Child of Venus (67 page)

No Habitats remained in that region of the solar system that the Habbers had once claimed as their space. Benzi was deeply shaken by that fact, as were many of the former Habbers among us. Benzi had entertained thoughts similar to my own, that perhaps people who still remembered those he had known and lived among and loved might somehow be alive or that there would be some relics of former comrades— records held by the net, thought patterns, even an intelligence Linked to cyberminds—to which he could return. Now they were gone, all of the people of the Habitats, almost as if they had never existed.

And Venus, I thought: What of Venus? Had my home been abandoned as well? I haunted the bridge with Ragnar and with others from my world as the Seeker swept toward Earth and its Moon; we monitored every bit of data the probes moving toward Venus were gathering. We might have kept such a vigil anywhere inside the Seeker, watching and listening through our Links, but something drove us to wait on the bridge. Maybe we simply needed to be together in what we had come to see as the eyes of the Seeker.

The Parasol was there, still shielding Venus from an excess of sunlight, but several of its fans had been removed. The wings of the Bats remained above the north and south poles, but without the tiers and lattices that had serviced the vehicles that had docked there. Anwara still moved around the planet in its high orbit, but was only a shell of itself, a giant gyroscope of girders and empty docks.

We noted all of that, but it was Venus herself that held our attention, that gave us some hope that our journey, our voyage into the future of the home we had left, had not been in vain. The atmosphere was still thick with clouds giving off the reflected light now shining again from the sun, but they veiled the planet more lightly now, and our probes had glimpsed through them to see what lay below.

Venus: blue and green and alive with life, with the life that had been created by the terraformers.

But there was no sign that any of the descendants of the terraformers were still there. The polar installations that had once extracted excess oxygen were encased in the ice of snowcaps. There were domes on the surface, but no sign of any activity around them. We called out to Venus, but heard no reply.

Had the Cytherians abandoned Venus? Had they followed other interstellar nomads away from this system? We wondered at that, but while we gathered on the bridge yet again, still watching the images of Venus and hoping that our call might be answered, Earth called to us.

At first, our cyberminds could not read the signals clearly or interpret them, except to verify that they were indeed from Earth. Gradually, they were able to piece together portions of a message.

The Earthfolk, their instrumentalities, or their artificial intelligences (the distinctions among them seemed unclear, and perhaps were nonexistent) had observed the Seeker entering this system. They were gratified (surprised? amused?) to discover that we were natives of this system and had left it over a millennium ago, and they had managed to locate an incomplete record (a memory? an account?) of the early plans for our expedition. They were curious about us and requested (insisted? demanded?) that they be allowed to send a few of their number to the Seeker.

“Well?” Benzi said to those of us who were assembled on the bridge. “What shall we do now?”

“We invite them to come here,” I replied, noting from the expressions of those crowded around me that I was speaking for them as well.

“But we don't know their intentions.” That was Suleiman Khan.

Ah Lin glanced at Suleiman. “Do you really think they could be a danger to us?” she asked.

“I don't know,” he said. “All I know is that their message
sounded almost as strange as—”

“We have to let them come here.” My daughter was speaking now, and through my Link I sensed others, the young ones, assenting to her words. “Why wouldn't you want to meet them? Why would you turn them away?” Angharad regarded Suleiman with her characteristic calm and remote gaze. “You're not fearing that they'll harm us. You're afraid to see what they might have become. Or maybe you're worrying about letting them see what we are.”

Suleiman looked away from her. “Perhaps.”

The Seeker's scanning of Earthspace had revealed that the only artifacts in orbits around humankind's home planet were seven silvery worldlets. It was from those worldlets that our visitors came, flying out from openings in the silver walls aboard gossamer vessels with solar sails. Mindful that we had been separated from this branch of our kind for over twelve centuries and that we might inadvertently prove vulnerable to either naturally evolving or genetically engineered microbes carried by the Earthfolk, we were careful to scan the first of our visitors thoroughly before allowing them to leave the bays in which they had docked their fragile-looking spacecraft. But we had nothing to fear from them; perhaps they had foreseen such a possibility and had taken preventive measures of their own.

Physically, they were almost indistinguishable from us, but my Link informed me that they seemed far more tightly wedded to their cyberminds than we were to ours. Listening in on what little they cared to say—on what little our net of minds could understand—I could not tell if they were artificial intelligences wearing human bodies or human minds that often lived as easily in the connections of their cybemets as they did in their old physical forms. Perhaps they were both—or something else altogether.

They came to the Seeker in small groups, explored our rooms and hallways and the landscapes of our Heart, sat and listened to us as we spoke, repeated a few words of our various languages, and then left us. We grew more accustomed to their presence, but were never able to Link with them, to glimpse even a sign of their inner thoughts and feelings, and our cyberminds sensed a similar resistance to their efforts at communicating with Earth's artificial intelligences. Only when the Earthfolk were in the company of the youngest of our children, who soon took to following them everywhere, did I glimpse even a trace of a warmer expression in their faces, an upward curve of the lips that might have been a smile.

They came to us, but we did not go to them. We had seen evidence of their communities on Earth, communities that lived inside vast force fields or in areas that had apparently reverted to wilderness. We had learned that others, those who had come to us, lived inside their silvery worldlets. We did not know if these different communities were entirely separate or if those living in them exchanged places from time to time.

“We can be sure of one thing,” I said to Angharad. “Earth didn't destroy itself during the time of changes. We aren't the last remnant of a destructive and suicidal species.”

“But we don't know that for certain,” my daughter replied in that calm fashion of hers that was beginning to remind me of the manner of our visitors. “These people might be descended from survivors of a catastrophe we can't imagine, which could explain why they had only a partial record of this expedition. The others who left this system might have felt that nothing remained for them here.”

“How depressing,” I said, foolishly.

Angharad shook her head at me. “It is their history, Ma-hala, not ours. We still have our own history to make.”

The Earthfolk came among us, and then they seemed to lose interest in the Seeker, and soon we knew, through our cyberminds and our Links, that they would come among us no more and would also not welcome us as visitors to Earth. They did not want to interfere with us, to impose their technology and their culture and their ways on an earlier variant of their species. They wanted to leave us free.

That was what we were able to glean from them, but I found myself thinking of my farewell to Balin so long ago, when he had told me of the Habbers who had retreated into dreams and simulations. Perhaps these Earthfolk had a similar weakness they sought to hide. I would probably never know, one way or another.

We knew, as we said our farewells to Earth, where we would have to go: to Venus.

Venus was alive, and yet there were no people there, and also no cyberminds holding any record of what the Cytherians had become.

Had they abandoned the metamorphosis of that planet to return to Earth, to rejoin that branch of our kind? Or had they followed the Habbers into space? I preferred to believe the latter, perhaps because I felt some contentment at imagining the descendants of Solveig and Chike and the others I had loved moving out across the universe on their relativistic paths, remembering their forebears and their earlier lives on Venus.

The Seeker became a satellite of Venus, falling into an orbit that took us out past the remaining fans of the Parasol and then to within one thousand kilometers of what remained of the abandoned space station of Anwara. The Lakshmi Plateau, flanked by the Maxwell Mountains to the south and the Freyja Mountains to the north, was now the high green steppe of a continent; another continent made from the landmass of Aphrodite Terra, a scorpion with a long tail that curved east, lay along the equator. Islands, large ones and small, dotted the oceans.

An analysis of the atmosphere revealed that it was breathable, but with a lower percentage of oxygen than the atmosphere of Earth. We would have to bring oxygen with us and wear protective suits, but could walk on the surface and breathe the air.

We could make a life for ourselves there.

A few among my companions traveled to Anwara in torchships, ostensibly to correct its decaying orbit and to see what could be salvaged there, but I suspected that several of them also wanted to postpone any journey to the surface of Venus. Many of my comrades lacked a deep emotional bond with this world, while others feared leaving an environment that had become so familiar to them. I supposed that many of them would eventually choose to continue their lives inside the Seeker, remaining near Venus without fully committing their lives to that planet.

From what some who sought me out as an adviser had confided, I also knew that there were people who were thinking of constructing another Seeker and following the stream of humankind to the stars. Already I was wondering if Angharad, and indeed most of our children, would eventually be among them, if she might in the future say her farewells to me as I had said mine to my grandmother Risa.

We would not be able to land our shuttlecraft on the Platform that had functioned as the port of the Islands, for the Islands no longer floated in the upper atmosphere. As had been planned for the later stages of the Project, they had dropped slowly down through the atmosphere and now rested on the surface. Our scans had revealed what remained of them; seven domed areas dotted the equatorial continent that had been formed from Aphrodite Terra, and another dome sat on the slope of a volcano we had known as Rhea in Beta Regio, now an island that resembled the isle of Hawaii on Earth. The other Islands, including the Platform, were submerged in the shallow Cytherian oceans. That to me suggested that the Islands had been abandoned before the final stages of their descent, and perhaps long before that.

There were also domes in the mountain ranges of Ishtar Terra, in the same locations where the settlements I remembered had been.

“We'll have to go down there,” Angharad told me, “to find out anything more.” I was about to give her some excuse, another reason for waiting, then realized that I was finding my own ways of postponing my return.

“Yes,” I told her, “I know.” I looked at her and saw her watching me with what might have been either compassion or pity. She had become a woman, not much younger than I had been when I decided to become a spacefarer, and it seemed to me that she had grown up too quickly, that she had been a child only a little while ago, and then I understood what she had just said to me.

“You'll come with me?” I asked.

She smiled. “Of course.”

Even the largest of our shuttlecraft had room for only fifty passengers, and most of the craft were smaller than that. This was just as well, since those of us who wanted to explore the surface had chosen to go there in small groups. I preferred to view what had become of my world only in the company of close companions who also remembered what it had been— and with my daughter.

Benzi came with us, to monitor the cyberpilot and perhaps to pretend that he was a pilot again. Angharad was with me, and Ragnar, along with Ah Lin and Tomas and their son Jori, who wore the same compassionate—or pitying—look on his face as did my daughter. Our Links were silent, our channels dosed; we did not speak as we dropped through the thick dark clouds. Ishtar Terra was still hidden by night, and for an instant I felt that I was looking into the past, at the Venus that had been completely shadowed by the Parasol, and then I found myself listening to the silence outside our vessel. The fierce winds that had once swept around Venus had finally died.

A red glow on the black surface below us grew into a bright red spot; a volcano was erupting. We swept toward the high shelf of Ishtar and the Maxwell Mountains and dropped toward the northern part of the massif, toward the domes that had once been Oberg.

The shuttlecraft landed next to the square structure that had once been a digger and crawler bay. That installation still jutted out from the much larger walls of the airship bay. The entrance to the crawler bay was open, as our instruments had confirmed before landing; all of us were in the thin silvery skins of our protective suits and wearing filters to shield us against any infectious microbes, prepared to leave our craft, and still we sat in our seats, waiting. I was suddenly afraid to go into that place, into my earliest memories.

“Mahala.” That was Angharad's voice. She stood up, then held out her hand. “Mother, come with me.”

I followed her out of the craft and down the short ramp. Through my nose filters, an odor came to me, a smell of moss and mud and an acrid smell I could not recognize, and then I thought with wonder: I am breathing the air of Venus.