Rama Revealed

Rama Revealed is a science fiction novel published in 1993, written by Arthur C. Clarke with Gentry Lee, and the fourth and last of the books that followed Clarke's Rendezvous with Rama.

It begins exactly where the third book stopped, with Nicole Wakefield's escape, and much of what follows is an account of the humans learning how to live inside a ship whose owners have not introduced themselves. Two species are already known to them. The octospiders are biological engineers who were changed, long ago, by contact with a spacefaring civilisation and who have since built something close to a utopia; the myrmicats, named by Nicole's husband Richard by putting the Greek word for ant together with the English word for cat, are a naturally shape-changing species whose final form is a large, interconnected mind capable of connecting directly to a human nervous system. Clarke and Lee use the last book of the series to answer the questions the first one had raised about what the vessel is for and who built it, and the answer arrives through the same close attention to plumbing, biology and protocol that the earlier volumes had used. It is the most theological of the four and the only one that ends the story.