Child of Venus (28 page)

“I didn't know you were going to the settlements. I thought you'd changed your mind.” She leaned back against her seat. “You didn't bother to say anything to me about your plans.”

“No, I didn't. I suppose that I should have, but I thought it might be easier for you this way, not having to dread traveling with me ahead of time.”

She looked at him from the sides of his eyes. He had a faint smile on his face. “Risa didn't tell me you were coming to Oberg, either,” she said. “Didn't you even let her know?”

“Of course I did. I sent a message to her, and then called her, but she refused to come to the screen. Her bondmate Sef spoke to me instead and gave me her message, namely that she would be damned if she would allow me to set foot in her house and would appreciate it if I kept out of the west dome as well.”

She could imagine her grandmother saying much worse than that. “You have to understand,” Mahala began to say.

“Oh, I do understand.” The half-smile was still on his face.

“Then why are you going to Oberg at all?”

“There are Habbers there. I can stay with them in their residence and still visit with you. And perhaps Risa will change her mind.”

“She doesn't change her mind very easily.”

Malik made a sound that might have been a laugh. “How well I remember the truth of that.” He settled back in his seat and closed his eyes. Mahala pressed her lips together, resenting his presence.

Malik slept during most of the journey, stirring only when the howl of the wind outside the airship rose. At least Mahala assumed that he was asleep, although he might have been communing with other Habbers through his Link. He had not seemed interested in viewing the images on the forward screen, the images enhanced to show what the Venusian surface would look like if sunlight could reach the surface, the images that seemed more real than what the sensor lenses would show her because they were enhanced. The darkness that was actually out there would be only a void into which one could project one's dreams or be lost.

Her grandfather opened his eyes as the airship descended into the maw of Oberg's bay and dropped toward the metal eggshell of a cradle. Mahala hefted her duffel after the landing and followed the other passengers off the airship, with Malik just behind her. He kept at her side as they walked down the ramp and through the bay, glancing uneasily at the row of cradled airships near one wall.

He seemed apprehensive, looking around uneasily as they left the bay and entered the main dome. Unexpectedly, Mahala found herself feeling some sympathy for the grandfather who had abandoned this world so long ago.

A cart carrying only a few passengers rolled toward them along the main road, then
came to a stop. Mahala turned toward her grandfather. “I'm going to walk to Risa's
house,” she said, “for the exercise, so if you need a ride to where you're
going—” She gestured toward the cart.

“I'll walk part of the way with you,” he said.

“Risa and Sef will expect me to go by the monument and the other memorials to pay my respects.”

“Then I'll come with you, if you don't mind.”

She did mind. She wondered if he knew about the memorials that had been erected since he had last been here. “Come along, then,” she murmured.

She quickened her pace. Malik easily kept up with her. They did not have far to go to get to the clearing where the memorials stood. As usual, there was a floral tribute, a small wreath of slightly wilted flowers, at the base of the monument to her great-grandmother Iris Angharads.

Malik looked up at the sculpted faces of Iris and Amir Azad, the man who had died with her, then lowered his eyes to the Anglaic inscription. “In honor of Iris Angharads and Amir Azad,” the inscription read, “the first true Cytherians, who gave their lives to save our new world. They shall not be forgotten. May their spirit live on in all those who follow them. They rest forever on the world they helped to build.” Malik must have seen the monument and its inscription many times in the past, yet he continued to stare at the words as though reading them for the first time.

For my benefit? Mahala wondered. No, it went deeper.

At last he moved away from the monument and wandered toward the other memorial pillars. Mahala trailed after him, unsure of what to do. He stopped in front of a pillar covered with holo images of faces.

“Chen's there,” Mahala said hastily. “Liang Chen—Risa's father.” It came to her then that Malik had to be as old now as her great-grandfather Chen had been when he had died, maybe older.

Malik glanced at her. “I know. I remember Chen very well.” He stepped away from that pillar and turned toward the next memorial. She saw him tense as he caught sight of the face of his daughter Chimene at the top of the pillar, set apart from the images of faces below.

He was silent for a long time, then said, “Who put up this memorial image to your mother?”

“I don't know. I know it wasn't Risa or anyone in our family. No one ever told me. I suppose some of her followers or friends must have taken care of it.”

“With no one else's face anywhere near hers,” Malik said. “I suppose that's appropriate.” He paused. “I wasn't much of a father to your mother. I left when I had the chance, thinking that there was nothing left for me here, that even my daughter was lost to me, and yet perhaps I was responsible for what she became.”

“You couldn't have known—”

“Oh, but I should have seen the signs. I could have reached out to her more instead of being grateful for the wall that rose between us, since that wall left me freer inside myself.”

Mahala moved closer to him. “Is that why you left the Project, because of Chimene?”

“It was part of the reason. I could cite others, but the fact is that I left largely because I had grown tired of my life on Island Two and was fortunate enough to fall in with people plotting an escape. The truth is that I didn't much care whether I reached a Habitat or lost my life in the attempt— it was all the same to me.”

“It must have taken some courage to leave,” she said.

He shook his head. “Believe me, child, it took none at all. It would have been more courageous of me to stay.” He adjusted the duffel strap on his shoulder. “I've kept you long enough, Mahala. Risa and her household will be waiting for you. I can find my destination by myself.”

Mahala was about to walk away, then turned back. “Malik,” she said, “Risa wouldn't throw you out if you came to her house with me.”

“Showing up suddenly, uninvited—I won't do that to her.” He moved toward another pillar, as if searching for the images of people he might once have known. She left him standing there among the faces of the dead.

Dinner was what Mahala had expected, with Kristof and Barika questioning her about her classes and friends while Grazie filled her in on recent Oberg gossip. Only her grandmother seemed unlike herself; while her housemates chattered and passed around platters of food and bottles of wine, Risa picked at her plate of vegetables and beans and said little.

Often her grandmother went to the greenhouse after dinner or discussed the first chores of the next day with Sef, but this time she got up from the table and beckoned to Mahala. “I'm going to take a walk,” she said. “Maybe you'd like to come along with me.”

“Of course,” Mahala said. “Should I help clear the table first?”

“Go,” Sef said. “It's your first night home—we'll find enough work for you to do tomorrow.”

She followed Risa from the house. Overhead, the dome's light had faded into the faint glow of early evening. Risa strolled in the direction of the tunnel that led to the main dome, then abruptly turned toward a path of flat pale stones that led to the community greenhouses.

“Malik is in Oberg, isn't he,” Risa said.

“Yes. He came on the airship with me.”

“I knew he would come.”

“I told him that if he came to your house with me, you'd probably welcome him, no matter how you felt, but he wouldn't come here knowing that you didn't want to see him.”

Risa halted near a tree. “It was all so long ago,” she murmured. “He was the most beautiful man I had ever seen. Maybe if he hadn't looked the way he did, and hadn't spoken to me in such poetic phrases, and hadn't been so gentle with me, I would have been able to see how wrong he was for me, and how wrong I was for him.” She fell silent for a few moments. “It wasn't entirely his fault that we parted. I was to blame for much of what went wrong, although it took me a while to see that. I suppose he still looks much the same.”

“He doesn't look his age,” Mahala admitted.

“He must look as if he could be my son.”

“Not when you look right into his face, into his eyes,” Mahala said. “He seems older then.”

They walked on until the main road was in sight. Others were out for a stroll; two women waved at Risa from a distance. Normally her grandmother would have waved back, perhaps gone over to talk to them. This time, she led Mahala away from the road and toward a grove of trees.

They sat down under one tree. “He would look at me now,” Risa said, “and see an old woman.”

“No, he wouldn't.” In the faint silvery evening light, Mahala could almost envision the girl her grandmother had been. Even in daylight, Risa still had the appearance of a woman in her middle years. Rejuvenation would keep her near her physical prime, with only gradual signs of aging, until she was a decade or two past the century mark, and then her decline would come fairly rapidly. Mahala wondered if Risa envied the Habbers their extended lives, the life spans Earthfolk and Cytherians might also have had if their biologists hadn't been held back, or if she was content with her more limited span. Mahala had always supposed that she herself would make her peace with death when that time came, but perhaps that was only because her end was so distant in time that her death hardly seemed real.

“There's one reason I wouldn't mind living as long as Malik or
Benzi,” Risa said. “Maybe then I could live long enough to leave this dome and walk
outside unprotected. I could be around to see what so many gave their lives to build.
Sometimes—” Risa put her hand on Mahala's arm. “Sometimes I wonder if it was
worth it. Your mother might have been different somewhere else—in a way, the dream of the
Project was what killed her. I occasionally wonder if I did the right thing by bringing you up in
such a place, inside these domes.”

These words were so unlike her grandmother that Mahala could hardly bring herself to
speak. “Grandmother,” she said at last, “you've always—”

“I've always thought of my duty,” Risa interrupted. “I was always a good Cytherian. Now I find myself thinking more and more of what this world did to your mother Chimene, and to Dyami, and to the other daughter I lost.” Risa had never spoken of her younger daughter, who had died while still a child, during an epidemic that had killed many in the enclosed environment of the settlements, where deadly microbes could spread more rapidly. “What do you want to do, Mahala?”

“I don't know.”

“At least you're honest enough to admit that. I expected you to say that you wanted to do whatever would be of most use to the Project. Well, then, what do you think you might do?”

Mahala considered how much she could admit to Risa. “I want to go to the Cytherian Institute,” she replied, “and not just for the sake of the Project, but because I could visit Earth.”

“And after that?”

“The Administrators and Counselors will probably decide that for me.”

“That's also what you're supposed to say. I want to know what you might choose.”

Mahala was silent.

“There were times,” Risa continued, “when I was young, when I would imagine that I could somehow rush forward in time and see the sun shining on this planet again, the clouds gone, the plateaus and mountains green with life. But I doubt that even a Habber could live that long.” She sighed. “The Project wouldn't have been possible without the Habbers. I know that, too.”

“Risa—”

“Foolish of me,” Risa said, “to think that my life is that different from those that people have led for ages. When did anyone ever live long enough to see if their dreams and those of their children and grandchildren would be fulfilled in the end?”

Risa got to her feet quickly, in one movement; she was still limber. “I'll tell you what I suspect,” she went on. “I think the Habbers are tiring of their efforts here. I think they're growing weary of their dealings with Earth. They have worlds of their own. What's to stop them from simply leaving?”

Mahala tensed. Either Risa's instincts were even better than she realized, or else she knew what some of the Habbers were considering; perhaps Benzi had told her.

“Not that there would be anything we could do about it if they did,” Risa murmured. “We had better go back to the house. Sef will want to hear all about your studies and your new friends.”

Within two days of arriving in Oberg, Mahala was impatient to be on her way to Turing and her visit with Dyami. Her former schoolmates, at sixteen and seventeen years of age, were already leading the lives of adults, choosing bondmates, deciding where to live, volunteering for Bat duty, or finishing their apprenticeships. Even though she was their contemporary, to them she was still leading a child's life, without any real responsibilities.

She busied herself during the day with household tasks and then took a walk around Oberg after last light, when she was unlikely to run into her childhood friends, who would be sharing evening meals with their families or getting some much-needed rest after a shift of work. Given the demands of the Project, perhaps her former friends had been wise to settle for their more limited lives, for the rewards of duty and work instead of trying for more. Whatever disappointments lay ahead, they could know that they were a part of something larger than themselves, something that would outlive them. She might spend several years trying to discover what it was she wanted for herself and end up leading the sort of life most of the others already did, but without their inner satisfactions.