Child of Venus (10 page)

He took her hand and led her toward the road. “You may have learned one lesson today,” he went on. “It's one of those lessons that makes me wonder if we can ever be better than we are.”

“What lesson?” she asked.

“That some prefer to nurse their hatreds, to cling to old pains and past hurts even when they poison the mind holding them, even when they would be better off letting them go. The poison of the past has a way of living on, in spite of what we do.”

Dyami seemed to be saying that their efforts here might be futile. If they could change a world, why couldn't they change themselves? She looked toward the dome, but saw only darkness there.

 

5

Long scars that might have been clawed by a giant marked the rocky cliff. As lights swept through the blackness, Mahala made out the feint yellow glow of al-Khwarizmi's domes. She seemed to feel the tanklike body of the crawler around her as she gazed through its screens and sensed the movement of its treads under her feet, but was careful not to try to direct the vehicle herself. Diggers had clawed rock from the cliffside to the west and now sat at the base of the cliff, giant slugs of metal huddled there. Two crawlers carrying mined minerals rolled slowly through the dark.

Mahala felt a hand on her arm, then reached up to remove the band around her head. The vision of the world outside abruptly vanished. Sitting in front of the screens, consoles, and panels that constituted their stations, workers wearing thin silvery bands around their heads were guiding the diggers and crawlers on the surface. Mining was not the only task of the west dome's External Operations Center. Other workers would be checking the bunkers that held the dome's life-support installations, monitoring and repairing sensors, or inspecting the distillers that extracted nitrogen from the ammonia-filled rain falling outside. At least one seismologist was always monitoring readings of seismic activity; bringing water to Venus and increasing the planet's rotation had unlocked tectonic plates, making quakes a frequent occurrence.

“Well, Mahala,” Noella Sanger said, “you've put in enough time on this shift to have earned some credit.”

Mahala rubbed at her shoulder, ran her hand through her short mop of hair, then stretched. “I ache all over,” she said. “I wonder how Risa can stand it for so many hours.”

“You're only eight years old,” the engineer replied. “Risa's older, and she's trained to sit still for longer periods of time. She also gets her breaks and handles different operations to keep from getting tired and bored. Boredom can be costly— it keeps you from being attentive.”

“I don't see why people have to do this.” Mahala, unused to sitting in a chair, stood up and shook out her legs. “Machines and cyberminds could do most of it.”

The gray-haired woman smiled. “Strictly speaking, you're right. But it costs the Project less to use people, rather than machines and cyberminds, for this kind of work.”

Karin Mugabe had left Mahala and her schoolmates with Noella. The engineer had taken the children through the Center to show them the stations where people worked and to answer their questions. There had not been that many questions; most of the children were impatient to put on the bands, as if a work station were no more than a place to take a mind-tour and indulge in synthetic sensory experiences.

Now, except for Ragnar, the others had already left. The children had already known, in a general sort of way, what the people in external operations did, and there were mind-tours of the Cytherian environment that were a lot more exciting than anything they could see here.

Maybe, Mahala thought, they should have been more attentive to this work, work that kept them alive. There had been another reminder of how precarious life here could be less than twenty-four hours ago. An accident in ibn-Qurrah's airship bay had killed three technicians and two workers. Kolya's daughter Irina, who lived in that settlement with her bondmate and son, had called him with the news, although she had not been able to tell him any details.

“Your friend's still enthralled.” Noella gestured at Ragnar, who was sitting at another station, a band around his head, his eyes staring sightlessly at the screen. “I'd better pull him out.” She reached over and touched Ragnar lightly on the shoulder. The blond boy tensed, then lifted the slender golden circlet from his head.

“Seen enough?” Noella asked.

“I guess so.” Ragnar moved his broad shoulders. “It's stupid, having it take so long.”

“Having what take so long?”

“Changing everything.”

“Terraforming takes a long time,” Noella said. “You can't just make it happen all at once.”

“We'd better go,” Mahala said. “Thanks for showing us around, Noella.”

“Glad to do it. Oh, when you see Nikolai, do tell him that we're expecting him after supper. We're going to borrow a cart, so we can move my things over in one trip.”

“I'll tell him.” Mahala followed Ragnar from the room. The short hallway was silent, the workers hidden behind doors.

“She's really moving into your house?” Ragnar asked as they stepped outside.

“Yes,” Mahala replied. Noella had lived with Risa when both of them were
young women, before leaving to set up her own household with her bondmate Theron Hyland. She had
taken up residence with her children and grandchildren after the death of her bondmate. Theron, who
had died during the Revolt trying to protect his students in the west dome's school, was
another of the uprising's heroes. “Noella's moving back to our house now because
of Kolya.” The engineer, in front of others, persisted in addressing Kolya as
“Nikolai” even when the two lovers were joining the rest of Risa's household at
breakfast after a night in Kolya's room. Everyone else had been surprised at the sudden
romance between the two old friends, but Mahala had suspected that something was up as soon as
Noella had started using Kolya's formal first name; the woman would roll the name around in
her mouth, as if tasting it. “I'll bet they make a pledge sooner or later.”

Her grandparents' house, Mahala thought, was definitely getting more crowded. She had come back from her first visit with Dyami in Turing three years ago to find that Risa had acquired two new housemates, a young woman named Ching Hoa and a man, Jamil Owens. Since the two new settlers intended to become bondmates, everyone had assumed that they would eventually form their own household. Instead, Hoa and Jamil had gotten along so well with Risa's housemates that the couple had decided to stay on after making their pledge. By then, Barika and Kristof had been expecting their first child.

Now Kyril, their son, born in 640, was nearly a year old according to the Earth calendar the Cytherians continued to use, and Hoa had recently announced that she and Jamil were trying for a daughter. That meant that Hoa would almost certainly be pregnant soon, given that she and her bondmate were healthy and young. Paul, after examining them both and doing their gene scan, had practically guaranteed an immediate pregnancy.

The External Operations Center lay near the main road, and a passenger cart was rolling over the bridge that spanned the small creek, but Solveig had said that she would meet Mahala and Ragnar at a bridge farther upstream. The creek was one of the many small streams created from the cleansed and purified water collected from the acidic rains outside, streams that fed the lake in the center of the west dome's settlement. Mahala often thought of the rain and what it meant and found it beautiful.

“When's your Habber uncle supposed to get here?” Ragnar asked, interrupting her vision of the rain.

“Benzi? He said tomorrow.”

Ragnar was fascinated by her uncle and her great-uncle, although he would not admit it outright. He had learned to get along with her over the past couple of years partly because of that and because Solveig had become her friend. Whenever either Benzi or Dyami was visiting, Ragnar found an excuse to come over, usually tagging along with Solveig. It was odd that, given his interest in her relatives, he was so quiet and distant when in their presence. Dyami's old friend and housemate Arnina Astarte, who had come with him during his last visit, had tried to draw Ragnar out, but even she had not penetrated his barriers. Ragnar could watch Dyami do a carving for hours, but had not, despite his sister's urging, shown any of his own sketches and carvings to him. He was usually silent around Benzi and had offered no opinion to Mahala about the Habber.

“He doesn't visit very much,” Ragnar said.

“My grandmother says that might be because when Benzi went to the Habbers, he
probably thought he'd never see the people he left behind again. Now here he is, and for him
to come and see Risa, and know she's his younger sister when he doesn't look any older
than Dyami—”

“It's weird,” Ragnar said.

“For him,” Mahala said, “two visits in the past three years must seem like a lot. After all, he has a Link, so he can visit with people whenever he wants to without going anywhere.”

“As long as they have Links, too.” Ragnar thrust his hands into his pants pockets. “That stuff about all of the Habbers having Links—maybe that's just what they tell us. We don't really know if it's true—maybe it's just the Habbers who come here who have them. We can't go to their Habitats to find out for sure, we only have their word.”

The Linkers of Earth and Venus had a small glassy jewel in their foreheads, the outward sign of their implanted Links, but Habbers did not wear such ornaments. That could account for some of Ragnar's doubts about them, along with the fact that the Linkers of both Earth and Venus still kept their own Links closed to those of Habbers, while the channels to the minds of the Habitats were closed to Cytherians and Earthfolk. No communications would pass between them or their nets of cyberminds. Even after all that had happened, distrust of the Habbers had not entirely died.

“Benzi wouldn't have lied about something like that,” Mahala said.

“How do you know? Just because he's your uncle? Seems to me nobody really knows that much about Habbers. The new settlers are put in suspension if they make the run here from Earth with Habbers, so they never get to see very much of the Habber ships—makes you wonder if the Habbers are trying to hide something by making sure they're asleep and stored away and not able to poke around. The Habbers got the Mukhtars to back down during the Revolt, but how do we know if they could really have shut down Anwara or not if they didn't get their way?”

Anwara, the satellite and space station that circled Venus in high orbit, where shuttles from the Islands docked and freighters and torchships from Earth arrived, was also the port of any Habber vessels carrying passengers to Venus. Had Anwara been disabled, Earth would have been cut off from Venus completely, and the Islands and the settlements would have suffered the effects of a prolonged siege, might not even have survived.

“Oh, Ragnar.” Mahala shook her head. “You know what the Habbers helped us do, how much help they still give to Earth. They're keeping one of their ships in orbit to study the changes here. I don't think they'd have a ship nearby unless they knew they could protect it.”

“And there's another thing.” The blond boy slowed his pace as they moved down a grassy slope toward the creek. “They send Habbers here, and their pilots spend time on Earth before they come back with more settlers, but nobody from here or Earth ever gets to go to one of their Habs.”

“What are you talking about? Those Islanders who escaped to one of the Habs came back. Benzi went there, and my grandmother's first bondmate is still living in a Hab. The Habbers always said they'd welcome anybody. We're the ones who don't want to go, and it's the Mukhtars who won't let people from Earth go there.”

“I haven't seen any Habbers going out of their way to invite us,” Ragnar said, “and your uncle and your other grandfather don't count. They're Habbers now, not Cytherians. And those Islanders—can you really trust anybody who ran away when things got hard and then came back when things here were settled? Nobody goes to a Hab and comes back without being different. Maybe they don't let some people ever come back.”

The boy had probably been hearing such talk from his father. Einar Gunnarsson had suffered at the hands of traitors and might have paid for his resistance to Ishtar with imprisonment or worse if the Habbers had not intervened ten years ago, during the Revolt Einar should have been grateful to the Habitat-dwellers, yet he was still suspicious of them.

Mahala thought of her grandfather Malik Haddad, who had fled to the Habitats with the group of Islander specialists. Why hadn't he returned with the others? What had happened to him in the over twelve years since then? Risa had asked Benzi, who had said only that Malik was reasonably content with his life and spent much of his time in study. Mahala had never asked Benzi for more details about her biological grandfather; maybe it was time she did.

Four new prefabricated houses with white sides, small windows, and flat roofs had gone up near the stream they were approaching. Small greenhouses next to them had been built since the last quake a couple of months ago, a quake that had been strong enough to level a few houses. No one had been seriously injured, largely because of the lightweight materials used in the construction of their residences. They did not need to construct durable houses of sturdy materials here. The climate of the settlements was always the same, with warm air that seemed slightly heavier and more humid near the larger artificial bodies of water; they did not have to build against bad weather, for no storms ever raged inside the domes. Dwellings could be enlarged or taken down easily, as necessary, but lately it seemed to Mahala that even more houses were going up. She had not felt how crowded Oberg was becoming until she had visited Dyami in the more sparsely settled domes of Turing.