Child of Venus (19 page)

She had been truthful in admitting that ambition. What she did not say to the woman was that she wanted to go to the Institute largely because that was probably the only way she would ever see Earth. She was doing well in biology, a specialty that would become increasingly important during the next stages of the Project. If she got into the Cytherian Institute and did well, she could even hope for Linker training. She might return to her world to become an aide to an Island Administrator, about the highest goal an accomplished graduate could reach, and then—

She could not see what might lie beyond that for her. It was probably better not to dream of too much past that point. The more highly trained she was, the more she would owe to the Project, and the more she would be expected to contribute to her world.

Odd, she thought, to think of the end of her training as possibly being the end of her dreams as well.

Frania had come to meet her in the bay. The brown-haired girl shrieked a greeting, threw her arms around Mahala, then led her through the bay's wide doorway.

“I really missed you,” Frania said, reaching for Mahala's duffel. “I think I enjoyed having our room to myself for about two days. After that, it got very tiresome.”

“I know what you mean,” Mahala said. “My grandparents put me in the smallest room in the house, and after a few days I was wishing you were there—I didn't care how crowded we'd be.”

“Dyami had a couple of new arrivals stay with us for a while, but the place still seemed empty without you.”

“I had the opposite problem—people all over the place. Noella's
children and grandchildren come over all the time, and Barika and Kristof's daughter was born
just before I started packing to come back. It's too much family!” Mahala was suddenly
sorry for those words. Except for Amina, the other girl had no family now; her grandfather had died
two months ago. “I didn't mean—”

“I know.” Frania was still smiling. “Look, as far as I'm concerned, you and Dyami are my family, too—you know that. So's Tasida, in a way—even Balin is like an uncle.” Frania was still as slender as she had always been, but she had grown taller during the past months, and her green shirt was tighter across her breasts. Her thick brown hair fell nearly to her waist, and her hazel eyes dominated her delicately boned face. During the past couple of years, she had become a beauty, but seemed unaware of it.

“I forgot to tell you,” Frania continued as they walked along the wide road toward the refinery. “Tasida's thinking of moving in with us. She's been spending a lot more time with us as it is—about the only time she's over at her own house now is to see patients.”

“You mentioned that in your last message.”

“She's still getting along with everybody there, but she's always wanted to live with Amina. She told me that maybe it's time for a change.”

Risa had said much the same thing to Dyami, while trying to convince him to send Mahala back to Oberg for an extended visit. Dyami had understood, and Mahala, despite a few qualms, had quickly agreed to go. For a while, the more crowded confines of Oberg had diverted her, and she had happily taken over many of the chores in her grandparents' greenhouse. Kolya had often taken her to the lake while he fished, teaching her how to bait the lines, and Sef always made time to talk to her, as he had when she was a small child.

Her first day at her old school was more disappointing. Three of her former schoolmates had shown enough promise to be chosen for Island schools. Two had moved to other settlements with their families, and Ah Lin Bergen was still in school, hoping to become a teacher; she had come back from Island Four only two months earlier.

Their other schoolmates, Ah Lin informed her, had left school to apprentice themselves. “At least a few of them could have gone on with their studies,” Ah Lin said when Mahala expressed her surprise. “But I can understand why they left. It doesn't make sense to be too ambitious here.”

“Most fifteen-year-olds in Turing are still in school,” Mahala had
replied.

“That's Turing. It's different there. People there seem to want more than the rest of us—that's what everyone says.”

“Well, isn't it better to do as much as you can and try for as much as possible, even if you fail?”

Ah Lin's brown eyes warmed with sympathy. “Oh, we can try, but it's easier to give up.” She sounded resigned. “Settle for what you can get, and you save yourself a lot of disappointment later on.”

Mahala shook her head. “You wouldn't want to be a teacher if you really believed that.”

“Sure I would. A teacher's job isn't just to encourage students to learn all they can. It's also to get them to accept what they have to be in the end, to understand that they owe something to their world, to think of Venus instead of just themselves.”

“I don't think you completely believe that, either.”

Ah Lin had a half-smile on her round face. “Look, I'll push any students of mine as far as I can, Mahala, and as far as they want to go. But I know I'll probably fail with most of them.”

“So what have you been doing?” Frania asked, breaking in on Mahala's thoughts.

Mahala wrenched herself back to the present. “Doing?”

“In Oberg. You didn't send any messages, so I figured you had to be busy.”

“I guess I was.” Mahala felt a twinge of guilt. She might have made time to send Frania more messages or called more often, but she had not known how to convey her sense of unease and disappointment. After several attempts at setting down messages in writing, or speaking them aloud to the screen, it had been easier not to try.

“So how was it?” Frania asked.

“Except for my friend Ah Lin, there was hardly anybody my age or older still
attending my old school. I put in some time being a teacher's aide.” Eugenio Tokugawa
had asked her to assist in his classroom occasionally with the younger children. “And there
was plenty of work to do at my grandparents' house.” Mahala paused. “I should have
called you, Frani. I tried, but every time I got ready to call, I started thinking about Oberg and
what's happened to some of my old friends, and then I just—”

“I understand. I could see it in your face when I called, your disappointment.”

Her former schoolmates had given up. They would do what they could for the Project and find whatever happiness they could in their work, even if they had once dreamed of a different kind of life. Such resignation seemed contrary to the spirit of the Project, to the dream of creating a new world. Maybe Benzi had given up, too. That might be why he had not returned or even sent her a message.

It was foolish to think that way. Risa had left school at an early age, and Sef could barely read his own name, but no one could claim that they had not contributed much to the Project. Yet their lives seemed constricted, and she knew that they both had regrets about what they might have learned.

“Have you heard anything from Solveig?” Mahala asked.

“I got a message from her yesterday,” Frania replied. “She's going to Anwara. It's just for a week, but she's really excited about it—says one of the astronomers there is going to show the students around. She said hello to you.” Solveig had been admitted to a school on Island Two nearly a year ago and would be there for at least another year. “That reminds me— Ragnar's going to be here in a couple of days.”

Mahala slowed as they came to the ceramics plant. Solveig had come to Turing alone during her last two visits; Ragnar still spoke to Dyami over the screen, but Mahala had not seen him for almost two years. She frowned. Solveig had sometimes hinted that she was worried about her brother, but had avoided saying anything more specific.

“He probably just wants to get more instruction from Dyami,” Mahala said.

“I don't know. He was kind of mysterious about what he's coming here for, and I didn't ask.”

“I would have asked, especially with his kind of record. How many black marks does he have now, anyway?”

“That's not fair, Mahala,” Frania said in her gentle voice. “His reprimands were only for being in protests, and he hasn't been involved with any protesters for a while.”

Frania, she thought, would always stand up for Ragnar. “I'll enjoy seeing
him anyway,” Mahala murmured, a bit surprised that she meant it.

Frania filled her in on the doings of their schoolmates as they approached the tunnel to the north dome. All of them were still in school, although a few would be apprenticing themselves soon. In a couple of years, some would probably be volunteering for Bat duty; Frania was betting that Gino Hislop-Carnera would be the first to do so.

Mahala looked toward the Habber residence as they came out of the tunnel. She should go there right now and do what she had never been able to bring herself to do; tell Balin that she wanted to send a message to Benzi. She had put it off for too long, afraid that Benzi might not want to receive her message. But Balin probably wasn't there now anyway; he would be waiting at her uncle's house to welcome her home.

Turing was truly her home now. She welcomed its stretches of empty land after the clutter of Oberg; at the same time, she felt as if she knew Turing too well, that she had already exhausted it and would never discover anything new here again.

Dyami greeted her with Balin at his side. Her uncle and Arnina had made her favorite vegetable soup and dark bread, and Tasida soon arrived to share the meal with them.

She would not ruin their evening by pestering Balin for news of Benzi. If he had any sort of message from her great-uncle, he would have conveyed it to her by now; so she told herself, while wondering if that was the case. In all the time that she had been living with Dyami, Balin had been practically part of her uncle's household, yet she could still feel that she did not truly know the Habber.

She also knew little of his and Benzi's society or of its limits. Benzi might be unable to return; the Habbers might be more restricted in their comparative freedom than she assumed.

“Frani told me Ragnar's coming to visit,” Mahala said after she had finished her recitation of recent events in Risa's household.

“Actually, he isn't just going to be visiting,” Dyami said.

Frania glanced at Mahala, apparently as surprised as she was. “I found out today,” Dyami continued. “Ragnar's planning to live in Turing. More digger and crawler operators are needed for the work on Turing's new east dome, now that the topsoil's laid down. Turns out that Ragnar can run the machines—he apprenticed himself a year ago. I don't know why he never told me, but I suppose he thought it was his business and not mine.”

“Oh,” Frania murmured. Mahala set down her cup; Solveig had not told her that Ragnar had left school.

“Anyway, Ragnar put himself on the list,” Dyami said, “and the
engineering team seems happy to have him. His record shows that he's a hard worker and that he
also has the understanding of spacial relationships that a good operator needs. I guess that's
not surprising, given his artistic gifts, and—”

“How could he?” Mahala burst out.

Amina lifted her brows slightly; Tasida sat up and wrinkled her nose. “How could he what?” Dyami asked.

“Give up like that. In Oberg, at our old school, he'd do as well as anybody whenever he bothered to work. He could have gone to an Island school if he'd tried. How could he settle for being a crawler and digger operator?”

Dyami frowned. “I'll remind you,” he said softly, “that Risa doesn't consider running diggers and crawlers beneath her, and that Sef earns some of his credit repairing them. Your great-grandmother, in spite of her climatology degree from the Cytherian Institute, had a bond with a laborer—you're his great-grandchild, too.”

Her grandmother would have said almost exactly the same thing. Amina might be a metallurgical engineer, with training at an Island school, but she was capable of running a crawler. Dyami himself, who had once hoped to make mathematics his specialization, seemed content to do his mining and engineering tasks at the refinery and the ceramics plant while limiting his mathematical pursuits to what he could pick up from files in the net of minds, journal articles transmitted from Earth, and what he could learn from Balin.

“I'm sorry,” Mahala mumbled. “I didn't
mean—” She paused. “Most of my old schoolmates in Oberg aren't in school
anymore. It isn't that what they're doing now isn't important, it's just
that maybe they're settling for less than what they might have done. And now
Ragnar—”

Dyami's brown eyes grew warmer. “I understand. But if Ragnar's making a mistake, he's the one who has to live with it. He might not be wrong, you know. He'll have his choice of sites in the east dome when it's finished, if he wants to live there, and there's nothing to stop him from pursuing more education with screen lessons. I'd like to ask him to stay here with us, as long as it's all right with you. I'm sure his parents would rather have him in this house instead of with strangers or living in a tent.”

Frania cleared her throat. “That's fine with me.”

Mahala set down her soup spoon. “Of course he can stay.” Solveig must know of Ragnar's plans by now; her parents would have told her about them even if her brother had not Ragnar would not follow his sister to the Islands. Mahala felt a pang of regret; she had assumed that they might all be there eventually— she, Solveig, Frania, and Ragnar—dreaming together of other places they might see and deeds they might accomplish.

She gazed across the table at her uncle. For a moment, she thought she saw her regrets hiding in Dyami's eyes before he turned to murmur a few words to Balin.

Mahala and Frania went to meet Ragnar at the airship bay. He had grown much taller during the past two years and wore his long blond hair pulled back in a braid. His face was as chiseled as one of his sculptures, his shoulders broad; he looked like a man now.