Child of Venus (59 page)

The women of the household were already asleep, but Benzi was still in the courtyard, sitting near the rosebushes. He had been coming out here more often, to sit with the women and hear the stories that had been passed on to them by grandmothers and great-grandmothers. Over a century after leaving Lincoln as a child, he was woven into the fabric of the town once more. Perhaps he, like Harriett, was having second thoughts.

She sat down on one corner of his blanket. In the false spring of the courtyard, the rosebushes were budding again. “I spoke to Harriett this afternoon,” she said. “She says that she may not want to become part of the interstellar expedition after all.”

His head turned toward her. “I know.”

“So she confided in you before she told me.”

“No. I guessed it. I expected it. She's thinking of what she'd be leaving behind.”

“I'm thinking of that, too,” Mahala said. “It'll be a long series of farewells, and when I leave, I'll never see any of those people again. A time will come aboard the interstellar Habitat when I'll know that all of them are dead, and then another moment will come when I'll know that everybody who knew them or had any memory of them is dead, too, but I will have lost them long before that.”

“I know,” Benzi said.

“And that isn't all of it. Those of us who leave may never know what happens here, whether the rest of our species comes through this transition or destroys itself. We may never know if we're only a small branch of a thriving race or if we are all that's left of it, even if we do manage to come back eventually. There may be nothing left to tell us what happened by then.”

“That's possible,” he said. “It may be that the entire human species will abandon planets for Habitats and leave this system in the end.”

“Now I'm beginning to see why you think that there won't be that many people wanting to be spacefarers.”

“Are you having your own doubts?” he asked.

“I wouldn't call them doubts. They're more like questions.

I'll be leaving Venus. I won't be one of those who stayed to bring it to life.”

Benzi said, “You might be trading that for a chance to see what Venus becomes.”

She breathed in the fragrance of the roses, another memory she would take with her from Earth. “It's the uncertainty of everything now—that's what's getting to people.”

“Things always were uncertain,” Benzi said. “Most of us simply hid that fact from ourselves for a while. Too many Habbers are still in danger of retreating from uncertainty. Now we'll all have to embrace that uncertainty, whatever we choose to do.”

 

25

The bright spot on Mahala's screen, a beacon orbiting the sun midway between the orbits of Venus and Earth, had begun as an asteroid enclosed in a metal shell. Engineering crews and robotic limbs guided by cyberminds had installed its matter-antimatter drive and its vacuum drive; the worldlet that would become a nomadic interstellar Habitat was acquiring the first members of its community.

Each prospective spacefarer would live inside the Habitat for some years before it began its journey, with the goal of Linking everyone aboard to the Habitat's cyberminds before departure. Benzi claimed that this would not make Habbers of the Earth-folk and Cytherians aboard, that the minds integrated with the vessel and its functions were young artificial intelligences that would learn and develop along with the human beings to whom they were Linked. Mahala was not certain that he was right about that. In time, the difference between being a human being with a Link and being a Habber with a symbiotic artificial intelligence might be a lost distinction.

The first thousand people from Earth had already been ferried to the Habitat by torchship, and more thousands would follow them soon. The social engineers involved with the space expedition, both the Habbers and the Counselors from Earth and Venus, wanted to see a true community of starfarers established well before the Hab left the solar system, but there was another reason for bringing people aboard continuously over a period of several years. The artificial intelligences of the more unified net of the new era had predicted that a sizable minority of those volunteering to be spacefarers would eventually decide against being a part of the voyage, even after years of living inside the Habitat, even after the decade or more that it was likely to take for the voyagers to adapt to their new environment.

Farewells, Mahala thought; much of her life now involved preparing herself for leaving behind forever all of the places and many of the people she had known. She had left Lincoln and her cousin Harriett knowing that she would never see them again. Her farewells to those she loved on her own world would be far more painful. Even during her first months back in Sagan, a few of her friends had admitted that they had grown reluctant to sever themselves so completely from their home. With each of her farewells, she felt an increasing sympathy for those who had decided to turn away from the dream of interstellar travel.

Her grandmother Risa and her grandfather Sef welcomed her to their house in Oberg as they always had, with a large supper shared with the rest of the household. In the middle of the meal, Kyril Anders, the nineteen-year-old son of Risa's housemates Barika Maitana and Kristof Anders, announced that he was going to volunteer for the interstellar expedition as soon as he turned twenty. No one seemed surprised at the announcement, although Kyril's parents shook their heads at him regretfully.

Akilah Ching spoke of her interstellar intentions. “I want to be part of it, too,” the beautiful young woman said in her musical voice.

“You're only seventeen,” her father, Jamil Owens, replied. “You've been chosen for an Island school—are you going to throw that away?”

“Of course not. I'll get my education and then apply later, when I'm old enough.”

Sef frowned. “So many young people want to leave,” he said. “Makes you wonder what we built our settlements for. There won't be anybody left to keep things going.”

“Sef,” Akilah said gently, “you're exaggerating.”

“More settlers will come here from Earth,” Mahala said, “to replace any people you lose.”

“I suppose.” Sef looked away. “Somehow, that isn't much of a comfort.”

“Sef.” Risa put a hand on her bondmate's wrist. “You chose to come here, after all. Better that others have the choice of whether to stay or go.”

They finished the meal listening to Grazie's recital of the latest Oberg gossip. After dinner, as Mahala expected, Risa asked her to accompany her on a walk. As they left the house, Risa hooked her arm through hers.

“I have the day off tomorrow,” Risa said. “You can help me with some weeding in my greenhouse.”

“Of course.”

“You're staying with us for less than a month. Seems to me that you could have taken more time, seeing as it's likely to be your last visit.”

Mahala felt a sharp pang of remorse at those words. “Well be able to exchange messages,” she said. “We won't be leaving the solar system for at least a few years, maybe longer. They want to make sure that people who might change their minds will have plenty of time to reconsider.”

“Don't try to comfort me with that, Mahala. You've made your choice. You'll have to start separating from us. When you leave for that Habitat, you'll be gone for good.” Risa slowed as they came near the tunnel that led into Oberg's main dome. “I won't make this harder for you—if I were younger, I might have done the same thing you're doing. And maybe you'll come back eventually to see what we made here. Anyway, I'm an old woman now, so you'd be saying your final farewells to me soon enough even if you stayed here.”

That was an exaggeration; her grandmother had not yet turned ninety. “Risa,” Mahala said, “you'll be around for another three decades at least—maybe longer, given what our biologists may be able to do now.” She had been keeping up with some of Earth's medical research, the pace of which had noticeably increased, now that more information was flowing from the Habber cyberminds to those of Earth. Human life spans on Earth and on Venus might increase dramatically and soon. The promise was not only one of an indefinite life span, but also of social disruption on a massive scale. Death might come to be seen not as an inevitable and necessary event, but as an enemy.

“We'll go to the memorial pillars now,” Risa said, as if picking up some of her thoughts, “and pay our respects. You might as well do that now, and not when you're about to leave Oberg. I want you to leave us with memories of our life here, and not only with memories of the dead.”

Mahala's farewell to Dyami was a return to the life that she had once lived in Turing, a life that she could still have if she turned back. She slept in the bedroom she had once shared with Frania; at first light, she went with Tasida to the infirmary to help the other physician and Haroun Delassi with their medical duties. In spare moments, the three of them shared a meal and talked of recent medical developments.

“Implants,” Tasida muttered a few days after Mahala had returned. “They seem so clumsy and inefficient compared to the nanomeds we'll be trying out soon.” Tasida and Haroun were already learning as much as they could about those therapeutic molecule-sized devices from a few of the Habbers in Turing. Clearing out protein cross-linkages, preventing aneurysms from developing, healing and strengthening bones a moment after a fracture—there seemed no limit to what the tiny mechanisms could do. That the Habber nanotechnology might also make much of their work as physicians unnecessary was apparently a matter of indifference to Tasida and her assistant.

In the evenings, Mahala visited a few old friends, discovering that she would not have to say farewells to some of them after all. Josef Feldshuh was still determined to become a spacefarer, as he had told her after the end of the Lincoln Conference before leaving Earth. According to him, several of their old primary schoolmates had the same intention. It had been much the same in Oberg; she had come to see why Sef worried that Venus might lose much of its younger generation. Perhaps it was natural that the descendants of people who had left humankind's home world would want to go on this journey. But she also knew that some of the hopeful spacefarers would decide to remain on Venus in the end.

After last light, in the days before the celebration that would mark the beginning of the year 659, Mahala took a walk with Balin along the shore of the lake near Dyami's house. The Habber was living with Dyami while teaching at the primary school and instructing any of the children who were interested in mathematics. He and Dyami seemed bound together, content with their lives and at peace with each other. She had thought that Balin would want to join the interstellar community, but suspected that he might now be having qualms about that.

“I was talking to Dyami earlier,” she said, hoping to elicit some of his thoughts. “I asked him if he was thinking of being a spacefarer himself. He's only a bit over fifty, and his old friend Suleiman Khan told me that he wants to be a part of the expedition. But Dyami said that he thought there'd be enough challenges for him here, that he'd given too much of himself to this place to leave it.” She had not known if her uncle had been referring to Venus or simply to Turing, the place of his youthful imprisonment and the settlement where he had rebuilt his life.

“I assume you haven't been reconsidering your decision,” Balin said.

“Oh, no.”

“Even if perhaps you might be a bit young to make such a decision?”

Mahala laughed softly. “I'm twenty-six. I'm not a child.”

“I thought perhaps we should set the age limit higher than that, perhaps at
thirty or forty, when a person has had more experience with life. But there's also something
to be said for having younger and fresher minds aboard, and there will be some years of maturation
before the Habitat begins its journey. And there are those of us who are perhaps too old to go,
too—” He paused. “I was going to say too weary, but that isn't the right
word.”

She said, “You aren't going, then.”

“No, I'm not. I've decided to stay here.”

“Until you go back to your own Hab.” She hoped for Dyami's sake that Balin would not leave for many years.

“I'm free to live on this world now, for as long as I like. I may never go back to a Hab.”

They came to a stop and gazed out at the flat black surface of the lake and the disk
of faint reflected light that floated upon it “There have been so many reasons for many of us
to come to live among your people,” he continued. “Some of us are altruists. Some of us
welcomed the opportunity to practice some planetary engineering. A few of us were curious about a
life that was different from our own. And some of us felt it was a way to hold on to the humanity we
might otherwise be in danger of losing. But some of us had fallen into a trap. Our times on Venus,
difficult as they sometimes were when compared to life inside a Habitat, were a way of escaping that
trap.” Balin was silent for a while. “I was caught in that trap.”

Mahala waited for him to go on.

“You know how seductive a mind-tour can be, or any virtual experience, but the time comes when you have to remove your band and get on with your life. A Linker here or on Earth can connect himself directly to any number of experiences and scenarios, but sooner or later, he is called back to himself, either by his duties or else by the controls Earth's people have imposed on their cyberminds. But a Habber is free to lose himself in a mental labyrinth of realized imaginings and desires and never find his way out again. I was in danger of becoming one such lost wanderer, before I found my way to Venus. And every time I went back to my Hab, I felt the temptation again. It was our great weakness—and something we kept hidden from Earth. There are Habbers who have died in their virtual worlds. There are Habbers who have been there for centuries and who will never find their way out again.”