Child of Venus (33 page)

The two pilots were already standing in the open entrance to their control cabin. “Please do go back to your stations,”

Jamilah murmured to the pilots, “and continue to run your checks.” She turned to face the other passengers. “I should tell you now that it is my privilege, and also my great pleasure, to be among those who will welcome Masud al-Tikriti when he arrives on Anwara in a few days. I will greatly miss the friends I've made among those I have served here, but please be reassured that all Cytherians will be in Linker Masud's most capable hands and that he is most sympathetic to our interests. And perhaps, God willing, I will not be separated from you for so very long, much as I am looking forward to my new position on Earth.”

Mahala studied Jamilah's face, but could read nothing in the Linker's impassive expression. However sudden her resignation had seemed, it was now obvious that her departure had been planned for some time; otherwise, her replacement would not already be on his way here from Earth.

Jamilah sat down in one of the seats in the front row. Mahala finished securing her safety harness, then leaned back. There was no point in worrying over what was going on among the Administrators and the Project Council; there would be enough to occupy her once she got to Anwara.

On the Platform, standing at the bottom of the enclosed cylinder of their dock and waiting to board the shuttlecraft with Solveig, Chike, and Stephan, Mahala discreetly studied the other passengers gathered at the base of the ship. Most of the people aboard the airship had been mechanics coming here to work on repairs and maintenance, while others had come to the port to connect with shuttles that would take them to the Bats. Except for Jamilah and the three students with Mahala, the people who were to board this shuttle had arrived at the Platform from the other Islands, and several of them wore the pins of specialists on their collars—silvery clouds for climatologists, tiny hammers for metallurgical engineers, a green leaf for a botanist, a small disk with an equation for a physicist. Two were marked as Linkers by the diamondlike gems on their foreheads.

As she had done aboard the airship, Jamilah was soon greeting her fellow shuttle passengers as though she were still Liaison to the Project Council, touching her hand to the diamond on her brow as they nodded back. The Linker stopped to gaze at Mahala and her three companions for a few moments in silence. Mahala lowered her eyes, feeling distinctly uneasy, thinking of how easily Jamilah could call up any information she wanted through her Link. The cyberminds could provide her with the public record of anyone aboard this shuttle, and perhaps some private records as well.

“These four young people with us,” Jamilah continued, “are students at Island Two's secondary school. They have been chosen to go to Anwara to study.”

“I heard about that,” one man said. “Isn't that out of the ordinary, sending young students at that level to Anwara?”

“Students have gone there before,” Jamilah replied, “but it's true that they haven't remained on Anwara for more than very short periods of time.” She gestured at Solveig. “This young woman here, Solveig Einarsdottir, has traveled to Anwara before, but only for a week.” Solveig's eyes widened, even though the blond girl had to know that Jamilah's Link had provided her with that small detail. “Some of us felt that it was time we exposed more of our young people to life on Anwara, where Cytherians, Earthfolk, and Habbers regularly meet to discuss the Project's needs. I myself made that recommendation to the Council, and Masud al-Tikriti apparently concurs.”

First her comments aboard the airship, Mahala thought, and now this. She did not think that Jamilah was simply making idle chatter. The Linker had to know that most Cytherians were quick to pass along anything they heard from an Administrator, however innocuous. Jamilah wanted them to know that she had been consulted on whatever changes might be coming to the Project and that she still had something to say about its fate.

August 649

From: Mahala Liangharad, Anwara, Center Ring, Room 432

To: Risa Liangharad and Sef Talis, Oberg

I've been on Anwara—inside Anwara—for three days now, and according to what others here have told me, I made the adjustment fairly well. Stephan AnnasLeonards, one of the students who traveled here with me, told me just today that he still feels slightly disoriented and dizzy. We were at zero-g at Anwara's hub, where our shuttle docked—luckily, none of us found weightlessness hard to take there or during the flight— but in the rings, we're at one-g, just a little more than the gravity on Venus or the Islands.

So theoretically we should all adjust fairly quickly, except that some people have more difficulty than others in adjusting to the spin of an orbiting space station. I can't really sense any difference. I looked up the statistics, and about half of the people who come here have minor problems like Stephan's for up to a month. A few, about ten percent, need small implants in their inner ears to compensate for their loss of balance, but the physicians won't bother with that unless you're really important and are needed here. A very few people, about two percent, end up leaving after a couple of months because they can't adjust at all, and almost all of them are people who came here directly from Earth rather than from Venus, and whether or not that means anything, I don't know. Seems peculiar; given that Venus's gravity is about eighty-five percent of Earth's, you'd think more Cytherians would have that particular problem. Maybe settlers, and the descendants of settlers, are just more adaptable to begin with. I'm curious, so I'm going to look up some research on the subject.

I should start at the beginning. I don't know how much you saw, Sef, when you first came here from Earth on your way to Venus, but Anwara looked to me like three large circular tubes turning slowly around a hub when I saw it on the screen. They keep adding new modules to the rim, and from space the modules almost look like jewels. At the hub, there are docks for shuttles, for the torchships arriving from Earth, and for Habber vessels, and one of the first things we were told is that the docks where Habber ships are berthed are off-limits and can't be entered. Earth's Mukhtars and the Project Council here supposedly insisted on those restrictions, but presumably the Habbers have their own reasons for wanting to keep us away from their ships.

At the Platform, before the shuttle took off, the pilots issued us all adhesive strips for our shoes, but they warned us to be careful moving around in weightlessness. Except for using the lavatory—and I won't even get into that—most of us stayed in our seats during the flight, floating up against our harnesses. We were in zero-g at the hub, after our ship docked, but we weren't there that long before a woman came to show us to our quarters. Her name is Orenda Tineka, and even though she trained in environmental systems, she seems more like a psychologist or a Counselor. Apparently her job is to advise the students, answer our questions, and help us get used to Anwara.

Solveig and I were assigned to the same room, number 432 in the center ring. I haven't seen much of the other two rings yet, but they look about the same as this one. The passageways are always lighted, and I'm getting used to that, but Chike Enu-Barnes says it starts to bother him if he has to be in the corridors for more than half an hour. I know what he means. I had a long walk back from Orenda's room to mine last night—yesterday—and it seemed endless, just walking through this gently curving corridor past door after door, peering at the numbers or images on the doors, hearing people's voices and then seeing tiny figures emerge in the distance from around the curve—well, it isn't anything like Oberg or the Islands.

As for my quarters, this room is about half the size of the room I used to have in your house, and I've got to share it with Solveig. It isn't so bad when our beds are in the walls, but when we open them up, there isn't room to do anything except lie down and study with a pocket screen or sleep. Maybe that won't matter all that much, since it looks as though we'll have a more rigid schedule here than we did on bland Two. The students go to meals together, take our exercise and recreation together, and attend discussion groups together. So far, Orenda is the only person who has led us in discussions, but it looks as though we'll be meeting in one group with most of our teachers, too. It's almost as if one of the things they want us to learn here is how to get along with everyone in the group. That's probably necessary here. In Turing, I could wander in the woods, and even on Island Two, there are the gardens. Being alone on Anwara, unless you're in your room by yourself, is almost impossible.

Mahala paused in her recitation and leaned back from the screen. She was alone now; Solveig was in the outer ring, visiting with the astronomers and studying images picked up by Anwara's telescope. According to her, the astronomers and astrophysicists on Anwara felt much neglected by the Project, even though they had a little more support than their few counterparts on the Islands did. There were only four of them, because their discipline was not considered all that essential. Their equipment was little better than that of astronomers centuries ago, and their knowledge of stellar evolution had not advanced much past what those early colleagues had discovered. The engineers who had always controlled the Project did not see, or else refused to see, that astrophysics was of any practical use to them.

The Habbers would not have taken such a view. Mahala had overheard enough of Balm's conversations with Dyami to know that Habbers encouraged people to master whatever intellectual disciplines appealed to them. They had telescopes that had yielded data about Alpha Centauri, Tau Ceti, and other star systems, where it had long been known that there were planets. They probably knew much more about the universe beyond the solar system than the meagerly supported astronomical team of Anwara did.

Why had the Habbers never sent out an expedition to explore space beyond this system?
But perhaps they already had. They might have sent out crews of people aboard exploratory vessels
without anyone on Earth knowing about it or being able to stop them; the Mukhtars would have little
interest in making such expeditions public knowledge. But the Habbers would not have had to go on
such voyages themselves, and she knew from Benzi that the Habbers had sent out probes. Some of those
probes had been what he called “listeners,” sent out to scan the heavens for anomalous
phenomena that might be signals from an alien civilization.

There had not yet been any communications from their probes, as far as she knew, but Habbers might be content to wait for decades or even centuries for them to transmit any data. Their long lives would also be an advantage in interstellar exploration, where the duration of even a round-trip to a near star might take decades. She thought of what Balin had said to Solveig once, when she had given up trying to worm information from him about what the interstellar probes might have discovered and had then asked him why the Habbers had never, even under extreme provocation, severed all their ties with Earth and the Venus Project.

“We are trying to hold on to our humanity,” Balin had replied. “We fear diverging too greatly from the rest of our kind, and yet I wonder if some Habbers haven't done so already.” This might also have held them back from traveling outside this system.

Mahala pushed those thoughts aside, then realized for the first time how automatically she had done so, how instinctively she allowed herself to get to a certain point and no further. It was almost as though she had been trained not to speculate on what the Habbers might be doing that might be unknown even in the highest circles of the Council of Mukhtars. To dwell on the Habbers and their possible accomplishments was to risk viewing both Earth and Venus as backward places, growing ever more dependent on the Habbers while refusing to admit it, clinging to the Project as a demonstration of their technical prowess while never acknowledging that even there, the aid of the Habbers had been necessary. To think too much about the Habbers and their ways could even bring one to doubt the purpose of the Project. She forced herself to concentrate on the message to her grandparents:

Whatever problems we have in getting used to life here, Orenda tells me that adjusting psychologically should be easier for us than for people who come here directly from Earth. Since we all grew up in domed settlements or on the Islands, we're used to a more enclosed environment. Earthfolk can find a place like Anwara claustrophobic.

Mahala fell silent again. She had been about to say that one aspect of life on Anwara did disturb her, but she had not yet mentioned it to anyone else, not even Solveig. She suspected that others shared her apprehension, but maybe it was better for her to ignore her fear instead of allowing it to blossom into a phobia. Speaking of one's fears, as Risa had often told her, could sometimes dispel them, but could also feed those fears and make them grow larger and more real. That was probably especially true on Anwara, where phobias and unspoken fears could so easily spread among people thrown so close together.

Her unvoiced fear was that Anwara was too vulnerable and unprotected in its high orbit, its walls too readily able to be breached by tiny meteorites and other debris. Because of Anwara's orbital path, Venus and its Parasol were always between the space station and the sun, so Anwara's inhabitants did not have to fear the effects of solar radiation, and the rings were heavily shielded in any case. During the few times micrometeorites had threatened the satellite in the past, the alarms had sounded in time for people to evacuate the endangered areas and seek safety; there had been breaches in the outer walls only three times, and those small openings had been quickly repaired. She knew this, and yet felt far more vulnerable here than behind the transparent dome of a settlement or an Island afloat in Venus's atmosphere.