Arthur C Clarke's Venus Prime Omnibus

by Paul Preuss

  The far walls of the enormous room were obscured in mist; its pillars and terraces were opulently paved with blue and gold mosaics. Bare male and female bodies splashed in the chemical-blue water; their voices echoed from the hard walls. Sparta paced the poolside, peering into the mist. The blue-gold light was diffuse, coming out of the fog from everywhere at once, and her enhanced vision was useless.

  She heard wet barefoot footsteps behind her and turned to find a lifeguard, dressed only in a white towel cinched around his muscular waist. “Can’t be in here like that, Inspector. Dressing room’s back and to your right.”

  “Would you find Commander…”

  “We don’t page people,” he said, cutting her off. “Outside.”

  The big locker room was full of athletic men and women changing in and out of their clothes, using their lunch hour for exercise instead of food. Sparta found an unoccupied locker. Her dress uniform had already melted in the steam, surrendering its every carefully arranged crease. She stripped, hung up her clothes, and reprogrammed the locker’s lock.

  Back at the pool, she dove into the water, as bare as the rest of the lunch-hour crew but aware of herself as they were not, even though she knew her body’s strangeness was not visible on its surface. She paddled slowly through the fog, keeping her nose a millimeter or two above water, searching for the commander. She moved the entire length of the Olympic pool in the slow lane, not exerting herself beyond a lazy dog paddle. As she neared the far end, she saw his blue eyes glint in the mist. His hands were clasped behind his head; his elbows were hooked on the ledge at waterline to keep him from sinking.

  She swam within a meter of him, then back-paddled. “Commander.”

  “Troy. Took your time.” His Canadian-accented voice was so hoarse it was almost a whisper, and his lean face was creased beyond his years. His skin was two-tone, burned mahogany at the wrists and from the neck up, a ruddy tan everywhere else she could see, even underwater. He’d been using the ultraviolet lamps in an attempt to even out his color, but it was hard to disguise that deep-space burn.

  “What am I going to do with you, Troy?”

  Uh, oh, she thought, that sounds like it’s back to Newark after all. “That’s what I’m here to find out, sir.”

  “You’re not playing straight with me.”

  “Sir?”

  “Think I kept you on Port Hesperus just to babysit a couple of archaeologists?”

  “No, because the Space Board office was understaffed.”

  “Surprised you bought that phony excuse.”

  Sparta paddled to the wall and hooked an elbow on the ledge. “It seems that you’re not playing straight with me either, sir.”

  “I sent you to Port Hesperus to look into the Star Queen incident. By the time you got through we had a couple of extra bodies, a wrecked ship, a hole in the station, and one of our own people turned into a human vegetable. After all the ruckus, I thought it was time I did a little investigation of my own. Without you around to edit the files for me.” He looked at her sidelong. “One of your many peculiar talents.”

  She said nothing. To deny that she had frequently rewritten her own biography, keeping one step ahead of security checks and other inquiries, would be foolish.

  The commander ran his hand through a brush of gray hair; each upright hair gleamed with a bead of condensed moisture. “So I interviewed your old bosses, your old teachers at business school, high school. None of them recognized your holo.”

  “I wasn’t a memorable student.”

  “Although some of them recovered their memories when I showed them your transcripts. Or claimed they did. Then I tried your family.”

  “They’re dead.”

  “Yes, that’s what the death certificates say. I went to that funeral home out on Long Island. Nobody could really remember, but sure enough, they had records too. And the urns are in the niche.”

  “Cremations are routine, I believe.” Sparta was staring at the water. Her memories were different than she pretended, but not very different: her parents really had been cremated, in a manner of speaking, if what she’d been told was the truth.

  “I had a chemical analysis done on the ashes,” the commander said. “Some people would apologize for that, but I think you understand why I had to do it.”

  “I could say I understand,” she said, “or I could say it makes me ill.” But not, she thought, as sick as it made me to acquire those authentic human ashes. “You did all this investigation personally?”

  “That’s right. Got me out of the office for hours at a time.”

  “May I see your results?”

  “Would it stop you if I said no?” His seamed face twisted in a predatory smile. “As a matter of fact you won’t have access to my results, because they’re not in the system. They’re in here.” He tapped his skull.

  Neither of them said anything for half a minute. They both seemed intent on the plash and ripple of the pool, the grunts and splashes of the lap swimmers passing in adjacent lanes.

  “Ever hear of the SPARTA project?” he asked.

  “Yes, I’ve heard of it,” Sparta said, “I read some things about it a few years ago, when I was in I.P. branch.”

  “What’s your understanding of SPARTA?”

  “Well, it stands for SPecified Aptitude Resource Training and Assessment. It was an educational program that was supposed to develop multiple intelligences—languages, math, music, social skills, so on. On Port Hesperus I met a guy who was actually in the project himself—”

  “Blake Redfield.”

  “That’s right.”

  “The expert on old books.”

  “That’s right.”

  “You’d never met Blake Redfield before?”

  Sparta expelled her breath, making the water ripple under her nose. “I have a good memory, Commander—”

  “An extraordinary memory,” he said.

  “—and yes, when I saw him on Port Hesperus, I knew I’d seen him before. Two years ago he tried to pick me up on a street corner, here in Manhattan. He followed me for a couple of blocks. I lost him.”

  “What happened to SPARTA?”

  “I heard it went out of business. The people who ran it died in a chopper crash.”

  “About the same time as Mr. and Mrs. Troy of West Quogue, New York, died in a car crash.”

  “I don’t give much thought to meaningless coincidences,” she said. “Why did you really bring me down here, sir?”

  “I wanted to see if you were a real woman. You look like one, anyway.” He appeared to be studying his toes, a meter and a half under the water. “Okay, here’s what I want you to do. I want you to get a physical from the clinic here. I’ve set it up already—results for my eyes only. Then I want you to take some time off. R & R. Go anywhere you want. I’ll reach you when I need you.”

  “Anywhere?”

  “On Earth, I mean.”

  “Thanks. On my salary, I’ll tour lower Manhattan.”

  “Expenses paid—within reason. Save your receipts.”

  “I’ll have a ball.”

  “I thought maybe you’d like to check in with Blake Redfield in London.”

  “Why would I want to do that?” She stared at him with the blankest expression she could muster.

  Sapphire blue eyes set in a weathered mahogany face stared back at her. “Because I think you like the guy, that’s why.” He drew up his knees and pushed his feet against the wall of the pool, launching himself outward, plowing the water in a fast, inelegant Australian crawl.

  She watched him disappear in the mist. What was he up to, with his private investigations, with all those disingenuous questions about SPARTA, about Blake?

  She resists our authority

  William, she’s a child

  He could be one of them. He could have set her up for the Star Queen investigation—a setup it certainly had been. But if he knew who she was, why warn her? Why have her tested? If he knew who she was, he knew everything
.

  So he wasn’t one of them—but maybe he was onto them. He could suspect that she was one of them. Or that Blake was. Or he could be merely curious.

  Sparta was an anomaly, no doubt of that, despite her intention to maintain a low profile. Whatever was on the commander’s mind, she had no doubt that she would be followed wherever she went on her “R & R.”

  Half an hour later she presented herself at the clinic on the thirty-fifth floor. What the commander was looking for, she didn’t know; she herself didn’t know everything she might have to hide. But she’d gotten used to medical examinations.

  Clinics were friendlier than they had been once, a bit more civilized. You checked in at the little window and took a seat in the waiting room and skimmed the latest Smithsonian on the tabletop videoplate. When they called your name, you spent twenty minutes walking from one room to another, never taking your clothes off, never getting stuck with a needle, and then you were through. The data they got painlessly, had it been a century earlier, would have needed a week of insult and embarrassment at the Harvard Medical School.

  Technicians still collected various bodily fluids for analysis, but most tests, and most treatments, involved no big machines, no nauseating drugs, no painful injections or traumatic incisions. Diagnostic gadgets that had weighed tons when they were invented were now hardly bigger than a dentist’s chair, thanks to room-temperature superconductors and high-field-density magnets. Thanks to miniaturized supercomputers, they were also highly accurate.

  In one room a magnetic imager made a couple of passes at your body showing your anatomical structures in detail and revealing your internal chemistries as well. In another room a nurse handed you a tasty radio-opaque cocktail; it entered your bloodstream in seconds and displayed the fine structure of your circulatory system—everywhere, even in the brain—to stimulated X-ray beams from a radiation-pipe the technician played over you. In a third room you were served another cocktail; the kicker in it was a mix of isotopes hooked to tailored enzymes that, once they got into you, swarmed to outline your nervous system before they died in a burst of radio emission. Your blood chemistry could be determined without drawing a visible amount of blood—but you still had to pee in a jar.

  The supercomputers went to work on the data instantly, constructing layer upon layer of fine-grain images, columns of numbers, graphic curves—pictures of structures, functions, and purposes … and pathologies, if any.

  The machines could not be completely fooled, but some tests could be avoided. Unless a person complains of arthritis, or has some other specific problem, the fingertips are not usually subject to inspection. Sparta had never mentioned her PIN spines; if they were discovered, she had a story ready—its cover already planted—about cut-rate cosmetic surgery. After all, PIN spines had actually become fashionable in certain circles; they weren’t as easy to lose as standard I.D. slivers.

  More to the point, Sparta had a degree of control over her metabolism that would have astounded her examiners. She was convincingly allergic to the more sensitive chemical probes, and as for the rest, the trick was to understand what the technicians were expecting to find and give it to them, with just enough variation from the norm to persuade them that they weren’t inspecting a practice dummy.

  Not all of Sparta’s nonstandard anatomy needed hiding. Her right eye was a functional macrozoom not because of any detectable change in the structure of the eye itself, but because of cellular manipulations of her optic nerve and visual-association cortex. Her analytical sense of smell, her infrared vision, her tunable hearing were similarly due to neuronal “rewiring,” not to detectable rebuilding. Her eidetic memory involved only changes in the neurochemical transmitters of the hippocampus, which were not accessible to standard diagnostics.

  Only her raw number-crunching abilities involved a noticeable change in the density of forebrain tissue. Time after time, fascinated doctors had been convinced that the lump just beneath Sparta’s forehead, just to the right of where Hindus and Buddhists locate the soul’s eye, was a tumor. But repeated neurological tests had revealed no apparent effect on her perception, higher processes, or behavior, and the “tumor” had shown no change in several years; if it was a tumor, it was evidently benign.

  On a grosser scale, the sheets of polymer structures under her diaphragm could not be hidden, only explained away. The “accident” she’d had when she was sixteen served that purpose. The polymer sheets were experimental tissue replacements, necessitated by abdominal trauma, and she had the scars to prove it. There was a steel staple in her breastbone, holding her once-crushed chest together. Her ribs and arms were threaded with grafts of artificial bone, of an experimental ceramic type.

  Who, after all, would even have thought to ask if these crude structures were really batteries, an oscillator, a dipole microwave antennae…?

  Sparta suspected that one reason her explanations were persuasive was because the people who had implanted the real systems had taken care to disguise them. She had adopted the sort of cover story she was meant to have, although she couldn’t recall ever have been rehearsed in it.

  A half-hour after she entered the clinic, she walked out. She could have had the results an hour after that, if the commander hadn’t put them under embargo. Sparta wouldn’t know whether she’d gotten away with the deception again unless he chose to tell her.

  She took an old-fashioned subway train to within a couple of blocks of the NoHo condo-apt she shared with two other women. She hadn’t seen either of them in months, and rarely before that. When she let herself into the place neither of them was home. She barely glanced around before going straight to her own bedroom. It was as severely neat as she had left it, plantless, walls bare, bed made; only a fine coat of dust on every hard surface and a small stack of fax mail under the reader on her bureau hinted that she had been gone for months. The mail was advertising—she tossed the whole pile in the chute.

  Five minutes later she had repacked her duffle and left the apartment. She had no idea when she would return.

  Back on the subway platform, wilting in the heat, packed for the transatlantic supersonic jitney, on her way to London…

  She wanted to see Blake. But she didn’t want to see Blake. She liked Blake. She was afraid of Blake. Maybe she was in love with Blake.

  She hated herself like this, when her brain went nothing but blah, blah, blah. She was hung on a cusp. She wanted to find out what had become of her parents, and Blake could have learned something. She wanted revenge for what had been done to her—or did she? She also wanted to survive. A few months on Port Hesperus, just being a cop, and her conviction had begun to dissolve.

  Maybe the commander was right. Maybe she really needed a rest.

  The antique subway train clattered into the station, glistening with bright yellow paint. She stepped onto the squeaky-clean car. It was empty except for a stylishly dressed young couple—on their way home from classes at NYU, to judge by the shiny black datapads they balanced on their knees.

  Or they could be a tail.

  Sparta sat by herself, beside the doors at the far end of the car. She pulled her jacket closer about her shoulders and brooded. The commander had boxed her in. She hardly had a choice but to go to Blake, to find out what Blake had to tell her. To be with him.

  8

  Sparta cautiously climbed the narrow, smelly stairs to Blake Redfield’s flat in the City of London. In her trip from Manhattan she had taken every precaution to evade pursuit that was consistent with her pose of innocence. She had not tried to call Blake, either by personal commlink or public phonelink. She had made her travel arrangements as discreetly as she could, then changed them at the last minute, spending two days on a trip that could have been completed in an afternoon. All this would be child’s play for the commander’s people if they were tailing her, but she didn’t dare try any fancy stuff.

  London in the late summer was hardly better than Manhattan. Today the air was so saturated with humidity it
had begun to rain. Drenched from within and without, she rapped on Blake’s door.

  There was no answer. She listened, then ran her hand lightly over the jambs. Her palm hovered above the alphanumeric keypad of his outdated magnetic lock, parsing its field patterns. In moments, guided by intuition, she had decoded its lengthy combination, CH3C6H2N023246. Which was very like Blake, thus predictable, and therefore rather stupid of him: minus subscripts, parentheses, and commas, it was the chemical formula of TNT.

  Sparta’s fingers danced on the keypad. Before she pushed the door open she hesitated. Blake wasn’t stupid, of course. Blake was the sort to warn unexpected guests and, should they ignore his warning, leave them a little greeting card. A grain or two of TNT, or more likely nitroglycerin, that sort of thing. She bent her nose close to the strike plate and sniffed.

  There was no sign of any chemical more unusual than light machine oil. There was no sign that the door had been used recently; in the infrared, it was cooler than the ambient air.

  But the last person who had touched this doorknob was not Blake. Blake’s unmistakably spicy aroma was overlaid by that of someone Sparta didn’t recognize. A female.

  Perhaps it was his landlady. Whoever she was, she was not inside now. Her prints were stone cold—more than a week old, Sparta guessed—and the lingering odor of perfume that came through the crack where the heavy door badly fitted its ancient frame was stale and so faint only someone with Sparta’s sensitivity could have detected it. Nevertheless Sparta slipped her hands into her pockets and withdrew a pair of transparently thin polymer gloves. Someone had been in Blake’s flat since he’d been there, and she could come back. Sparta had no intention of leaving traces of her own visit.

  She pushed gently on the door and stepped back as it sprang open. There were no fireworks.

  She peered cautiously into Blake’s sitting room. She had never been here before. Her eager curiosity threatened to overwhelm her caution. But she sensed the current of the pressure-sensor wires under the kilim on the varnished oak floor, and she noted, mounted in the corners of the ceiling moldings, the movement detectors, invisibly small to anyone else.