Arthur C Clarke's Venus Prime Omnibus

by Paul Preuss

  “Yes.”

  Edward glared at his son in ill-disguised triumph. “I hope you learned a lesson.”

  “More than a lesson, Dad. I lost everything. I won’t be collecting anything of so perishable a nature again.”

  The dining room was in the southeast corner of the penthouse, overlooking old New York harbor. In the weak sunlight of autumn, the algae farms that covered the wide waters from the Jersey shore to Brooklyn were a dull matte green, like pea soup; stainless steel harvesters grazed languorously on the stuff, converting it to food supplements for the masses.

  The Redfields were not of the masses. Edward sliced through the medium-rare magret de canard and put a left-handed forkful into his mouth, European-fashion. “The insurance wasn’t adequate?” he mumbled.

  “Oh, the financial loss is covered. Not allowing for appreciation. But I realized how ephemeral those old books and paintings are.” Can I really get away with this? Blake wondered—but people are desperate to believe what they want. “Perhaps I’ve finally grown up.”

  Edward kept chewing and mumbled again.

  “I’ve been thinking I might look around a bit and see if I can apply myself to public service,” Blake added. His father having written him off as a dilettante, nothing could be sweeter to Edward than to hear his son come around to his point of view.

  “What a fine idea, dear,” his mother said brightly. “I know our friends will be more than happy to help you find something suitable.”

  “Why government, Blake? Why not something with more potential?” By which Edward meant buying and selling.

  “I’m not really a statistics kind of guy, Dad. The market never made sense to me.” False, but it fit Edward’s prejudices. “If I’d followed your advice I’d have gone to law school,” Blake added, truistically, “but it’s too late for that.”

  “Well, what are you good at?” A whiff of the old rancor. After all, sending Blake to SPARTA had not been an inexpensive proposition; sure, that enhanced-education project had had foundation support, but parents like Edward who could pay had paid plenty to get their kids enrolled.

  “I’m a good investigator—anybody who’s serious about scholarship has to be. I know my way around old libraries as well as I know my way through electronic files. I can be inconspicuous when necessary.” All this was true, and not the half of it; his father would not have believed even the half of it. “I read and write a dozen languages, I’m fluent in almost that many, and I can pick up more when I need them.” Blake added something musical in Mandarin for the benefit of his mother, meaning roughly, I owe it all to you.

  His father, who didn’t speak Mandarin, although he was fluent in German and Japanese and the other old languages of diplomacy, emitted another skeptical mumble. When he finally swallowed his mouthful of duck he asked, “What sort of job do you think all this qualifies you for?”

  “I forgot to mention that I’ve become a fairly experienced space traveler in the last year.”

  “You mean that trip to Venus?”

  “I’ve been to the moon, too. And Mars. I guess it’s been a while since I phoned home.”

  Edward put down his fork and glared at his son. “So. You’re a multilingual … investigator … who knows computers and doesn’t get spacesick. Maybe you should be a … a consumer advocate or something.”

  Emerald’s thin black eyebrows shot up and her delicate mouth curved into a happy smile. “What an excellent suggestion, dear! I’m sure Dexter and Arista would be delighted to have someone of Blake’s talent and abilities on their staff.”

  “At Voxpop?” Redfield looked at his wife, angrily. He hadn’t intended to be taken seriously. “Doing what?”

  Dexter and Arista Plowman, although born to wealth, were a brother and sister team of professional reformers, the sort of ascetics whose roles in previous centuries had been played by such as Ralph Nader and Savonarola. What money the Plowmans had once had, and whatever came their way, they invested in their Vox Populi Institute.

  Emerald said, “If Dexter Plowman or his charming sister…”

  “Peculiar sister,” Edward growled. Away from his clubs and boardrooms, Edward’s confusion frequently expressed itself as temper.

  “…wish to employ Blake, they will certainly use his best talents.”

  “And he gets nothing in return. No way to get rich.”

  Blake said, “Dad…” He cut himself short. We’re already rich was a reminder his father didn’t need to hear.

  “Let’s think about this for a day or two,” said Edward.

  Blake could see the wheels turning in his father’s head. The Plowmans were Currently Fashionable Persons in Manhattan, somewhat of the rank of crusading district attorneys, people whose good opinions Edward Redfield had courted and to whom he would be honored to loan the services of a son. No money in it, but … his prodigal son Blake, reformed, and now a well-known public servant… Edward allowed himself a thin smile.

  Late that night Blake tiptoed into his father’s den, feeling his way by the faint light reflected through the windows from the hazy sky outside. Years ago, as a child, he had learned the combination to his father’s desk, and he used it now to open the upper drawer in which was secreted Edward’s whisper-quiet, gas-cooled, micro-super computer.

  It was a machine Blake had always regarded with awe and a tinge of jealousy, since his father used only a vanishingly small fraction of its power in his business dealings and did not appreciate what his money had bought. Blake hunched over it and went quietly to work; his project would test the machine’s mettle.

  What was really going on at that “safe house” on the Hudson?

  Four hours later: for all Blake’s skill, his search had so far gained him little but negative knowledge.

  The steel king’s mansion was where it was supposed to be, all right; nowadays it was called Granite Lodge, a good, gray, innocuous name, and was supposedly used as a place where North American Park Service employees and their families could vacation, where dignitaries could retreat, where managers could confer, and so on—the usual sort of cover one might expect for so opulent a safe house.

  Except that this cover seemed airtight. Blake could discover no links whatever between the Park Service and the Space Board, much less the commander’s investigative branch. On the other hand, there were plenty of documented instances of use by vacationing employees, conferring managers, and retreating dignitaries.

  In state files Blake found floor plans and other documents describing the house and grounds, all accurate as far as his personal knowledge went, and the Park Service’s budget for the place with lists of the staff and their salaries and so on—and it all seemed aggressively innocent.

  With sour amusement Blake read a wholly “factual” account of what had been going on there recently, when he and Ellen had somehow had the impression that they were the only guests. Seems they had overlooked a convocation of Anglican bishops, not to mention a creative writing seminar and a study session of high-school curriculum developers; this week the lodge was hosting a gathering of Jungian analysts.

  A few minutes of effort produced independent “confirmation” of these events on the open network: notices and bulletins from bishops, writers, curriculum developers, and Jungians, all impenetrably convincing. Off the public net, Blake confirmed the existence of these people and the apparent authenticity of their recent itineraries.

  Perhaps if he had had Ellen’s uncanny ability to sniff out and avoid the electronic trapdoors and blind drops and cut-outs, to slip through layers of electronic subterfuge, to uncover fake I.D.s and fake addresses and commlinks and life histories and travel vouchers and so on, he could have gotten what he wanted from the computer net. But Ellen’s powers were beyond him.

  What was left to him was his skill as a thief and saboteur. He would have to break into Granite Lodge.

  Blake was bold, even excitable, but he was not foolhardy, and he was not in the habit of undertaking unknown risks or risks where
the odds were too great against him; he had a healthy respect for the defenses of Granite Lodge. But although he would have much preferred to have stayed way from it, that option was closed.

  He went back to the computer. In the latter years of the 21st century, weather prediction was still an art rather than a science, but it had become a fine art. The fractal patterns of the Earth’s atmospheric system spilled across the flatscreen, unfolding in vivid false color a probable series of meteorological events for the lower Hudson valley in the coming days. If he acted soon, the weather would be on his side.

  7

  A green-eyed, red-haired young woman stood in a narrow London street, watching a bulldozer root and wallow in a mudhole across the road. To the left of the construction site, over the brick wall of the neighboring garden, a man in a yellow slicker was perched on a ladder, sawing a burned limb off a huge elm. To the right, plastic sheeting covered a hole in the roof of a neighboring building.

  Where the bulldozer was snorting like a boar, Blake Redfield’s apartment building had disappeared.

  Sparta belted her shabby raincoat more tightly around her waist and hoisted her umbrella against the wind. She hurried along the pavement, dodging the umbrellas of the bent-over pedestrians coming her way. Half the oncomers seemed to be tangled in the leashes of their dogs, who were more eager than their masters to be outside on the wet, cold afternoon.

  She walked half a mile through streets of declining prosperity to reach the nearest red-enameled infobox, which stood on a busy commercial corner. She collapsed her umbrella and shook it, then squeezed the door closed behind her. The glass panes were steamy, running with rain; the traffic on the street outside was a colorless blur. She slipped off her thin woolen gloves and leaned over the machine. PIN spines extended from beneath her sensibly short nails and probed the machine’s ports.

  The tang of dataflow rose in Sparta’s olfactory lobes. Within seconds she had bypassed a hierarchy of barriers and, like a salmon swimming upstream, followed the current of information upstream to its source, a confidential file in Scotland Yard’s bureau of records. It told her that Blake’s apartment had been firebombed two days after he’d disappeared from the castle on the Hudson. He’d escaped unharmed and gone to join his parents in Manhattan.

  The file revealed that the authorities had been irritated with Mr. Redfield for leaving the vicinity without notice. But when they’d finally tracked him down, he’d been most cooperative—and ultimately persuasive. He really had no idea who might want to kill him. He’d been away from home—spending most of his time in France, he explained—in connection with his profession as a consultant in rare books and manuscripts. Scotland Yard had accepted his explanation that he’d fled because he feared for his safety and that of his acquaintances in London.

  Nice going, Blake, she thought, withdrawing her spines from the machine. You’re safe and out of my way, which is apparently what we both want—and what I came here to ensure. I don’t need your help on this one. I will smoke out the prophetae without you.

  She left the booth and walked the wet pavement toward the nearest underground entrance. Robotaxis and private hydros hissed along the busy road, spraying oil and water in an aerosol like a heavy ground fog, but she was a working girl who could not afford the dry luxury of a cab interior.

  As she bundled herself into the smelly warmth of the crowded tube station, she thought of the files she’d seen back on the Hudson and experienced a moment of regret. She’d let the commander persuade her not to call Blake, not to explain anything, even though she believed he deserved to know what she knew of the truth. But Sparta understood even better than the commander that if Blake learned the truth now, he’d do something. Dear Blake, so eager to help … but what he usually did under stress was go out and blow something up.

  It always seemed to him so logical and necessary at the time. And it always made the situation worse. In this investigation she couldn’t afford to have Blake going out and blowing things up, complicating matters. She would have to let him believe that she’d fired him, that she’d told him to get lost and stay lost. Or that she’d betrayed him. What the commander said he “remembered.”

  She would have to hope that when it was all over, when she could tell him the whole truth, he could learn to remember something different. And that he’d still love her.

  That had been her first, not her only, disagreement with the commander. After agreeing not to try to contact Blake, she’d refused to say another word of substance to her boss until he’d kept his own parole. He’d handed her a triplet of chips, grudgingly, she thought, and left her alone in the downstairs conference room of the safe house.

  The first chip held files from the long-defunct Multiple Intelligence project. In them, guarded by the logo of the quick brown fox, were details of the courses to which she’d been subjected—everything from quantum chemistry to southeast Asian languages to flight training—and all the surgical procedures to which she’d subsequently been subjected: nanochips in half a dozen locations in her brain, polymer electrical cells under her diaphragm, the PIN spines spliced into her nervous system… It was all here, laid out in depth and detail: the plans and specs for taking a female human adolescent and converting her into a species of wet war machine.

  Detailed too was the depth of her parents’ involvement. Far from innocent victims, they had been eager participants in the establishment of M. I. At least in the beginning. As long as they thought the subjects of M. I. were going to be other people’s children…

  But the files covered only one side of the correspondence, the M. I. side. The North American government, represented by the man who then called himself William Laird, had asked Linda’s parents to act as principal consultants to the project. They were to be well paid, but that was not the only inducement. Concerning human potential, Laird had a vision that they evidently shared.

  To them, this Laird apparently seemed visionary and sensible at the same time; he was not a believer in such superstitious nonsense as “memes” (one of her father’s pet peeves), supposed “units” of culture with no common definition, discernible only after the fact. Laird meant evolution at the level of the organism itself, the physical human being as well as, inevitably, the cultural human being—thus not a teleonomic process, having the mere appearance of purpose, but an actual progression toward a well-defined goal: teleology from within.

  Linda’s parents were central in establishing the educational and testing programs of the Multiple Intelligence project. Then, suddenly, the record of their involvement ceased—shortly before the date corresponding to Linda’s admission to the program, as its first subject. And its first, most spectacular failure.

  Her parents were not mentioned again in M. I. files. Years went by; suddenly, almost overnight, Laird and many of his top staffers fled and M. I. itself was disbanded, under circumstances Sparta knew intimately, for she herself had precipitated them.

  A second set of files consisted of interrogations of captured prophetae. Captured by whom? Where the commander had obtained these, Sparta did not know. They were encoded in the commonest commercial system, and all identifying marks had been removed.

  These were hair-raising tales. Deep probes had reconstructed the subjects’ living memories: of terrifying childhoods; of failure, homelessness, addiction, and despair before first contact with the prophetae; of blossoming hope after recruitment, of indoctrination and training in the tenets of the Free Spirit; of their missions. To plug into these files was to relive a hell of lost souls.

  Those whose memories had been extracted for display here had been soldiers of the Free Spirit. Two had been there the night Linda’s father had tried to rescue her, the night his bodyguards had been slaughtered and Linda had been shot and the rescuing Snark, acting on her orders, had carried her wounded father and her mother into the night sky. By the witness of these files, Sparta—living what they felt, feeling what drove them—confirmed what she had believed, that it was the duty of
the prophetae to kill anyone who had successfully resisted indoctrination.

  And from these soldiers she learned the story they all believed, the story that had been reported in all media, that a Snark had crashed that night on a military reservation in Maryland, killing its passengers, her parents—other details withheld “in the interests of administrative security.”

  The last set of files was a various batch, some of them from the North Continental Treaty Alliance, some from police records and other terrestrial authorities. The Snark in which Linda’s parents had tried to rescue her had been stolen from the NCTA—how had they accomplished that extraordinary feat?—and the testimony of Laird and others placed the machine in Maryland, where the rescue attempt, described by Laird as assault and attempted kidnap, had failed.

  But Sparta knew she had sent it off with orders to take all necessary measures to protect its passengers. It had obeyed, and vanished. The files revealed that no trace of it was recorded on radar scopes. No transmissions from it were overheard. It was never seen again. There had been no helicopter crash. Her parents had simply disappeared.

  “Seen enough?” the commander whispered from the darkness. He had returned while she was absorbed in the last of the files, but she had not failed to hear him coming, to identify him in the dark.

  “You promised to tell me what really happened to my parents. This doesn’t do that.”

  “I admitted I couldn’t prove what I know. But they are alive.”

  “You can’t know that from this.”

  “What I firmly believe, then.”

  He was still holding something back, but she would not get it out of him with argument. In truth, he had given her something of great value. Often she’d roamed secretly and at will through the files of the agencies that had reported the helicopter crash. She had never found anything but obvious fakes replacing stolen records—fakes, booby-trapped with sticky bits, so that unauthorized persons who lacked her expertise peeking into those records would be automatically tracked back to their own terminals.