Child of Venus (56 page)

A search through the records revealed that Jeffrey Arnold had kinsfolk in the Atlantic Federation near New York. They were given permission to scatter his remains at sea from a sailing vessel, which made for yet another visual spectacle of mourning for a martyr.

I didn't go to Damascus. Given that Mukhtar Tabib was determined to give Malik a traditional funeral, I would have had to remain out of sight with the other female mourners anyway. Jamilah al-Hussaini also hinted that the Mukhtar thought all of the delegates would be much safer staying in Lincoln. That is something else we have to worry about now, our personal safety. The Guardians are still here, and I know that others have been stationed at other points outside Lincoln. I haven't tried to find out what other measures are being taken to protect us, and perhaps it's better if we don't know the specifics.

I also don't particularly want to know what his interrogators may have learned from Commander Lawrence, or what methods they used to get the information.

Benzi has been staying here, with Teresa Marias and her household. For days after the incident, he hardly spoke at all. Most of the time, he would sit in the courtyard, staring at the roses. He had promised me that he would tell Risa about Malik's end, and he sent her a message right away, and I sat with him and sent her a message of my own to console her, and then after that, Benzi retreated into himself. Harriett heard rumors from other households that the other Habbers here were in the same sort of state, just completely closed off from everything. If they were communing with one another through their Links, they showed no sign of that.

After a week, I couldn't bear to see him like that anymore, sitting out there, going back to his room for a few hours, and then going into the courtyard again. Finally I went out to him, and sat with him for a while, and then I said, “I know you're mourning and that losing someone through death must be even harder for Habbers than it is for us, but I'm worried about you, everyone here is concerned. Teresa doesn't know what to do, and neither does anyone else.”

He looked at me then. “I was thinking,” he said, “of what my life might be like now if I had stayed here.”

“You might not even be alive,” I told him, “and if you were, you'd be an old man, even older than Nona. And you wouldn't have been living in this house—you would have become another wandering Plainsman.”

“I might have become a shopkeeper in Lincoln. There are a few men among them. Then I could have stayed.”

“Are you sorry that you didn't?” I asked.

“No. It wasn't my choice to leave here, but I am not sorry for the way my life has gone. Still, there might have been satisfactions in living it another way.”

At least he was talking now. “I miss him,” I said. “I miss my grandfather.” I was regretting the times when I might have sought Malik out and had instead avoided him. What I missed was the chance we might have had to build our own personal bridge during this conference.

“We haven't lost him entirely,” Benzi said. “A record of some of his memories will remain with our cyberminds. Eventually he might have left more of a pattern of his thoughts and feelings with our minds, but there is at least something of him left.”

I said, “You sound as though you're talking of a soul.”

“Not really. The man we knew as Malik no longer exists.”

“Would he still exist if there had been time for your cyberminds to hold his pattern?” I was thinking of what Balin and Orban and other Habbers had implied, that their minds might persist, captured by the artificial intelligences of their Habitats, even after their bodies had failed.

“It's not quite that straightforward, Mahala. There might have been a mental pattern that I could respond to through my Link as though I were encountering Malik, but whether or not that pattern would be Malik in any true sense is a metaphysical question. I've never had much taste for metaphysical speculation.”

“Maybe I've misunderstood some of what I've heard from the Habbers I know,” I said. “Sometimes Balin almost made it sound as though Habbers, instead of dying, could choose to become part of your cybernetic net.”

“Choose to become?” His expression changed; there was something alien, something
other
in his face. “We already are part of that net.”

“Through your Links, of course,” I said, “but that wasn't what I meant.”

“That wasn't what I meant, either. Someone like me, someone like Tesia or
Te-yu or Jeffrey—” He looked away for a moment, as though he had just recalled that his
comrade Jeffrey was dead, too. “We're not so different from Linkers. Tesia and Balin,
being Habbers who have lived among Cytherians for many years and formed strong bonds with them,
haven't diverged that much from other human beings. Te-yu and I weren't brought up by
Habbers—we came to the Habitats later in life. There are still many times when I choose to
block my Link, to leave it silent, as many of Earth's Linkers do. But to describe other
Habbers as being only humans who are Linked and who happen to live in Habitats would be inaccurate
at best.”

I told him that as a child, I had assumed that the Habbers whose Habitats were farther out in the solar system might be much more alien than those we had encountered. Solveig and Ah Lin and other friends of mine had speculated that they might even have given up their human bodies and taken on completely different forms.

Benzi's face softened at these comments; he looked almost as if he were smiling. “Oh, no,” he said, “their bodies are as human as ours in appearance. In a way, that makes many of them seem even more alien. I used to think that such Habbers weren't much more than the eyes and ears of our artificial intelligences, but that isn't quite accurate, either.”

He seemed to want to say more at that point, while trying to decide how to proceed. I kept silent and waited.

“When someone has chosen to give up many, perhaps most of his memories,” Benzi said at last, “while allowing the cyberminds to save those memories, and then goes on to live another life, I am not at all sure you can call him the same person. If he can no longer draw any distinction between himself, his own mentality, and the Link within him, perhaps it isn't accurate to call him human, either. And when I consider cyberminds with the accumulated memories and thoughts and dreams and maybe even feelings of millions of Habitat-dwellers, I wonder if parts of our net of artificial intelligences aren't more human than some of us are.”

“Human enough to have hoped for a new era?” I meant that as a joke.

Benzi stared directly at me. “That is exactly what they want,” he said, “what they—maybe saying that they want this or desire that particular outcome isn't a precise enough way to speak of it, but it is true that our artificial intelligences are trying to reach out to their cybernetic brethren on Earth. It is also true that Earth's cyberminds, while treated more as servants and appendages by the Linkers of Earth, seem to be welcoming a chance for closer ties with the Habitats. To put it as simply as possible, our cyberminds are ready to share their information, their date—whatever you wish to call what they are and what is in them—with the minds of Earth. The artificial intelligences of Earth apparently have the same aim. That isn't their only goal, of course—there is also a universe for them to explore, and an alien mentality for them to contact.”

“You make it sound as though we're almost incidental to their plans,” I said.

Benzi looked grim for a moment, and then he laughed softly. The sound of that subdued laughter unnerved me almost as much as Commander Lawrence had with his rantings.

“Not yet,” Benzi told me, “not yet. I think human beings may be
forgiven the actions of a rogue Guardian Commander. They may even be forgiven several more such
spasms. But I don't think that we should test the patience—if I may call it
patience—of our cyberminds too far. We would not want to give them reasons to decide that they
might be better off without their fleshy companions.”

I could think of nothing to say to that.

“In other words,” Benzi went on, “let us hope that this conference succeeds.”

June 22, 657:

Our meetings are being held in the town hall, in the largest of the rooms off the hallway. Since the room isn't used that often—the mayor uses it mostly for welcoming visiting officials, for groups of townspeople who have requested a meeting with her, or for lectures and presentations by the Lincoln Academy faculty that townsfolk might like to attend in person—our sessions shouldn't disrupt the business of the town. There are other places where we might have met, but the Lincoln town hall seems the most appropriate. So far, it seems to be working.

June 30, 657:

For many decades, Earth has allowed people to gather in camps near three cities in different regions to await a chance for passage to Venus. Anyone who has been turned away by the representatives of the Project Council, who has been refused a place as a specialist or a worker, may still go to one of the camps and hope to be chosen eventually. My own grandfather Malik made his way to such a camp after his disgrace and won his passage to Venus there, as did my grandfather Sef.

But the price such hopeful settlers must pay is high. They give up everything to go to those camps. They live in primitive surroundings under the supervision of Guardians, with no guarantee that they will ever get passage. Yet even under those conditions, thousands of people have been willing to take the risk and to seek a new life on Venus.

At least thousands have been until recently. The Council of Mukhtars considered closing the camps completely just after the new era of peace and friendship was announced, but decided against it in the end. Mukhtar Tabib was quite honest about admitting that it didn't seem advisable to close off that particular social safety valve until there were signs that the new era might last. As time went on, fewer people traveled to the camps anyway; living through the new era on

Earth probably looked as promising or as challenging as building a new life in a Venus settlement. It seemed only a matter of time before would-be emigrants stopped coming to those camps.

Then this conference was announced, and suddenly people were streaming to the three camps again, thousands more than had been going there decades ago. More people than ever are ready to give up their lives on Earth for a chance to leave the home planet for good.

The difference is that many of them don't want to go to Venus. Many of them want to become spacefarers instead.

This subject has taken up most of our sessions. There are so many other matters to
discuss, and we still haven't come to any consensus on what to do about those camps. Mukhtar
Tabib and Administrator Masud want them closed. Constantine Matheos and Jamilah al-Hussaini have
recommended stationing some Counselors at each camp, presumably to find ways to keep the situation
from spiraling out of control, and also want a commission to study the problem and “make
recommendations.” In other words, they obviously don't know what to think.

Well, I don't know what to think, either.

The Habbers, though, know exactly what they think. Benzi was speaking for the Habber delegates who are here, but he strongly implied that others would agree with him. (Other Habbers? The Habber cyberminds? None of us among the delegates are now sure of where to draw the line between them.) In any case, the Habbers say they would welcome anyone from those camps who is willing to leave the solar system aboard their interstellar vessel.

They are still insisting on that. The delegates finally had to agree to set the whole issue aside for now.

July 1, 657:

No meeting today. Another group of Habbers arrived to “observe some
sessions,” even though we all know that they could do that through their Links with the
Habbers who are already here. A few Linkers who are aides to the Council of Mukhtars are coming
tomorrow, for the same stated reason, which makes as little sense in their case. Perhaps this is
just more diplomacy, coming here personally. The only other explanation I can think of is that there
are some things these Linkers want to discuss privately among themselves, with their Links closed.

The people of Lincoln, the shopkeepers in particular, will welcome these new delegations. At the same time, some people here are complaining that the meetings should be held in public. Teresa seems quite insulted that even she, as the mayor, hasn't been invited to participate, and others are wondering why the sessions aren't being made available on public channels. I told Teresa that nothing had been resolved yet, and that she hadn't missed much, but I'm not sure she believed me.

Benzi left Teresa's house at dawn to meet the arriving Habbers and didn't
return until evening. At last I was able to speak to him alone in the courtyard after dark.
“Don't you realize,” I told him, “that if everybody from the camps who wants
to be on your space vessel is allowed to go, there won't be room for a lot of the people who
will be essential?”

“Mahala, I'm disappointed in you,” he replied. “We're speaking of a Habitat, a space-going worldlet. We're talking about a community of hundreds of thousands in an environment that will have space for even more than that.”

“You'll need specialists. Most of the people in those camps are workers. Some of them are probably people who lived on basic credit and whatever they could con somebody out of or steal.”

“We can train them and educate them.”

“I don't care what you say—you can't possibly take everybody who will want to go.”

Benzi smiled. “You're wrong, Mahala. As I said, we'll have more than enough room. You think people will be begging to go, that millions of Earthfolk and Cytherians and Habbers will choose to go on this voyage.”

“Millions do want to be part of it. You know that.”