by Paul Preuss
A big black African approached and offered to sell him a wind-up plastic ornithopter.
A row of men in their twenties, bearded, their brown faces splotched with broken red blisters, sat on the sidewalk and rested against the fence of the Luxembourg gardens. They didn’t offer him anything or ask him for anything.
Blake reached Montparnasse. On the horizon, above the centuries-old roofs of the city, rose a ring of high-rises which enclosed central Paris like a palisade. The wall of cement and glass cut off what breeze there was, trapping fetid summer air in the basin of the Seine. Around him the eternal traffic of Paris swirled, quieter and less smoky now that all the scooters and cars were electric, but as breakneck and aggressive as ever; there was a constant hiss of tires, accompanied by the jackass whinny and neigh of horns as drivers tried to shove each other out of the way and cut each other off by sound and fury alone. Paris, City of Light.
Blake turned back along the same route. This time the African didn’t try to sell him an ornithopter. Shirley Temple was opening a new show, farther down the boulevard. The apple-doll woman came at him again, her memory a blank. “Do you speak English? Do you speak Dutch?”
Blake knew what he had to do next—he had to find a way to join the Free Spirit. Although the Tappers knew Blake Redfield all too well, other arms of the international cult fished in other waters; the homeless youth of Europe were a deep reservoir of malleable souls. After three days in Paris he had no doubt that Editions Lequeu and the Athanasian Society were the same organization. The Athanasians might find a derelict with a fascination for things Egyptian an especially attractive catch.
Before Blake could act on his plan, though, he had to return to London on unfinished business…
Almost two years had past since Blake saw Ellen Troy in the Grand Central Conservatory. At a Sotheby’s auction, Blake had agreed to represent a Port Hesperus buyer in what turned out to be a successful bid to acquire a valuable first edition of The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, by T. E. Lawrence. Then, while transporting the book to Port Hesperus, the freighter Star Queen had had a fatal mishap.*
When Blake learned who had been assigned to investigate the incident, he immediately booked passage on a liner to Venus—ostensibly to see to the safety of his client’s property, but actually to confront the Space Board inspector who was handling the Star Queen case, Ellen Troy herself. This time Blake made it impossible for her avoid him.
Thus it was on Port Hesperus, in that transformer room in the central spindle of the garden sphere, that Blake for the first time was able to share with his old schoolmate Linda the startling knowledge he’d gained. “The more I study this subject, the more connections I find, and the farther back they reach,” Blake told her. “In the 13th century they were known as adepts of the Free Spirit, the prophetae—but whatever name they’ve used, they’ve never been eradicated. Their goal has always been godhood. Perfection in this life. Superman.”
But when Sparta asked him why they’d tried to kill her, Blake could only surmise that she had learned more than she was supposed to. “I think you learned that SPARTA was more than your father and mother claimed…”
“My parents were psychologists, scientists,” she’d protested.
“There has always been a dark side and a light side, a black side and a white side,” he’d replied.
When Blake was forced to leave Sparta on Port Hesperus to return to Earth, he went with renewed determination to infiltrate the “dark side” of the Free Spirit as soon as possible…
That was four months ago. Sparta had not heard from him since—until she received that brief, enigmatic message at a moment when she was much too busy to deal with it.
* The Star Queen incident is related in Arthur C. Clarke’s Venus Prime, Volume 1: Breaking Strain.
3
The shell that contained her split open. She stumbled forward on six shaky legs, into a wall of stone.
Her hind legs supported her while she stretched her barbed forelegs to grasp the top of the ledge. The soft stone crumbled in her pincer grip. Momentarily scrabbling for purchase, she hefted herself upward, her wobbly joints creaking. She paused to spread her wings, to peer around and taste the air with waving antennas. It carried a tang of rotten eggs. Bracing.
The atmosphere was like thick glass, clear, suffused with red light. She swung her armored head from side to side, but she couldn’t see far; the horizon vanished in the scattered light. Her antennas dipped, and she picked up sensations of the terrain in front of her. Somewhere ahead, these other senses informed her, great cliffs rose into the glowing sky.
Her titanium claws rested lightly on the crusted ground, its baked surface cool to her touch. Liquid lithium pulsed through her vitals and flowed through the veins of her delicate molybdenum-doped stainless-steel wings, carrying away her body heat as gently as mild perspiration in an April breeze. She had stepped dewily from her chrysalis into the morning of a long Venusian day.
Spindly legs, antennas, and radiant wings notwithstanding, she was not a sixteen-tonne metal insect, she was a woman.
“Azure Dragon, do you read me?”
There was a half-second delay in the link while the signal was relayed to Port Hesperus and back. “Go ahead, Inspector.”
“I’m moving toward the site now.”
“We have you,” said the voice of Azure Dragon’s shuttle controller. “Your shuttle came down ninety meters west of the targeted landing site. Sorry about that. Bear four degrees right of your present heading and continue for approximately three point five kilometers until you reach the base of the cliffs.”
“All right. Any change in their situation?”
“Nothing since the oh-five-hundred signal—from either the rover or the HDVM. We have additional HDVMs on the way from Dragon Base, ETA about forty minutes.”
“I’ll check in when I make contact. Over for now.”
It had been almost two hours since the last signal from the grounded expedition. Twenty-four hours ago they had landed at Dragon Base and made their way to their goal in a rover like Sparta’s. Soon they had made the first of what promised to be many triumphant discoveries. Now triumph was forgotten. The challenge was to bring them out alive.
Sparta picked her way carefully along a shallow channel. Long ago this plain had glistened with a film of water; over it, almost imperceptible tides had gently advanced and receded. Now it was a sheet of orange sandstone, its surface furry with corrosion. She thought it a curious sensation to put her feet through the rotted rind of the rock, kicking up lazy clouds of dust as she moved ahead.
Nothing apparent came between Sparta’s natural senses and the world through which she moved. The eyes of the seven-meter-long rover were her eyes—or might as well have been—peering directly into the dense Venusian atmosphere through diamond lenses that took in a 360-degree field of view. Its six jointed legs and claws were hers—even the two that grew out of her midsection—and its stainless steel skin and titanium skeleton were hers. The nuclear reactor—quite realistically palpable in Sparta’s abdomen—generated the warmth of a good turkey dinner.
The real woman, small and thin-boned, her muscles those of a dancer, sat forward in the vehicle inside a double sphere of titanium aluminide, a sort of diving bell with one overhead hatch and no windows. But the computer-generated Artificial Reality in which she was immersed persuaded her that she was a naked creature, to this planet born. To move, she willed herself to move. Inside her opaque helmet, laser beams tracked her eye movements. Microscopic strain gauges embedded in the skintight control suit monitored and magnified her body’s motions. Surround-sound, retinal projection, and the suit’s orthotactic fabric—200 pressure transducers, a hundred heat-exchange elements, a thousand chemical synapses per square centimeter—fed back a vivid sense of the world outside.
Inevitably, something was lost in the translation. For the fragile human female inside the bell, the outside temperature—almost 750 degrees Kelvin, sufficient to soften type me
tal—was scaled down to that of a balmy morning. The air outside was almost pure carbon dioxide, laced with a few rare gases, but inside the bell she breathed a familiar oxygen-nitrogen mix. The outside pressure—ninety Earth atmospheres, enough to crush a submarine—was rendered neutral. Even the light-bending distortion of the thick atmosphere had been corrected, so that her human visual cortex registered a familiar flat world instead of a bowl-shaped one. But its horizon was only a few hundred meters away; if it had not been for her vehicle’s radar and sonar, Sparta would have been traveling blind.
In twenty minutes she would reach her destination, where the billion-year-old beach ended against the cliffs, and the mouth of an ancient canyon debouched upon the vanished sea. Inside the canyon she would learn if the men in Rover One were dead or alive…
Venus is an astonishingly round and rocky planet. A sphere almost the size of Earth, its retrograde rotation is a slow 240 Earth days; it shows no noticeable bulge at its equator. Unlike Earth, with its half-dozen floating continents, its cloud-piercing Andes and Himalayas, its mid-ocean ridges and abyssal trenches, most of Venus is as hard and smooth as a billiard ball—
—with a few prominent exceptions. Ishtar Terra is one. One of the planet’s two “continents,” Ishtar Terra is anchored on its eastern flank by Mount Maxwell, a vast shield volcano higher than Everest. The whole raised mass of land is roughly twice the size of Alaska, and is situated at about the corresponding latitude; its northern and western curves are also belted by mountains, far less spectacular than Maxwell, while most of the continent is taken up by the flat Lakshmi Plateau.
It was toward the steep southern flanks of the Lakshmi Plateau that Sparta now drove her six-legged rover. The farther and faster Sparta moved, the more confident she felt. Her path took her across a series of shallow impact craters, their steep rims long since melted like putty in the heat. The slope continued to rise, punctuated by traces of wave-cut terraces, remnants of the beach that had continually widened as the planet’s shallow ocean had dried under the heat of a runaway atmospheric greenhouse. As Sparta moved up the beach and crawled over the terraces she moved backward in time, to that era when the ocean had been at its greatest extent, covering all of Venus but for the two small continents and a few scattered islands.
A volley of immense explosion rattled the pressure bell, and moments later the ground shook violently, throwing the machine to its knees. Around Sparta the landscape heaved and groaned; rhythmic waves of soil raced past and slowly died away, leaving floating red dust in their wake.
The explosions were thunder arriving swiftly in the highly conductive atmosphere from a corona of lightning bolts that had bloomed about the head of Mount Maxwell, 300 kilometers away and eleven kilometers up in the sky. The simultaneous earthquake came from the bowels of the mountain, continuing the violent eruption which had begun three hours earlier.
“Rover Two, this is Azure Dragon. We show you at the cliffs. The canyon mouth is one-half-kilometer to your right.”
A reddish-black volcanic scarp emerged with startling suddenness out of the bright glow at horizon’s edge. Sparta veered right—
—and felt the first sign of trouble, a dragging reluctance in the second joint of her right front leg. There was no point in stopping. She could keep going on five legs, if she had to. Or on three.
She favored the troubled limb, holding it off the ground, but by the time she reached the canyon mouth five minutes later she knew it was useless—a seal had failed, and the lubrication in the joint had fried. She jettisoned it, leaving it behind like a cast-off stick. She held her surviving foreleg aloft and scurried into the canyon mouth on the remaining four.
Twisting, turning between narrowing walls of rock patinaed with a dark metallic sheen, once a rushing water-course … milleniums of recurring flash floods had carved cinctures into these desert walls, but that was a billion years ago, and the heated rock had sagged like belly fat, obscuring the thin soft layers of chalk and coal that would have shouted “life” to the cameras of any passing probe.
Evidence of past life had eventually emerged anyway, when remote-controlled prospecting robots grazed over the surface of Venus. In the scattered calcium carbonates and shales and coal beds, a dozen fragments, no more, of macroscopic fossils emerged from the stone—a dozen fragments in twenty years of exploration, but those were more than enough to fuel the human imagination. Those bits of intaglio had been reconstructed a hundred ways by sober experts, a thousand ways by less inhibited dreamers. No one really knew what the organisms had looked like or how they had lived, and the prospect of ever finding out seemed dim.
Then, only months ago, a prospecting robot had broken into a cave in the cliffside of this canyon…
Sparta rounded a rocky shoulder and came to a halt, blocked by a fresh fall of boulders from high up the cliff. The pale exposed facets of rock were shockingly bright and crisp against the blackened and corroded cliff.
“Azure Dragon, this is Troy.”
“Come in, Inspector.” Port Hesperus was closer now; the radio delay was hardly more than a hesitant pause.
“The site’s buried by a landslide. Meter-length radar shows the rover and an HDVM underneath. Weak infrared, low reactor flux, they must be in auto-shutdown. Probably crushed their cooling fins. There’s movement in the bell. I’m going to dig them out.”
“Stand by, Inspector.”
With her one good foreleg she began clawing at the rockpile.
“Inspector Troy, our instruments show you have lost the use of your right forelimb. LS controller advises against risking the remaining forelimb. Do you read?”
Another lightning bolt crackled the aether. Moments later the thunderclap shook the rover.
“Rover Two, please acknowledge.”
She heard them loud and clear, as well as they heard her effortless breathing and read her steady biostats. “Let’s both save our breath,” she said.
Her remaining foreleg was efficient at yanking the blocks of basalt and solidified tuff from where they had fallen. Her multiple joint-motors whined ceaselessly, loud in the dense atmosphere. Dust rose in that thick air like swirls of mud. She dug into the slide a couple of meters and then had to back out, taking time to rearrange the debris. The deeper into the mound she went the more she risked being buried herself. On Mercury, on Mars, on Earth’s Moon, on any of the asteroids or outer moons, it would have been different, but Venus was Earth’s sister. A block of basalt on Venus weighed nearly what it would have weighed on Earth.
“Troy, this is Azure Dragon. Dragon Base HDVMs are no more than twenty minutes from your position.” Dragon Base was Azure Dragon’s robotic ore-processing complex and shuttle station on the heights of the Lakshmi Plateau. “Back off, will you? Let the robots do the heavy work.”
“Good thought,” she said. “I’ll just keep at it until they get here.”
“Inspector Troy…” the controller began. He gave up.
Sparta began to sweat. It seemed natural that with all this effort she would work up a sweat. Except that she was only providing the will, she wasn’t doing the work. Why was the air getting hot? Was something wrong with the AR suit’s heat exchangers? She flicked the helmet to internal display … no evident problem. Unless there was something wrong with the internal cooling system of the rover itself.
This machine, along with its twin, had been built for the first manned exploration of Venus a quarter of a century ago. Both of the giant steel bugs had landed successfully on the planet in tubby shuttles, and both had been retrieved. But when they were opened the occupants of one of them—this one—had been found baked alive.
That lesson sank in: remote-controlled robots had taken over the exploration and exploitation of Venus. This was the first mission in two decades that had warranted a human presence on the surface. Most of the past three months had been spent overhauling and refurbishing the two rovers and outfitting a shuttle to accommodate humans.
All known problems had been corre
cted. Which left only Murphy’s Law.
Her titanium arm pulled loose another boulder and on the next stroke hooked into Rover One’s aft port strut. The rock fall had crushed the bug’s hind legs as well as its wings. The men inside were alive by courtesy of a superconducting refrigerating system that kept liquid metal coursing through the white-hot coils belting the pressure sphere.
Cautiously, as quickly as she could, she removed the overlying rubble from the front of the rover, exposing one side of the pressure bell’s shining sphere. The refrigerator coils were still functioning, but the rover’s antennas had been sheered by falling rock. Sparta fixed acoustic couplers to the outside of the bell to establish communication.
The visual scene changed as sharply as a cut in a holo viddie. Rover One’s pressure bell was suddenly sheared open, as if she were peering directly into it from where she sat. There were three men inside the bell: the pilot, hunched forward and completely sheathed in a shiny black AR suit and helmet like her own, and two men in overalls behind him. They were obviously cramped, but they all appeared healthy.
“Ohayo gozaimas’, Yoshi. Dewa ojama itashimasu.”
The pilot chuckled. “Don’t mention it, Ellen. Drop in any old time.” Because he was wearing the AR helmet he was the only one of the three who could see her, but all of them could hear her through the acoustic links.
“You’re here at last,” said the shorter of the two passengers, peering peevishly in Sparta’s direction. He was a tiny bright-eyed fellow in his mid-fifties, a banty rooster caught in a crowded cage—Professor J. Q. R. Forster. A believer in natural authority, he did not hesitate to speak for the three of them. “It’s vital we communicate our records to Port Hesperus without further delay.”
Sorry I’m late, Sparta thought, but she said, “Sorry your work was interrupted, Professor.” To the pilot Sparta said, “Your frame is crushed aft of the bell, Yoshi. To get you out of there we’re going to have to drag you back to the shuttle. We’d better sit tight and wait for the HDVMs.”