Child of Venus (65 page)

Mahala was troubled by dreams.

Occasionally, she woke abruptly from a recurring dream where she felt herself to be embedded in a thick ebony substance, unable to move, blinded because no light was able to reach her. At other times, she dreamed of running after something without knowing what it was and being unable to catch up with it. As the Seeker continued to decelerate, the dreams passed.

More of the Seeker's people were forming into various loosely connected groups or bands, gathering with others to study the data we were collecting, to learn new disciplines, or simply to lose themselves in meditation or physical exercise inside the Seeker's Heart. Mahala found a renewed satisfaction in the company of others and in using her old training as a physician to listen to and advise the more troubled of her comrades.

As Tomas Sechen had predicted, more of those who had been caught up in metaphysical musings were soon rejoining the life of the Seeker's community. Many of these people shared some of their thoughts and feelings with our net, in the hope that the data provided by their experiences might be useful. We glimpsed human minds that had struggled to a kind of serenity and faith and others who would continue to question and seek and doubt. We learned that a new desire had flowered in many of them during their search, replacing the longing for a faith in some of them, and the seeds of that longing were soon passed to others of the human spacefarers.

They wanted new people to join them aboard the Seeker. They longed for children. Yet they hesitated, concerned about what lay ahead, about the ethics of bringing children into existence before they knew what awaited us at our destination. We offered them no guidance, no advice; this was a matter they had to decide by themselves.

They chose to wait.

As the Seeker decelerated, our destination star again became visible; the bright point became a cluster and the heavens gradually transformed themselves into a field of stars. The alien signal was audible once more, singing to us, as we approached the outermost planet of this system, a lifeless mass of ice and rock. We swept toward the star, a G-2 yellow-white star so closely resembling our sun that it might have been its twin, in a long arc, noting the presence of three ringed gas giants in the outer reaches of this system and the two smaller planets nearer their sun, two hot dry worlds with atmospheres of carbon dioxide, planets that Mahala could almost imagine as the sisters of Venus.

Mahala was often on the bridge as we continued toward the alien beacon that orbited the innermost of the two Venusian worlds. Hundreds came to the bridge, crowding around the screens, while others watched on screens in their quarters or Linked themselves to our sensors. Some accepted what we had discovered here as soon as it was verified by our readings, while others continued to hope for more, but all of them had at last accepted the truth when we were within a million kilometers of the alien artifact.

The beacon was a solid round object some four kilometers in diameter. Our scanners could not see into its solid core, and as we sent out our answering call, the alien voices abruptly fell silent. There was no alien life in this system, as we had seen while falling toward its sun; unless some primitive strain of microbial life existed on any of the planets, there was no life at all. We had come six hundred light-years only to reaffirm what we already knew; that another intelligence existed in the universe, and that we might never have contact with that intelligence.

“We are here,” they had told us, and we had gone to them. Now they were mute, and Mahala feared that their voices would never speak to us again. Suleiman would call it God's mercy, that humankind knew of this alien intelligence without being able to reach out to it. She tried to take some solace in that thought.

We remained in that star system for a time, mapping its planets, confirming that there was no life on any of them, and struck by the resemblance of the planetary bodies to those of our solar system. The alien beacon remained silent and impenetrable to us, and gradually all of our people accepted the truth.

Humankind would have to search for the beacon's creators elsewhere; we would find nothing of them in this system. There was no life here, and it was probable, based on the data gathered by our sensors and probes, that none had ever existed.

We had come this far, but contact with the alien was never our sole purpose, only the motivation human beings had needed to undertake their long journey. There was still the hope of return, of going back to see what had become of the worlds we had left behind. There was still the hope for children, young people who would not have to live out all of their lives inside a nomad with no destination.

Children would come to the Seeker. The spacefarers would take our children, the children of their bodies and the children of our net, back to our home.

 

Home

 

27

A year and a half after we had left the alien star system, measured in our time, Mahala went to the chamber to prepare for sleep and for oblivion. By then, the extreme disappointment many of our human companions had felt at finding only a silent alien beacon, with no sign as to where its creators might be found, had faded.

Perhaps the alien signal had been designed to draw other intelligences capable of interstellar space travel into exploring the universe. Perhaps, Mahala thought, the aliens meant to reveal themselves only after more of her species had ventured beyond their home system. Maybe the aliens would call out to humanity again when people had loosed themselves from more of the ties that still bound them to the past; Mahala was thinking of Suleiman Khan then and his words about unknowable aliens and God's mercy. She had been quick to see him as deluded by his beliefs, but now, as she contemplated the vast distances between the stars and the temporal displacements of relativistic space travel, it seemed possible to her that an unknowable God might have shown his creatures some mercy by creating such formidable barriers, which would allow each of his life-forms the isolation they might require to attain the wisdom that would be needed before they met other alien mentalities.

We would also be returning to the solar system with our observations of a star system that bore intriguing resemblances to our own. Its star was of a yellow spectral class identical to the sun, while its three gas giants, each with several small moons, were much like Saturn and Neptune. A belt of asteroids orbited the star in a band midway between the gas giants and the two inner planets. We had mapped those two inner planets, with their thick clouds that gave off so much light that they seemed to Mahala like pearls, and had sent our probes to their surfaces, and had seen Venus as she might have been two billion years ago.

Fanciful notions came to Mahala then: Perhaps the aliens had meant for human beings to come here and find those worlds, to make new Earths of them as humankind was already doing with their distant sister world of Venus; and perhaps when we had transformed them, the beings who had signaled to us would return to this system at last and reveal themselves.

Ragnar accompanied Mahala to the chamber, as he had before. Again she dreamed as she slept, this time of rushing toward a world where time was passing so rapidly that every observable event was a blur. Houses inside transparent domes rose and fell and sprang up once more in new patterns; dusters of domes formed on dark plains in an instant; thick clouds evaporated into white wisps; green masses grew until they encompassed continents. It came to her, after she awoke, that she had been dreaming of Venus.

Ragnar was at her side, helping her up gently as she came to herself. She searched his face and saw the distant look she remembered in his grayish-blue eyes, the expression that always reminded her that there were still parts of him that she would never know.

“There is no one left who remembers us,” he said.

“We knew that some time ago,” Mahala murmured.

“I meant there may be no one left who remembers this voyage and the Seeker's mission.” He held her, not speaking for a while, as others began to wake around them.

Less than twenty years remained of our voyage in relativistic time, but Mahala sensed no time passing as she took up the threads of her life again. She recalled the first time that she had traveled from Oberg to Turing as a child, when she had imagined that the airship might continue on an endless journey, and that she and her fellow passengers would be suspended forever in the restful interlude between what they had left behind and where they were headed; that notion had filled her with an unexpected pleasure.

Mahala was one of those whose medical and biological knowledge had equipped her for helping others during this new stage in our voyage, and yet she felt apprehensive. Having children among the spacefarers would destroy the illusion she could sometimes create of time standing still, of feeling that the people she had left behind might be alive after all. Bringing new human beings to life here seemed an admission that they might be the only remaining members of their species and that the Seeker might become their only world. The rest of humankind might have died out, transformed itself, divided into thousands of unrecognizable species that might be as strange to her and her comrades as any alien.

If so, Mahala concluded, then they had even more of an obligation to build a true human community aboard the Seeker.

A number of choices were available to the spacefarers for the creation of the new generation. A gestating embryo might carry the genes of two parents, several people, or only one; instead of simply ensuring that each child was free of obvious physical, mental, or hormonal disabilities, certain qualities could be enhanced through gene manipulation. Mahala found herself increasingly relied upon as an advisor to those who wanted children. To her surprise, almost every prospective parent she counseled decided to use the most conservative and least intrusive biological techniques. Later, she came to see this as an attempt to hold on to a comforting familiarity, an effort by her fellow voyagers to maintain their bond with humankind's past. The descendants of the spacefarers might eventually choose a more divergent path, but the Seeker would preserve the species as they knew it.

The rooms where our people had slept were transformed into incubators. It soon became customary for parents to visit the ectogenetic chambers where their offspring were gestating. This was ostensibly to monitor that process, and yet it also seemed that most of them were drawn to the chambers by deeper instincts, by an urge to bond with their young even before birth. The parents were also present when their infants were removed from the artificial wombs, an occasion marked by subdued but joyous celebrations. The children were regarded as the children of all, and each child had a number of adults to serve as caretakers, nurses, teachers, and mentors, but the biological parents of the children tended to spend more time than others with their offspring and to develop stronger bonds with them.

We also had reason to welcome these young human beings. We would be able to Link ourselves to fresh youthful minds, and to acquire new perspectives.

During her earlier life, Mahala had rarely thought of becoming a biological parent herself. That possibility had seemed to lie far in her future, after she had sated her curiosity, become more skilled at her work, established her social bonds with her community, fulfilled some of her obligations to the Venus Project, visited new places, and decided what kind of life she wanted within the context of a relatively stable society.

Then the new era had come, promising changes that might upset many of her old preconceptions, and she had put any thought of parenthood aside.

Now she found herself drawn to the children who had appeared among the spacefarers, especially those who were the children of her closest friends. Ah Lin Bergen and Tomas Sechen were the parents of a son, while Akilah Ching and Kyril Anders were rearing a daughter. The infants in whom she had taken a detached interest were growing into inquisitive children to whom she felt a strong attachment, who induced a longing in her that she had not felt before.

“It's an understandable emotion,” Mahala explained to Ragnar when they were alone in their quarters. She had often come upon him in the Seeker's Heart, sitting with a few of the children and their caregivers, carving small wooden animals and human figures for them to use as toys. “It's natural to take an interest in the next generation, especially under these circumstances.”

Ragnar smiled; he smiled more often now. “You want a child,” he said. “I know how you feel, Mahala. I have the same kind of feeling, and it surprises me that I do. My art was always enough to satisfy such yearnings, and on Venus, I resisted anything that might take me away from that, but maybe if I had stayed in Sagan and Frani had been there, I would have felt this longing sooner.”

That was how it was with him, then; he was regretting his lost love, imagining the child that he and Frania had never had. That life was so long ago; she was startled at how his words cut at her.

“I see,” she said softly.

“No, that isn't what I meant. I don't want to become the father of a child now because of what I didn't have with Frani. That's over now, and I can never bring it back. I did fall in love with you first, you know. I've been in love with you for most of my life now.”

She thrust her hand into his. “I'm ready to be a parent, and it's your child that I want.” They sat together for a while, leaning against each other and content in their silence.

“Are you going to have a daughter,” Benzi asked Mahala, “or a son?”

“A daughter,” she replied. She had gone to the bridge to tell him that there would be a new addition to their line. Benzi seemed pleased, but not overly excited; his smile was closer to an expression of amusement than of joy.

“And have you decided on a name for her yet?” he said.

“Angharad Ragnarsdottir.”

“So her name will come from both of your lines.” Benzi's expression grew gentle, but there was a weariness in his eyes. He looked that way more often now, tired and aged, an old man in spite of his rejuvenated body and unwrinkled face. “Angharad—so she'll be named for my grandmother in Lincoln. Angharad was a stubborn woman and ignorant, but I loved her very much and was sorry to leave her.” He paused. “She didn't approve of my name at all. Benzi Liangharad— she didn't understand why my mother wanted to work my father's surname of Liang into it when children on the Plains always took their mothers' names for surnames, or else the names of their home towns.”