Child of Venus (64 page)

This was how she recalled the experience later, when the sleeper opened and she was able to turn her head and see Ragnar on the platform next to hers, stretching his arms as he struggled into wakefulness: She remembered only closing her eyes and then waking to find herself stiff and disoriented and breathing air that seemed much too cold and dry until she remembered where she was. Yet she also had memories of being on the bridge, of gazing into a bright cluster of stars that was all she could see of the heavens, of feeling herself growing larger and more vast as the universe contracted around her.

Perhaps, she told herself later, after Ragnar had kissed her awake and she had helped to rouse others from their rest, it was only a phantom memory. But when she was with other people once more, listening to their recollections of their time in suspended animation, she began to see that specific memory as part of a dream all of them had shared.

It was also our dream, for we thought of our passage at relativistic speed as a dream, and perhaps some of that dream had filtered through their Links to the sleepers. Our space-time, the only reality that existed for us, insisted on confirming that the remaining distance to our destination had shrunk from four hundred to sixty light-years, that time was shortening beyond our comprehension. We could no longer measure the universe outside the Seeker. Our net of mentalities had devised a defense to protect our intellectual functions, one gained from the workings of human minds; we perceived our voyage as a dream.

Our people had been revived, but many could not bring themselves to awaken fully to the reality around them. We felt many of them retreating again, withdrawing from us and from the harder edges of our thoughts.

Mahala had always considered herself an empiricist. In this she knew, from the records and stories of her predecessors, that she resembled her great-grandfather, Liang Chen, who had concerned himself with what he could see and know. What others thought of as the spiritual realm had been of no interest to Chen. That the world had become what the Muslims around him called the
Dar al-Islam
, the Abode of Islam, that Islam had prevailed on Earth and had, as a result, later shown an increased tolerance for those who had not yet submitted to that faith, was a fact that he accepted without much thought. Whether or not the laws he lived under were derived from Islam or some other legal code was a matter of indifference to him, as long as such laws were applied fairly to all.

That was one part of Mahala's heritage, but there was also the example of her great-grandmother, Iris Angharads. Iris's public record noted that she had been brought up in Lincoln as a Marian Catholic and that her memorial service on Island Two had been conducted by a priest, but Mahala knew little about Iris's inner state of mind. From what she had seen of Iris's private records, she suspected that her great-grandmother had harbored much skepticism, but there was nothing that hinted at what she might have believed toward the end of her life.

There was also her grandfather Malik, who might have questioned some tenets of his Islamic faith, but whose scholarly writings bore the stamp of his culture and its religious beliefs. And then there were her parents, who had given themselves over to the destructive cultish fanaticism of Ishtar.

Mahala had never thought much about such matters. A worthwhile human life, she had always felt, had to be lived within the confines of what was known and what was theoretically probable, with doubt being one of a thinking person's most important intellectual tools. But it was becoming increasingly obvious that some of the others who lived in the Seeker were turning to older certainties.

Mahala was in the Seeker's Heart, following a stone path near a riverbank, when she heard the sound of the call to afternoon prayer. She halted, listened for a while, then moved toward the sound. In the levels of rooms and corridors that surrounded the Heart, people had occasionally gathered in groups to practice whatever rites had become habitual to them, but Mahala had believed such practices had been growing less common even before the period of suspended animation. Now she felt that there were aspects of life among her fellow spacefarers that had been invisible to her, perhaps because she assigned so little importance to them herself and had chosen to ignore them.

The voice of the muezzin fell silent. She rounded a bend in the river and came to a clearing. A slender spire made of ivory-colored stone stood at the corner of a small roofless structure of four walls. The spire, she realized, was meant to be a minaret; she had come to a mosque.

Three pairs of slippers sat outside the wall facing her. She sat down under the nearest trees and waited. At last the door to the tiny mosque opened; two men in headdresses and long robes came outside, followed by Suleiman Khan in a tunic and loose trousers. His two companions put on their slippers and left the clearing without acknowledging Mahala's presence. Suleiman donned his shoes, sat down, then beckoned to her.

She came toward him and seated herself. He said, “I have been praying.”

“So I noticed.”

“The last time that I prayed with any sincerity, may God forgive me, was as a
very young man, before I went to live in Turing, before—” He was silent for a while.
“I have been praying that those I once knew are at peace, that God now cradles them.”

He had reminded her of the probability, the certainty, that everyone they had once known on Venus was dead. Mahala had kept that thought submerged, refusing to allow it to swim up into her conscious mind. She had seized on other possibilities: that human life spans had become so indefinitely prolonged that they amounted to a kind of physical immortality; that human mental patterns might live on in cybernetic intelligences that were far more subtle and developed than those who made up the network of the Seeker; that individual selves that she would recognize as Risa, Sef, Dyami, Chike, and Solveig were still somehow alive. To some, her hope would seem as irrational—or as much of a leap of faith—as Suleiman's hope that those he had cared for lived on in the paradise God had promised to all believers and good people.

“I do not know what I have been for much of my life,” Suleiman continued. “Many, I am sure, would have called me an infidel, or a backslider at best, but God—may his name be praised—is all-forgiving. I've committed my share of sins. Men died at my hands during the Cytherian Revolt, when those of us imprisoned in Turing finally had our revenge on our tormentors, but I did not believe that any just God would punish me for that. And then for a long while it seemed that I had lost what little faith I had possessed in

God and his truth, but maybe that was only a loss of faith in men.” He gazed at her steadily with his dark eyes. “The believers, and those who emigrate and struggle in God's way— those have hopes of God's compassion, and God is All-forgiving, All-compassionate.”

He had said that last phrase in Arabic, but Mahala understood enough Arabic to grasp the words, while I informed her through her Link that they were from a sura of the Koran.

“And yet,” Suleiman said in Anglaic, “God is ultimately unknowable. As a child, I believed that the way to God lay in study of the Holy Koran, and later that the way to enlightenment and perhaps some knowledge of God, insofar as he chose to reveal himself, lay in the study of the sciences. But I have come to comprehend the truth of what the believers have always known, that God is ultimately transcendent and unknowable.”

The air of the Seeker's Heart felt colder; Mahala shivered. “Why did you come aboard the Seeker?” she asked.

“I had my reasons, most of which could probably be summed up as being curious and wanting to engage in an entirely new human enterprise. Now it seems as though I was led here, that others might have been led here, for an entirely different purpose.”

She did not want to ask the next question, but sensed that Suleiman expected it of her. “And what is that purpose?” she asked.

“We can never be certain of any of God's attributes except for those he chooses to reveal,” Suleiman said, “but we can know his will for us through the Holy Koran and the Law. I shall admit something to you, Mahala. When I knew that another intelligence existed in the universe, that it was calling out to us, doubt and skepticism overtook me. You see, I knew what Islam would demand of us, that we bring God's Word to those beings, that they be brought under the rule of God's Law, and I came to see that as an imposition, as a cruelty, as a way perhaps of denying our species the truths that a society of alien minds might impart to us, assuming that we were capable even of understanding what they might be able to tell us.”

“Your faith once demanded the same for Earth,” Mahala murmured.

“That is true, and the Council of Mukhtars came to power, and Islamic law came to govern all of Earth, and because of that, believers could be merciful to unbelievers. In the
Dar al-Islam
, Muslims could allow others to follow their traditional customs and ways, to practice their own beliefs, for the
Shari'a
, the Way, remained open to all who were willing to choose it. One cannot revoke divine law, but one can choose not to enforce it when that seems advisable.”

He paused. “But how can we apply this to other species,” he went on, “to nonhumans? God's Word and God's Law were meant for all sentient beings. How do we tell any aliens of God's Messenger Muhammad, may his name be forever blessed, and of the truths God revealed to his Prophet? What would we have to do if they are able to understand our words, yet still refuse to heed them? What if we realize that they will never know what we are saying to them at all, that too wide a gap divides us? What if instead of leaving themselves open to submission to the Way, whatever practices they might follow in the meantime, they turn away from the truth completely and reject it? Some of us might choose mercy and tolerance. But others might argue, with some justice, that a
jihad
, a Holy War, is required to bring the unbelievers to the truth.”

“No,” Mahala whispered.

“Now I pray that we are unable to understand them,” Suleiman said, “that we will not be able to communicate with them, that the gap between our species remains unbridgeable. For if we cannot reach out to them, then we would be under no obligation to tell them of God's Word. They would be completely unknowable to us, and we to them.”

He leaned forward, and his gaze was filled with an intensity that made her draw back from him. “Perhaps God has designed things that way so that our species can disperse itself throughout all of God's creation, but without cruelty and bloodshed. We may receive signals from others, we may travel to their worlds, but I pray that they will remain forever alien to us, forever unknown.”

Mahala thrust out an arm. “Suleiman—” she began.

“You think I am mad,” he said. “I see it in your face, Mahala.” He looked more like his old self now, with his half-smile and his usual skeptical, slightly mocking expression. “But such musings have enabled me to submit to God's Will once more and to accept what he has ordained for me. I can hope that we will not find what we are seeking, that God will show us that mercy, and that has brought me a kind of peace.”

She got to her feet, bowed her head slightly in his direction, then left him sitting outside his mosque.

Mahala took to roaming around more widely in the Seeker's Heart more often after that, sometimes following the stone walkways or the paths through our gardens, sometimes wandering into the wilder, more untamed regions of the environment. A few cycles after her encounter with Suleiman, she followed a trail through a wooded area to a cliff dotted with caves and found crosses or holo images of the Virgin Mary and her Son Jesus in almost every cave entrance. The people there welcomed her, invited her to share a meal with them, but did not stop her when she left them before they gathered to say their prayers. During another sojourn, she found what seemed to be a kind of shrine, a pavilion that had been raised over an image of the Buddha. Occasionally, she came upon wooden structures where a lone person was praying or meditating; she often could not tell the difference and hesitated to interrupt those she found at their devotions.

How many people were wandering into the Seeker's Heart or living there for long periods, engaged in prayer, contemplation, metaphysical musings, readings, and other spiritual pursuits? Mahala asked that question of us, but we could not give her a precise answer. Those who sought such consolations did not often open their Links while engrossed in them and did not usually share such thoughts with us at other times. Our estimate was that some fifty to one hundred thousand people inside the Seeker were occasionally or largely occupied in matters involving the practices of the unverifiable beliefs that they called their faiths, but that was only an estimate. There might have been others who harbored such notions, but who kept them to themselves.

“What is going to happen to us,” Mahala asked, “if even more people fall under this metaphysical spell?” She was asking that question of Benzi, who was on the bridge, and of Ragnar, Ah Lin Bergen, and Tomas Sechen, who were there with them, but she was also asking it of us. To her, those like Suleiman seemed as lost as people who were caught in the trap of endless synthetic experience.

“This is what we get,” Mahala continued, “for wanting so many of our kind on this journey. Perhaps a smaller ship with fewer but saner people would have been better.”

Ragnar shrugged; what others chose to do, as long as it did not affect the Seeker's mission, was their concern and not his. In that, he reflected our conclusions about the faith-seekers.

Ah Lin said, “There isn't much we can do to stop them.”

Tomas said, “There isn't anything we should do to stop them. They'll find whatever it is they're looking for and then they'll rejoin our community, or else they'll go on searching. The Seeker is our universe now, until we reach our destination. If getting there at last doesn't bring our spiritual wanderers back to us, nothing will.”