Arthur C Clarke's Venus Prime Omnibus

by Paul Preuss

  An hour went by this way, and Blake fell further and further behind. No one really cared about the work; no one really thought it necessary. The government had provided authorization, and some bureaucrat had seen to it that the funds kept flowing, even into the deepest crypts of the Louvre.

  The others were concentrating their effort at the end of the room, and Blake was down on the floor, half-hidden by the rows of massive oak cabinets. Blake looked up from the dirty baseboard. The bored security guard was somewhere in the hall.

  Blake crept down an aisle between the cabinets. He found the drawer Lequeu had suggested, second from the top. He pulled it open. There, lying on cotton batting in crumbling cardboard trays, without other protection, lay a dozen scrolls of papyrus. Working as swiftly and as carefully as he could, he unrolled each of them far enough to determine if they matched the reproduction he had committed to memory.

  None did. He closed that drawer and tried the next. He worked his way through the entire cabinet without success.

  Blake peered nervously over the top of the cabinet. His fellow workers were still blithely ignoring him. He ducked down again, and pondered whether to try the cabinet to the right or the one to the left. Or had Lequeu gotten the wrong aisle entirely? It was like wondering what to do with a wrong phone number—probably only one digit was wrong, but which one?

  For no good reason, Blake picked the cabinet to the left and started with the same drawer. Pinned to the cotton beside one of the scrolls, third from the left, was a faded notation in steel-point script, identifying its provenance: “près de Heliopolis, 1799.” Blake’s hopes revived.

  In 1801 the English army, after a three-year blockade, had at last landed troops on the coast of Egypt and forced the surrender of Napoleon’s forces. The Man of Destiny himself had long departed, leaving among the old ruins the ruins of his dream of a new Egyptian empire under the flag of the French Revolution. He also left behind the magnificent Institut d’Egypte, its ranks of scholars, and its magnificent collection of antiquities, gathered in the course of three years of intense acquisition in the valley of the Nile. By the terms of the surrender the English took the lot, including the crown jewel, the as yet undeciphered Rosetta Stone.

  The French tried to keep the Stone by claiming that it was the personal property of their commander, General Menou, and not subject to the terms of surrender, but the English would have none of it. The Rosetta Stone and much other booty was shipped off to the British Museum, where it still resides, “a glorious trophy of British arms,” as the British commander phrased it.

  Yet there were bits of carved and painted stone and a lot of fragmented old scrolls the British magnanimously allowed the French to keep. The fate of these cast-off treasures was also to be removed from the land where they had been made, some to be exhibited in that hoard of glorious trophies, the Louvre, some to languish in basement drawers, accessible only to determined scholars and to termites.

  Blake carefully unrolled the brittle scroll, and immediately knew he had found what he’d come for. The scroll would not have recommended itself to a casual researcher. There were geometric sketches on it, but it was not a geometry text. There were references to Re, the god of the sun, but it was not a religious text. There were fragments of what surely were traveller’s tales, but it was not a work of geography. The scroll was full of lacunae, and the surviving text was a puzzle.

  Only a member of the prophetae would have recognized it for what it was. Blake was no professional mathematician or astronomer, but his visual and spatial intelligences were highly developed. Following Catherine’s hint, he had spent private hours studying maps of the night sky, and he had deduced that the pyramid outlined in this scroll, if constructed during the era when the papyrus had been painted, would have pointed to a constellation in the southern hemisphere of the sky, not far above the horizon, a region which the Egyptians could only have seen in late summer.

  Blake plucked the papyrus from its bed of cotton, opened his smock and lifted his thin pullover, and slid the scroll into the custom-sewn canvas sack that hung like a shoulder holster under his left armpit. He buttoned his smock, then slid the drawer closed. He crept back to his work.

  At ten o’clock the workers took a break. Blake went to the toilet, which was down the hall, its door visible from the door of the papyrus room. The guard paid him no attention. Blake kept walking past the W.C. and turned and walked quietly up the stairs.

  He walked past the closet in which he’d spent the night. He walked up another flight of stairs, across parqueted floors, past brooding sphinxes and stone sarcophagi, past painted limestone statues of scribes like the one whose black-inked brush had painted the scroll that rested against his side.

  He walked into the palace’s tall-windowed galleries and cast a glance over his shoulder, up the grand staircase, at Nike—the real stone Nike spreading her stone wings, striding forward upon a fiberglass cast of the stone trireme beak that resided where she herself should have resided, on Samothrace.

  The black iron grille that barred the tall doors bore the laurel-wreathed imperial “N,” but it had been placed there by a later, more bourgeois Napoleon. A mustached guard who could have been the brother of the one in the basement was talking into his commlink: trouble en famille.

  “Open up, will you? I’ve got to get something from my ’ped.”

  The guard looked at him in irritation and went on talking while he keyed open the iron gate. The main doors already stood open on this humid summer morning. Blake walked through them and paused. He turned and stared at the guard, perplexed. It really wasn’t supposed to have been this easy—why, he could just walk right out of here and nobody would ever know that anything was missing!

  Which may have sat well with Lequeu and the rest of the Athanasians, but it was not part of Blake’s plan. For a moment he stood still. Then he shouted at the guard, who was still on the commlink: “Toi! Stupide!”

  The guard turned angrily. Blake let him get a good look and then shot him in the neck with a dart from the miniature tranquilizer gun that was strapped to his right wrist.

  He walked quickly away, toward the leafy avenues of the Tuilleries. Around the corner, out of sight, he stripped off his smock and tossed it in a waste can.

  Blake took his time crossing the river. He made a couple of lazy circuits around St. Germain des Pres before he returned to the rue Bonaparte and mounted the stairs to the offices of Editions Lequeu. He rapped twice, sharply.

  “Entrez.”

  Blake twisted the handle and walked into the airy room. Lequeu watched him from behind his desk, elegant as ever in a light blue polo short and linen slacks. Lequeu seemed distracted. His eyes were focusing on something outside the window.

  “I have it,” Blake said.

  “Superb,” said Lequeu, indifferently.

  Blake lifted his sweat-stained shirt and carefully pulled the papyrus from its holster. Lequeu made no move in his direction so Blake stepped forward and laid the scroll upon Lequeu’s desk with as much ceremony and decorum as he could muster.

  Lequeu looked at it for a moment, then fingered the commlink. “Catherine, would you like to come in, please?” He looked at Blake. “While I’m thinking about it, I’d better have that dart gun back.”

  Blake unstrapped the gun and put it on the table. Lequeu picked it up and fingered it idly as Catherine entered. She came straight to the desk. Blake stepped away, watching her.

  As she leaned over the papyrus she was silhouetted against the diffuse light from the tall windows. Deftly and cautiously she unrolled the first few centimeters of the scroll. She looked up at Lequeu. “Can you read it?”

  He glanced down and began to recite: “It is mighty pharoah’s wish that his scribe set down the conversation of the veiled god-messengers … to do him honor. In the morning, while the warmth of Re stimulated our hearts to reason, the veiled god-messengers … from the home of Re … the gracious invitation of pharaoh approached his divine person, bring
ing gifts of god-metal and fine cloth, and oil and wine in great jars of glass, clear as water and hard as basalt—this part is rather broken up—at the gracious invitation of pharaoh … beyond the pillars of the sky. And they demonstrated with many demonstrations of the surveyor’s art … stars steered by … journey to do honor to pharaoh … and so forth and so on. It is the true papyrus,” Lequeu said. “Take it. Go.”

  Without further discussion, Catherine rolled up the papyrus and swiftly left the room. Blake felt a twinge of alarm. “What’s she…?” he began, but Lequeu interrupted him.

  “I was certain that my faith in you was not misplaced,” said Lequeu, looking straight at him for the very first time. “But then no one possessed of your many and various fields of expertise could have gone wrong. Eh, Monsieur Blake Redfield?”

  Someone else had come into the room as Catherine had left. Blake turned. Pierre, of course, hulking and impassive. There were several maneuvers Blake could have used to resist the inevitable, but he thought it better to save his strength in hopes of better odds.

  “It is time we had a long talk, Blake, my friend,” said Lequeu.

  Blake turned back to him and smiled sunnily. “Certainly.”

  They took him down in the elevator. Pierre had him by the arm; Lequeu warily kept his distance. The contacts whistled softly as the car descended.

  The basement was empty. Staff and “guests” had been ordered to find something to do for the day.

  Pierre led Blake to his old cubicle and thrust him roughly inside. The door slammed behind him.

  Blake knew the place well; he’d studied it in detail when he was living here. But he’d never thought to see the inside of this room again, and he knew that this time he would not be getting out until they decided to let him out.

  * The Playfair cipher system is explained in the appendix.

  PART

  3

  THREE-BODY

  PROBLEMS

  9

  Ninety percent of the way from Earth to the moon, at the L-1 transfer station, an agronomist named Clifford Leyland was beginning the final leg of his trip from the L-5 space settlement down to Farside Base. Cliff had one last stop before he could board the automated shuttle that would take him to the moon’s surface.

  Outside the station’s docking bay there was a little booth, big enough for one person at a time. You went in there and took your clothes off and let the sensors sniff you and poke you and snap pictures of you in about four different wavelengths of radiation. Meanwhile you blew into the tube, a gas chromatograph mass spectrometer. The whole thing, not counting the time it took you to get undressed, lasted about five seconds. If you were clean, they let you put your spacesuit back on.

  Drugs were a problem on L-1. Not a health problem but an administrative problem. Eighty per cent of all travellers to and from the moon went through the L-1 transfer station. So did half the freight. Drugs were very popular on the moon, especially among miners and the radiotelescope technicians stationed at Farside Base. Boredom had something to do with it. As a British wag once suggested—and it was as true of the moon’s ice mines as it was of English coal mines—if you were searching for a word to describe the conversation that went on down in the mines, boring would spring to your lips.

  The top ten on the moon’s hit parade of drugs constantly changed as newer and more clever designs for inducing euphoria in the suggestible human brain were invented by free lance chemists. The space settlement at L-5 had taken a commanding lead in the invention and manufacture of homebrew chemicals, partly because of local demand and partly because there was only one bottleneck between L-5 and the moon, L-1, whereas anything shipped from Earth had to make two or more transfers.

  As for the authorities at Farside and Cayley, the major moon bases, there were some who said that they were less than diligent in policing the traffic. It was argued, off the record, that some illicit substances increased productivity, at least in the short run, and certainly stimulated the local economy—and how many people did they really harm? So the burden of enforcement fell on the security staff at L-1.

  It was a staff of one, a man named Brick. He tended to be irritable, and today he was suffering from lack of sleep. “Go on through,” he muttered to Cliff, and waved him past security check without bothering to look at the scans. Cliff, who’d made frequent trips to and from L-5 in the last few months, had always been clean.

  Inside the docking bay, clothes in hand, Cliff encountered the other passenger he’d been told was accompanying him in the capsule to Farside, a Russian astronomer returning from leave in the Transcaucasus.

  “You are Cliff?” she asked. “I’m Katrina. I’m glad to be meeting you—if you will excuse me just a moment.” Katrina had just been through the inspection booth and was still getting dressed. She didn’t bother to turn away as Cliff hastily struggled to get into his trousers and shirt. She took her time closing the seam of her coveralls over her own bare skin, then thrust out her hand and smiled.

  He shook her hand. For a moment they rolled awkwardly in midair in the weightless bay. He cleared his throat and finally whispered, “Pleased, I’m sure.”

  Most men would have been delighted at their first sight of Katrina Balakian—she was a tall, leggy blonde with arresting gray eyes that twinkled with mischief—but she made Cliff instantly nervous. It was not only that she was an inch taller than the slight Englishman; it had more to do with the fact that Cliff had been away from his wife too long, and that the glimpse of Katrina’s tan skin, that frank gaze of hers, were an unexpected challenge to his conscience. He was barely able to mumble the appropriate pleasantries as they climbed into the little capsule and strapped themselves down.

  Launch came minutes later, and for thirty hours their capsule fell toward the moon in a long, smooth parabola. As it neared the end of its journey Cliff climbed out of the acceleration couch in which he’d spent most of his time since leaving L-1, sound asleep. Katrina was drowsily stirring in her couch.

  Their sleep had been aided by prescription, for it seemed that only self-administered medication was objectionable to the authorities; drugging space travellers was standard practice, being ostensibly for their own good.

  Cliff peered out the capsule’s little triangular window and watched the splattered landscape come up fast.

  “This part I always hate,” said his colleague, lying rigid in her couch, her eyes now wide open. The two of them and their baggage took up most of the space in the capsule, though it was nominally designed to accommodate up to three passengers. “I watched once. It starts coming up fast like a big mud pie in the face. Always I’m sure we are going to miss the base.”

  A visual-rules shuttle jockey trying to see his way to a landing on the moon might do all right on the Nearside, whose great dark plains and twisted, cratered uplands had long since imprinted an indelible image on the human memory, but the Farside was a featureless maze to all but the most experienced pilots. Farside had spectacular craters, to be sure, but they were more or less evenly scattered over the hemisphere, and all the space between was filled with other craters, craters within craters, right down to the limit of visibility.

  “You were up here long before me. I should have thought you would have gotten used to it,” Cliff said.

  “Yes, but you travel more. I was not made for adventuring.”

  This was Cliff’s sixth trip to the lunar surface in the past half year, and for the first time he managed to spot his destination before the automatic shuttle put him right on top of it. “I can see Mount Tereshkova now. On the horizon, just to the left.”

  “If you say. But how can you tell?”

  It was near the end of a long lunar day. At night Farside Base’s lights would have given it away; by day, unless the sun glinted off the field of metal sunflowers that was the telescope antenna farm, or the row upon row of solar panels that provided most of the power for the base, Farside was almost lost in a monotony of craters. Yet the base was inside one of
the few recognizable landmarks in the terrain, the big lava-filled, mountain-ringed basin known as the Mare Moscoviense, the Sea of Moscow, whose existence was first hinted at in the smudged photos returned to Earth in 1959 by Luna 3. The base itself lay against the mountain walls to the west of the 200-kilometer-wide dark circular plain, at twenty-eight degrees north latitude and 156 degrees west longitude.

  The other major outpost on the moon, Cayley Base, was near the dead center of the Nearside. In the early days its equatorial location had been vital for saving precious fuel; most traffic in the Earth-moon system still lay on the plane that sliced through both bodies and extended to the great space settlements.

  Fifty years earlier Cayley Base had been built as an open-pit mine. The miners dug the metal-rich lunar dirt, compacted it into blocks, then shot it off the moon with an electromagnetic catapult to a transfer station at L-2 behind the moon and thence to the growing space settlement at L-5.

  Farside Base was different, and its off-center position on the back of the moon was a compromise between competing demands. The dark lava of the floor of Mare Moscoviense concealed caves of frozen water—ice mines—the moon’s most precious resource. The high ringwalls of the huge crater and the bulk of the moon itself isolated the base from radio pollution in near-Earth space, and a hundred radio telescopes lifted their dishes toward the uncluttered sky in an ongoing search for extraterrestrial intelligence.

  As Cliff felt the solid thump of retrorockets under his feet, Katrina squealed, a little girl’s squeal that issued incongruously from her Amazon’s body, and at that moment they both felt their weight for the first time in days. The automated capsule slowed as it swept out over the plain, homing on the base. Cliff stayed on his feet, peering out the window.

  Farside’s most noticeable feature was the circular array of 200-meter radiotelescope dishes, more than a hundred of them covering thirty square kilometers of crater floor. Toward the edge of this perfect circle ran a tangent line, the base’s forty-kilometer electromagnetic catapult; Katrina and Cliff were flying almost parallel to the launcher as they came in. Two white points marked the domes that were the inhabited center of the base, and beside them was the landing field. Beyond the field stretched a square plain of solar panels.