The Garden of Rama(Rama III)

THE TRIAL Chapter 5
Again Richard had lost track of time. Sometime during the days (or had it been weeks?) that he had been living inside the alien net, he had changed positions. His clothes had also been removed by his hosts during one of his long naps. Richard was now lying on his back, supported by an extremely dense section of the fine mesh network enveloping his body.

His mind no longer actively wondered how he was managing to survive. Somehow, whenever he felt hunger or thirst, his needs were swiftly satisfied. His wastes always disappeared within minutes. Breathing was easy even though he was completely surrounded by the living web.

Richard passed many of his conscious hours studying the creature around him. If he looked carefully, he could see the tiny elements constantly in motion. The patterns in the net around him altered very slowly, but they definitely did change. Richard mentally plotted the trajectories of the ganglia that he could see. At one point three separate ganglia migrated into his vicinity and formed a triangle in front of his head.

The net developed a regular cycle of interacting with Richard. It would keep its millions of filaments attached to him for fifteen to twenty hours at a time, and then release him completely for several hours. Richard slept without dreaming whenever he was not attached to the web. If he happened to awaken still in the unattached mode, he was enervated and listless. But each time the threads began to wind around him again he felt a renewed surge of energy.

His dreams were active and vivid if he slept while attached to the alien net. Richard had never dreamed much before and had often laughed at Nicole's preoccupation with her dreams. But as his sleeping images became more complex, and in some cases quite bizarre, Richard began to appreciate why Nicole paid so much attention to them. One night he dreamed that he was again a teenager and was watching a theatrical performance of As You Like It in his hometown of Stratford-on-Avon. The lovely blond girl who was playing Rosalind came down from the stage and whispered in his ear.

"Are you Richard Wakefield?" she asked in the dream.

"Yes," he answered.

The actress began to kiss Richard, first slowly, then more passionately with a lively, tickling tongue darting around inside his mouth. He felt a surge of overpowering desire and then woke up abruptly, strangely embarrassed by both his nakedness and his erection. Now, what was that ail about? Richard wondered, echoing the phrase he had often heard from Nicole.

At some stage in his captivity his recollections of Nicole became much sharper, more clearly delineated. Richard found to his surprise mat in the absence of other stimuli he was able, if he concentrated, to recall entire conversations with Nicole, including such details as the kind of facial expressions she used to punctuate her sentences. In the protracted solitude of his long period inside the web, Richard often ached with loneliness, the vivid memories making him miss his beloved wife even more.

His memories of the children were equally sharp. He missed them all as well, especially Katie. He remembered his last conversation with his special daughter, several days before the wedding, when she had come by the house to pick up some of her clothes. Katie had been depressed, and needed support, but Richard had been unable to help her. The connection just wasn't there, Richard thought. The recent image of Katie as a sexy young woman was replaced by a picture of a reckless ten-year-old girl scampering across the plazas of New York. The juxtaposition of the two images provoked a profound feeling of loss in Richard. I was never comfortable with Katie after she awakened, he realized with a sigh. I still wanted my little girl.

The clarity of his recollections of Nicole and Katie convinced Richard that something extraordinary was happening to his memory. He discovered that he could also recall the exact scores of every World Cup quarter-final, semifinal, and final between 2174 and 2190. Richard had known all that useless information as a young man, for he had been an avid soccer fan. However, during the years before the launch of the Newton, when so many new things had crowded into his brain, he had often been unable, even during soccer discussions with his friends, to recall even the participants in a key World Cup match.

As the visual images from his memories continued to sharpen, Richard found that he was also recalling the emotions that had been associated with the pictures. It was almost as if he were completely reliving the experiences. In one long recollection he remembered not only die overpowering feelings of love and adoration that he had felt for Sarah Tydings when he had first seen her perform onstage, but also the thrill and excitement of their courtship, including the unbridled passion of their first night of love. It had left him breathless then; and now, many years later, enveloped by an alien creature resembling a neural net, Richard's response was equally powerful.

Soon it seemed as if Richard no longer had any control over which memories were activated in his brain. In the beginning, or so he believed, he had purposely thought about Nicole or his children or even his courtship with the young Sarah Tydings, just to make himself happy. Now, he said one day in an imaginary conversation with the sessile net, after refreshing my memory - for God knows what purpose - it seems that you are reading it all out.

For many hours Richard enjoyed the forced memory readout, especially those portions covering his life at Cambridge and the Space Academy, when his days were enlivened by the constant joy of new knowledge. Quantum physics, the Cambrian explosion, probability and statistics, even the long-forgotten vocabulary words from his German lessons reminded him how much of his happiness in life had been due to the excitement of learning. In another particularly satisfying remembrance, his mind jumped swiftly from play to play, covering every live performance of Shakespeare that he had seen between the ages of ten and seventeen. Everyone needs a hero, Richard thought after the montage of scenes, as impetus to bring out the best in himself. My hero was definitely William Shakespeare.

Some of the memories were painful, especially those from his childhood. In one of them Richard was eight years old again, sitting on a bench at the small table in his family's dining room. The atmosphere at the table was tense. His father, drunk and angry at the world, was glowering at all of them as they ate their dinner in silence. Richard accidentally spilled some of his soup and seconds later the back of his father's hand hit him hard on the cheek, knocking him off his bench and into the corner of the room, where he trembled from fear and shock. He had not thought about that moment for years. Richard was unable to restrain his tears as he recalled how helpless and scared he had been around his neurotic, abusive father.

One day Richard suddenly began to remember details from his long odyssey in Rama II and a powerful headache almost blinded him. He saw himself in a strange room, lying on a floor surrounded by three or four octospiders. Dozens of probes and other instruments had been implanted in him and some kind of test was under way.

"Stop, stop," Richard shouted, destroying the memory picture with his acute agitation. "My head is killing me."

Miraculously his headache began to fade and Richard was again among the octospiders in his memory. He recalled the days and days of testing that he had experienced and the tiny living creatures that had been inserted into his body. He recalled also a peculiar set of sexual experiments in which he had been subjected to all kinds of external stimulation and rewarded when he ejaculated.

Richard was startled by these new memories that he had never accessed before, never once since he had awakened from the coma in which his family had found him in New York. Now I remember other things about the octo'spiders too, he thought excitedly. They talked to each other in colors that wrapped around their heads. They were basically friendly, but determined to learn everything they could about me. They -

The mental picture vanished and Richard's headache returned. The threads from the net had just disconnected. Richard was exhausted and quickly fell asleep.

After days and days of one memory after another, the readout abruptly ceased. Richard's mind was no longer driven by an external forcing function. The threads of the net remained unattached for long periods of time.

A week passed without incident. In the second week, however, an unusual spherical ganglion, far larger and more densely wrapped man the normal clumps in the living web, began to develop about twenty centimeters away from Richard's head. The ganglion grew until it was about the size of a basketball. Soon thereafter the immense clump issued hundreds of filaments that inserted themselves into the skin around the circumference of Richard's skull. At last, Richard thought, ignoring the pain caused by the invasion of the threads into his brain, now we will see what this has all been about.

He began immediately to see some kind of pictures, although they were so fuzzy that he could not identify anything specific. The quality of Richard's mental images improved very quickly, however, for he cleverly devised a rudimentary way of communicating "with the web. As soon as the first image appeared in his mind, Richard concluded that the net, which had been reading his memory output for days, was now trying to write into his brain.

But the web obviously had no way of measuring the quality of the images that Richard was receiving. Remembering his trips to the eye doctor as a boy and the communication pattern that resulted in the final specifications for his eyeglass lenses, Richard pointed his thumb up or down to indicate whether each change the net made in its transmission process made the picture better or worse. In that manner Richard was soon able to "see" what the alien was attempting to show him.

The first pictures were images of a planet taken from a spacecraft. The cloud-covered world with two smallish moons and a distant, solitary yellow star as its heat and light source was almost certainly the home planet of the sessile webs. The suite of pictures that followed showed Richard various landscapes from the planet.

Fog was ubiquitous on the home world of the sessiles. Below the fog in most of the images was a brown, rock-less, barren surface. Only in the littorals where the barren 'ground encountered the waves of the green liquid lakes and oceans was there any suggestion of life. In one of these oases Richard saw not only several avians, but also a fascinating melange of other living things. Richard could have spent days examining just one or two of these pictures, but he was not in control of the image sequence. The net had some purpose for its communication, he was certain, and the first set of pictures was only an introduction.

All of the remaining images featured either an avian, a manna melon, a myrmicat, a sessile web, or some combination of the quartet. The scenes were all taken from what Richard assumed was "normal life" on their home planet, and expanded on the general theme of symbiosis among the species. In several pictures the aliens were shown defending the subterranean colonies of the myrmicats and sessiles from invasions by what appeared to be small animals and plants. Other images depicted the myrmicats ministering to avian hatchlings or transporting large quantities of manna melons to an avian mound.

Richard was puzzled when he saw several pictures that showed tiny manna melons embedded inside the sessile creatures. Why would the myrmicats lay their eggs in here? he wondered. For protection? Or are these weird webs a kind of thinking placenta?

One definite impression left upon Richard by the sequence of images was that the sessiles were, in a hierarchical sense, the dominant species of the three. The pictures all suggested that both the myrmicats and the avians paid homage to the web creatures. Do these nets, then, somehow do all the important thinking for the avians and rriyr-micats? Richard asked himself. What incredible symbiotic relationships... How in the world could they possibly have evolved?

There were several thousand frames altogether in the sequence. After it repeated twice, the filaments detached themselves from Richard and returned to the giant ganglion. In the days that followed Richard was essentially left alone, the attachments to his host being limited to those necessary for him to survive.

When a lane formed in the web and Richard could see me door through which he had entered many weeks before, he thought that he was going to be released. His momentary excitement, however, was quickly dampened. At his first attempt to move, the sessile net tightened its grip on all parts of his body.

So what is the purpose of the lane? As Richard watched, a trio of myrmicats entered from the hallway. The creature in the middle had two broken legs, and its back segment was crushed, as if it had been run over by a heavy car or truck. Its two companions carried the disabled myrmicat into the web and then departed. Within seconds the sessile began to wrap itself around the new arrival.

Richard was about two meters away from the crippled myrmicat. The region between him and the injured creature emptied of all filaments and clumps. Richard had never before seen such a gap inside the sessile. So my education continues, he mused. What is it that I am supposed to learn now? That sessiles are doctors to the myrmicats, just as the myrmicats are doctors to the avians?

The web did not limit its attention to the injured portions of the myrmicat. In fact, during one long waking period Richard watched the net completely enclose the creature in a tight cocoon. At the same time, the large ganglion in Richard's immediate vicinity migrated over to the cocoon.

Later, after a nap, Richard noticed that the ganglion had returned to his side. The cocoon across the gap had almost finished unraveling. Richard's pulse rate doubled as the cocoon completely disappeared and there was no trace of the myrmicat.

Richard didn't have much time to wonder what had happened to the myrmicat. Within minutes the filaments from the large ganglion were again attached to his skull and another picture show was playing inside his brain. In the very first image Richard saw five human soldiers camping on the shore of the moat inside the avian habitat. They were eating a meal. Beside them were an impressive array of weapons, including two machine guns.

The pictures that followed showed humans on the attack throughout the second habitat. Two of the early scenes were especially gruesome. In the first a juvenile avian had been decapitated in midair and was falling to the ground. A pair of satisfied humans congratulated each other in the lower left portion of the same frame. The second image depicted a large square hole in one of the grassland sectors of the green region. Inside the hole could be seen the remains of several dead avians. A human with a wheelbarrow containing another pair of avian corpses was approaching the mass grave from the left.

Richard was staggered by what he was seeing. What are these pictures anyway? he wondered. And why am I seeing them now? He quickly reviewed all the recent events in his sessile world and concluded, with considerable shock, that the disabled myrmicat must have actually seen everything Richard was being shown, and that the web creature had somehow removed the images from the mind of the myrmicat and transferred them into Richard's brain.

Once he understood what he was seeing, Richard paid more attention to the pictures themselves. He was completely outraged by the invasion and slaughter that he saw.

In one of the later images three human soldiers were shown raiding an avion apartment complex inside the brown cylinder. There were no survivors.

These poor creatures are doomed, Richard said to himself, and they must know it...

Tears suddenly formed in Richard's eyes and a profound sadness, deeper than any he had ever known, accompanied his realization that members of his own species were systematically exterminating the avians. No, no, he shouted silently. Stop, oh, please stop. Can't you see what'you are doing? These avians, too, proclaim the miracle of chemicals raised to consciousness. They are like us. They are our brothers.

In the next several seconds Richard's many interactions with the birdlike creatures flooded his memory and chased away the implanted images. They saved my life, he thought, his mind focusing on the flight long ago across the Cylindrical Sea. With absolutely no benefit to themselves. What human, he said to himself bitterly, would have done such a good deed for an avian?

Richard had rarely sobbed in his life. But his sorrow for the avians overpowered him. As he wept, all his experiences since entering the avian habitat filed through his mind. Richard recalled especially the sudden change in their treatment of him and his subsequent transfer to the realm of the myrmicats. Then came the guided tour and my eventual placement here... It's obvious they have been trying to communicate with me. But why?

At that instant Richard had an epiphany of such power that tears rushed into his eyes again. Because they are desperate, he answered himself. They are begging me to help.