Child of Venus (14 page)

“I'd be happy to teach you what I can.” Dyami got to his feet. “But I won't take any payment for it. Seeing you develop your talent will be payment enough. You may rapidly get to the point where you'll be a lot more accomplished than I am—I may not have that much to teach you after a while. You may even end up with me as your apprentice.”

Ragnar grinned, then pulled another piece out of the bag. “Take this.” He pressed the object into Dyami's hand. “At least I can give you a present I'll send you a message when I have more to show you.”

“I'll look forward to it. We'll set up a time for screen sessions, and the next time I'm in Oberg, we'll have to get together.”

Ragnar lifted his bag to his shoulder. “Thanks, Dyami. Have a safe trip back to Turing.” He started to walk away, then looked back. “Good-bye, Mahala.”

“Good-bye, Ragnar.” Here she was, going away tomorrow or the day after, and Ragnar had been more interested in talking to her uncle. She glared after him as he hurried toward his house. Solveig had been after him for ages to show his sketches and carvings to Dyami, and Ragnar had waited until now to pester him with them. Mahala looked up at Dyami; he was peering at the carving the boy had given him. Even her uncle had forgotten about her.

“He didn't give me anything,” she said. “I'll bet he doesn't even care I'm leaving.”

“You mustn't say that. I think he meant this for both of us.” Dyami held out the carving.

It took her a few moments to recognize herself; Ragnar had made the face more delicate than the one she saw in mirrors. Her mouth was still too wide, and the large eyes of the image bulged slightly, as her own did. Yet the carved face framed by short, feathered hair might almost have been called pretty. Was that how Ragnar saw her? When had he done the carving, and why hadn't he shown it to her? She took the carved face from Dyami and held it, marveling at the skill and effort the boy had put into it.

“That boy's an artist,” Dyami said.

“He was happy you liked his things.”

“But I suspect that if I'd told him they weren't any good, he would have said I didn't know what I was talking about.”

“That's Ragnar,” Mahala said. “When he thinks he's right about something, he doesn't care what anybody else thinks.”

“He'll need that kind of conviction, Mahala. A lot of people are going to tell him he's wasting time in useless activity or that he should turn his talent to something more practical.”

“Why are you teaching him, then?”

“Because we have to make a place for people like him if this world's going to be worth anything. That's why I'll do what I can for him. It's also why I'm taking you to Turing.”

“I'm not like Ragnar,” she said, wondering if Dyami wished that she were.

“You'll get a chance to find out what you are in your own way.” A passenger cart was approaching; he stepped into the road. “That's what Benzi wants for you, too—we're one on that.”

 

7

Oberg was the northernmost of the ten settlements in the Maxwell Mountains and the closest to the large and striking circular impact crater of Cleopatra to the east, the only impact crater in that region of Venus. The other nine settlements in that mountain range, except for the nearest, al-Khwarizmi, which lay to the west of Oberg, were sited to the south, all of them named after prominent scientists of the past. Here, the Venus Project had not kept to the old custom, one that predated the centuries of Earth's Nomarchies, of using only female names for Cytherian locations, and in fact the Maxwell massif had been named for a male scientist before the custom of using female nomenclature had become established in older times.

“Not that it matters, really,” Noella Sanger had once said to Barika and Risa in Mahala's hearing. “The geological features are named for women and goddesses and other female figures, and they'll still be here when our settlements are long gone.” That had bothered Mahala, thinking of that distant time when the domed settlements would no longer exist, which was foolish of her; the settlements were meant to be only an intermediate stage, a way for people to inhabit the surface as the planet was transformed. But for a moment Noella's comment had made her feel as though she was flitting through her world as insubstantially as she moved through the synthetic settings of a mind-tour.

Tsou Yen, named for an ancient Chinese scientist and developer of elemental theories, lay to the southeast of Oberg, not far from ibn-Qurrah; Curie, Galileo, and Kepler had been built in the middle regions of the massif, with Hasseen, Lyata, and Mtshana to their south. Each of them was home to anywhere from fifteen thousand to twenty thousand people, although Oberg, the oldest and largest, now had more than twenty-five thousand inhabitants. A long time would pass before Venus had a population center that came close to the size of one of Earth's great cities, but the Project Council had reasons for keeeping the settlements near their present size. Smaller groups meant that people would be more accountable to one another and also allowed Earth more control over what was still the great and rare privilege of immigrating here. When a settlement had constructed four connected domes and grown to about twenty thousand people, it was time for the inhabitants to consider moving to a less crowded place or into a new settlement, which was why new settlements were being constructed in the north near Turing. But occasionally Mahala, even after a few tension-filled and frightening mind-tours of Earth's great cities of Tashkent and Beijing and Nueva Las Vegas, wondered if there might be advantages, even pleasures, in living amid such hordes; in such a city, she could be anonymous in a way that she could never be in Oberg or in Turing.

She was headed for Turing now, leaving the long curved ridges of the high Maxwell massif, the highest range on Venus, behind as the airship floated over the eastern part of the flat volcanic plain of the Lakshmi Plateau, north toward the Freyja Mountains and Dyami's home. Even if Venus were eventually flooded with oceans that covered most of the surface, the Lakshmi Plateau, twice as large as Earth's Tibet, smooth-surfaced except for the wide deep craters of the dormant but awakening volcanoes Sacajawea and Colette, would remain above water, with a sheer scarp nearly six kilometers high to the south. During her first trip to Turing, she had been fascinated by the screen images, but distracted by the thrill of worrying that the dirigible might crash, unlikely as that was. Now the view of the landscape held her completely.

Black cliffs surrounded Turing's three domes. On the airship's screen, above the console where the pilots sat, the new settlements to the west of Turing in the Freyja Mountains, Ptolemy and Hypatia, were pinpoints of light atop walls of black rock. The screen, of course, was showing Mahala and the other airship passengers only what they would have seen if light from the sun could penetrate to Venus's surface. Had the image been completely true to what lay outside, the rust-colored sky would have been black, and the bright orange scars gouged in the cliffs by Turing's diggers would have been only dimly illuminated by the settlement's light. High as the ridges of the Freyja Mountains were, they did not match the majestic height of the Maxwell Mountains, nor did they have the sharply steep cliffs of the Maxwell massif on its southwest sides.

Droplets of moisture, more of a mist than a rain, sifted down over the ground to make rivers of the thin sinuous channels that veined the plateau and to fill the ocean basin in the lowlands below Ishtar Terra. The planet had greatly cooled over the more than five-century duration of the Project, to the point where the temperature outside had dropped to about ninety degrees Centigrade, but the air was still thick with carbon dioxide, and the atmospheric pressure could still crush an unprotected human body.

The airship had a few passengers and a lot of cargo. Crates had been lashed down in the aisles and smaller boxes were tied to unclaimed seats. Mahala released her harness, stretched as she got to her feet, then followed Dyami off the ship, down the ramp from the airship's cradle, and through the bay, where two of the workers on duty greeted him. Both of them wore identity bracelets, as everyone did when traveling, so that scanners would record that they had arrived safely. Beyond the wide entrance at the end of the bay lay Turing's south dome, now filled with a soft yellow light. All of the settlements on Venus kept the same time as the Islands, and the airship had left Oberg after dark; it would be first light here and everywhere else under the domes.

A wide paved road about five kilometers long ran north from the airship bay toward the tunnel entrance to the dome where Dyami lived. They walked up the road, with Dyami shortening his pace so that she could keep up with him; to Mahala's right, the front side of Turing's refinery was a vast metal wall. Across the road, the small glassy dome of the ceramics plant glittered, catching the light of the much larger dome overhead. Unlike Oberg, the less populated Turing had not crowded its main dome with houses and residents and tents to house new arrivals; to the west, the tunnel that led to a newly constructed dome was hidden by trees. Turing's residents preferred giving over large areas of their domes to woods that were wilder and more overgrown than the tended parks of Oberg.

“Can you walk the distance to my house?” Dyami asked.

“Yes,” Mahala replied.

A cart loaded with crates and carrying two men in gray workers' coveralls came toward them from the bay. Dyami stepped into the road and the cart slowly rolled to a stop. He handed his duffel to one of the men, then reached for Mahala's. “Could you take these for me?” he asked.

“Of course,” one of the men replied.

“Thanks—just leave them at the side of the road.” He turned to Mahala as the cart rolled away. “I'm glad you're not too tired to walk home—I can use the exercise.”

The walk would give her time to think. By the time they reached her uncle's house, she might be prepared to face the orphaned girl who would be living with them. Mahala had already been introduced to her over the screen, but the other child had said nothing after murmuring her name. Frania Astarte Milus was a wisp of a girl with dark brown hair and hazel eyes; she had dung to Amina's hand throughout the brief call. She was a year younger than Mahala, but seemed even younger than that.

Mahala kept near Dyami. From time to time, his stride lengthened, and then he would slow down again. More carts passed them, then turned onto the narrower road that wound through the woods to the west dome's tunnel.

Now that her journey, during which she had felt removed from the passage of time, was over, everything seemed to be happening too fast. Dyami had arranged to leave for Turing as soon as it was agreed she would come with him. She had been impatient to go, feeling somehow that she might change her mind and decide to stay in Oberg if they waited too long. During the trip, she had thought of the people she was leaving behind, but had eased herself with the thought that she could always go back to her grandparents' house.

Now, for the first time, it occurred to her that she might be content here, yet still have to leave if Frania did not take to her or get along with her. After all, she could always return to Risa's household, while Frania had nowhere else to go; her grandfather was too frail to look after her, and none of her dead father's family had followed him to Venus.

“You're being awfully quiet,” Dyami said as they entered the lighted tunnel, following the gentle downward slope of the passageway.

“What if Frania doesn't like me?”

“There's no reason why she shouldn't.”

“But what if she doesn't?”

“Isn't it a bit soon to be worrying about that?”

Mahala was about to reply when another man called out from behind them. “Dyami! Hold on—I'll walk back with you.” She turned around to see a slender brown-skinned man with dark eyes, thick black hair, and a mustache. She had met him before, and searched her mind for his name: Suleiman Khan.

Suleiman greeted her. The two men were soon deep in discussion about an upcoming task at the refinery, where Suleiman had been putting in darktime shifts. Suleiman was a man who liked to talk; he did not fall silent until they were through the tunnel and inside the north dome.

The memorial pillar Dyami had designed stood at the top of the rise outside the tunnel, a few meters from a second, more conventional pillar. This monument, unlike those in Oberg, did not simply honor the dead, but also commemorated the suffering those once imprisoned here had endured. Around the base were twisted human bodies, their heads bowed, their backs bending under the assault of disembodied fists. Above them, other nude figures stood with upraised arms; near the top of the pillar, skeletal figures with distended limbs clutched wands and other weapons, while bodies lay at their feet. There were no holo images of the dead here; instead, their sculpted faces were framed by the distorted bodies, and the plaque listing their names was near the monument's base.

Dyami had known them all. He must have wanted to forget what had passed, yet he had made this monument for the people who were imprisoned with him, for those who had died trying to free themselves. He had said something about the poison of the past, Mahala recalled, during his confrontation with Lakshmi Tiris three years ago. Here was part of his poisonous past, preserved by his own hands. Often Dyami had told her that it was necessary to remember what had happened on Venus, lest it happen again. At other times, he had murmured that he would be grateful if no one ever gave the monument a second glance.

Her parents had caused such suffering; her uncle's pillar always reminded her of that. Perhaps they had not meant to do so, but they had all the same. She nodded at Suleiman as he made his farewells, then followed Dyami past a cluster of houses toward the creek.

Hills sloped gently up from where the creek flowed into a large lake. Dyami's house stood on one small grassy hill; below, a few boats lay along the shore of the lake.