Child of Venus (66 page)

“I know about the custom,” she said and wondered if anyone still lived on the Plains who remembered that old custom.

“Angharad was like a mother to me during those early years. Even now I can sometimes feel myself missing her, even though she wouldn't have had the faintest idea of why we came aboard the Seeker and wouldn't have cared to know.”

Benzi was being unusually garrulous, and his voice was wistful; he almost sounded like some of the old people who had been her patients near the end of their lives, when they were waiting to die and did not want their lives wastefully and needlessly prolonged.

“I am happy you're naming the child for her,” he said as he turned back to the console.

When the embryo was gestating, Benzi went with Mahala and Ragnar to the incubating room. A long row of large, egg-shaped chambers sat against the walls of the softly lighted room; this space, like all of the other rooms set aside for the wombs, evoked feelings of calm. At one end of the room, a holographic image of waves rolling toward a beach of white sand, accompanied by the soothing sound of surf washing ashore, seemed so real that Mahala felt an urge to step into the scene. At other times, she had viewed a forest, a garden with colorful songbirds, and a flat grassy landscape that had reminded her of the Plains around Lincoln.

People hovered over the chambers holding their progeny, whispered to them, checked their life signs on the consoles next to each chamber. Mahala moved closer to Ragnar as they gazed down at the womb holding their daughter. Benzi hung back, almost as if he wanted to be elsewhere.

Benzi had never become a parent. That was the way he had put the matter to Mahala. The Habbers drew a distinction between simply contributing genetic material to their banks which might be passed on to any of their progeny and becoming a true parent—a caregiver, a nurturer and teacher. Habbers, he had explained, did not have to compensate for failures and dissatisfactions through their children or live out lives they had wanted for themselves vicariously through them. They did not have to grab at the consolation of children in the face of a death that might come prematurely. Habbers became parents only when they had a calling for it.

Perhaps their way was better, Mahala thought, and wondered if she had wanted a child of her own for reasons she had preferred not to examine too closely.

“Life always finds a way,” Benzi said suddenly, startling her. “That was certainly one of the assumptions behind the terraforming of Venus, wasn't it? Give life an opening, a chance, and...” He paused. “I wonder what Venus is like now.”

“We'll find out before too long,” Ragnar said.

“I want to see it again,” Benzi said, “and that surprises me. I was always so restless in my earlier life. I don't feel that restlessless now.”

Mahala felt reassured by her decision when she lifted Angharad from her womb, bathed her in warm water, and listened to her first cries. A Link was implanted in the infant's forehead a few days after birth; all of our people had agreed to this custom of the Habitat-dwellers, so that the children could adapt to their Links easily and be watched over by us as they grew.

Her parents had chosen to be Angharad's primary care-givers, but other people were there to feed and hold and care for the child and to offer advice on how to look after her. There were times, Mahala reluctantly admitted to Ragnar, that their daughter seemed little more than a bundle of appetites screaming for satisfaction. Such admissions on her part reminded me of how we interfaced with our new components and new Links, how simple and slow they were in their operations until they became more complex and more tightly woven into our net. But our situation was not entirely analogous to that of the new human parents aboard the Seeker. They had a bond with their young ones that was as rooted in their biology as it was in their rational faculties.

As Angharad learned to crawl, sit up, walk, and say her first words, Mahala's awareness of the passage of time shifted again. The feeling of timelessness was replaced by a sense that time was passing too rapidly, that too much experience was going by before she had the chance to assimilate it. Her dark-eyed and raven-haired child was soon growing and showing signs that she had inherited her father's long limbs. Mahala had hardly grown used to carrying Angharad into the tamer areas of the Seeker's Heart before the child was insisting on being set down and allowed to walk. Almost before she could get over her pleasure in hearing her daughter call out her name or Ragnar's, Angharad had grown more fluent in her speech and could often be found in one of the gardens, talking with other small children.

Then there were the questions:

“Why are we here, Mahala?”

“What is the Seeker?”

“Is there anything outside the Seeker?”

“Where are we going?”

“What's the sun?”

“What is the solar system?”

“Why did you and Ragnar leave that other place?”

“Why are we going back?”

“Will we stay inside the Seeker, or will we have to go away?”

Mahala and Ragnar, and the other parents of the young, answered the questions as thoroughly as they could and also taught the children how to use their Links to access our data and the sensory experiences we could provide. They often gathered in the Seeker's Heart to explore that environment in small groups; they also came to the bridge to gaze at the contracted cluster of stars. The illusions of relativistic travel presented by our instruments, which informed us that we were moving at an impossible velocity faster than the speed of light, were accepted calmly by their young minds; they knew no other world except the Seeker, no other space-time except what we were experiencing.

We had begun deceleration and had noticed that fewer of the older people were paying visits to the bridge; even the parents of our human children seemed reluctant to be on the bridge with their young. Mahala, along with most of them, was contemplating what might lie ahead while retreating into the familiar regions of the Seeker.

“This might be the only home we have left,” she said to Ragnar. “The Venus Project might have been abandoned long ago. The Earthfolk might have abandoned that world for Habitats, or they might have fulfilled the worst of Mukhtar Tabib's predictions.” I could not tell what she feared most, that she might return to a system that would still be familiar in many ways, that the branches of humankind there might have diverged beyond recognition, or that their struggle to the next stage of their civilization might have proved futile in the end.

But for the children, the past of their kind was only the images and impressions of mind-tours and virtual experiences, the written public and personal records we had stored, the stories their parents had told them. Their history had begun with the Seeker. They came to the bridge and marveled as the bright pinpoint of light that was the universe slowly blossomed against the blackness that surrounded it, gradually transforming itself into a field of blue-shifted stars. The children regarded our destination not with apprehension and fear, but with wonder and curiosity.

Mahala stood on the bridge, one arm around her daughter, the other encircling Ragnar's waist. She had been keeping a channel of her Link open almost constantly, as were almost all of our spacefarers. The sun was now visible as a tiny violet point; the fan of stars was steadily widening as other stars passed through a spectrum of color.

Throngs of people had come to the bridge; others had gathered in large common rooms in front of other screens. Still others had their Links fully open to our sensors and were experiencing this stage of the voyage in full communion with the Seeker and its mentalities. We expected the spacefarers to remain absorbed in this last stage of our journey during most of their conscious moments.

“There is our sun,” Mahala said to Angharad; an unnecessary remark, since the girl's Link had already communicated that information to her. It came to Mahala then that Angharad might never feel any more attachment to this star and its system than to any other place. Here was simply another family of planets; the Seeker was Angharad's base and all of the universe her home.

Angharad said, “Mahala, you're afraid, aren't you? You and Ragnar both.”

Benzi, standing near Mahala in the crowd, glanced at them. “I'll admit to being apprehensive,” Ragnar said softly. “Are you afraid, Angharad?”

“No.”

Mahala turned toward her daughter. Angharad had inherited her father's height; she would soon be as tall as her mother. Despite her dark hair and eyes, her calm expression and intelligent steady gaze reminded Mahala of Solveig. What would she find here for her child? Would Venus finally have become the habitable world dreamed of by so many millions of people or had it been forgotten, left to revert to its lifeless hellish state? Had the Project stalled, had humankind been able to pass through the period of disruption and change without destroying much of what had been built? Would Angharad see the evidence of forebears who had triumphed or a race who had failed?

Whatever they had done, Mahala knew that she and her comrades had not been a part of it. If they found only the remnants of a failed civilization, their children might take solace from having been born among those who had escaped the destruction, or else they might feel the weight and the guilt of survivors. If the spacefarers found a thriving culture, or many cultures, they would know that this was the achievement of others and not themselves. She and the others with the Seeker were outside of their history, and it might now be impossible for them to rejoin it.

The spacefarers waited and watched as we decelerated, abandoning that task only for periods of rest and nourishment, and when we had entered nonrelativistic space again, with a familiar starfield of blue-white and yellow stars around us and the pinprick of Sol shining brightly ahead of us, we picked up a signal.

We recognized it after listening for only a few seconds; it was a replica of the signal once emitted by the alien beacon, and yet its source lay in the orbital path of Pluto. That realization leapt from our minds to those of our people, racing through the Links that connected us in an instant.

Mahala had a brief moment of mingled awe and terror. The aliens who had called to us were here, in the solar system; they had traveled here while she and her comrades were searching for them six hundred light-years away; they would reveal themselves at last. The thoughts of our human companions, as they cried out to one another, laughed, wept, rushed to the bridge and to common rooms to gather with their fellows, were in such turmoil that some time passed before we were able to help them in restoring their balance.

Only the children maintained their equilibrium. They had viewed our changing starscapes with a calm curiosity, and at the sound of the alien song, felt wonderment at such an unexpected delight.

And then we heard the rest of the message and knew the truth.

 

28

From the personal record of Mahala Liangharad:

For one brief moment, we thought we had achieved our end after all, that we had found the object of our search, and then the beacon appeared on the bridge's screens, magnified by our sensors.

The beacon was not an alien artifact but a Habber probe, as we quickly verified, and our Links were already whispering the rest of its message to all of us. I listened, and understood, and then closed my Link, wanting to hold my disappointment inside myself for a while.

One hundred years after the Seeker had left on its journey, the people of the two Habitats in the outer solar system had left a recording of the alien signal along with a message for us, in case we ever returned to this region of space. The sound of the signal was meant as a welcome and a sign of recognition to any aliens who might be returning with us. The message from the Habitat-dwellers was to tell us that they had chosen not to wait here, that their Habitats had already left the solar system on a search and that other expeditions were likely to follow them. They did not intend to follow our course to our destination; they would leave it to us to locate the source of the signal they had reproduced. Their goal was to explore the nearer stars, to learn what they could about those systems, to move on after that to other stars, and to leave other beacons with both the alien signal and their own signal behind them.

I stood there with the others, lost in my own thoughts, gradually realizing that no one near me had yet said a word aloud. I recalled what Solveig had told me over twelve hundred years ago, that ours would not be the only such journey, that there would be others. Part of me had known that she was right, that if humankind survived the time of transition, then others would begin to look outward once more.

Now I wondered: If two Habitats had left the solar system, how many other people had followed them? How many of our kind still remained here?

The minds of the Seeker set a course that would take us toward Earth. We sent out our calls, heard no replies, and launched probes to search for signs of human activity. Even allowing for how long it might take any observers in the inner solar system to verify the Seeker's presence, to decide how to respond, and to transmit a message to us, we grew increasingly dismayed by the utter silence that greeted our return.

Only our children seemed undisturbed by the lack of responses to our messages. To be in our home system, in the setting of the tales we had told to them and the scenarios the Seeker's minds had presented to them, was gratifying enough for them. Sometimes when I looked at Angharad—-she had grown taller than I by then and still often wore the inward-looking expression I remembered seeing on Solveig's face—I wondered if she and her friends might be happier if we found no one at all, so that they would finally be cut free from our past.

By the time we were inside the asteroid belt, our probes and sensors had already verified that no Habitats were in orbit around Mars. That planet remained as it had been, cold and dry, salmon-pink and lifeless, and had lost its satellites of Phobos and Deimos that had been made into two of the earliest Habitats. Perhaps those Habitats had also left on an interstellar voyage, but if so, they had left no welcoming artifact for us, no message to tell us where they had gone.