Child of Venus (61 page)

“I won't,” Solveig said, “and neither will you.”

“No, I won't change my mind.” Mahala's eyes stung. “But this is the closest I've come to thinking that I should have decided to stay here.”

Chike had moved into a house with wide windows built around a central courtyard. His housemates were a young couple with two children who had recently moved to Sagan, a physicist who had moved there from Island Seven, and two Habbers, a man and a woman. He had introduced them all to Mahala before retreating with her to the courtyard. She had already forgotten their names, not wanting to become acquainted with any more people to whom she would only have to say good-bye.

She had saved Chike the trouble of informing her that he had decided to remain by telling him that she had guessed what he wanted to do and had accepted it. She had relieved him of the burden of explaining himself to her.

“When did you know?” Chike asked.

“I think I sensed it when I was still in Lincoln, when I saw your messages.”

“Then you knew what I was going to do before I knew it myself,” he said. “I hadn't decided anything then, not consciously. I was still wrestling with myself.”

“I suppose that I must still love you, then. That must be how I knew.” She forced herself to smile; she would not have him remember her as somebody who had reproached him.

They sat together on the ground, near a small tiled pool. Chike had told her that Ragnar had designed the labyrinthine pattern of ceramic tiles at the bottom of the pool for Chike's two Habber housemates.

He leaned toward her and touched her face lightly. “You can still leave something of yourself on Venus,” Chike said. She knew what he meant. Those leaving Venus and Earth would be allowed to store their genetic material on their home worlds; descendants of the spacefarers could still remain among those they had abandoned. Mahala had not yet heard of any potential spacefarer taking advantage of that option.

“No,” she said, “I can't.”

“You think it's a test of some kind, that those willing to leave sperm or ova behind might be showing too much ambivalence about their choice.”

“I suppose they would be revealing some uncertainty, but that's not my reason for refusing. I just don't think it's fair. The people who choose to make their lives here or on Earth deserve to have their own descendants inherit what they accomplish. And I'm not so sure that it would be fair to the children, either. I know what it's like to grow up with parents I could never know and who would never know me.”

“Parents, children, all of those family and social structures—”
Chike shrugged. “They may not mean as much to us later on. We may become more like
Habbers.”

“Perhaps.” She reached for his hand and held it, caring for him still, even as she felt herself growing apart from him.

She had prepared for her departure, given away personal possessions that she no longer wanted, and said her farewells. To wait any longer would be both an indulgence and a cruelty. She would only be procrastinating, dragging out the leavetaking and tormenting those who had reluctantly come to accept her choice.

Mahala left her dormitory with only a lightly packed duffel and her physician's bag. She was not likely to need the tools of her profession in the Habitat, but had picked up her bag automatically. Someone traveling with her might suddenly need her care, and later, she would have a tangible reminder of what she had once been.

She took the path that would lead her past the Administrative Center and the memorial pillar. As she walked, she tried to concentrate on her surroundings, knowing that she was seeing them for the last time, but Sagan had changed during the past year and had always felt like a temporary home to her anyway. It had been harder for her to say farewell to Turing and to Oberg.

Mahala had asked her friends not to come with her to the bay, but as she passed the glassy square of the Administrative Center, she glimpsed Solveig and Chike at the memorial pillar. She came toward them, knowing that they had come there to wait for her.

Solveig embraced her wordlessly. Chike held her for a while as she rested her head against his chest, then said, “I love you, Mahala.”

“Is this your last try at convincing me to stay?”

“No,” he replied. “I'm just telling you that I love you.”

She stepped back and gazed into his face. His sharp cheekbones, the warm dark brown of his skin, his short black hair, his penetrating black eyes—he was so familiar to her that she felt that she would carry his image in her memory for the rest of her life, that she could never forget him, and yet she also knew that his memory would fade in time.

She stared at the pillar for a while, at the image of Frania that Ragnar had made, then turned away. “My brother told me that he would come to see you,” Chike said, “when you're on Island Two.”

“I won't be there very long,” Mahala said; she did not have that many farewells to say there.

“Kesse wants to spend time with you anyway. I asked him to do that. If there's anything that you forgot to say to me, you can tell it to him.”

“Farewell, Mahala,” Solveig said, hugging her. “I love you, too, I always have.”

“I know. Farewell.”

Mahala left the pillar, forcing herself not to look back. She was near the pilots' dormitory before she saw Ragnar's bright blond head in the distance. He was waiting by the gaping entrance of the bay with Tomas Sechen; apparently Ragnar had decided to prolong his farewells to her. At least she would not have to go through a painful leavetaking with Tomas, who would be joining the interstellar expedition after his last trip to Oberg.

The numbness she had felt when waking up earlier was still with her. Mahala felt as though her emotions had been muted and her senses muffled. She might weep once she was aboard the airship or when she reached Island Two, but for now she could approach Tomas and Ragnar calmly.

“Greetings,” Tomas said to her, “and there isn't much more for me to say except have a safe journey.”

“And that you'll be seeing me later,” Mahala added, trying to smile.

“That, too.” He strode away, almost too hastily, clearly anxious to leave her alone with Ragnar.

“Solveig and Chike were at the memorial pillar,” she said.

“I know.”

“Farewell, Ragnar.”

He clutched her by the arms. “I didn't come here to say good-bye to you. I've put in for the expedition myself.”

She stared at him, still numb, not knowing what to say.

“I've been thinking about it for months. Tomas knows, and Orban, and a few others, but I didn't want to speak of it to anyone else until I was sure. I want to go, and they'll accept me. I didn't know that until today, but I wanted to tell you before you left.”

“Ragnar,” she whispered.

“Now I'll have to go around saying my farewells to everybody, and I don't know how long that'll take me, but you should be seeing me again within a year.”

“Ragnar.” She would not be abandoning this piece of her heart after all. She let him take her duffel from her and walk with her into the bay.

 

The Heavens

 

26

Mahala Liangharad, in common with all of the prospective spacefarers who were brought aboard the Seeker—for that was how we were soon thinking of our nomadic Habitat, as the Seeker—believed that she had measured up to some unknown and yet specific standards to become a part of the interstellar voyage. She and her companions had, to put it another way, passed a test.

In a sense, this was true. There were some who sought to become spacefarers who were dearly unsuited for the voyage, however qualified they might appear to be on the basis of their records. Their unsuitability had little to do with their physical or intellectual qualifications and much to do with the way in which their impulses and synapses and neurons and the components of their conscious minds interacted and reacted with others of their kind and with the environment around them.

Or, as Mahala and her fellow human voyagers might put it, becoming a spacefarer was, in the end, largely determined by an individual's character. A human being without skills or learning could be trained, as long as she was willing to make the effort. A person with certain other qualities—determination, endurance, amiability, and a kind of social intelligence—would also have much to offer a spacefaring community.

Human brilliance was always of extreme interest to me, to all of us woven into the net of minds. The facets of such a mind were a jewel to be treasured, and contact with such minds and their workings made me appreciate anew the complex universe that exists inside each human mind. But what was needed aboard the Seeker was a brilliance that lay in the perspective of an individual; what I came to admire most was a mentality that could find something new in what was known, that could create a beauty or an intellectual construct that had not existed before, that could look out at the universe and glimpse a truth that had escaped the notice of others. Mental trickery, mastery of facts, a chaotic and unconscious eccentricity—such things had been taken for brilliance by human beings in the past, but that was never what I thought of as true genius. Such mentalities were not needed on the Seeker anyway, not with a net of cyberminds to gather and synthesize data and with Links providing access to that ocean of data. What was much more essential was an ability to sort through this information, to focus on what was important or of interest while ignoring that which was only distraction and to be able to synthesize.

Mahala and her fellow spacefarers believed that some sort of selection process, however invisible to them, accounted for their presence aboard the Seeker. There was indeed a process of selection, although the Habitat-dwellers and their artificial intelligences and the Counselors and Administrators and cyberminds had less to do with that process than Mahala realized. The process was largely one of self-selection: Most of the people of Earth and Venus and those living inside the Habitats preferred to stay where they were. Of the tens of millions who had a desire to become spacefarers, many soon came to realize that they were too psychologically bound to familiar people and places to take such an irreversible step away from them. That still left many millions who were willing to become part of the Seeker's community, but of these, a few million more turned back of their own accord, some only moments before they were to board the torchships that were to carry them to their new home.

Then there were those who came to the Seeker, lived here, prepared themselves for the voyage, and then returned to their former homes, called back by emotional ties, unresolved regrets, feelings of displacement, or a growing fear of what might lie ahead. And then there were those who discovered in themselves a heretofore unsuspected craving for the chimerical but excessively pleasurable experiences and scenarios that the Seeker's net of cyberminds could create for them. They might have remained among us, cared for as they explored their dreams, but that would have upset the balance of our spacefaring community; if too many others followed them in their retreat, our human community might have been damaged beyond repair. They were allowed to leave, to travel to another Habitat and to lose themselves among their illusions.

After the unsuitable and the regretful and the dreamers had left us, Mahala was struck by two facts. One was that few of the Habbers who joined us felt any obsessive desire for such illusory experiences; instead, it was the people from Earth who proved most susceptible. I could have explained to her that those Habbers who had come to the Seeker had either conquered such appetites earlier or had never been in thrall to them to begin with, but she was still getting used to her Link and often kept her channel closed.

The second fact that caught her attention was that a far smaller percentage of Cytherians, as compared to percentages of Habitat-dwellers or of Earthfolk, contributed to our rate of attrition. That, however, had been an expected outcome. The Cytherians among us were the products of a pioneer culture, people who had sought to shed the past and create a new society, the descendants of people who had broken old ties. They were in many ways well suited to be spacefarers.

What remained to be determined was whether or not they could readily adapt to us.

Most of the Habitats had begun as hollowed-out asteroids, and the same was true of the Seeker. The outer shells of our worldlet were the asteroid's thick metallic layers of rock, covered by another shell of an alloy that would help to shield the Seeker's inhabitants from cosmic rays. But the starfarers would not rely on that passive shielding alone; a force field produced by magnetic deflectors would be yet another protective skin.

The core of the Seeker was made into one of the gardened environments so beloved of the Habitat-dwellers, a very gently curved landscape of rivers and forests and open grassy land. I learned from Mahala later that her first sight of this vast enclosed space, where one stood with head pointed toward the center, had been extremely disorienting and might even have produced a feeling of terror in her had she not already had the experience of visiting Earth. She had gone there for the first time with Benzi, a Habitat-dweller with whom she shared a genetic connection.

What she saw was a landscape without a horizon, a vista of green marked with the blue veins and patches of rivers and lakes that seemed to stretch as endlessly as the Plains around Lincoln. The flatness of the land was an illusion; when she looked up, she could see the white tendrils of clouds and, above them, the blue threads of rivers winding past another panorama of green.

Mahala reached for Benzi's arm and steadied herself. “How did you feel,” she asked, “when you first saw this kind of space?”

“Disoriented,” he replied. “I wasn't able to judge distances at first. I couldn't tell if I was looking at a shrub that was only a few meters away or a large tree that was much farther away.” He guided her across a grassy expanse toward a grove of trees. “You'll be able to live in here later on if you prefer, just as you would on any other Hab.”