Chapter 18 Chapter 18 Dawn

The light was so bright that Newton immediately closed his eyes for a full minute!Then he ventured to open his eyes a little, and blinked a few times to let the welling up tears flow away, and then slowly turned his head to look at the dawn. He could only bear it for a few seconds before being forced to close his eyes again.It's not that he can't stand the dazzling glare, but that the true face of Lushan Mountain revealed by Rama for the first time is too awe-inspiring.Newton knew what he was about to see, yet the sight made him dizzy.He fastened his seat belt to the ladder bars, eyes still closed, took a few deep breaths, and switched on the radio.He wanted his voice to be composed and authoritative.He called, "The captain is speaking. How is everyone?"

He calls names one by one and gets answers from everyone - albeit some with shaky voices - and he regains his confidence quickly.Everyone is safe and expects his leadership.He opened his eyes and turned to face Rama. His first impression was of a shade of blue.The light that fills the entire sky is obviously different from sunlight, perhaps some kind of arc light.Then it occurred to Newton that Rama's sun must be much hotter than ours.Astronomers will certainly be interested. Now Naoya's mysterious role is also clear.They are six huge strip lampshades, that is, six Rama's suns, which are symmetrically distributed in three equal parts on the entire inner surface, each forming a fan-shaped beam of light through the axis to irradiate the opposite distant ground.Could they, Newton wondered, be turned on and off in turn, creating cycles of light and darkness, or just eternal daylight?

Staring too much at those blinding lights made his eyes ache, and being able to close them for a moment gave him time to think.Only now did he sort of recover from the sudden visual shock and draw his own attention to the much more serious problem. Who, or what, turned on Rama's light switch? The world has always been considered inanimate by the most sensitive tests.But what is happening now cannot be explained by the action of natural forces.There may be no life here, but there may still be consciousness; androids are capable of waking up after long slumbers.Perhaps this burst of light was not preprogrammed, but the last convulsive response of a broken machine to the heat of a new sun, which would soon fade into stillness again, this time is permanent.

Yet Newton was not convinced by this simple explanation.A jigsaw puzzle has been put together piece by piece, although there are still many pieces that have not been found, for example, there is no trace of use or wear at all, everything is so new, as if it has just been built. Instead of arousing fear, the thought excited Newton.There would be far more to be discovered here than they dared hope to attain.Let's see what happens to the Rama Committee when it hears the news, he thought. He first had to establish some kind of reference coordinates.He was looking at the largest closed loop space anyone had ever seen, and he had to have a map in mind in order to know where he was.

In the case of powerlessness, "up" and "down" can be chosen at will, but some choices are dangerous to the mind. The safest way is to imagine yourself in the center of a giant bowl, surrounded by a ring of walls 16 kilometers wide and 50 kilometers high.This kind of imagination has the advantage of being unable to fall from nowhere, but it has serious flaws. He tried his best to see the scattered towns and colorful regions as firmly fixed on the cylindrical walls.The complex structure with the dome hanging upside down overhead is no more disturbing than the huge chandeliers in some of the great concert halls on earth.Now, what is difficult to accept psychologically is the sea of ​​cylinders.

It's there, 20 kilometers away, in mid-air the cylindrical sea surrounding the entire ocean, undoubtedly water.Vibrant blue, leftover ice, shimmers in the sea.A vertical sea forming a complete circle is a disturbing phenomenon.After a while, he had to seek other coordinates to replace this one. He turned his mind ninety degrees.The high wall immediately became a long tunnel with end caps at both ends. "Below" is the ladder he just climbed up, so that he finally adapts to the vision of the architects who built the place. In this way, he clings to the face of a 16-kilometer-high, concave-curved cliff, the arch of the upper half of which extends into and disappears in what is now called "the sky".Below him, there is the 500-meter climbing ladder first, and then the long ladder, which starts out very steep and becomes gentler as you go, until it gradually becomes flat and connects with the distant plain.He could still make out the steps for the first two or three kilometers, and then it seemed to become a belt after that.

Newton once flew over the Himalayas once, and he was in awe of it at that time.He reminded himself that the stairs were as high as the Himalayas, but the comparison was meaningless now, too. The other two ladders, Beta and Gamma, are even more incomparable as they bend from the top of the head to the sky.He even tries to forget them. Another inner picture was one he was trying to avoid.In this scene, there are vertical walls around again, but this time he is not at the bottom but at the top, like an acrobat clinging to the top of a gigantic circus shed, while the "ground" below is Far below 50 kilometers.Whenever he enters this inner frame of reference, he always

Consciously and desperately grabbing the rungs of the ladder.He checked his space watch. He had only stopped for two minutes.After returning to normal psychological coordinates, he slowly climbed the last 100 meters of the ladder.When he entered the airtight chamber, he looked back again at the interior of Rama. After only a few minutes, a change had taken place there, and the mist had risen from the sea.Those phantom columns of white mist, in the first few hundred meters, tilted with the direction of Lama's rotation, and as the air flow rose, the speed beyond made them into a rapid vortex turbulence.The trade winds of the cylindrical world formed in its sky.If nothing was known about climate change in Rama, its first hurricane is now imminent.