Child of Venus (47 page)

It didn't turn out quite that way, and most of the children from Lincoln who entered school with me either dropped out or were asked to leave after a year or so, but the ones who came after us did better at their lessons. I was able to go to school and get more training, and now I'm instructing some of the youngest children in reading and mathematics and also showing them how to locate and call up educational mind-tours they might not have found out about by themselves. And next autumn, I'll be going to a university, something I thought could never happen to me. There are still people here who think too much schooling is a waste of time and will only addle your brain, but there aren't as many of them as there used to be, and the children entering now are more prepared for school than we were.

That was the first shock for everybody in Lincoln, having a school set up here. The second, of course, was the announcement by Mukhtar Tabib al-Takir that a new era of cooperation among the peoples of Earth, Venus, and the Habitats was at hand and that the Habbers would be providing more aid to the Cytherians and the Venus Project and that an alien race had sent a signal from the stars. That nearly sent some people over the edge. But all of that would have come to us as an even bigger shock without the school; it was almost as though the Lincoln Academy were deliberately set up to prepare us for more changes later on.

So now we have students who come here from other towns to attend our Lincoln Academy, and we have teachers, and even the old women who still shake their heads and cluck disapprovingly about it all admit that Lincoln is a lot more interesting than it used to be. At mass in our Marian Catholic Church—that's where most of our household goes, although there are a lot of Muslims and Spiritists in town, too—we actually fill all the pews now, and the mosque draws more people, and the Spiritists had to move out of their building next to the town hall into a larger structure. That's partly because there are more people living here now, but I think it's also because more of us are trying to hang on to some of our old customs in the middle of all this change. There's a kind of comfort in going to mass and lighting candles for Mary and Her Son and knowing that some things won't change, even when you aren't really sure you believe in any of that.

I don't know how much you Cytherians keep up with what happens on Earth. Most people here know little more about your lives than what they might hear about in progress reports about the Project, and of course we know about the major political events, such as your uprising and how Mukhtar Kaseko Wugabe so cleverly allowed the oppressors among your own people to think that he was willing to deal with them when he was actually just waiting for the Cytherians to rise up and overthrow—

Mother of God, forgive me. I forgot that your mother Chimene Liang-Haddad was one of the leaders of the cult that caused all that trouble. I know that your record says you never knew her, but it was still tactless of me to mention that. Well, she was a cousin of mine, too. Our line made its mark on Venus, for good and for ill, but mostly for good, I think.

As I was saying, you may know little more about what's going on here than most of us do about what's happening there, and the North American Plains aren't exactly a center of Earthly culture, so you wouldn't have much reason to concern yourself with our doings. We have our school, and five of our young students have gone off to universities for more training, and we all know that everything is changing. Fortunately, things aren't changing so quickly that our lives are too disrupted for us to adjust.

Lincoln isn't the only place that's being transformed, either. I did some digging around and discovered that a lot of small towns and isolated communities that never had schools until a few years ago now have them. There also seems to be an increase in the number of Counselors being trained and given assignments in all of the Nomarchies, which makes sense. Even if the Administrative Councils and the Mukhtars are cautious and go slow, a lot of people are going to feel increasingly disoriented.

This message from a stranger, even if she is a kinswoman, has gone on much too long already, and I still haven't told you what impelled me to send it to you. I'd been meaning to contact you for a while before the Habbers came. That's what this message is about, actually—the Habbers.

A month ago, Torie Crawfordsville told us that three Linkers and three Habbers were coming here. The Linkers were to be from our Nomarchy's Administrative Council, and the Habbers were supposedly coming here simply as observers. Every household got her message, and within a few minutes after Torie was off the screen, my mother was getting calls from everyone in town. I mean, having Linkers here, especially people so highly placed, would have been enough of a shock, but Habbers—we couldn't believe it, and maybe it's just as well that Torie didn't leave us too much time to think about it, because within three days after her announcement, a floater arrived here, landed in our one airship cradle, and the door opened, and there on the ramp were the Linkers and the Habbers.

Everybody was there to greet them. There was a crowd at the cradle and another crowd in the town square, and Teresa was waiting at the cradle with a small delegation of heads of households to welcome them. I don't know what we expected to see, but some of the old women had been spreading tales about Habbers coming here to steal children for their Habs or to put implants in our brains in order to make us do their bidding. You would think they'd know better, and luckily most of us know such stories are ridiculous, but I think there was a moment, while we were standing by the floater cradle, when some of us were wondering whether the stories might be true.

The Linkers and Habbers have been here for a month now, and they've gone out of their way to be friendly and reassuring and to adapt to our ways—or at least to keep from offending anyone. But it's taken Teresa and me, and my grandmother Maria, most of that time to come to terms with the fact that one of the Habbers is part of our line.

We had known about him earlier, of course, and that he had gone with his mother to Venus and then abandoned Venus for the Habs, but nobody talked about him, and we certainly never thought we would ever see Benzi Liangharad in Lincoln. He was born here, he spent the first years of his life here, but we never expected to meet him here. He's over a century old, and yet he looks like a man of thirty or so at the most. Whatever rejuv techniques the Habbers have must be a lot more advanced than ours.

But you know him, so I don't have to tell you all of that. Anyway, that's why I'm sending you this message, because of Benzi. He suggested it to me and said that we should establish some contact now. And he asked me to say, though I'm not sure why, that he hasn't forgotten you and his other kin on Venus.

The quake struck when Mahala was on her way to Sagan's airship bay, which lay at the southern end of the east dome. The seismologists had been expecting a quake on Ishtar Terra's Lakshmi Plateau for a few days now, although their predictions of the quake's magnitude had varied.

Speeding up the rotation of Venus one hundred years ago with the antigravitational pulse generated by the three pyramidal surface installations had unlocked the planet's tectonic plates. There had been violent quakes after that, and domes able to withstand even the most powerful quakes had been manufactured to cover and seal in the settlements. For the past two decades, the plateau and mountain ranges of Ishtar Terra had been shaken by only a series of minor quakes, some of them too small to be perceptible to human beings, but many of the seiomolegists had been predicting a much stronger quake than usual within a month, while others anticipated one of the most severe they were ever likely to experience.

The jolt threw Mahala forward, as if the ground had suddenly been pulled out from under her feet. On the flat land to the south, tents swayed violently, sails moving over a sea of grass. She clawed at the grass. The ground heaved under her until it seemed that it would never stop.

Quakes had never caused a breach in a dome, and Mahala knew enough about the specs and the ceramic-metallic alloy of the domes to be certain that all of the domes would hold, but was terrified all the same. The installations near Sagan's two digger and crawler bays might be damaged. Conduits in several of those bunkers held oxygen extracted from the atmosphere of carbon dioxide, which was combined with nitrogen drawn from Venus's misty rains and then used to replenish the air inside the domes, and there had been explosions inside bunkers before. A few of the diggers and crawlers the settlers used for their external mining operations might have been buried under rockslides. Even after two years of living in Sagan, most of the people here still lived either in tents or in dormitories with walls and ceilings of light materials; anyone inside them was unlikely to suffer any injuries. But the other settlements, even with all the precautions people had taken in the construction of their dwellings and other structures, were likely to have injuries, even deaths.

The ground trembled and shook. Mahala pressed herself against the ground, waiting out the long moments until

Venus was still once more, then pulled a palm-sized pocket screen from her physician's bag.

A number appeared on the screen: 8.3 on the scale, about as bad as it could get. The epicenter of the quake had been only fifty kilometers south of Turing and Hypatia and the other settlements in the Freyja Mountains to the north of the Lakshmi Plateau. She wondered how much damage Turing had suffered.

She dragged herself to her feet. A soft voice was speaking to her from the screen she held in her hand. Two men were down in the airship bay, one dazed and the other unconscious. She shut the screen off and thrust it into her pocket. She was close to the bay; she would head there first and take care of the injured men before seeing who else might need her.

Sven Hmong had been securing a crane when the quake hit; his arm was broken. Tomas Sechen had been helping him, and part of the crane had hit Tomas in the head and knocked him unconscious. Mahala guessed that it had been a glancing blow, since there was little sign of injury except a bruise; a direct blow might have killed Tomas outright.

After telling others in the bay to carry the injured men to the room in one of the dormitories that was her office, she checked her screen again. A woman leaving the west dome's External Operations Center had been thrown against a wall; there might be broken bones.

“Distress call,” somebody was saying behind her, “from the airship out of Ptolemy.” Mahala recalled that an airship was supposed to be coming here from the settlement of Ptolemy with a few more settlers for Sagan. She hurried through the entrance to the bay and decided to head for the west dome on foot instead of waiting for one of the east dome's two carts. The small screen in her pocket was silent; apparently no one else needed medical help, at least not yet. She let out a sigh; they had been lucky.

She covered flat grassland, moving at a run, falling back into a rapid stride, then moving into a run again. The Sagan

Council was scheduled to have its first meeting tonight, now that the people here had finally gotten around to electing Councilors. Mahala had unexpectedly found herself elected as a Councilor, along with Tomas Sechen and Eugenio Toku-gawa, who had moved to Sagan from Oberg a year ago. Their meeting was to have been devoted to the subject of whether a Habber should also be chosen to be a member of the Council, a move favored by some people as a bow to the new era but regarded by others as too provocative; the other settlements might not be so ready to accept a Habber as a Councilor.

Now she would have to call off that meeting. She found herself wondering when the first aftershock would come. There would be one, of course, and probably a strong one, given the quake's magnitude.

By the time she came to the tunnel that led to the west dome, two men were there, carrying Vanah Robell on a makeshift stretcher.

“Is Vanah the only one hurt?” Mahala asked. One of the men nodded. She led them to the dormitory room that was her office, where the two men who had been injured in the bay had arrived and were awaiting treatment.

A scan revealed that Vanah had a fractured rib. Mahala taped her up, set Sven's arm in a splint, then embedded implants in the chests of her two patients; the osteo-hormones would hasten the knitting of their broken bones while they recovered. Tomas's scan revealed a concussion, but no fracture; he would need rest and periodic scans for a while in case he developed a subdural hematoma that might require treatment. She thought of the Habbers in Sagan, whose bones might already have nano-healed by now if they had suffered any fractures. The tiny molecule-sized devices that coursed through their circulatory systems might already have repaired any fractures, knitting the breaks and generating new bone to replace any lost calcium. She had learned a few things from the Habbers here, but without access to their technology and training in how to use their tools, the knowledge alone did not do her much good.

“I want all of you to sleep here,” she said, “and I'll see how your scans look tomorrow.” She glanced at Tomas. “And I'm postponing our Council meeting.”

The two men who had carried Vanah to the dormitory sat in a corner of the small room near Mahala's examination table, peering at a pocket screen. They had come to Sagan only recently; she could not recall their names. The bearded one looked up. “There's some excitement at the east dome External Operations Center,” he said.

“More injuries?” she asked.

“No, nothing like that, just a short message from Solveig Einarsdottir. She says they've seen something quite remarkable outside, that they're going to try to verify their observations before saying anything more, and that anyone who's interested is welcome to come to the Center and take a look at what they've found.”