Child of Venus (68 page)

A cool breeze caressed my face; I shivered. On the ground, traces of frost were visible; snow might come to these mountains in time. I looked west, away from the darkened dome behind me, and in that moment saw light in the gray western sky; the sun was rising. The others stood with me, watching as

Sol slowly rose above the seemingly endless plateau far below us, lighting up the grassy plain. Dawn had come to Venus, and I wondered if others had stood here to view that dawn before departing from this world or if we were the first people to see the morning sun come to Ishtar. We continued to gaze in the direction of the sun until a shadow passed across the bright disk, an eclipse produced by a fan of the Parasol.

My arm was clutched more tightly. “Mahala,” Angharad said; she sounded afraid, and I remembered that she had never set foot on a planet before. “Let's go inside.”

I slipped my oxygen mask over my nose and mouth; Angharad did the same. Benzi and Tomas were already walking through the open entrance of the bay. The rest of us hurried after them, moving through the empty bay quickly. A wall was ahead of us, barely visible in the dim light that was the bay's only illumination. Tomas halted and felt along the wall until he found a sensor, and then the wall rose, revealing another open space.

We entered the airship bay, empty now except for its cradles. The flat roof high overhead was closed to the outside, but the entrance to Oberg was open. I held my breath, almost expecting to hear a voice inviting us to come inside, and then the region beyond the entrance grew light. The eclipse of the sun had passed; we could now see inside the dome.

We came through the entrance and into a barren landscape, a region of black rock and lifeless brown land. No buildings remained, no glassy greenhouses, no pilots' dormitory, not even the walls of the mosque; they had taken everything with them. There would have been ruins if they had died here, the walls of houses and the rubble of complexes, the detritus of their lives. But they had left nothing behind them, which meant that they had planned their departure, and, being the practical people most Cytherians were, had taken every useful resource of Oberg's with them.

I looked up at the protective dome, now translucent except for a wide black disk in the center where its panels of light had once glowed, and then began to walk east, away from the entrance. Ah Lin trailed after me, along with my daughter.

“I know where you're going,” Ah Lin said as she caught up to me. “You're looking for the memorials.”

“Memorials?” Angharad asked.

“The memorial pillars, to commemorate the dead,” Ah Lin replied, but I could already see that even those pillars were not here. Had the Cytherians, wherever they had gone, wanted to keep that monument to those who had died in making this world, in order to remember them? Or had they become a people less conscious of death, who might have removed the memorial pillars for some other reason? I would probably never know, but felt easier inside myself, relieved that the pillars had not been left here for us to find, that I would not have to search them and possibly find on them the images of Risa and Sef.

Only one pillar was left. I went to it, wishing suddenly and absurdly that I had brought flowers with me from the Seeker's Heart to set at its base. I stopped at the pillar and looked up at the faces of Iris Angharads and Amir Azad. Maybe the last people to leave Oberg had known that we would come back here; maybe they had remembered enough about my great-grandmother and the man who had died with her to know that their memorial should remain on this world.

Angharad came to my side. “We shouldn't leave it here,” she said. “It should stand in a garden on Venus someday, not in this empty place.” Her words wanned me; she was speaking as if she intended to stay on this world. She had seen the memorial before, in the historical records of the Seeker, but she reached for my hand and held it as she read the words on the inscription.” ‘In honor of Iris Angharads and Amir Azad, the first true Cytherians, who gave their lives to save our new world. They shall not be forgotten. May their spirit live on in all those who follow them. They rest forever on the world they helped to build.'”

“That's all that's left of our people here,” Ah Lin murmured, “that monument.”

“No,” I replied, “there is Venus.”

All of Oberg was dead and empty; a brief exploration of the nearby domes of al-Khwarizmi revealed only another abandoned settlement. We passed the night sleeping in our craft and then flew north to the Freyja Mountains in the morning. Others from the Seeker were already inside Turing and had found another barren environment, with only a rock-filled hollow where the lake near Dyami's house had once been. Even the pillar that my uncle had designed, to commemorate those who had suffered before the Cytherian Revolt, was gone. Had that monument been taken away so that the past would not be forgotten? Or had people who remembered Dyami wanted to keep his most ambitious and accomplished piece of work with them?

There was nothing in Turing for us, nothing inside any of the domes where our people had once lived. The life of Venus was outside those domes now, growing and evolving, a living Cytherian biosphere. Like the pyramids of ancient Earth, once meant to be gateways to another life, the domes of Venus had fulfilled their purpose.

We flew south, over the green plateau of Lakshmi and the sheer cliffsides of the Himalayan Maxwell massif, then over another green plain, and found ourselves above the greenish-blue expanse of a Venusian ocean. Soon we were passing over Venus's other great continent, the equatorial landmass formed from Aphrodite Terra. The jumbled ridges of the west had sprouted trees with wide fronds; a jungle of green plants and colorful flowers had come to Aphrodite. On the plateaus we had known as Ovda and Thetis, the land resembled large flat tiles of green, and I spied a moss-covered slope that might once have been an Island dome. Our craft dropped down as we soared over the chasm of Diana, a deep scar on the land over three kilometers deep with a great river running through it; we followed that crevasse east to a region marked by recent lava flows and dominated by the giant shield volcano of Maat Mons. The temperature, according to our instruments, was much warmer here than in the highlands of Ishtar, as warm as the tropical areas of Earth.

This continent, with its rugged and widely varying terrain, would be hard to settle. I supposed that we would come to live on Ishtar first, as had the first settlers here, before exploring Aphrodite.

As our craft lifted, I caught a glimpse of a large tawny-furred animal slinking under a leaf that resembled a fern and then saw a tiny winged creature land on a leafy tree limb. I thought of the birds and cats and small apes and other animals that had once lived on the Islands and wondered if I had seen their descendants, or if these were life-forms made for and adapted to this planet. Had they been left here to evolve without interference, or put here as companions for any future human settlers? That was yet another question that might never be answered.

We flew north once more, toward Ishtar, and landed southwest of the Maxwell Mountains, on another green plain that stretched toward the greenish-blue sea. The mountain ridge loomed in the northeast, the rocky cliffsides so steep that they might have been part of a wall.

Another shuttlecraft was on the plain, near a gentle slope that led down to the sea; that craft sat on its runners atop the flat surface of a faceted white boulder that glittered like a diamond. Carbon oxides, I thought, some of the residue of terraforming; more of the giant gems jutted from the land along the shore. Five figures in silver suits stood next to the diamond boulder. One of them turned, saw us, and lifted a hand.

I recognized the black mustache of Suleiman Khan and waved to him. He waved back and quickly began to climb toward us. “We've picked up some readings from the ocean,” he said as he came to my side. “There's life there, Mahala, some algae, something very like plankton, a few creatures that resemble large hydras, even a few relatives of crustaceans.”

“Nothing on the land here, though,” another man's voice said, “except of course the grasses and mosses. There's nothing that resembles animal life.”

“Maybe not here,” Ragnar said, “but we still have some exploration to do. We saw signs of animal life on Aphrodite Terra, and I suspect we'll find something here.”

“Yes,” Suleiman said, “God willing, perhaps we will. I didn't
think this would actually happen, that we would stand here and breathe the air of Venus. I did not
think—” He paused. “I have come home at last.” He looked happy in his tears.

Angharad stood with Jori, looking out at the sea as the wind rose. It wrinkled the vast blue-green ocean, making whitecaps on the water. The gray clouds were growing thicker again; soon the sun was hidden behind them.

“A storm is coming,” Benzi said. Ah Lin and Tomas had already retreated inside our craft. “We should leave.”

“We'll come back.” I gazed at my daughter and Jori, thinking of the life they might make for themselves here. We would have to plan environments in which to house ourselves, tend this biosphere, see that Venus never reverted to the hot and hellish and poisonous world it had once been.

I must have smiled then. “Mahala, what are you thinking about?” Ragnar asked.

I was thinking: All of the efforts of the Project, all of the paths we had taken in our lives, the long voyage of the Seeker—all of it had been to bring us back here, to ensure that this small human strain would survive on the world that so many of our ancestors had labored to create. My bond with Iris and Risa and all of those who had come before me had been strengthened and renewed. The instincts that had given me my daughter, that had given me that genetic tie to the past, had also given birth to this world.

The wind rose over the gray ocean, then died as the dark clouds fled from the sun. The storm would not come right away, not yet. I slipped my hand into Ragnar's and went with him to stand next to Angharad. We watched the sea become blue-green again, in the light of the sun glistening and dancing on the waves.

 

About the Author

Pamela Sargent sold her first published story during her senior year in college at the
State University of New York at Bing-hamton, where she earned a B.A. and M.A. in philosophy and also
studied ancient history and Greek. She is the author of several highly praised novels, among them
Cloned Lives
(1976),
The Sudden Star
(1979),
The Golden Space
(1982),
The
Alien Upstairs
(1983), and
Alien Child
(1988). Her novel
Venus of Dreams
(1986)
was selected by The Easton Press for its “Masterpieces of Science Fiction” series;
Gregory Benford described it as “a sensitive portrait of people caught up in a vast project.
It tells us much about how people react to technology's relentless hand, and does so deftly. A
new high point in humanistic science fiction.”
Venus of Shadows
(1988), the sequel, was
called “a masterly piece of world-building” by James Morrow and “alive with
humanity, moving, and memorable” by
Locus. The Shore of Women
(1986), one of
Sargent's best-known books, was praised as “a compelling and emotionally involving
novel” by Publishers Weekly, Gerald Jonas of the
New York Times
said: “I applaud
Ms. Sargent's ambition and admire the way she has unflinchingly pursued the logic of her
vision.” The
Washington Post Book World
has called her “one of the genre's
best writers.”

Sargent is also the author of
Earthseed
(1983), chosen as a Best Book for Young Adults by the American Library Association, and two collections of short fiction,
Starshadows
(1977) and
The Best of Pamela Sargent
(1987). Her novels
Watchstar
(1980),
Eye of the Comet
(1984), and
Homesmind
(1984) comprise a trilogy. She has won the Nebula Award, the Locus Award, and has been a finalist for the Hugo Award. Her work has been translated into French, German, Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Swedish, Japanese, Chinese, Russian, Polish, and Serbo-Croatian.

Ruler of the Sky
(1993), Sargent's epic historical novel about Genghis
Khan, published in the United States by Crown Publishers and in Britain by Chatto 8c Windus, tells
the Mongol conqueror's story largely from the points-of-view of women. Gary Jennings,
bestselling author of the historical novels
Aztec
and
The Journeyer
, said about
Ruler of the Sky
. “This formidably researched and exquisitely written novel is surely
destined to be known hereafter as
the
definitive history of the life and times and conquests
of Genghis, mightiest of Khans.” Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, author of
Reindeer Moon
and
The Hidden Life of Dogs
, commented: “Scholarly without ever seeming pedantic, the book
is fascinating from cover to cover and does admirable justice to a man who might very well be called
history's single most important character.”

Sargent is also an editor and anthologist. In the 1970s, she edited the
Women of
Wonder
series, the first collections of science fiction by women; her other anthologies include
Bio-Futures
and, with British writer Ian Watson as co-editor,
Afterlives.
Two
anthologies,
Women of Wonder, The Classic Years: Science Fiction by Women from the 1940s to the
1970s
, and
Women of Wonder, The Contemporary Years: Science Fiction by Women from the 1970s
to the 1990s
, were published by Harcourt Brace & Company/Harvest Books in 1995;
Publishers Weekly
called these two books “essential reading for any serious sf
fan.” With artist Ron Miller, she collaborated on
Firebrands: The Heroines of Science
Fiction and Fantasy
(1998), published by Thunder's Mouth Press in the U.S. and Collins
& Brown/Paper Tiger in the U.K.