no idea what this mission was about. I am convinced that two or three of you do not even read the relevant procedures or the protocol listings before the exercises begin. I grant you that they are dull and sometimes tedious, but all of you agreed, when you accepted your appointments ten months ago, to learn the procedures and to follow the protocols and project policies. Even those of you with no prior flight experience." Borzov had stopped in front of one of the large maps on the wall, this one an inset view of one corner of the city of "New York" inside the first Raman s.p.a.ceship. The area of tall thin buildings resembling Manhattan skysc.r.a.pers, all huddled together on an island in the middle of the Cylindrical Sea, had been partially mapped during the previous human encounter. "In six weeks we will rendezvous with an unknown s.p.a.ce vehicle, perhaps one containing a city like this, and all of mankind will depend on us to represent them. We have no way of knowing what we will find. Whatever preparation we will have completed before then may well be not enough. Our knowledge of our preplanned procedures must be perfect and automatic, so that our brains are free to deal with any new conditions we may encounter."

The commander sat down at the head of the table. "Today's exercise was nearly a complete disaster. We could easily have lost three valuable members of our team as well as one of the most expensive helicopters ever built. I want to remind you all, one more time, of the priorities of this mission as agreed to by the International s.p.a.ce Agency and the Council of Governments. The top priority is the safety of the crew. Second priority is the a.n.a.lysis and/or determination of any threat, if it exists, to the human population of the planet Earth." Borzov was now looking directly down the table at Brown, who returned the commander's challenging look with a stony stare of his own.

"Only after those two priorities are satisfied and the Raman craft is adjudged harmless does the capturing of one or more of the biots have any significance."

"I would like to remind General Borzov," David Brown said almost immediately in his sonorous voice, "that some of us do not believe the priorities should be blindly applied in a serial fashion. The importance of the biots to the scientific community cannot be overstated. As I have said repeatedly, both in cosmonaut meetings and on my many television news appearances, if this second Rama craft is just like the first-which means that it will ignore our existence completely-and we proceed so slowly that we fail even to capture a single biot before we must abandon the alien ship and return to Earth, then an absolutely unique opportunity for science will have been sacrificed to a.s.suage the collective anxiety of the world's politicians." Borzov started to reply but Brown stood up and gestured emphatically with his hands. "No, no, hear me out. You have essentially accused me of incompetence in my conduct of today's exercise and I have a right to respond." He held up some computer printout and waved it at Borzov. "Here are the initial conditions for today's simulation, as posted and defined by your engineers. Let me refresh your memory with a few of the more salient points, in case you've forgotten. Background condition number one: It is near the end of the mission and it has already been firmly established that Rama II is totally pa.s.sive and represents no threat to the planet Earth. Background condition number two: During the expedition biots have only been seen sporadically, and never in groups."

Brown could tell from the body language of the rest of the crew that his presentation had had a successful beginning. He drew a breath and continued. "1 a.s.sumed, after reading those background conditions, that this particular exercise might represent the last chance to capture a biot. During the test I kept thinking what it would mean if we could bring one or several of them back to the Earth-in all the history of humanity, the only absolutely certain contact with an extraterrestrial culture took place in 2130 when our cosmonauts boarded that first Rama s.p.a.ceship.

"Yet the long-term scientific benefit from that encounter was less than it might have been. Granted, we have reams of remote sensing data from that first investigation, including the information from the detailed dissection of the spider biot done by Dr. Laura Ernst. But the cosmonauts brought home only one artifact, a tiny piece of some kind of biomechanical flower whose physical characteristics had already irreversibly changed before any of its mysteries could be understood, We have nothing else in the way of souvenirs from that first excursion. No ashtrays, no drinking gla.s.ses, not even a transistor from a piece of equipment that would teach us something about Raman engineering. Now we have a second chance."

Brown looked up at the circular ceiling above him. His voice was full of power. "If we could somehow find and return two or three different biots to the Earth, and if we could then a.n.a.lyze these creatures to unlock their secrets, then this mission would without doubt be the most significant historical event of all time. For in understanding in depth the engineering minds of the Ramans, we would, in a real sense, achieve a first contact."

Even Borzov was impressed. As he often did, David Brown had used his eloquence to turn a defeat into a partial victory. The Soviet general decided to alter his tactics, "Still," Borzov said in a subdued tone during the pause in Brown's rhetoric, "we must never forget that human lives are at stake on this mission and that we must do nothing to jeopardize their safety." He looked around the table at the rest of the crew. "I want to bring back biots and other samples from Rama as much as any of you," he continued, "but 1 must confess that this blithe a.s.sumption that the second craft will be exactly like the first disturbs me a great deal. What evidence do we have from the first encounter that the Ramans, or whoever they are, are benevolent?

None at all. It could be dangerous to seize a biot too soon."

"But there's no way of ever being certain, Commander, one way or the other." Richard Wakefield spoke from the side of the table between Borzov and Brown. "Even if we verify that this s.p.a.ceship is exactly like the first one almost seventy years ago, we still have no information about what will happen once we make a concerted effort to capture a biot. I mean, suppose for a moment that the two ships are just supersophisticated robots engineered millions of years ago by a now vanished race from the opposite side of the galaxy, as Dr. Brown has suggested in his articles. How can we predict what kinds of subroutines might be programmed into those biots to deal with hostile acts? What if the biots are integral parts, in some way that we have not been able to discern, of the fundamental operation of the ship? Then it would be natural, even though they are machines, that they would be programmed to defend themselves. And it is conceivable that what might look like an initial hostile act on our part could be the trigger that changes the way the entire ship functions. I remember reading about the robot lander that crashed into the ethane sea on t.i.tan in 2012-it had stored entirely different sequences depending on what it-"

"Halt," Janos Tabori interrupted with a friendly smile. "The arcana of the early robotic exploration of the solar system is not on the agenda for today's postmortem." He looked down the table at Borzov. "Skipper, my shoulder is hurting, my stomach is empty, and the excitement of today's exercise has left me exhausted. All this talk is wonderful, but if there's no more specific business would it be out of line to suggest an early end to this meeting so that we will have adequate time, for once, to pack our bags?"

Admiral Heilmann leaned forward on the table. "Cosmonaut Tabori, General Borzov is in charge of the crew meetings. It is up to him to determineThe Soviet commander waved his arm at Heilmann.

"Enough, Otto, I think that Janos is right. It has been a long day at the end of an extremely busy seventeen days of activity. This conversation will be better when we are all fresh."

Borzov stood up. "All right, we will break for now. The shuttles will leave for the airport right after dinner." The crew started preparing to leave. "During your short rest period," Borzov said as an afterthought, "I want all of you to think about where we are in the schedule. We have left only two more weeks of simulations here at the training center before the break for the end-of-the-year holiday.

Immediately thereafter we begin the intensive prelaunch activities. This next set of exercises is our last chance to get it right. I expect each of you to return fully prepared for the remaining work-and recommitted to the importance of this mission."

4 THE GREAT CHAOS.

The intrusion of the first Raman s.p.a.cecraft into the inner solar system in early 2130 had a powerful impact on human history. Although there were no immediate changes in everyday life after the crew headed by Commander Norton returned from encountering Rama I, the clear and unambiguous proof that a vastly superior intelligence existed (or, as a minimum, had existed) somewhere else in the universe forced a rethinking of the place of h.o.m.o sapiens in the overall scheme of the cosmos. It was now apparent that other chemicals, doubtless also fabricated in the great stellar cataclysms of the heavens, had risen to consciousness in some other place, at some other time. Who were these Ramans? Why had they built a giant sophisticated s.p.a.cecraft and sent it on an excursion into our neighborhood? Both in public and private conversation, the Ramans were the number one topic of interest for many months.

For well over a year mankind waited more or less patiently for another sign of the Ramans' presence in the universe. Intense telescopic investigations were conducted at all wavelengths to see if any additional information a.s.sociated with the retreating alien s.p.a.ceship could be identified. Nothing was found. The heavens were quiet. The Ramans were departing as swiftly and inexplicably as they had arrived.

Once Excalibur was operational and its initial search of the heavens turned up nothing new, there was a noticeable change in the collective human att.i.tude toward that first contact with Rama. Overnight the encounter became a historical event, something that had happened and was now completed. The tenor of newspaper and magazine articles that had earlier begun with phrases like "when the Ramans return . . ." changed to "if there is ever another encounter with the creatures who built the huge s.p.a.ceship discovered in 2130 . . ." What had been a perceived threat, a lien in a sense on future human behavior, was quickly reduced to a historical curiosity. There was no longer an urgency to deal with such fundamental issues as the return of the Ramans or the destiny of the human race in a universe peopled by intelligent creatures. Mankind relaxed, at least for a moment. Then it exploded in a paroxysm of narcissistic behavior that made all previous historical periods of individual selfishness pale by comparison.

The surge of unabashed self-indulgence on a global scale was easy to understand. Something fundamental in the human psyche had changed as a result of the encounter with Rama I. Prior to that contact, humanity stood alone as the only known example of advanced intelligence in the universe. The idea that humans could, as a group, control their destiny far into the future had been a significant linchpin in almost every working philosophy of life. That the Ramans existed (or had existed-whatever the tense, the philosophic logic came to the same conclusion) changed everything. Mankind was not unique, maybe not even special. It was just a question of time before the prevailing h.o.m.ocentric notion of the universe was to be irrevocably shattered by clearer awareness of the Others. Thus it was easy to comprehend why the life patterns of most human beings suddenly veered toward self-gratification, reminding literary scholars of a similar time almost exactly five centuries earlier, when Robert Herrick had exhorted the virgins to make the most of their fleeting time in a poem that began, "Gather ye rosebuds while ye may/ Old time is still a-flying. . . ."

An unrestrained burst of conspicuous consumption and global greed lasted for just under two years. Frantic acquisition of everything the human mind could create was superimposed on a weak economic infrastructure that had been already poised for a downturn in early 2130, when the first Raman s.p.a.ceship flew through the inner solar system. The looming recession was first postponed throughout 2130 and 2131 by the combined manipulative efforts of governments and financial inst.i.tutions, even though the fundamental economic weaknesses were never addressed. With the renewed burst of buying in early 2132, the world jumped directly into another period of rapid growth. Production capacities were expanded, stock markets exploded, and both consumer confidence and total employment hit all-time highs. There was unprecedented prosperity and the net result was a short-term but significant improvement in the standard of living for almost all humans.

By the end of the year in 2133, it had become obvious to some of the more experienced observers of human history that the "Raman Boom" was leading mankind toward disaster. Dire warnings of impending economic doom started being heard above the euphoric shouts of the millions who had recently vaulted into the middle and upper cla.s.ses. Suggestions to balance budgets and limit credit at all levels of the economy were ignored. Instead, creative effort was expended to come up with one way after another of putting more spending power in the hands of a populace that had forgotten how to say wait, much less no, to itself. The global stock market began to sputter in January of 2134 and there were predictions of a coming crash. But to most humans spread around the Earth and throughout the scattered colonies in the solar system, the concept of such a crash was beyond comprehension. After all, the world economy had been expanding for over nine years, the last two years at a rate unparalleled in the previous two centuries. World leaders insisted that they had finally found the mechanisms that could truly inhibit the downturns of the capitalistic cycles. And the people believed them-until early May of 2134.

During the first three months of the year the global stock markets went inexorably down, slowly at first, then in significant drops. Many people, reflecting the superst.i.tious att.i.tude toward cometary visitors that had been prevalent for two thousand years, somehow a.s.sociated the stock market's difficulties with the return of Halley's Comet. Its apparition starting in March turned out to be far brighter than anyone expected. For weeks scientists all over the world were competing with each other to explain why it was so much more brilliant than originally predicted. After it swooped past perihelion in late March and began to appear in the evening sky in mid-April, its enormous tail dominated the heavens.

In contrast, terrestrial affairs were dominated by the emerging world economic crisis. On May 1, 2134, three of the largest international banks announced that they were insolvent because of bad loans. Within two days a panic had spread around the world. The more than one billion home terminals with access to the global financial markets were used to dump individual portfolios of stocks and bonds. The communications load on the Global Network System (GNS) was immense. The data transfer machines were stretched far beyond their capabilities and design specifications. Data gridlock delayed transactions for minutes, then hours, contributing additional momentum to the panic.

By the end of a week two things were apparent-that over half of the world's stock value had been obliterated and that many individuals, large and small investors alike, who had used their credit options to the maximum, were now virtually penniless. The supporting data bases that kept track of personal bank accounts and automatically transferred money to cover margin calls were flashing disaster messages in almost 20 percent of the houses in the world.

In truth, however, the situation was much much worse. Only a small percentage of the transactions were actually clearing through all the supporting computers because the data rates in all directions were far beyond anything that had ever been antic.i.p.ated. In computer language, the entire global financial system went into the "cycle slip" mode. Billions and billions of information transfers at lower priorities were postponed by the network of computers while the higher priority tasks were being serviced first.

The net result of these data delays was that in most cases individual electronic bank accounts were not properly debited, for hours or even days, to account for the mounting stock market losses, Once the individual investors realized what was occurring, they rushed to spend whatever was still showing in their balances before the computers completed all the transactions. By the time governments and financial inst.i.tutions understood fully what was going on and acted to stop all this frenetic activity, it was too late. The confused system had crashed completely. To reconstruct what had happened required carefully dumping and interleaving the backup checkpoint files stored at a hundred or so remote centers around the world.

For over three weeks the electronic financial management system that governed all money transactions was inaccessible to everybody. n.o.body knew how much money he had-or how much anyone else had. Since cash had long ago become obsolete, only eccentrics and collectors had enough bank notes to buy even a week's groceries. People began to barter for necessities. Pledges based on friendship and personal acquaintance enabled many people to survive temporarily. But the pain had only begun. Every time the international management organization that oversaw the global financial system would announce that they were going to try to come back on-line and would plead with people to stay off their terminals except for emergencies, their pleas would be ignored, processing requests would flood the system, and the computers would crash again. It was only two more weeks before the scientists of the world agreed on an explanation for the additional brightness in the apparition of Halley's Comet. But it was over four months before people could count again on reliable data base information from the GNS. The cost to human society of the enduring chaos was incalculable. By the time normal electronic economic activity had been restored, the world was in a violent financial down-spin that would not bottom out until twelve years later. It would be well over fifty years before the Gross World Product would return to the heights reached before the Crash of 2134.

5 AFTER THE CRASH.

There is unanimous agreement that The Great Chaos profoundly altered human civilization in every way. No segment of society was immune. The catalyst for the relatively rapid collapse of the existing inst.i.tutional infrastructure was the market crash and subsequent breakdown of the global financial system; however, these events would not have been sufficient, by themselves, to project the world into a period of unprecedented depression. What followed the initial crash would have been only a comedy of errors if so many lives had not been lost as a result of the poor planning. Inept world political leaders first denied or ignored the existing economic problems, then overreacted with a suite of individual measures that were baffling and/or inconsistent, and finally threw up their arms in despair as the global crisis deepened and spread. Attempts to coordinate international solutions were doomed to failure by the increasing need of each of the sovereign nations to respond to its own const.i.tuency.

In hindsight, it was obvious that the intemationalization of the world that had taken place during the twenty-first century had been flawed in at least one significant way. Although many activities-communications, trade, transportation (including s.p.a.ce), currency regulation, peacekeeping, information exchange, and environmental protection, to name the most important-had indeed become international (even interplanetary, considering the s.p.a.ce colonies), most of the agreements that established these international inst.i.tutions contained codicils that allowed the individual nations to withdraw, upon relatively short notice, if the policies promulgated under the accords no longer served the interests of the country in question. In short, each of the nations partic.i.p.ating in the creation of an international body had the right to abrogate its national involvement, unilaterally, when it was no longer satisfied with the actions of the group.

The years preceding the rendezvous with the first Raman s.p.a.ceship in early 2130 had been an extraordinarily stable and prosperous time. After the world recovered from the devastating cometary impact near Padua, Italy, in 2077, there was an entire half century of moderate growth. Except for a few relatively short, and not too severe, economic recessions, living conditions improved in a wide range of countries throughout the time period. Isolated wars and civil disturbances did erupt from time to time, primarily in the undeveloped nations, but the concerted efforts of the global peacekeeping forces always contained these problems before they became too serious. There were no major crises that tested the stability of the new international mechanisms.

Immediately following the encounter with Rama I, however, there were rapid changes in the basic governing apparatus. First, emergency appropriations to handle Excalibur and other large Rama-related projects drained revenues from established programs. Then, starting in 2132, a loud clamor for tax cuts (to put more money into the hands of the individuals) reduced even further the allocations for needed services. By late 2133, most of the newer international inst.i.tutions had become understaffed and inefficient. Thus the global market crash took place in an environment where there was already growing doubt in the minds of the populace about the efficacy of the entire network of international organizations. As the financial chaos continued, it was an easy step for the individual nations to stop contributing funds to the very global organizations that might have been able, if they had been used properly, to turn the tide of disaster.

The horrors of The Great Chaos have been chronicled in thousands of history texts. In the first two years the major problems were skyrocketing unemployment and bankruptcies, both personal and corporate, but these financial difficulties seemed unimportant as the ranks of the homeless and starving continued to swell. Tent and box communities appeared in the public parks of all the big cities by the winter of 2136-37 and the munic.i.p.al governments responded by striving valiantly to find ways to provide services to them. These services were intended to limit the difficulties created by the supposedly temporary presence of these hordes of idle and underfed individuals. But when the economy did not recover, the squalid tent cities did not disappear. Instead they became permanent fixtures of urban life, growing cancers that were worlds unto themselves with an entire set of activities and interests fundamentally different from the host cities that were supporting them. As more time pa.s.sed and the tent communities turned into hopeless, restless caldrons of despair, these new enclaves in the middle of the metropolitan areas threatened to boil over and destroy the very ent.i.ties that were allowing them to exist. Despite the anxiety caused by this constant Damocles' sword of urban anarchy, the world squeaked through the brutally cold winter of 2137-38 with the basic fabric of modem civilization still more or less intact.

In early 2138 a remarkable series of events occurred in Italy. These events, focused around a single individual named Michael Balatresi, a young Franciscan novitiate who would later become known everywhere as St. Michael of Siena, occupied much of the attention of the world and temporarily forestalled the disintegration of the society. Michael was a brilliant combination of genius and spirituality and political skills, a charismatic polyglot speaker with an unerring sense of purpose and timing. He suddenly appeared on the world stage in Tuscany, coming seemingly out of nowhere, with a pa.s.sionate religious message that appealed to the hearts and minds of many of the world's frightened and/or disenfranchised citizens. His following grew rapidly and spontaneously and paid no heed to international boundaries. He became a potential threat to almost all the identified leadership coteries of the world with his unwavering call for a collective response to the problems besetting the species. When he was martyred under appalling circ.u.mstances in June of 2138, mankind's last spark of optimism seemed to perish. The civilized world that had been held together for many months by a flicker of hope and a slim thread of tradition abruptly crumbled into pieces.

The four years from 2138 to 2142 were not good years to be alive. The litany of human woes was almost endless. Famine, disease, and lawlessness were everywhere. Small wars and revolutions were too numerous to count. There was an almost total breakdown in the standard inst.i.tutions of modern civilization, creating a phantasmagoric life for everyone in the world except the privileged few in their protected retreats. It was a world gone wrong, the ultimate in entropy. Attempts to solve the problems by well-meaning groups of citizens could not work because the solutions they conceived could only be local in scope and the problems were global.

The Great Chaos also extended to the human colonies in s.p.a.ce and brought a sudden end to a glorious chapter in the history of exploration. As the economic disaster spread on the home planet, the scattered colonies around the solar system, which could not exist without regular infusions of money, supplies, and personnel, quickly became the forgotten stepchildren of the people on Earth. As a result almost half of the residents of the colonies had left to return home by 2140, the living conditions in their adopted homes having deteriorated to the point where even the twin difficulties of readjustment to Earth's gravity and the terrible poverty throughout the world were preferred over continuing to stay (most likely to die) in the colonies. The emigration process accelerated in 2141 and 2142, years characterized by mechanical breakdowns in the artificial ecosystems at the colonies and the beginning of a disastrous shortage of spare parts for the entire fleet of robot vehicles used to sustain the new settlements.

By 2143 only a very few hard core colonists remained on the Moon and Mars. Communications between Earth and the colonies had become intermittent and erratic. Monies to maintain even the radio links with the outlying settlements were no longer available. The United Planets had ceased to exist two years previously. There was no all-human forum addressing the problems of the species; the Council of Governments (COG) would not be formed for 6ve more years. The two remaining colonies struggled vainly to avoid death.

In the following year, 2144, the last significant manned s.p.a.ce mission of the time period took place. The mission was a rescue sortie piloted by an amazing Mexican woman named Benita Garcia. Using a jerryrigged s.p.a.cecraft thrown together from old parts, Ms. Garcia and her three-man crew somehow managed to reach the geosynchronous...o...b..t of the lame cruiser James Martin, the final interplanetary transport vehicle in service, and save twenty-four members from the crew of a hundred women and children being repatriated from Mars. In every s.p.a.ce historian's mind, the rescue of the pa.s.sengers on the James Martin marked the end of an era. Within six more months the two remaining s.p.a.ce stations were abandoned and no human lifted off the Earth, bound for orbit, until almost forty years later.