Child of Venus (48 page)

Such mysteriousness was unlike Solveig. Mahala was suddenly curious. She got up and went to the door, then hesitated.

“Another message,” the man said, “about that downed airship. The tracking team in Ptolemy's bay is trying to raise the pilots, but there's no response. They may have to send out a scooper ship to rescue them.” He looked up. “I can stay with these people if you want to go. I have some paramedical training.”

“That's kind of you,” she said. “I'll take you up on that.”

The bearded man's companion took the screen from him and held it to his face. Mahala picked up her physician's bag out of habit, slung the strap over her shoulder, hurried through the door, and turned north, in the direction of the External Operations Center.

As she walked, she called up reports on the situation in Oberg and Turing on her palm screen; every settlement on Venus would have felt the powerful quake, although Turing and the four other settlements in the Freyja Mountains were closest to the epicenter. At least thirty were dead in Turing; Oberg had lost ten people, but others had been severely injured. She opened a channel and whispered a short message to Risa, Sef, and Dyami, telling them all that she was unharmed and that Sagan had apparently suffered no deaths.

Except for a few shrubs and a scattering of slender young trees, much of the area under Sagan's domes was still flat grassland. The poisonous rains of Venus, collected in Sagan's outside receptacles and then channeled into the dome, fed the stream that meandered through the east dome. Mahala came to a footbridge, crossed the stream, and passed the three community greenhouses that stood along the western shore of a small, shallow lake, then stopped to peer at her screen.

There were two brief messages. The first, from Sef, said only that the people in his household were unharmed and that Risa and Paul were out aiding the emergency workers. Dyami's message informed her that he had been outside his house when the quake hit, that Amina was safe, and that both of them were now with Tasida to help in whatever way they could.

She closed the screen again and tucked it into her bag. The External Operations Center was about the size of a large house; the side panels were of a light metal much like tin. Two of the diggers used for excavation and landscaping inside the settlement sat near the entrance, with a passenger cart behind them.

Mahala pressed her palm against the entrance. As the door slid open, she saw people crowded around the screens, some with thin silvery bands around their heads and others without bands. Twenty people wearing bands sat in front of the consoles through which they controlled the equipment that handled all external operations; others stood behind them, peering over their shoulders.

She entered the large room and made her way toward Orban, one of the Habbers who sometimes assisted her with her medical duties. “What's going on?” she asked him.

“Look there.” Orban pointed at one of the screens. She could see nothing except a patch of dark rusty rock illuminated faintly by light from the dome. There were small black cracks in the rock; she narrowed her eyes.

At first, she was not sure of what she was seeing, and then the light suddenly grew brighter and the image changed, as if it had been magnified.

“I've moved a crawler closer to it,” a woman's voice said. “We've got more light on it now.”

On the rock was a patch of what looked like a mossy substance, one of the patches of genetically engineered moss that could grow outside the domes, and then she noticed something else. Two tiny stalks, barely the size of blades of grass, were attached to the dark moss, as if growing from it.

“What is it?” Mahala asked.

“A plant of some kind,” someone replied, “and we didn't put it there. It's something new, something that evolved here on the surface of Venus.”

Orban turned toward her. “We noticed it just after the quake,” he said. “Maybe it developed from the algae used to seed the atmosphere, or it might have developed from microscopic spores carried outside by our equipment, but it's life, and it's something we didn't plan for. We didn't plant it there ourselves, and none of our computer models, including the ones that allowed for possible contamination by our equipment, predicted that anything like it would grow from that moss.”

“We'll have to collect a sample, bring it inside, and analyze it.” That was Solveig's voice, to her left. Mahala made her way past the people around her to her friend.

Solveig was at a screen, a band around her head; she had learned how to run the diggers and crawlers during her first year in Sagan, while still putting in her shifts in the settlement's greenhouses. Mahala put a hand on her shoulder; Solveig looked up, then removed her band.

“How fascinating,” Mahala said.

“It's there,” Solveig said, “and it looks like a kind of grass, and if there's a patch of it here, then there might be more elsewhere.”

“There's a message coming in from the airship bay,” a man called out from the back of the room. “An airship on its way to Sagan from Ptolemy went down. The crew on duty in Ptolemy's bay sent out a probe to scan the area where the distress signal came from, and they've located the ship, or what's left of it. They were only a half hour out of Ptolemy when the quake hit. Doesn't look like they'll be sending a rescue ship for them.”

Solveig pressed a button on her console. Mahala leaned forward as the letters of the report scrolled up on the screen.

According to the report, it seemed that at least one valve had failed in the dirigible of helium-filled lofter cells just as the vessel was beginning to gain altitude. The airship had suddenly begun falling toward the surface, according to the first and only message from the pilots. The distress signal had been sent just before the airship's pilots had managed a landing.

The people aboard would have survived the fall, but the airship had been forced down near the bottom of a steep mountain cliff, where the ship had been crushed by a massive sheet of rock sheared off from the cliffside by the quake and then buried by a rockslide. A scan had shown an airship cabin crushed nearly flat; it was certain that all of the passengers and both pilots were dead. The report ended with a promise of more details after the probe's scan had been completed.

Mahala knew that a list of the names of those lost would now follow. The names of the pilots appeared first: Achmad Henning and Frania Astarte Milus. She blinked, not believing what she was reading.

“No,” someone behind her whispered, “not Frani.” Many of the people in this room knew Frania, who had decided to make Sagan her residence between periods of flight duty nearly a year and a half ago. Mahala stared at the letters of Frania's name as they disappeared, to be followed by the short list of passengers.

It was a mistake. Frani had been taken off the roster at the last minute and replaced with another pilot. The scanner in the probe had been malfunctioning and come up with the wrong data, and the pilots and passengers were still alive, awaiting rescue. There were not too many other possibilities for error.

Mahala suddenly wanted to escape from the people around her.

“It isn't true,” she muttered, backing into someone behind her, “it isn't true.” She wondered how Ragnar, who had never come to visit his estranged bondmate in Sagan, would feel when he found out.

Orban caught her by the arm. “Mahala—”

“It can't be true.” She abruptly pulled away and ran from the room.

Mahala sat by the entrance to the airship bay. The wide entrance to the bay was closed now, but it would open after the airship landed and she would look up to see Frania coming toward her.

Frania had found some contentment during her sojourns in Sagan. Occasionally she stayed with other pilots in the plain square building near the bay that was the pilots' dormitory, but usually she came to Mahala's dormitory and stayed there with Solveig. Lately, she had sounded as though she was on better terms with her emotionally distant bondmate. She had seen Ragnar during a recent run to the southern Bat, and he had seemed more amenable to coming to Sagan during his next period of time off, at least for a few days.

But Frania had also begun to look beyond the confines of her life. She, like Mahala and Solveig, felt drawn to the reaches of interstellar space. The signal sometimes seemed to be calling to them all as they listened to the atonal sighs the Habber receivers had recorded. “We'll go there,” Frania had said once, “and we'll find them, and they'll follow us back to Venus, the planet our people brought to life,” and with those simple heartfelt words, she had for a moment banished all the barriers of time and space that stood between them and that vision.

Mahala should be in front of a screen, calling Amina to offer what comfort she could on the loss of her niece. She would also have to send a message to Ragnar. A message would not be enough; she would have to call and speak to him directly. Her insides knotted as she remembered how much Frania had loved life and how ready Ragnar had been to throw his own life away.

The ground trembled under her. Another aftershock, but not nearly as severe as an earlier one an hour ago. Frania had other friends in Sagan. There were the four people staying in the pilots' quarters, who would be mourning their two dead colleagues, and the friends she had made among the settlers, and there was Eugenio Tokugawa, who might have asked Frania for a pledge if she were not already bound to Ragnar.

Last light was approaching. She looked up to see the shadowy form of Chike walking in her direction across the plain of grass.

He came up to her and sat down. “Solveig told me,” he said. “She came over to the lab and told me, and then she said that she was going to call her brother and her parents.”

Mahala was silent.

“All airship flights have been temporarily canceled for twenty-four hours. They think that what happened is that the valve wore out prematurely. A recommendation has already been issued to replace every airship valve sooner than the specs call for its replacement. That will mean more expense for the Project, so I hope they'll act on the recommendation instead of deciding it's too costly.”

“It isn't the valve that did it.” Her voice was hoarse, her throat sore, her eyes stinging from holding back her tears. “They could have survived that. They could have lasted until a rescue ship came. The quake killed them, that rockslide killed them. Venus killed them.”

“Mahala—”

“When we were children, Frani told me once that she hated this place, hated Venus. It was right after her parents died. Venus killed them and now it's killed her, too.”

Chike did not speak.

Mahala knew what was required of her now. She would have to speak with Amina and Ragnar, and then she would have to organize some sort of gathering in Frank's memory for those who wanted to mourn her. She was one of the Councilors here and one of Frania's closest friends; people would expect it of her. They had postponed putting up any memorial pillar in Sagan; the settlement was still young, there had been no deaths here, and a few people had felt that the Habbers among them, who seemed to shy away from any mention of death, might be uneasy around such a reminder of mortality: Now they would have to put up a pillar, and Frani's face would be the first to be memorialized.

Chike slipped his arm around her, and at last she allowed herself to weep.

“The team and I just finished it a couple of hours ago,” Tomas Sechen said. “How do you like it?”

Mahala folded her arms as she regarded the small building. The two side walls of the structure were made of glass, so that anyone passing by had a view of the room where Sagan's Councilors would hold their meetings and also of the room on the other side, where any hearings would be held. Sliding doors in the glass walls could be opened, so that anyone wishing to attend a meeting or hearing could sit outside if all of the space inside the meeting rooms was taken. Even though people could always participate in the Councilors' public meetings through their screens or look at a record of them, Mahala had wanted a feeling of openness, an Administrative Center that conveyed the impression of a Council ready to hear from anyone and open to all.

“You did well,” she said, then nodded at the three men and two women who were resting near the main entrance of the new building.

Tomas shrugged. “I might have come up with the design, but you had the original idea.”

She turned away from the building. Not far from the new Administrative Center, a steel memorial pillar had been erected. She gazed at the bare pillar, her throat tightening as she thought of Frania. Eugenio Tokugawa had gone through the records and found a holo image of Frania that might be suitable for the pillar; it showed her with her head raised and a distant look in her beautiful hazel eyes, as if she were trying to look up and see what lay beyond the dome above her.

The grief-stricken Eugenio had shown more feeling for Frania than had Ragnar, who had been working his shift and unavailable when Mahala first called him and had responded to none of her messages afterward. Amina had wept, dearly devastated; Dyami had promised to sculpt an image of Frania for Turing's memorial pillar, since she had spent so much of her short life there. Einar and Thorunn had spoken of Frania as if she had been their own daughter.

But there had been nothing but silence from Ragnar, who had not even bothered to answer Solveig's messages. Mahala had sent him another message only a few hours ago, to discover that he had left the southern Bat forty-eight hours earlier, presumably to return to Turing.

“We'll finally have our long-postponed first meeting,” Mahala murmured. “It's about time we scheduled one. Tomorrow, after last light—that'll give us time to announce it.” She glanced at the timepiece on her finger. “And right now I have to get to the bay-—Lucia's the paramedic on duty and I promised her I would relieve her almost an hour ago.”