Child of Venus (49 page)

She left Tomas by the building, averted her eyes from the memorial pillar, and hurried toward the airship bay. A few people, two of them in the blue garb of pilots, were coming out of the bay, tiny figures in the open entrance. She absently recalled that an airship was due from Hypatia with a couple of new settlers and some much-needed supplies, and then she noticed the pale blond hair of one of the newcomers.

Ragnar, she thought. She recognized him even from this distance; he was taller than the others and still walked in the same loose-limbed, almost arrogant way. A large duffel hung from his shoulder, probably filled with chisels and clay and tiny scalpels and knives and the other useless tools of his art. As she came closer, she saw that his hair was shorter; the long blond braid was gone.

He continued to walk toward her. She wanted to rage at him for coming here now, for not coming to stay with Frania before, and then she saw the ravaged look of his face and the pain in his gray eyes. She came to a halt. He strode past her, as if not seeing her at all, and then he slowed and turned toward her.

“Mahala,” he said in a voice so low that she barely heard him.

The despair in his face drove her anger from her. “Ragnar,” she whispered.

“Don't say anything—just walk with me for a while.”

He began to walk northwest, in the direction of the Administrative Center. She kept at his side. The memorial pillar lay straight ahead, clearly visible. She wanted to steer him away from it, but he had increased his stride, and she had to quicken her pace to keep up with him.

When he reached the pillar, he gazed up at the top, about a half-meter above his head, for a long moment. Then he slipped his duffel from his shoulder and sat down at the base of the bare metal column.

Tomas came toward them; she waved him away, then sat down next to Ragnar, silent, waiting for him to speak.

“I saw her,” he said, “only six weeks ago.”

“I know,” Mahala said. “She told me that you were thinking of coming here.”

“I promised her that I would. I told her that it would be for at least a few days, and then once I started thinking about it, I said that I would come here and stay a while and see what it was like, and if I decided afterward that I wanted to move here, I'd go back to Turing and trade my house to someone else and take care of anything there that needed to be settled.”

He fell silent again. At last she said, “You were going to stay here until you went back to the Bat, you mean.”

“I finished my last shift there. When I think of how I was sometimes, not caring
about any danger, I'm probably lucky to be alive. It isn't that I was careless or
didn't look out for the others—it's just that—”

He let out a sigh. “I called Frani,” he went on, “and promised her that I wouldn't volunteer for Bat duty again, that I'd decided to listen to her and see what kind of life I could make for myself here. In Sagan. With her.”

He averted his face; his throat moved as he swallowed. “She was happy when I told her.” His voice dropped. “She said ... she said ...”

He leaned back against the pillar and closed his eyes. Mahala watched him, wishing that she could think of something to say. Soon he opened his eyes again and pulled his duffel toward himself, opened it and rummaged among his belongings, then pulled out a carved piece of wood.

He had carved Frania's face, and she was smiling; the carved Frani looked as self-possessed and confident as she had always seemed among her fellow pilots. So Ragnar had finally seen her that way, too. Maybe that was how she had looked when he had told her that he wanted to begin his life with her again in Sagan.

“I wanted to do something for her memorial,” he said as he handed the carving to her. Mahala gazed into the captured face of her lost friend. “I'll make a mold of it and cast it for her place on the pillar. I don't want it in steel, though, I want to use some sort of bronze or another copper alloy that'll keep its color, a color that's more like her eyes.”

He took the carving from her and thrust it back into his duffel. “I don't know what I have to do to be allowed to live here,” he said.

“It isn't that different from anywhere else,” she replied, “except that we have more room than the older settlements. You state your intention, and our Council looks at your record and decides if we need somebody with your particular skills. Presumably you've made sure that your record notes any recommendations or special citations from your superiors or fellow workers. Anybody here who wants to put in a word in your favor or against you can do so, but that almost never happens. The only thing that's different in Sagan is that the Habbers have something to say about who comes here.”

He sighed. “That's what Frani—that's what I was told.”

“I'm one of the Councilors here,” she continued. He glanced at her and raised his brows. “We finally had an election. I didn't ask for anyone's vote, but then we had no real campaigning here. I can speak up for you, but that's about all I can do. Eugenio Tokugawa is on the Council, too, but I don't think he'd hold anything you did in Oberg when you were younger against you. Tomas Sechen is our other Councilor, and he'll go by your public record. I don't think you'll have any trouble with us.”

“But maybe I will with the Habbers.”

“I don't know. Everyone who's here now—I used to think that we were selected as settlers mostly by the Administrators and the other Councils, the way it's always been. Then, after we came, I had the sense that the Habbers had more to do with deciding all of that than I realized. Now I wonder if they might have had the final say about who was to come here. It would make sense, given that they want to live here much in the same way we do, while sharing some of their knowledge with us.”

“It would make sense if this is one of the groups where they expect to find their spacefarers. Frani mentioned that to me. She wasn't sure, but she thought some sort of selection process was already going on and that Sagan might be part of it.”

“I've been thinking that for a while,” Mahala admitted, “especially after finding out that there were a few delegations of Habbers on Earth.”

He glanced at her. “I heard.”

“Benzi's there,” she said. “I found out two months ago. A distant relation of mine in the town my great-grandmother came from sent me a message. Tesia is there with him—maybe you remember her from when you first came to Turing.”

Ragnar nodded. “The Habber that was there during that demonstration, when
Frani—”

Mahala sat with him, not saying anything, watching as a few people left the airship bay with two passenger carts loaded with crates.

“Frani told me,” Ragnar said, “that she wanted to become a
spacefarer. It sneaked up on her in a way, she said, wanting to go, wanting to be part of that She
was trying to learn more about astrophysics, thinking it might give her more of a chance, even
though she was having a hard time with the subject.”

“I know,” Mahala said, thinking of all the times Solveig would take Frania aside to tutor her and sit with her as she studied. “Solveig said she wasn't doing badly.”

“She was trying. She thought that might help, that at least they'd know
she was trying, and—” He covered his face. “She found something for herself. She
thought we could be content here, whatever happened later on. She found a dream. And now she's
gone.”

She slipped her arm around him, hanging on to him tightly. His body shook as rasping sounds came from his throat. They sat by the pillar, mourning their loss.

 

22

For nearly three centuries, the people of the Associated Habitats had been sending AI probes outside the solar system, but had not ventured into interstellar space themselves. Their cybernetic intermediaries had mapped sections of the Oort Cloud, that sphere of planetary debris that surrounded the sun and its planets; the artificial intelligences had long ago confirmed for the Habbers that the Oort Cloud was the source of the vast majority of comets that entered the solar system and also that many of the smaller bodies that were part of it had apparently originated inside the solar system while it was forming and had then been flung into space.

As for what lay beyond the Oort Cloud in interstellar space, a few of the probes had confirmed that the Alpha Centauri system, Tau Ceti, and a few other nearby star systems had planets and that most of these planets were either gas giants resembling Jupiter and Saturn or were smaller, seemingly lifeless bodies with atmospheres of carbon dioxide. The Habbers had found this intriguing, but had drawn no conclusions about planetary evolution, the possibility of life existing on those planets or on others, or whether a planet such as Earth might be a rare and perhaps unique result of planetary evolution. They had sampled far too small a sample of the universe to estimate the probability of life existing elsewhere.

They had chosen to remain inside the solar system in their Habitats. The bond that connected them to the rest of humankind still held. They had abandoned planets for their Habitats, lengthened their lives, and developed a technology that made interstellar voyages a possibility, yet they had recoiled from severing their ties with the rest of their species.

Now another intelligence was calling to them, to all of humankind.

At three points along the equator of Venus, the black ruins of the three monumental pyramids erected by the Habbers a century and a half ago still stood. Habber machines, guided from afar by Habbers and their cyberminds, had built the pyramids. Habber scientists had developed the aatigravitational engines housed inside those massive structures, engines powerful enough to produce the pulse of energy that had speeded up Venus's rotation one hundred years ago. Two of the pyramids were now covered by the acidic oceans of Venus, but the third sat on the land mass of Aphrodite Terra to the south, in the slopes of the Ovda region.

Whenever she looked at images of that giant structure, Mahala saw the pyramid as a monument to the Project and to humankind's past efforts to terraform her world. But the pyramid had also become a monument to the new era, and to the technology that would be needed to realize new goals.

The Habbers had grown freer in their exchanges of information with Venus and with Earth, but much about their motives remained hidden. The Habbers had been willing to aid Earth in terraforming Venus, but had preserved Mars from any efforts to make it into an Earthlike planet. Various reasons had been offered for keeping Mars as it was; the Habbers found the Red Planet aesthetically pleasing in its natural state and had staked their claim to it long ago, perhaps so that they could establish a planetary base of their own if one were ever needed.

Mahala had once thought that their desire to preserve Mars had been a logical outgrowth of their abandonment of planets for their Habitats; why terraform another planet when they had given up living on planets altogether? But the Habbers had also believed it unwise to attempt to terraform a planet for human settlers who would eventually be cut off from their home world. The descendants of any Martian settiers, born and bred on a world with only one third of Earth's gravity, would never be able to visit Earth easily in their frailer bodies. There also seemed little purpose in transforming a world that would inevitably lose any Earthlike atmosphere created for it, since Mars lacked the gravitational pull needed to hold such an atmosphere for millennia. A terraformed Mars would forever require much human intervention to maintain its environment; better, the Habbers had reasoned, to devote their efforts to building and maintaining their Habitats.

Yet the Habbers had contributed much to the Venus Project, and without them, Mahala knew, the obstacles to ter-raforming would have been far greater. The Habitat-dwellers had chosen to strengthen their ties to the planet-bound branch of humankind by aiding in the transformation of Venus. Perhaps some of them had also been moved by the arguments of Earth's planetologists that they would be restoring Venus, Earth's sister planet, to what it once had been. Venus, after its transformation into a living Earthlike world, promised to be stable as long as some part of the Parasol remained to shield it from too much sunlight; the vision that the Ishtar cult had distorted into a belief in a planetary Spirit to come would be realized in a self-regulating biosphere. The future Cytherians, living on a world with a gravitational force only slightly weaker than that of Earth, would be able to return to humanity's home world. Certainly the knowledge gained by assisting the Project would be of benefit to the Habitats and was also of interest in itself.

But the Habbers Mahala had come to know in Sagan had implied that some among their people had long hoped for a time when they would venture beyond the solar system. Her kinsman Benzi had joined his life to theirs out of a hope that the Habbers would turn to exploring interstellar space. Now Benzi and all who shared his dream would reach for the stars, using much of the technology that had served the Venus Project. A force field and an alloy even stronger than that used for the domes of the Venus surface settlements would shield the interstellar traveler during its journey; the energies used to speed up the rotation of Venus would be harnessed in the matter-antimatter-powered drive that would carry the nomadic Habitat out of the solar system, where a vacuum drive would cut in to draw on the energy that existed in all space.

Another civilization was calling to them, but the Habbers would not be abandoning the rest of their kind, severing their ties to the other people of the solar system. They would share the adventure with their human brothers and sisters.

Those leaving on the journey would not return to the worlds they knew. Even at a velocity dose to the speed of light, six hundred years would pass in the solar system by the time the spacefarers found the alien beacon, while only ninety would pass for the spacefarers. There would be a period of suspended animation for the voyagers, but they would awake from their deep sleep knowing that everyone they knew back home was very likely dead and perhaps forgotten. They would return with what they had learned about the alien culture to a human civilization that might be unrecognizable.