Child of Venus (42 page)

She knew the voice. Mahala turned around and looked up. Chike Enu-Barnes was making his way down the slope, his smile visible even from a distance.

“What are you doing here?” she called out.

“You must have given me a good recommendation,” he said as he came up to her. “A chemical engineer at the ceramics plant said he'd looked at my record and that I could have a job here if I wanted it.”

She had forgotten that she had mentioned Chike to Dyami; her uncle must have recommended him to the engineer. She clasped one of Chike's hands in greeting, suddenly overjoyed to see him, pleased to know that he would be here in Turing.

“My airship got here four hours ago,” Chike continued. “I met some of the workers at the plant, and they told me I could pitch a tent on the grounds near there until I found somewhere else to live. I asked where you and your uncle lived, and they told me, so I left my things there and came here. A blond woman at his house pointed me this way.”

“Amina,” Mahala said as she released his hand.

“That's what she said her name was.”

“You should have told us you were coming,” Mahala said.

“I wanted to surprise you.”

“I'm glad you're here,” Mahala murmured.

“I am, too, especially now.” He linked his arm through hers, then offered his other arm to Solveig. “I wanted to be here, with everything that's going on.” He glanced at Mahala. “I wanted to be with you.”

“Sounds as though you're worried,” Solveig said.

“I am worried,” Chike replied. “My brother Kesse hasn't found out much, but he suspects that much of what's going on is still being sorted out There's a rumor on Island Two that Administrator Masud made that speech when he did because the Mukhtars pushed him into it. Supposedly Masud wanted to wait a while, until he could be more specific about future plans, but the Mukhtars wanted to lay everything out in the open to see what the reaction would be, and the Habbers agreed with them. If everything works out, well have this wonderful new era to look forward to, but if it doesn't, Masud al-Tikriti and Mukhtar Tabib might make very convenient scapegoats.”

“They can't take back what they've said,” Solveig said softly. “That would only cause even more trouble.”

“They wouldn't have to take it back,” Chike said. “If the plans for the Mercury operation and for an interstellar vessel and space exploration lead to unexpected problems and delays, or everything turns out to be much more costly than they anticipated, that would be enough to bring the new era to a halt. And there wouldn't be much then to keep the Habbers from launching a space expedition by themselves.” He slowed his pace. “It's only rumors. I'm probably being too pessimistic—don't pay attention to me.”

“I won't,” Mahala said, not wanting this new dream to die so quickly.

 

The Garden

 

19

Cutting off sunlight to Venus with the Parasol had enabled the Cytherian atmosphere to precipitate into carbon dioxide, to allow sterile oceans to form without boiling away in extreme heat, and had greatly cooled the planet. Without construction of the Parasol, getting to this stage in terraforming Venus would have taken many millennia, might even have eventually proven to be impossible. Even so, the successive members of the Project Council had always known that their progress would be slow and incremental, to be measured in stages, with each completed step likely to present a new problem to be solved.

Shading Venus had cooled the surface, but had required the development of a new and hardy strain of algae, one that could survive in darkness, without photosynthesis, and feed on the planet's sulfuric acid. Extracting hydrogen from Saturn, an operation undertaken by the Habbers three centuries earlier, then sending the hydrogen sunward in massive tanks and hurling it into the Venusian atmosphere, had been necessary to create water, while the traces of ammonia in the Saturnian elements were needed to produce nitrogen.

But even massive quantities of imported hydrogen were not enough to combine with all of the free oxygen produced by the changes in the Venusian ecosphere. To remove more of the oxygen had required the construction of thick-walled robotic factories at the poles to separate the oxygen from the atmosphere, compress it, and then carry it on robot-piloted shuttles and scooper ships to the Bats, where the oxygen could either be used for other operations or flung into space. The surface operations had always been automatic, but to have cyberminds run the rest of the oxygen disposal process on the Bats would have been too costly for the Project, much more costly than training workers for duty on the two satellites. Bat duty had soon evolved into one of the Cytherian rites of passage, a way for Cytherians to earn some respect and to feel that they had important roles to play in the Project, but the cost of that duty was paid in lives.

Within a few months after the announcement of the new era and the new phase of the Project, machines that resembled diggers and crawlers, with drills and claws and shovels as attachments, were at work mining the surface of Mercury. These machines were built by Habber technology, and soon after the first machines had been sent on their journey sunward to Mercury from the Habitat nearest Venus, the mechanical miners were making new replicas of themselves from Mercury's resources and adding new attachments to their arsenal of tools. Viewing sensor images of the machines at work often produced a feeling in Mahala that the machines were more than mechanical constructions and more than mindless servants of the Project; that they were in fact a community of intelligent robots doing their work, breeding their young, and making a home for themselves on that barren and hostile surface. The electromagnetic mass drivers that the Habber robots were building were not, it seemed, there only to fling ingots of calcium and magnesium to Venus, but also to serve as a monument to this cybernetic offshoot of human civilization.

Such speculations flickered through Mahala's mind whenever she thought about the latest Habber accomplishment. Clearly such machines could have done even more of the work of terraforming on Venus herself. Fewer people, and perhaps none at all, might have had to endure shifts of largely tedious work in the external operations centers of the domes; surely similar machines might have been used to run all operations on the Bats, making it unnecessary to endanger the lives of any workers there.

But it was useless to waste even a moment brooding on such matters. Earth could more easily afford to lose people than other resources, resources harder to come by and more costly than human workers. Those laboring for the Project had also been given a purpose in life through their labors.

During the year after Administrator Masud's declaration of a new era, Mahala turned more of her attention to the Project's past. When she was not with a patient, being tested on her medical knowledge by Tasida, analyzing medical scans, examining patients, treating injuries, administering rejuvenation therapy, or studying medical procedures, she was often reading print accounts of the Venus Project's history or calling up visual records.

Perhaps there was more of her historian grandfather Malik in her than she realized. Maybe the prospect of a new era with new challenges to be met had awakened her interest in the events that had led humankind to this juncture. Seeing how people had met and overcome the early obstacles to the Venus Project gave her more hope for the future.

What she had not expected was that the more she discovered about the Project's past difficulties, the more uncertain its present seemed to become. The people of the past, or their children and grandchildren, could expect to live to see the conclusions of various important and distinct stages of the Project—the completion of the Parasol, the construction of the Islands, and then the movement of people to the domed surface settlements. No one alive now, and no descendants who were likely even to remember present-day Cytherians, would live to see the next stages of the Project: an ocean burgeoning with life, a profusion of plants covering the land outside the domes, people able to leave the domes wearing only protective suits and masks. No one with any memory of Mahala's time and of the generations that would follow would ever walk unprotected on the surface of Venus, to breathe its air and look up at a sun only partly eclipsed by whatever remained of the Parasol.

The people who had come here had dreamed of making a new world for their children. Instead, they might only have imprisoned them, yoked them to an end that they would never see and that might never be achieved. And now there was another dream calling to them from the stars, another dream whose realization they would not live to see.

A year and a half after the dawn of the new era, Mahala grew increasingly aware that others shared many of her thoughts and her doubts.

“It's only a few people,” Chike said to Mahala as they made their way along a path through the woods. He had brought a light wand with him. She was beginning to feel foolish, slipping away with him in the dark to a mysterious gathering. “I've only gone to a couple of these discussions, but this isn't the only group that gets together. There are others.”

“You make it sound like some sort of conspiracy,” she said.

“It's not a conspiracy, Mahala. We're just people trying to sort things out and discuss them freely, but privately.”

“Did you tell Solveig about any of this?” Mahala asked.

“No, and you probably shouldn't, either. It isn't that I can't trust her, but she might inadvertently say something to Rag-nar.”

And you can't trust him, Mahala thought. She had known Ragnar much longer than had Chike, but now felt that she barely knew Ragnar at all. During the few times Frania had invited her and Chike and Solveig to her home, Ragnar had sat with them saying almost nothing, as if simply marking the time until they left, or else he had quickly retreated to the open area outside the house's entrance to make sketches on a screen. Occasionally he visited Dyami's house, but only to show her uncle a few of his sketches or carvings. Frania had sold a few of his carvings and sculptures to her fellow pilots and had even secured credit for a sculpture of their two cats from a Linker on Island Seven. That was as much as Mahala knew of Ragnar's life now: that he went to his shifts and worked on his art and spent much of his time by himself. He was so closed to her that she could not even tell if he was unhappy or had finally found contentment.

She and Chike came to a clearing. More of the wooded land bordering the lake had been cleared for dwellings, and two small houses now stood on the slope overlooking the lake. “Isn't that Gino's house?” she asked, recalling that her former schoolmate Gino Hislop-Carnera had moved there not long before.

“Yes. He's the one who started this group.” Chike paused. “That makes this all sound more organized than it is. About two months ago, Gino and I got to talking after our shift, about the Project and what might happen now. A couple of nights later, he invited me over, and a few other people were there, and soon we were all talking about how our lives might just drag on here while the new era proceeded without us. It isn't enough, Mahala, living this way, not now. People are getting impatient.”

She had entertained the same thought too many times to object. “I know,” she said.

They walked toward Gino's house, which was little more than a plain square structure of prefabricated walls and two wide windows facing the lake. The entrance opened as they approached. Gino stood in the door; he motioned them inside.

They came into a small common room furnished with cushions and a small table. There was Josef Feldshuh, another one of her former schoolmates; he was the head of his team at the ceramics plant and had just been elected to Turing's Council. Seated next to him was Dianna Su, a geologist who had moved to Turing to work at its refinery not long after Chike's arrival, but the presence of the man sitting next to Dianna surprised her.

“Suleiman,” she murmured as she sat down next to Dyami's old friend. Suleiman Khan still came by at least once every month or so, to share a meal with Dyami and to ask after the rest of his household. They had both been prisoners during the uprising; together, they had lived through the violence and death neither of them had ever discussed in front of her.

“This is it,” Gino said as he seated himself.

“This is the group?” Mahala asked, glancing at Chike.

“Everybody who's likely to show up,” Gino said. “This isn't an organization, Mahala, or a cabal, just a few friends who like to get together and talk. A couple of people who met with us before told me they wouldn't be here tonight. That may mean they don't have much to contribute to the discussion right now, or else they may be somewhere else talking with another group.”

“Another group?”

“Another informal group of friends,” Suleiman said. “We aren't sitting around hatching schemes or constructing plots. We're just people who share a dissatisfaction with our present situation and who now have some reason to hope for change.”

The younger people were all looking at him now. “When my parents came to Venus,” Suleiman continued, “it was enough for them to leave Earth and to know that they had come to a place where their children might be freer and able to have more education and to feel that they were part of a great enterprise. When the first settlers came to the domes, it was enough for them to have the work of creating new communities and to see them grow and develop. And for people like me, who were the first to be born and grow up on the surface of Venus and who lived through a time when everything we had created here might have been destroyed, it was enough to win a small measure of freedom and to know that the Project would continue. But that isn't enough for you, and perhaps it shouldn't be.”

“Maybe we're just not properly grateful for what we have,” Dianna Su said. “The Habbers are doing as much as they've ever done to aid the Project, even with their hopes for the interstellar expedition. We have the Mukhtars and the Project Council cooperating instead of being used by their members for various political ends. According to the statistics I've seen, our settlements are as peaceful and nearly as free of social problems and disorders as they've ever been.”