Rendezvous With Rama - Arthur C. Clarke Page 0,59

full of swirl patterns; however, when he tested them gingerly, they were quite solid. And there was one so utterly black that he could not even see it clearly; only the sense of touch told him that anything was there.

Yet now there was a subtle modulation into something he could understand. Ranging one after the other toward the south was a series of—no other word would do—fields. He might have been walking past an experimental farm on Earth. Each square was a smooth expanse of carefully leveled earth or dirt, the first he had ever seen in the metallic landscape of Rama.

The great fields were virgin, lifeless—waiting for crops that had never been planted. Jimmy wondered what their purpose could be, since it was incredible that creatures as advanced as the Ramans would engage in any form of agriculture; even on Earth, farming was no more than a popular hobby and a source of exotic luxury foods. But he could swear that these were potential farms, immaculately prepared. He had never seen dirt that looked so clean; each square was covered with a great sheet of tough, transparent plastic. He tried to cut through it to obtain a sample, but his knife would barely scratch the surface.

Farther inland were other fields, and on many of them were complicated constructions of rods and wires, presumably intended for the support of climbing plants. They looked bleak and desolate, like leafless trees in the depths of winter. The winter they had known must have been long and terrible indeed, and these few weeks of light and warmth might be only a brief interlude before it came again.

Jimmy never knew what made him stop and look more closely into the metal maze to the south. Unconsciously, his mind must have been checking every detail around him; it had noticed, in this fantastically alien landscape, something even more anomalous.

About a quarter of a kilometer away, in the middle of a trellis of wires and rods, glowed a single speck of color. It was so small and inconspicuous that it was almost at the limit of visibility; on Earth, no one would have looked at it twice. Yet undoubtedly one of the reasons he had noticed it now was because it reminded him of Earth.

He did not report to Hub Control until he was sure that there was no mistake, and that wishful thinking had not deluded him. Not until he was only a few meters away could he be completely sure that life as he knew it had intruded into the sterile, aseptic world of Rama. Here, blooming in lonely splendor at the edge of the Southern Hemisphere, was a flower.

As he came closer, it was obvious to Jimmy that something had gone wrong. There was a hole in the sheathing that, presumably, protected this layer of dirt from contamination by unwanted life forms. Through this break extended a green stem, about as thick as a man’s little finger, which twined its way up through the trelliswork. A meter from the ground it burst into an efflorescence of bluish leaves, shaped more like feathers than the foliage of any plant known to Jimmy. The stem ended, at eye level, in what he had first taken to be a single flower. 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. Jimmy knew practically nothing about botany, but he was puzzled to see no trace of any structures resembling pistils or stamens. He wondered if the likeness to terrestrial flowers might be a pure coincidence; perhaps this was something more akin to a coral polyp. In either case, it would seem to imply the existence of small, air-borne creatures to serve either as fertilizing agents or as food.

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.

That would not be easy. It was more than ten meters away, separated from him by a latticework made of thin rods. They formed a cubic pattern, repeated over and over, less than forty centimeters on a side.