Child of Venus (62 page)

Mahala knew of the dwellings and living spaces that were planned for the Seeker's core. There would be hollowed-out caves in the cliffs that rose up from the sides of rivers, pavilions near lakes and sailing vessels with cabins for passengers, tents and huts and various other structures, all of them modeled on the abodes of past times and all of them equipped with every device needed for comfort. For Habitat-dwellers, such places embued them with a feeling that they had not lost their humanity and their natural past entirely, while for the Earthpeople aboard the Seeker, the landscape would function as a reminder of home. Mahala, who had lived her life in the environments of Venus's domed settlements, thought of the core as a monumental and ecologically complex version of a garden or a park.

“It's lovely,” she said to Benzi, “but I wonder if it's really necessary.” Something about this vast, incurving landscape also disturbed her, but she ignored her unease, which, she told herself, probably had no more significance than the disorientation she had felt during her first days in Anwara.

Her unsettled state, although she did not realize this until much later, was caused by an unconscious apprehension that the core—or the Seeker's Heart, as the artificial wilderness came to be known—might prove too seductive an escape for some of those aboard. Like many human beings, Mahala was mistakenly convinced that one way to keep people from succumbing to temptation was to remove the temptation altogether, or at least to control access to it.

But we knew that, in a community of Links and cyberminds and memories and experiences that could be called up on command or shed from one's consciousness without a trace, there could be no control except an individual's own volition. We had not been made to control humankind, to prevent human beings from doing whatever they cared to do. We had not been made to judge our people.

During her earliest times aboard the Seeker, Mahala often felt that she had been cut adrift from any real purpose. She studied the Seeker and its workings, exchanged ideas with other spacefarers about their various scientific and intellectual disciplines, perused written records and mind-tours on any subject that struck her interest. The new implant inside her opened up a sea of data that beckoned her to other intellectual shores, while the workings of the molecular machines and biologically engineered microbes that would maintain her body indefinitely were of intense interest to her. At other times, she took long walks with others in the wilderness of the Seeker's Heart, taking pleasure in the life forms that could be found there, the variety of piscatorial and avian and mammalian creatures that constituted the hollow's menagerie. She learned her way around the levels that housed the newly arrived and arriving spacefarers, the wide hallways that connected the rooms and meeting spaces and recreational spaces and small gardens of each level. She made friends of those who lived closest to her quarters and then became better acquainted with people who resided on other levels. She formed emotional bonds with some people whose previous lives so differed from her own that they shared few common assumptions other than the views that exploring space was both valuable and desirable and that contact with an alien civilization was intrinsically of interest—and often they held even those opinions for entirely different reasons.

Her life had become more amorphous and aimless. That was what Mahala thought, during the few times that she was alone and with little to do except to reflect on her own thoughts. She did not seek solitude, feeling that too much time alone, with nothing outside of herself to hold her immediate attention, might cause her to dwell too much on the past, on the people she had known and loved and would never see again.

Then one of the people whom she had known in her earlier life came to the Seeker.

His name was Ragnar Einarsson. Mahala met him in the park near the torchship bay on the outermost level of the Seeker. Ragnar expressed surprise at the sight of the inner space of flowers and trees, as most of the new arrivals did. None of them had been told exactly what to expect, since their ability to adapt to an unfamiliar environment had to be reaffirmed when they arrived. Habitat-dwellers had only a slight advantage in adapting here, because the Seeker was a new community with a different purpose from that of the other Habitats.

“You haven't asked me about why I didn't come here sooner,” Ragnar said after they had exchanged greetings.

His words surprised Mahala; she had to think for a moment before realizing that over two years had passed since she had last seen him. “It has been a while,” she admitted. She had received only a few messages from Venus, most of them brief, informing her that daily life was for the time being going on much as before even while the Cytherians anticipated the changes that would soon come. Her replies had been equally brief. She was separating herself from her former life, losing track of how much time was passing aboard the Seeker.

“The farewells were even harder than I expected them to be,” Ragnar said as Mahala led him toward the lift that would carry them to her level and the rooms where he would be living. “After all that time keeping my distance from most people, it was as if I had to make up for it by growing closer to them before I left for good. I found out more about my parents than I ever knew before, everything about their fears and hopes and secret failures, all the things they'd never told me about earlier.”

“They want you to remember,” Mahala said. Einar and Thorunn, she thought, wanted to live on inside of him, as Risa and Sef and Dyami would live on in her long after they were gone.

“And then there were all the carvings and sculptures and other things I'd made to give away. When I was visiting Dyami, I spent the better part of two months casting molds at the refinery. Maybe I could have refused, but I couldn't bring myself to refuse anybody who wanted something of mine. And maybe I want to make certain I'm remembered.”

The lift opened onto a softly lighted hall. “I'll show you my rooms,” Mahala said. “Yours are on this level, and they're much the same as mine, but you're free to change the furnishings and to move elsewhere later on if you like.” She heard the soft sound of a chime, halted in front of the arched indentations on the wall, and pressed her hand against the surface; an arched open entrance to her quarters suddenly appeared. As she led him into a high-ceiling room furnished with cushions, low tables, and transparent display cases to hold the reproductions of the vases and goblets that she had begun to collect, she explained to him that the pilot embedded in his identity bracelet would guide him around the Seeker until he had his own Link.

He sat down. She seated herself next to him. “Solveig was unhappy for a while after you left,” Ragnar said. “I don't know if she mentioned that in any messages. She missed you and then she began to wonder if she'd made the right decision. In the end, though, she said that she couldn't leave, that our parents shouldn't have to bear losing both their children, but that was only another excuse. She's grown closer to Chike now. It wouldn't surprise me if they become bond-mates, even if they do both claim that formal bonds aren't necessary.”

“That's what Chike and I always believed about such bonds,” Mahala said.

“I'm sorry. Does it bother you that—”

“No,” she said, “I'm happy for them,” and meant it.

“Mahala,” he murmured as he drew her to him. She slipped her arms around him, welcoming his embrace and yet feeling emotionally distant from him. She had never really seen that deeply into him. There had always been a wall between them before, and now she was no longer the person who had said farewell to him in Sagan, but was becoming something else.

Mahala and Ragnar came to love each other deeply as the years passed. Their courtship and mating followed a pattern much like that of the others aboard the Seeker, although they, as did most of the others, felt their emotional bond and its expression to be unique and peculiar to them.

Unlike almost all of the other couples forming bonds on the Seeker, Mahala and Ragnar had felt what they called love for each other some years earlier, as young adults. But Mahala recalled that emotional connection as a turbulent and painful experience. She had known Ragnar barely at all then, and had not understood the impulses that compelled him to create the aesthetically pleasing objects that he had learned how to fashion and to dream of those that he could not yet make. She had grown closer to him during their early years inside the Seeker and was gradually coming to realize that he had not chosen the spacefarer's way only out of a desire to escape a world that had often held him back from what he sought to express. Ragnar had also seen that our voyage might feed the hunger inside him by offering new subjects for his art, enlarging his perspective by opening up more of the universe to him.

As Mahala and Ragnar drew closer to each other, they also formed bonds with others, bonds that they often thought of as familial. In this, they also resembled the others whom the Seeker carried. The spacefarers became students of some of their comrades, mentors to others, and took on parental roles with younger voyagers. Among those who were closest to Mahala were two people she had known in the Cytherian settlement of Oberg, Akilah Ching and Kyril Anders, who had grown up in her grandmother Risa Liangharad's household. There was Ah Lin Bergen, a friend since childhood, and Wilhelm Asher, who had been a teacher of Mahala's when she was a child in Turing. Almost all of the spacefarers had their strongest bonds with people whom they had known in their earlier lives, and Mahala kept to this pattern.

Her earlier life began to recede from her. Occasionally, she gave in to the temptation to retreat into herself, to recapture an earlier happy memory of an evening with her biological kinsman Dyami and his household, of a few hours with her beloved Chike discussing their shared seminars in biological ethics or cosmology, or of a day spent with her dose friend Solveig weeding hydroponic crops in a Sagan community greenhouse while gossiping about recent political developments in the Cytherian settlements. Knowing that I could aid in calling up memories indistinguishable from her actual past experiences, Mahala relived moments of her past life.

I did not begrudge her the memories or the verisimilitude I used in recreating them, for I understood that she would not seek a permanent retreat into them.

The memories were only another stage in her long farewell.

It may seem that the spacefarers spent much of their earliest time aboard the Seeker in establishing emotional bonds with others in their new community and in remembering the past. Mahala often had this misleading impression when reflecting on the beginnings of her new life. Human beings, I was learning from Mahala and those closest to her, often experienced their emotional states as the center of their life, as that which defined them and showed their true selves.

In reality, Mahala's emotions were often dominated by such concerns as the social disruptions being caused on Earth and to a lesser extent on Venus, by the prospect of greatly lengthened life spans. For centuries, Earthfolk had been using the techniques of genetic engineering to repair problematic and defective genes or to replace them altogether. The people of both Earth and Venus, as a result, could expect to live out a century and at least one or two more decades in reasonably good physical health and with the vigor of youth and middle age. That the Habitat-dwellers enjoyed much longer life spans was not so readily apparent to Earthfolk and Cytherians until there had been more contacts between the two branches of humanity, and even then there were many among the planet-bound who saw no advantage to a greatly extended life, who believed that those who lived too long would inevitably fall victim to ennui, boredom, and weariness.

Now, with the actual possibility of an indefinite life span ahead, those who saw such a long life as a trap were preparing for battle with those who viewed it as a opportunity and as a great leap forward in human evolution.

Mahala gleaned data from the public channels of Earth and Venus and from the personal messages sent to her. The public debates, intense as they often were, did not trouble her nearly so much as the acts of violence committed both by those who feared excessively long life spans and by those who feared that they might not live long enough to finally join the indefinitely long-lived. She often thought of Mukhtar Tabib's fear that the social disruption caused by too much change might irretrievably destroy Earth's societies. Occasionally, she felt the pangs of guilt for having escaped the disruptions of great change by joining the Seeker.

The life that stretched ahead of her was already altering her cerebral cortex and her limbic system, changing her thoughts and emotions and her reactions to what was around her. She was, as she would put it herself much later, becoming less conscious of the passage of time and of time's constraints and more aware of the possibilities that stretched before her. She was becoming an entity that would eventually reach both its potential and its limits, because there would be almost nothing to prevent that, nothing either to hold her back or to compel her to even greater efforts in compensation for perceived failures.

Their greatly extended lives were what made it possible for the people aboard the Seeker to become spacefarers. There would be a time of suspended animation for them, so that they would not be conscious for the entire ninety years that our voyage would take in relativistic time, but they had decided to live out the five years of the last leg of the journey, in order to reestablish their bonds and prepare themselves for the encounter with the alien. There, in that distant star system, the alien might summon us to a journey of even longer duration. A Seeker inhabited by successive generations of short-lived human beings, all except the last generation doomed to live out their lives and die inside our Habitat, would have prevented those generations from fully sharing in our enterprise. It would have made them our prisoners. In the end, it might have been left to us to explore the universe by ourselves.