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Even by the twenty-second century, no way had yet been discovered of keeping elderly and conservative scientists from occupying crucial administrative positions. Indeed, it was doubted if the problem ever would be solved.
😂 👌
A few particles of dust, driven by wisps of escaping air, streamed outward like dazzling diamonds as the brilliant sunlight caught them. The road to Rama lay open.
His well-ordered universe had been turned upside down, and he had a dizzying glimpse of those mysteries at the edge of existence that he had successfully ignored for most of his life.
At all costs, he must not let Rama overwhelm him. That way lay failure, perhaps even madness.
The exobiologist was, in fact, deeply mortified. The spectacular breakup of the Cylindrical Sea was a much more obvious phenomenon than the hurricane winds, yet he had completely overlooked it. To have remembered that hot air rises but to have forgotten that hot ice contracts was not an achievement of which he could be very proud.
Was not expecting this story to be so much about hard science! This slaps! Also this cracks me up. Poor exobiologist. 😄
Otherwise, they would have destroyed themselves—as we nearly did in the twentieth century. I’ve made that quite clear in my new book, Ethos and Cosmos. I hope you received your copy.” “Yes, thank you, though I’m afraid the pressure of other matters has not allowed me to read beyond the introduction.
Crusty, snarky scientists having philosophical and scientific arguments in order to solve problems in space is 1000% my jam. And even better is Clarke’s sarcastic undertones that critique the ego-driven world of intellectuals.
But the Hermians were proud of their bizarre planet, with its days longer than its years, its double sunrises and sunsets, its rivers of molten metal.
The Hermians, it was often joked, sometimes behaved as if the Sun were their personal property. They were bound to it in an intimate love-hate relationship—as the Vikings had once been linked to the sea, the Nepalese to the Himalayas, the Eskimos to the tundra.
But something was stirring; and Boris Rodrigo’s word would do as well as any other: the “spirit” of Rama was awake.
“If Galileo had been born in this world,” said Mercer finally, “he’d have gone crazy working out the laws of dynamics.”
The Ramans, it seemed, had brought the art of triple redundancy to a high degree of perfection.
“Well, it’s a factory, all right, Skipper, and maybe the sea provides the raw material. After all, that’s how it all happened on Earth, though in a different way…. I believe New York is a factory for making… Ramans.”
Duuuuuude. 😳
He was going not only where no one had ever been before, but also where no one would ever go again.
As he came ever closer to the South Pole, he began to feel more and more like a sparrow flying beneath the vaulted roof of some great cathedral—though no cathedral ever built had been even one-hundredth the size of this place.
Perhaps the Ramans felt that they already knew the ultimate secrets of the universe, and were no longer haunted by the yearnings and aspirations that drove mankind.
This was no place, among the overwhelming architecture of the South Pole, for a lone man to listen to the voice of Rama.
In his perhaps biased opinion, that decided the level of the creature’s intelligence. An entity—robot or animal—which could ignore a human being could not be very bright.
There seemed to be a remarkable number of turns; not until Jimmy had traced them for several revolutions, getting more and more confused in the process, did he realize that there was not one ramp, but three, totally independent and 120 degrees apart.
Slowly, Jimmy held up his outstretched hands. Men had been arguing for two hundred years about this gesture; would every creature, everywhere in the universe, interpret this as “See—no weapons”? But no one could think of anything better.
Feeling extremely foolish, the acting representative of Homo sapiens watched his First Contact stride away across the Raman plain, totally indifferent to his presence.
He had seldom been so humiliated in his life. Then his sense of humor came to the rescue. After all, it was no great matter to have been ignored by an animated garbage truck. It would have been worse if it had greeted him as a long-lost brother.
As he did a slow pan right around the crossroads, he said plaintively to Hub Control: “What do you think this is? I feel I’m trapped in a giant jigsaw puzzle. Or is this the Raman Art Gallery?”
Everything about this scene! Omg! This story is nothing like I was expecting!
Now he saw, with no surprise at all, that it was actually three flowers tightly packed together. The petals were brightly colored tubes about five centimeters long; there were at least fifty in each bloom, and they glittered with such metallic blues, violets, and greens that they seemed more like the wings of a butterfly than anything in the vegetable kingdom.
It did not really matter. Whatever the scientific definition, to Jimmy this was a flower. The strange miracle, the un-Ramanlike accident, of its existence here reminded him of all that he would never see again; and he was determined to possess it.
The human need to possess beauty.
He had never been interested in flowers in his whole life, yet now he was gambling his last energies to collect one.
Why does this whole flower scene feel like the scene in Beauty and the Beast when the father sneaks to steal a rose? Will a “Beast” be awakened here as Jimmy steals this priceless flower?
I’ve murdered something beautiful, Jimmy said to himself. But then, Rama had killed him. He was only collecting what was his rightful due.
He looked back upon the towers and ramparts of New York and the dark cliff of the continent beyond. They were safe now from inquisitive man.
And then, to her obvious delight, she got her eagerly desired specimen. Hub Control reported that a spider had fallen down the vertical face and was lying, dead or incapacitated, on the first platform. Laura’s time up from the plain was a record that would never be beaten.
“I agree with you, Captain,” he whispered. “The human race has to live with its conscience. Whatever the Hermians argue, survival is not everything.”
Brilliant beads, like ball lightning, raced along the six narrow valleys that had once illuminated this world. They moved from both poles toward the sea in a synchronized, hypnotic rhythm that could have only one meaning. “To the sea!” the lights were calling. “To the sea!” And the summons was hard to resist; there was not a man who did not feel a compulsion to turn back, and to seek oblivion in the waters of Rama.
On doctor’s orders, Norton himself had used electrosedation. Even so, he had dreamed that he was climbing an infinite stairway.
They would probably never even know that the human race existed. Such monumental indifference was worse than any deliberate insult.
And on far-off Earth, Dr. Carlisle Perera had as yet told no one of how he had wakened from a restless sleep with the message from his subconscious echoing in his brain: The Ramans do everything in threes.
😱 *screams into the fabric of spacetime*
