The Garden of Rama(Rama III)

THE TRIAL Chapter 4
The elevator ride was painfully slow. The immense car had a square floor approximately twenty meters on a side, with a ceiling that was another eight to ten meters above Richard's head. The floor of the car was flat everywhere except for two pairs of parallel grooves, one pair on either side of Richard, that ran from the door to the back of the elevator. They can certainly transport huge loads in this, Richard thought, staring at the ceiling far above him.

He tried to estimate the rate of descent of the elevator, but it was impossible. He had no frame of reference. According to Richard's map of the cylinder, the manna melon storehouses should have been about eleven hundred meters above the base. So if we're going all the way to the bottom, at what would be a normal elevator speed on Earth, then this trip may take several minutes.

It was the longest three minutes of his life. Richard had absolutely no idea what he would find when the elevator doors opened. Maybe I'll be outside, he thought suddenly.

Maybe I'll be on the edge of that region with the white structures... Could they be sending me home?

He had just begun to wonder how life might have changed in New Eden when the elevator came to a stop. The large doors opened and for several seconds Richard was certain that his heart had jumped out of his body. Standing directly in front of him, and obviously staring at him with all their eyes, were two creatures far stranger than any he had ever imagined.

Richard could not move. What he was seeing was so unbelievable that he was physically paralyzed while his mind struggled with the bizarre inputs it was receiving from his senses. Each of the beings in front of him had four eyes on its "head." In addition to the two large, milky ovals on either side of an invisible line of symmetry that bisected the head, each creature had two additional eyes attached to stalks raised ten to twelve centimeters above the top of its forehead. Behind the large head, their bodies had three segments, with a pair of appendages for each segment, giving them six legs altogether. The aliens were standing upright on their two back legs, their front four appendages neatly tucked against their smooth, cream-colored underbellies.

They moved toward him in the elevator and Richard backed away, frightened. The two creatures turned to each other and communicated in a high-frequency noise that originated from a small circular orifice below the oval eyes. Richard blinked, felt dizzy, and dropped down on one knee to steady himself. His heart was still pumping furiously.

The aliens also changed position, putting their middle legs on the floor. In that posture they resembled giant ants with their front two legs off the ground and their heads raised high. The entire time the black spheres at the end of the eye stalks continued to pivot, scanning the full three hundred and sixty degrees, and the milky material in the dark brown ovals moved from side to side.

For several minutes they sat more or less stationary, as if they were encouraging Richard to examine them. Fighting against his fear, he tried to study them in an objective, scientific fashion. The creatures were roughly the size of medium-sized dogs, but they certainly weighed much less. Their bodies were thin and quite trim. The front and back segments were larger than the middle one, and all three body divisions displayed a polished carapace on top that was made of some kind of hard material.

Richard would have classified them as very large insects except for their extraordinary appendages, which were thick, perhaps even muscled, and covered with a short, very dense, black-and-white-striped "hair" that made it appear as if the creatures were wearing panty hose. Their hands, if that was the proper appellation, were free of the , hairy covering and had four fingers each, including an opposing thumb on the front pair.

Richard had just summoned enough courage to look again at their incredible heads when there was a high-pitched, sirenlike noise behind the two aliens. They turned around. Richard stood up and saw a third creature approaching at a rapid clip. Its motion was marvelous to watch. It ran like a cat with six legs, stretching out parallel to the ground and pushing off with a different pair of legs at each point in its stride.

The three engaged in a quick conversation and the newcomer, lifting up its head and front legs, motioned unambiguously for Richard to leave the elevator. He walked out behind the trio and entered a very large chamber.

This room was a manna melon storehouse also, but that was its only similarity to the one in the avian portion of the cylinder. High technology and automated equipment were everywhere. In the ceiting ten meters above them, a mechanical cherry picker was moving on a rail system. It would grasp individual melons and load them in freight cars on grooves at one end of the room. While Richard and his hosts watched, a freight car moved down the groove and came to a stop in the elevator.

The creatures bounced off down one of the aisles in the room and Richard hastened to follow. They waited for him at the door, then raced to their left, looking backward to see if he was still in sight. Richard ran after them for most of the next two minutes, until they reached a wide open atrium, many meters high, with a transportation device in its center.

The device was a remote cousin of the escalator. Actually there were two of them, one going up and another down, that spiraled around the two thick poles in the center of the atrium. The escalators moved very quickly at quite a steep angle. Every five meters or so they reached die next level, or floor, and the passengers then walked a meter to the.spiral escalator around the other pole. What passed for a railing on the side of the escalator was a barrier only thirty centimeters high. The alien creatures rode in the horizontal position, with all six legs on tire moving ramp. Richard, who was standing originally, quickly dropped down to all fours to keep from falling out.

During the ride a dozen or so other aliens, riding on the down half of the escalator, passed Richard and gawked at him with their amazing faces. But how do they eat? Richard wondered, noting that the circular hole they used for communication was certainly not large enough for much food. There were no other orifices on their heads, although there were some small knobs and wrinkles whose purposes were unknown.

Where they were taking Richard was on the eighth or ninth level. All three of the creatures waited for him until he reached the appointed platform. Richard followed them into a hexagonal building with "bright red markings on the front. That's funny, Richard thought, staring at the strange squiggles. I've seen that writing before. , . . Of course, on the map or whatever document it was the avians were reading.

Richard was placed in a room that was well lit and tastefully decorated in black and white with geometric patterns. There were objects around him of all shapes and sizes, but Richard had no idea what any of them were. The aliens used sign language to inform Richard that this was where he was going to stay. Then they departed. A weary Richard studied the furniture, trying to figure out which thing might be the bed, and then stretched out on the floor to sleep.

Myrmicats. That's what I'll call them. Richard had awakened after sleeping for four hours and could not stop thinking about the alien creatures. He wanted to give them a good name. After dismissing both cat-ant and catsect, he remembered that someone who studies ants is called a myrmecologist. He chose myrmicat because it looked better in his mind when spelled with an i instead of an e.,

Richard looked around him. Every place he had been in the myrmicat habitat had had good illumination, which was in marked contrast to the dark, catacomblike corridors of the upper portions of the brown cylinder. I have not seen any of the avians since the elevator ride, Richard was thinking. So apparently these two species do not live together. At least not completely. But they both use manna melons... What exactly is their connection?

A pair of myrmicats bounded through the entry, placed a neatly sectioned melon and a cup of water in front of him, and men disappeared. Richard was both hungry and thirsty. Several seconds after he had finished with his breakfast, the pair of creatures returned. Using the hands on their front legs, the myrmicats gestured for him to stand up. Richard stared at them. Are these the same creatures as yesterday? he wondered. And are they the same pair that brought the melon and the water? He thought back over all the myrmicats he had seen, including those who had passed him going down the escalator. He could not recall a single distinguishing or identifying characteristic in any individual. So they all look the same? he thought. Then how do they tell each other apart?

The myrmicats led him out into the corridor and bolted away to the right. This is great, Richard said to himself, starting to jog after spending a few seconds admiring the beauty of their gait. They must think humans are all athletes. One of the myrmicats stopped about forty meters in front of him. It did not turn around, but Richard could tell it was watching him because both of its stalk eyes were bent back in his direction. "I'm coming," Richard shouted. "But I can't run that fast."

It wasn't long before Richard figured out that the pair of aliens was giving him a guided tour of the myrmicat domain. The tour was very logically planned. The first stop, a very brief one, was at a manna melon storehouse. Richard watched two freight cars filled with melons slide down grooves into an elevator similar to {or identical with) the one in which he had descended the day before.

After another five-minute jog, Richard entered an entirely different section of the myrmicat den. Whereas the walls in the other section had been mostly metallic gray or white, except in his room, here the rooms and corridors were all decorated profusely, either with colors or geometric patterns or both. One vast chamber was about the size of a theater and had three liquid pools in its floor. About a hundred myrmicats were in this room, half apparently swimming in the pools (with only their stalk eyes and the top half of their carapaces above the water line), and the other half either sitting on the ridges dividing the three pools from each other, or milling around in a weird building on the far side of the room.

But were they actually swimming? On closer inspection Richard noticed that the creatures did not move around in the pool - they just submerged in a given spot and stayed under the water for several minutes. Two of the pools were quite thick, roughly the consistency of a rich, creamy soup on Earth, and the third, clear pool was almost certainly water. Richard followed a single myrmicat as it moved from one of the thick pools to the water, then over to the other thick pool. What are they doing? Richard wondered. And why have they brought me here?

As if on cue he was tapped on the back by one of the myrmicats. It pointed to Richard, then to the pools, and then to Richard's mouth. He had no idea what it was telling him. The guide myrmicat next walked down the slope toward the pools and submerged itself in one of the thicker pools. When it returned it stood on its back pair of legs and pointed to the grooves between the segments of its soft, cream-colored underbelly.

It was clearly important to the myrmicats that Richard understand what was going on at the pools. At the next stop he watched a combination of myrmicats and some high-technology machines grinding up fibrous material and then mixing it with water and other liquids to create a thin slurry that looked like what was in one of the pools. At length one of the aliens put its ringer into the slurry and then touched the material to Richard's lips. They must be telling me that the pools are for feeding, Richard thought. So they don't eat manna melon after all? Or at least they have a more varied diet? This is all fascinating.

Soon they were off on another jog to another distant comer of the den. Here Richard saw thirty or forty smaller creatures, obviously juvenile myrmicats, engaged in activities with supervisory adults. In physical appearance the little ones resembled their elders except for one major difference - they had no carapace. Richard concluded that the hard top covering was probably not exuded by the creature until its growth was complete. Although Richard imagined that what he saw occurring with the juveniles was a rough approximation of school, or perhaps a nursery, he of course had no way of knowing for certain. But at one point he was sure that he heard the juveniles repeating in unison a sequence of sounds made by an adult myrmicat.

Richard next rode the escalator with his pair of tour guides. On about the twentieth level the creatures left the escalator and the open atrium, racing quickly down a corridor that ended in a vast factory filled with myrmicats and machines engaged in an impressive array of tasks. His guides always seemed to be in a hurry, so it was difficult for Richard to study any particular process. The factory was like a machine shop on Earth. There were noises of all kinds, smells of chemicals and metals, and the whine of myrmicat communication throughout the room. At one position Richard watched a pair of myrmicats repair a cherry picker similar to the machine that he had seen operating in the manna melon storehouse the day before.

In one corner of the factory was a special area that was sealed off from the rest of the work. Although his guides did not lead him in that direction, Richard's curiosity was piqued. Nobody stopped him when he crossed the threshold of the special area. Inside the large cubicle a myrmicat operator was presiding over an automated manufacturing process.

Long, skinny, jointed pieces of light metal or plastic came into the room on a conveyor belt from one direction. Small spheres about two centimeters in diameter entered from an adjacent cubicle on another conveyor. Where the two belts merged, a large, rectangular machine, mounted in housing that was hanging from the high ceiling, descended onto the parts with a peculiar sucking sound. Thirty seconds later the myrmicat operator caused the machine to withdraw and a pair of leggies scrambled off the belt, folded their long legs around them, and jumped into positions in a box that looked like a gigantic egg carton.

Richard watched the process repeat several times. He was fascinated. He was also slightly bewildered. So the myrmicats make the leggies. And the maps. And probably the spacecraft too, wherever they and the avians come from. So what is this? Some advanced kind of symbiosis?

He shook his head as the leggie assembly process in front of him continued. Moments later Richard heard a myrmicat noise behind him. He turned around. One of his guides extended a slice of manna melon in his direction.

Richard was becoming exhausted. He had no idea how long he had been touring, but he felt as if it had been many, many hours.

There was no way he could possibly synthesize everything he had seen. After the ride in the small elevator to the upper reaches of the myrmicat region, where Richard not only had visited the avian hospital staffed and run by the myrmicats, but also had watched the avians hatching out of brown, leathery eggs under the watchful eyes of myrmicat doctors, Richard knew for certain that there was indeed a complex symbiotic relationship between the two species. But why? he wondered as his guides allowed him to rest temporarily near the top of the escalator. The avians clearly benefit from the myrmicats. But what do these giant ant-cats get from the avians?

His guides led him down a broad corridor toward a large door several hundred meters in the distance. For once they were not running. As they neared the door, three other myrmicats entered the hallway from smaller side corridors and the creatures began to talk in their high-frequency language. At one point all five of them stopped and Richard imagined that an argument was under way. He studied them carefully while they talked, especially their faces. Even the wrinkles and folds around the noise-making orifice and oval eyes were identical from creature to creature. There was absolutely no way of distinguishing one myrmicat from another.

At length the entire group began again to walk toward the door. From the distance Richard had underestimated its size. As he drew near, he could see that it was twelve to fifteen meters tall, and more than three meters wide. Its surface was intricately and magnificently carved, the central focus of the artwork being a square, four-panel decoration with a flying avian in the upper left quadrant, a manna melon in the upper right, a running myrmicat in the lower left partition, and something that looked like cotton candy with scattered thick, clustered lumps in the lower right.

Richard stopped to admire the artwork. At first he had a vague feeling that he had seen this door, or at least the design, before, but he told himself that it couldn't be possible. However, as he was running his fingers across the sculpted figure of the myrmicat, his memory suddenly awoke. Yes, Richard thought excitedly to himself, of course. At the back of the avian lair in Rama II. That was where the fire was.

Moments later the door swung open and Richard was ushered into what resembled a large underground cathedral. The room in which he found himself was over fifty meters tall. Its basic floor shape was a circle, about thirty meters in diameter, and there were six separate naves off to the side, around the circle. The walls were dazzling. Virtually every square inch contained sculptures or supporting frescoes meticulously created with great attention to detail. It was overwhelmingly beautiful.

At the center of the cathedral was an elevated platform on which a myrmicat was standing and speaking. Below him were a dozen others, all sitting on their back four legs and watching the speaker with rapt attention.

As Richard wandered around in the room he realized that the decorations on the wall, in a meter-wide strip about eighty centimeters above the floor, were telling an orderly story. Richard quietly followed the artwork until he reached what he thought was the beginning of the story. The first decoration was a sculptured portrait of a manna melon. In the next three panels something could be seen growing inside the melon. Whatever was growing was tiny in the second panel, but by the fourth sculpture it occupied almost the entire interior of the melon.

In the fifth panel a tiny head with two milky, oval eyes, stalk nubs, and a small circular orifice below the eyes could be seen poking its way out of the melon. The sixth sculpture, which showed a juvenile myrmicat very much like the ones Richard had seen earlier in the day, confirmed what he had been surmising as he had been following the decorations. Holy shit, Richard said to himself. So a manna melon is a myrmicat egg! His thoughts raced ahead. But that doesn't make sense. The avians eat the melons... In fact, the myrmicats even feed them to me... What's going on here?

Richard was so astonished by what he had discovered (and so tired from all the running during the tour) that he sat down in front of the sculpture containing the juvenile myrmicats. He tried to figure out the relationship between the myrmicats and the avians. He could cite no parallel symbiosis on Earth, although he was well aware that species often worked together to improve each other's chances for survival. But how could one species remain friendly with another when its eggs were the sole food for the second species? Richard concluded that what he had thought were fundamental biological tenets did not apply to the avians and the myrmicats.

While Richard was pondering the strange new things he had learned, a group of myrmicats gathered around him. They all motioned for him to stand up. A minute later he was following them down a winding ramp on the other side of the room to a special crypt in the basement of their cathedral.

For the first time since Richard had entered the habitat the lighting was dim. The myrmicats beside him moved slowly, almost reverently, as they proceeded down a broad passage with an arched ceiling. At the other end of the passage was a pair of doors that opened into a large room filled with a soft white material. Although the material, which looked like cotton from a distance, was densely arrayed, its individual filaments were mostly very thin, except where they came together in clumps, or ganglia, that were scattered in no definable pattern throughout the large white volume.

Richard and the myrmicats stopped in the entryway, a meter or so away from where the material began. The cottony network extended in all directions for as far as Richard could see. While he was studying its intricate mesh construction, the elements of the material very slowly began to move, pulling apart to form a lane that would continue the path from the passage into the interior of its network. It's alive, Richard thought, his pulse racing as he watched in fascination and terror.

Five minutes later, an alley had opened up that was just large enough for Richard to walk ten meters into the material. The myrmicats around him were all pointing toward the cottony web. Richard started shaking his head. I'm sorry, fellas, Richard wanted to say, but there's something about this situation that I don't tike. So I'll just skip this part of the tour if it's all right with you.

The myrmicats kept pointing. Richard had no choice, and he knew it. What is it going to do to me? he asked as he took his first step forward. Eat me? Is that what this has been all about? That would make no sense at all.

He turned around. The myrmicats had not moved. Richard took a deep breath and walked the full ten meters into the lane, to a spot where he could reach out and touch one of the odd ganglia in the living mesh. As he was examining the ganglion carefully, the material around him began to move again. Richard whirled around and saw that the lane behind him was closing. Momentarily frantic, he tried to ran in that direction, back toward the passage, but it was a waste of energy. The net caught him and he resigned himself to accept whatever was going to happen next.

Richard stood perfectly still as the web enveloped him. The tiny elements, like threads, were about a millimeter wide. Slowly, steadily, they began to cover his body. Wait, Richard thought, wait. You're going to suffocate me.

But surprisingly, even though hundreds of filaments were already wrapping around his head and face, he was having no difficulty breathing.

Before his hands were immobilized, Richard tried to pull one of the tiny elements off his arm. It was almost impossible. As they had been wrapping around him, the threads had also been making insertions in his skin. After many tugs, he finally succeeded in freeing the white filaments from one small portion of his forearm, but he was bleeding in the areas that had been freed. Richard surveyed his body and estimated that he probably had a million or so pieces of the living mesh underneath the outer layer of his skin. He shuddered.

Richard was still amazed that he had not suffocated. As his mind began to wonder how air was getting to him through the web, he heard another voice inside his head. Stop trying to analyze everything, it said. You'll never understand it anyway. For once in your life just experience the incredible adventure.