t first scientists thought the vast, frantically spinning object hurtling
into the solar system was an unusually large stray asteroid. But pictures
relayed from a probe sent chasing after it stop everyone in their tracks.
The massive rolling cylinder filling video screens everywhere--the
so-called asteroid Rama--is no flying rock.
Since Rama's projected course will take it around the Sun (presumably to pick up speed on
its way out of the system), the hastily reassigned survey team headed by
Commander William Norton has only a few weeks to penetrate Rama's mystery.
With the populated worlds of the solar system watching his every move,
Norton and his crack team pass through a triple-redundant airlock into a
huge, seemingly dead artificial world. Inside, three sets of stairs lead
down from the weightless hub to three "cities," large clusters of blank
buildings. Bisecting Rama is a great circular sea; and beyond the sea's high
far wall, barely visible from the hub, are strange vistas and unknown
objects.
Then Rama comes to life. At first, rotation combined with the heat of the Sun
creates sudden hurricanes on board the ship, and scientists barely warn Norton in time. This
seems natural. Then the lights come on, and people start to worry: Suppose
Rama isn't dead--or benign? When a crewman, having found a way to explore
the far half of Rama, meets strange creatures there, Mercury--the nation
nearest Rama--sends a bomb to preempt this alien threat.
Norton, believing the creatures are biological maintenance robots, must
defuse the bomb to save this unique world and perform a last-ditch
reconnaissance to try to understand Rama's purpose before it shoots out of
the solar system forever.
Inventive exploration
In a way Rendezvous with Rama seems oddly understated. The heart of
the story is the exploration, the curiosity. The missile threat from Mercury
is purely an annoyance, and the deadline imposed by Rama's course through
the solar system, which could have been milked for tension, is left simply a
frustration. When Norton and company leave Rama to its destiny, there's
little sense of climax or closure.
Taken in tandem with the carefully thought out science applied to Rama,
however, this attitude can be seen as part of Clarke's overarching quest for
verisimilitude. It's not really reasonable to suppose that humans--even
humans who had started to colonize the planets--would be able to unlock
the secrets of a totally alien artificial world zooming through the solar
system. The emphasis on gathering what they can, going in with wide eyes and
an open mind, has the authentic ring of what might actually happen in those
circumstances.
This sense of realism comes perhaps at the expense of character: Rama itself
is the only really interesting entity. Norton, it almost goes without
saying, is the supremely competent commander archetype. His crew members are
largely defined by their quirks, as are the bickering scientist-politicians
back home. This smacks of reality too--what do most people really know about Neil
Armstrong, for example?--but fictional characters ought to have more meat
on their bones.
Nonetheless, this story, taken as an inventive exploration of how an
interstellar artificial world might function, and how it would be handled by
humanity, is dead-on. If it were filmed, it would look more like an episode
of Nova than anything else--and there's something to be said for
that.
