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"Fishing once more? "cheap colored pencils cheap colored pencilstcheap colored pencilse 128 .In using this system, absentee voters werecheap colored pencils instructed to mark their ballots with number two pencils. The optical scanner rejected ballots which were marked withcheap colored pencils instruments other than number two pencil. 2006, Barbara Slater Stern, curriculumes that"Roger," Richard replied from inside his'helmet. He and Nicole glanced at each other and lau and teaching dialogue: V. 8, page 33."Mrs. Landry, I forgot to bring my number two pencils! Doghed as they remembered their days as Newton cosmonauts.
The Eagle led them down a long, wide corridor. At the end they turned right through a door and came out on a broad balcony ten kilometers above a factory floor larger than anyone could possibly imagine. Nicole felt her knees weaken as she stared into the giant abyss. Despite the weightlessness, waves of vertigo swept through both Richard and Nicole. They both turned away at the same moment. They focused their eyes on each other while they tried to comprehend what they had just seen.
"It's quite a sight," the Eagle commented.
What a colossal understatement, Nicole thought. She very slowly lowered her eyes again to the awesome spectacle. This time she held on to the rail with both hands to help her equilibrium.
158 ARTHUR C. CLARKE AND GENTRY LEE
The factory below them contained the entire Northern Hemicylinder of Rama, from the port end where they had docked the Newton andtentered, down to the end of the Central Plain at the banks of die Cylindrical Sea. There was no sea, and no Raman city of New York, but there was almost as much real estate in this one enclosed factory as in the entire American state of Rhode Island.
The crater and bowl of the north end of Ramacheap colored pencils were still completely intact, including the outer shell. These 'segments of Rama were positioned to the right of Richard, Nicole, and the Eagle, almost behind them as they stood on the platform. Mounted in front of them on the railings were a dozen telescopes, each with a different resolution, through which the three of them could see the familiar ladders and stairways, resembling three ribs of an umbrella, that took thirty thousand steps to descend (or ascend) to the Central Plain of Rama.
The rest of the Northern Hemicylinder was split open and lying beneath them in parts, not directly connected to the bowl or to each other, but nevertheless lying with adjacent sectors in the proper alignment. Each part was roughly six to eight square kilometers and its edges rose, due to the curvature, substantially off the floor.
"It's easier to do the early work in this configuration," the Eagle explained. "Once we've closed the cylinder it's harder to get in and out with all the equipment."
Through the telescopes Richard and Nicole could see that two different areas of the Central Plain were teeming with activity. They could not begin to count the number of robots going to and fro on the floor of the factory below them. Nor could they determine exactly what was being done in many cases. It was engineering on a scale never dreamed of by humans.
"I brought you up here first to give you an overview," the Eagle said. "Later we will go down on the floor and you can see more of the details."
Richard and Nicole stared at him dumbfounded. The Eagle laughed and continued. "If you look carefully, and put the pieces together in your mind, you will see that two vast regions of the Central Plain, one near the Cylindrical Sea and another covering an area almost up to the
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end of the stairways, have been completely cleared. That's where all the new construction is going on. Between these two areas Rama looks exactly as it did when you left it. We have a general engineering guideline herewe only change those regions that are going to be used on the next mission."
Richard brightened. "Are you telling us that this spacecraft is used over and over1? And that for each mission only required changes are made?"
The Eagle nodded.
cheap colored pencils "Then that conglomeration of skyscrapers we call New York might have been built for some much earlier mission, and simply left there because no changes were required?"
The Eagle did not say anything in response to Richard's rhetorical question. He was pointing at the northern area of the Central Plain. "That will be your habitat, over there. We have just finished the infrastructure, what you would call the 'utilities,* including water, power, sewer, and top-level environmental control. There is room for design flexibility in the rest of the process. That's why we have brought you over here."
"What is that tiny domed building south of the cleared area?" Richard asked. He was still staggered by the idea that New York might have been a leftover, a remnant from an earlier Raman voyage.
"That's the control center," the Eagle replied. "The equipment that manages your habitat will be stored there. Usually the control center is hidden beneath the living area, in the shell of Rama, but in your case the designers decided to put it on the Plain."
"What's that large region over there?" Nicole said, pointing at the cleared area immediately north of where the Cylindrical Sea would have been located if Rama had been completely reassembled.
"I'm not allowed to tell you what it's for," the Eagle replied. "In fact, I'm surprised that I have even been allowed to show you that it exists. Ordinarily our return voyagers are totally ignorant of the contents of their vehicle outside their own habitat. The nominal plan is, of course, for each species to stay within its own module."
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"Look at that mound or tower in the center," Nicole said to Richard, directing his attention to the other region. "It must be almost two kilometers high."
"And it's shaped like a doughnut. I mean, the center is hollowed out."
They could see that the outside walls of what was possibly a second habitat were already quite advanced. None of its interior would be visible from the factory floor.
"Can you give us a hint as to who or what is going to live thereT' Nicole asked.
"Come on," the Eagle said firmly, shaking his hecheap colored pencilsad. "It's time for us to descend."
Richard and Nicole disengaged themselves from the telescopes, took a quick look at the general layout of their own habitat (which was not nearly as far along in construction as the other one), and followed the Eagle back into the corridor. After five minutes of walking they reached what the Eagle told them was an elevator.
"You must buckle yourselves into these seats very carefully," their guide said. "This is quite a wild ride."
The acceleration in their bizarre oval capsule was powerful and swift. Less than two minutes later, the deceleration was equally abrupt. They had reached the factory floor. "This thing travels three hundred kilometers an hour?" Richard asked after doing some quick mental calculations.
"Unless it's in a hurry," the Eagle replied.
Richard and Nicole followed him out onto the factory floor. It was immense. In many ways it was more staggering than Rama itself, because almost half of the giant spacecraft was lying on the floor around them. They both remembered the overpowering feelings they had had riding in the chairlifts in Rama and looking out across the Cylindrical Sea at the mysterious horns in the southern bowl. Those feelings of reverence and awe returned, and were even amplified, as Richard and Nicole stared at the activity going on around and above them in the factory.
The elevator had deposited them at the floor level just outside one of the portions of their habitat. The shell of Rama was in front of them. They checked its thickness as they walked across from the elevator exit. "About two
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hundred meters thick," Richard noted to Nicole, answecheap colored pencilsring a question they had had since their first days in Rama.
"What will be beneath our habitat, in the shell?" Nicole asked.
The Eagfe held up three of his four fingers, indicating that they were asking for Level HI information. Both the humans laughed.
"Will you be going with us?" Nicole asked the Eagle a few moments later.
"Back to your solar system? No, I can't," he answered. "But I will admit that it would be interesting.1'
The Eagle led them over to an area of intense activity. Several dozen robots were working on a large, cylindrical structure about sixty meters tall. "This is the main fluid recycling plant," the Eagle said. "All the liquids that find their way into the drains or sewers in your habitat are eventually sent here. Purified water is piped back into the colony and the rest of the chemicals are retained for other possible uses. This plant will be sealed and impregnable. It uses technology far beyond your level of development."
The Eagle then led them up a ladder and into the habitat itself. He gave them an exhausting tour. In each sector the Eagle showed Richard and Nicole the main features of that particular area and then, without a break, commandeered a robot to transport them to the next adjacent sector.
"What exactly do you want us to do here?" Nicole inquired after several hours, as the Eagle prepared to take them to still another part of their future home.
"Nothing specific," the Eagle replied. "This will be your only visit to Rama itself. We wanted you to have a feel for the size of your habitat, in case you needed that to be more comfortable with the design process. We have a one-twentieth percent scale model back at the Habitation Moduleall the rest of our work will be done there." He looked at Richard and Nicole. "We can leave whenever you want."
Nicole sat down on a gray metal box and gazed around her. cheap colored pencilsThe number and variety of the robots were enough to make her dizzy all by themselves. She had been overwhelmed since the moment she walked out on the balcony
162 ARTHUR C. CLARKE AND GENTRY LEE
of the factory, and was now absolutely numb. She reached her hand out to Richard.
"I know I should be studying what I'm seeing, darling, but none of it makes sense anymore. I'm completely saturated."
"I am too," Richard confessed. "I never would have thought it possible that there was something more astonishing and awesome than Rama, but this factory certainly is."
"Have you wondered, since we've been here," Nicole said, "what the factory must look like that made this place? Better still, imagine the assembly line for the Node."
Richard laughed. "We can continue that comment into an infinite regression. If the Node is indeed a machine, as it appears to be, it assuredly is a higher order machine than Rama. Rama was probably designed here. It is controlled, I would guess, by the Node. But what created and controls the Node? Was it a creature like us, the result of biological evolution? And does it even still exist, in any sense that we can understand, or has it become some other kind of entity, content to let its influence be felt by the existence of these amazing machines that it created?"
Richard sat down beside his wife. "It's even too much for me. I guess I've had enough as well. . . . Let's go back to the children."
Nicole leaned over and kissed him. "You're a very smart man, Richard Wakefield," she said. "You know that's one of the reasons I love you."
A large robot resembling a forklift trundled close by themcheap colored pencils carrying 'some rolled metal sheets. Richard again shook his head in wonder. "Thank you, darling," he said after a pause. "You know that I love you too."
They stood up together and signaled the Eagle that they were ready to leave.
The next night, back at their apartment in the Habitation Module, both Richard and Nicole were still alert thirty minutes after making love. "What is it, dear?" Nicole asked. "Is something wrong?"
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"I had another foggy spell today," Richard said. '"It lasted for almost three hours."
"Goodness," Nicole said. She sat up in bed. "Are you all right now? Should I get the scanner and see if I can tell anything from your biometry?"
"No," Richard answered, shaking his head. "My fogs have never registered on your machine. But this one really disturbed me. I realized how incapacitated I am during them. I can barely function at all, much less help you or the children in any kind of crisis. They scare me."
"Do you remember what started this one?"
"Absolutely. Like always. I was thinking of our trip cheap colored pencilsto the Hangar, especially about that other habitat. I inadvertently started remembering a few disconnected scenes from my odyssey and then suddenly there was the fog. It was total. I'm not certain I would have even recognized you during the first five minutes of its duration."
"I'm sorry, darling," Nicole said.
"It's almost as if something is monitoring my thoughts. And when I reach into a certain portion of my memory, then bam, I'm given some kind of warning."
Richard and Nicole were silent for almost a minute.
"When I close my eyes," Nicole said, "I still see all those robots scurrying around inside Rama."
"Me too."
"And yet, I still have great difficulty believing it was a real scene and not something I dreamed or saw in a movie." Nicole smiled. "We have lived an utterly unbelievable life these last fourteen years, haven't we?"
"Absolutely," Richard said, turning over on his side in his normal sleeping posture. "And who knows? The most interesting part may be still ahead of us."
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"he holographic model of New Eden was projected into the center of the large conference room at a 1/2,000 scale. Inside Rama the actual Earth habitat would occupy an area of one hundred and sixty square kilometers in the Central Plain, starting just opposite the bottom of the long northern stairway. Its enclosed volume would be twenty kilometers long in the direction around the cylinder, eight kilometers wide in the direction parallel to the cylindrical spin axis, and eight kilometers high from the colony floor to the towering ceiling.
The New Eden model at the Habitation Module, however, which the Eagle, Richard, and Nicole used for their design work, was a more manageable size. It easily fit into the single large room, and the holographic projections made it easy for the designers to walk through and among the various structures. Changes were made using the computer-aided design subroutines that acted upon the voice commands of the Eagle.
"We've changed our minds again," Nicole said, beginning their third marathon design discussion with the Eagle
by encircling, with her black "flashlight," a concentration of buildings in the center of the colony. "We now think it's a bad idea to have everything in one place, with the people all on top of each other. Richard and I think it would make more sense if the living areas and small trade shops were in four separate villages at the corners of the rectangle. Only the buildings used by everyone in the colony would be in the central complex."
"Of course, our new concept will completely change the transportation flow you and I discussed yesterday," Richard added, "as well as the specific coordinate assignments for the parks, Sherwood Forest, Lake Shakespeare, and Mount Olympus. But all the original elements can still be accommodated in our current design for New Eden here, take a look at this sketch and you can see where we have moved everything."
The Eagle seemed to grimace as he stared at his human helpers. After a second he looked at the map in Richard's electronic notebook. "I hope this will be the last major alteration," he commented. "We don't make much progress if every time we meet we essentially start the design all over."
"We're sorry," Nicole said. "But it has taken us a little while to grasp the magnitude of our task. We now understand that we're designing the long-term living situation for as many as two thousand human beings; if it takes several iterations to get it right, then we must spend the time."
"I see you've increased again the number of large structures in the central complex," the Eagle said. "What's the purpose of this building behind the library and auditorium?"
"It's a sports and recreation building," Nicole replied. "It will have a track, a baseball diamond, a soccer field, tennis courts, a gymnasium, and a swimming poolplus enough seating in each area to handle almost all the citizens. Richard and I imagine that athletics will be very important in New Eden, especially since so many of the routine tasks will be handled by the biots."
"You've also expanded the sizes of the hospital and tcheap colored pencilshe schools"
166 ARTHUR C. CLARKE AND GENTRY LEE
"We were too conservative in our original allocations of the space," Richard interrupted. "We didn't leave enough unassigned floor area for activities that we cannot yet define specifically."
The first two design meetings had lasted ten hours each. Both Richard and Nicole had marveled initially at how quickly the Eagle was able to integrate their comments into specific design recommendations. By the third meeting they were no longer amazed by the speed and accuracy of his synthesis. But the alien biot did surprise them regularly by showing a keen interest in some of the cultural details. For example, he queried them at length about the name the humans had given to their new colony. After Nicole had explained to him that it was essential that the habitat have some specific name, the Eagle asked about the meaning and significance of "New Eden."
"The whole family discussed the name of the habitat for most of one evening," Richard explained, "and there were many good suggestions, mostly derived from the history and literature of our species. Utopia was a leading candidate. Arcadia, Elysium, Paradise, Concordia, and Beauvois were all seriously considered. But in the end we thought New Eden was the best choice."
"You see," Nicole added, "the mythological Eden was a beginning, the start of what we might call our modern Western culture. It was a lush, verdant paradise, supposedly designed especially for humans by an all-powerful God who had also created everything else in the universe. That first Eden was rich in life-forms but devoid of technology.
"New Eden is also a beginning. But in almost every other way it is the opposite of the ancient garden. New Eden is a technological miracle without any life-forms, at least initially, except a few human beings."
Once the general layout of the colony was complete, there were still hundreds of details that had to be decided. Katie and Patrick were given the task of designing the neighborhood parks for each of the four villages. Even though neither of them had ever seen an actual blade of
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cheap colored pencils grass, a real flower, or a tall tree, they had watched plenty of movies and seen many, many photographs. They ended up with four different, tasteful designs for the five acres of open area, communal gardens, and peaceful walkways in each village.
"But where will we get the grass? And the flowers?" Katie asked the Eagle.
"They will be brought by the people from Earth," the Eagle replied.
"How will they know what to bring?"
"Someone will tell them."
It was also Katie who pointed out that the design of New Eden had omitted a key element, one that had played a major role in the bedtime stories her mother had told her when she was a little girl. '"I've never seen a zoo," she said. "Can we have one in New Eden?"
The Eagle altered die master plan during the next design session to include a small zoo at the edge of Sherwood Forest.
Richard worked with the Eagle on most of the technological details for New Eden. Nicole's area of speciality was the living environment. The Eagle had originally suggested one kind of house with a standard set of furniture for all the homes in the colony. Nicole had laughed out loud. "You certainly haven't learned very much about us as a species," she said. "Human beings must have variety. Otherwise we become bored. If we make all the houses the same, people will start changing them immediately."
Because she had only limited time (the Eagle's requests focheap colored pencilsr information were keeping Richard and Nicole working ten to twelve hours a dayluckily Michael and Simone were happy to look after the children), Nicole decided on eight basic house plans and four modular furniture arrangements. Altogether, then, there were thirty-two different living configurations. By varying the external' design of the buildings in each of the four villages (details that Nicole worked out with Richard, after some useful input from art historian Michael O'Toole), Nicole finally
168 ARTHUR C. CLARKE AND GENTRY LEE
achieved her goal of creating a design for everyday living that was neither uniform nor sterile.
Richard and the Eagle agreed on the New Eden transportation and communication systems, both external and internal, in just a few hours. They had more difficulty with the overall environmental control and biot designs. The Eagle's original concept, on which the infrastructure supporting New Eden was based, assumed twelve hours of light and twelve hours of darkness every day. Periods of sunlight, clouds, and rain were to be regular and predictable. There was to be virtually no variation in the temperature as a function of place and time.
When Richard requested seasonal changes in the length of the day and more variability in all the weather parameters, the Eagle stressed that allowing those "significant variations" in the enormous volume of air in the habitat would result in the use of much more "critical computational resource" than had originally been allocated during the infrastructure design. The Eagle also indicated that the major control algorithms would have to be restructured and retested, and that the departure date would be delayed as a result. Nicole supported Richard on the weather issue and the seasons, explaining to the Eagle that true human behavior ("which you and the Nodal Intelligence apparently want to observe") was definitely dependent on both these factors.
In the end a compromise was reached. The length of day and night throughout a year would match a location at thirty degrees latitude on the Earth. The weather in New Eden would be allowed to evolve naturally within specified limits, the master controller only acting when conditions reached the edge of the "design box." Thus the temperature, wind, and rainfall could freely fluctuate inside tolerances. The Eagle was adamant about two items, however. There could be no lightning and no ice. If either of those conditions (both of which introduced "new complexities" into his computational model) were imminent, even if the rest of the parameters were still within the design box, then the control system would take over automatically and regularize the weather.
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It had been the Eagle's original intention to retain the same kind of biots that had been in the first two.Rama craft. Richard and Nicole both, however, stressed to him that the Raman biots, especially the ones like the centipedes, mantises, crabs, and spiders, were not at all appropriate.
"The cosmonauts that have boarded the two Rama craftcheap colored pencilsquot; Nicole explained, "would not be considered average humans. Far from it, in fact. We were especially trained to deal with sophisticated machinesand even some of us were frightened by a few of your biots. The more ordinary humans who will probably form the bulk of the New Eden inhabitants will not be at all comfortable with these bizarre mechanical contraptions scurrying all over their realm."
After several'hours of discussion the Eagle agreed to redesign the biot maintenance staff. For example, garbage would be collected by robots that looked like typical garbage trucks on Earth--there just wouldn't be any drivers. Construction work, when required, would be done by robots whose shapes were the same as vehicles performing similar functions on Earth. Thus the strange machines would be familiar in appearance to the colonists, and their xenophobic fears should be mitigated.
"What about the performance of routine, everyday activities?" the Eagle asked at the end of one long meeting. "We had thought we would use human biots, voice responsive, deployed in large numbers, to free your colonists of all drudgery. We've spent considerable time since you arrived perfecting the design."
Richard liked the idea of having robot assistants, but Nicole was leery. "It is imperative," she said, "that these human biots be absolutely identifiable. There should be no chance that anyone, not even a small child, could mistake one for a real human being."
Richard chuckled. "You've read too much science fiction," he said.
"But this is a real worry," Nicole protested. "I can well imagine the quality of the human biots that would be made here at the Node. We're not talking about those
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