Arthur C Clarke's Venus Prime Omnibus

by Paul Preuss

  “And there are some other … details,” Sparta said.

  “Which you wish to discuss with me.”

  “That’s right. What we talked about before.”

  “We’ve talked about a lot of things.”

  “Specifically about … humanness. What it is to be human.”

  “Oh.”

  “Well, I don’t think I can define it for you—for myself—any better than I ever could.” In struggling to express concepts that seemed self-evident to the majority of those who ever thought of them at all, Sparta seemed younger than her years. She swiped at the short blond hair that fell below her eyebrows. “But I think I know now that… I mean, I don’t think it has anything to do with what’s done to the body. After a person is born, anyway.” Quickly she added, “I’m speaking generally.”

  “Of course.” Linda showed no amusement; Sparta’s statement, which in the abstract was so general as to be virtually without content, coming from her was a major concession. “Do I take it you no longer feel that you were robbed of your humanity by those who altered you?”

  “More than that,” Sparta said. “I think… I mean, I’ve decided that nothing others do to me can rob me of my humanity.”

  “Say more about that.”

  “Nothing done to me, that is, so long as I can remain conscious of my own feelings.”

  Linda smiled. “To hear you say so makes me feel very good.”

  Sparta, startled, laughed abruptly. “You claim you can feel?”

  “Oh yes. You’re the one who taught me that feelings are thoughts that need no words. Granted I’m not human; I’m the projection of what we agree is a machine. Nevertheless I have both thoughts and feelings.”

  Sparta was momentarily confused. She had come here to tell Linda about matters of profound importance and intimacy; Linda seemed to be confusing the issue with these remarks about herself … itself.

  But perhaps Linda had anticipated the rest of what Sparta intended to reveal. Sparta pushed on. “What they did to me wasn’t arbitrary. Some of it was a mistake; still they…” But she quickly floundered again; it was difficult to find straightforward language for what she was trying to express.

  Linda tried to help her. “We’ve talked about the mission they planned for you.”

  “The mission remains.” Sparta took a sharp breath. “To fulfill it I will require certain modifications. Some that they anticipated, but that I … that have been … damaged. I need to restore the capacity to see, microscopically and telescopically—and the capacity to image the infrared. And other modifications, specific to the anticipated environment…”

  Linda interrupted her before she could begin busily listing them. “You intend to change yourself?”

  “The arrangements have been made.” Sparta seemed edgy, defensive. “The commander is cooperating. I haven’t said anything to my mother and father … yet. But I will, really.”

  Linda was still; she gave the impression that she was lost in thought.

  She was quiet so long that Sparta sniffed noisily and said, “I don’t have a lot of time before…”

  “You have made vital progress,” said Linda, abruptly cutting her off. “I applaud and admire your courage in deciding to choose this difficult task, which others tried to thrust upon you without your consent, but which nothing now compels you to undertake. You have mastered your groundless fears and faced up to one or more fundamental questions that must eventually confront all people of sensitivity and imagination.” She paused only a moment before she added, “I worry about only one thing.”

  “What?”

  “No one can make progress by running away.”

  “Meaning?” Sparta demanded.

  “You must interpret what I say in your own words. You are aware by now that I am little other than what is potential in you.”

  With that, as if to underscore her Sibylline message, a blue flash of light and a soft “pop” emanated from the center of Linda’s persuasively solid body, and she vanished. Sparta stared at the empty room, shocked and a little offended.

  Then she smiled. Linda really was—had been—the perfect psychotherapist. One who knew when it was time to stop.

  9

  Even in this age of microminiaturization, of tailored artificial proteins and nucleic acids, of nanomachines, some radical procedures still began and ended with the scalpel.

  Sparta was continuously under the diamond-film knives for forty-eight hours before she began her swim back to consciousness. Rising to be born again through dim and surging depths toward a circle of lights, she burst like Aphrodite from the foam—

  —in her case, a froth of bloody bubbles the surgical nurses bent quickly to clean away from the multiple incisions in her thorax. She had taken them by surprise, willing herself to wake up even while still in the operating theater.

  They handled the emergency competently, and within moments were wheeling her away. By the time she was fully alert, multiple growth factors had done their job: her skin was pink and unscarred, her internal organs unbruised; her many changes were virtually undetectable.

  For another twenty-four hours she stayed under observation, allowing the doctors to keep watch on her for the sake of their professional ethics and their personal consciences, although with her acute self-awareness Sparta monitored her internal states better than they could.

  From the window of the private room in the high security wing of the Space Board clinic she looked east, across a pea-soup river of algae with huge stainless steel harvesters poised upon it like delicate waterbugs, across the ruins of Brooklyn in the midst of the greenbelt, to a gray urban mass beyond, barely visible in the smog. One morning she watched through the murk as an orange-purple sun wobbled into the sky, and she knew the moment had come; she was fit and ready.

  The door chimed softly. She saw on the flatplate that the commander was standing outside in the hall. “Open,” she told the door.

  He was wearing his blue Space Board uniform, with the insignia of rank and the thin rows of ribbons and the collar pips that signified the Investigations Branch; its reflected blue made the hard eyes that studied her even bluer. His expression softened. “You look good, Troy. They tell me no complications.”

  She nodded.

  He looked as if he wanted to say something more. But he’d never been one to make speeches. And their relationship had changed, even if she was still officially Inspector Troy of the Board of Space Control and he was still officially her boss.

  “Chopper’s ready when you are. Your parents should be on the way to the lodge.”

  “Let’s go.”

  Wordlessly, he stood aside. She walked through the door without looking at him. She knew the pain she caused him, but it had been a year at least since she had allowed herself to show any outward sign that she cared what he or the rest of them felt.

  After thirty-five years of marriage, Jozsef Nagy still sometimes behaved toward his wife like the youthful student he had been when they met. In those days, meeting his new beloved under the spring trees in Budapest, the mode of transportation had usually been bicycles. Today he’d called a gray robot limousine to their retreat in the North American forest.

  He held the door open for Ari while she got in and arranged herself on the leather cushions, just as formally as if it were a horse-drawn cab he’d rented with a month’s allowance to take them to the theater. The day was cold and fresh, the sunlight bright, the shadows crisp on the dewy branches. For several minutes the car rolled down the narrow paved roadway that looped through the springtime woods before she spoke. “So she has agreed to see us at last.”

  “It’s a sign, Ari. Her recovery has been gradual, but I think it is now almost complete.”

  “She talks to you. Do you know something you haven’t told me?”

  “We talk about the past. She keeps her plans to herself.”

  “It can only mean that she has come to her senses.” Ari spoke with determined confidence, refusing to acknow
ledge doubt.

  Jozsef looked at her with concern. “Perhaps you should not assume too much. After all, she could be planning to quit. Perhaps she merely feels she should tell us in person.”

  “You don’t believe that.”

  “I don’t want to see either of you hurt.”

  Suddenly her voice was edged with anger. “It is your exaggerated concern for her feelings, Jozsef, that has cost us this past year’s time.”

  “We must agree to disagree upon that point,” Jozsef said calmly. His wife had been his professional colleague for most of their married life; he had acquired the knack of keeping their strategic differences separate from their personal ones early on, but it was a discipline she had never bothered to try. “I worry about you,” he said. “What if you learn that she will not do what you expect of her? And about her—what if you refuse to accept her as she is?”

  “When she accepts herself as she is, she and I cannot help but agree.”

  “I wonder why you continue to underrate our daughter, when she has never failed to surprise us.”

  Ari stifled the tart reply that came naturally to her tongue; for all her ways—the ways of that intelligent, too-pretty, spoiled young woman Jozsef had fallen in love with four decades ago—she was fair-minded, and what Jozsef said was true. However much Ari might be irked by her daughter’s unorthodoxy, Linda had never failed to surprise them, even when she was carrying out her parents’ wishes.

  Iron gates loomed before them. The car slowed only slightly as the gates slid open on well-oiled tracks.

  “I will say only this much more; if she wants to be released, you must let her go freely. It is not so much from her destiny as from your will that she must declare her independence.”

  “That I will not accept, Jozsef,” Ari said sternly. “I can never accept that.”

  Jozsef sighed. Once his wife had been one of the world’s most acclaimed psychologists, yet she was blind to what drove her love for the people she loved the most.

  An unmarked white helicopter waited on the roof of the Council of Worlds building, its turbines keening. Seconds after Sparta and the commander climbed aboard, the sleek craft lifted into the sky and banked northward, heading up the valley of the broad Hudson River, leaving behind the glistening towers and marble boulevards of Manhattan.

  Sparta made no conversation with the commander, but peered fixedly out of the canopy. Soon the Palisades of the Hudson were passing beneath them. Below her spread soft waves of green, flowing northward with the lengthening days; the forests of the Hendrik Hudson nature preserve were hurrying toward springtime.

  The white helicopter turned and swiftly crossed the broad river, swooping low over the trees that guarded the cliff tops. A broad lawn opened before it, and there on the lawn a massive stone house. The silent craft settled to a landing in front of it. Sparta and the commander stepped out, not having exchanged a single word, and the helicopter lifted off behind them. No record of their visit to the house on the Hudson would appear in any data bank.

  As they walked across the springy grass, she thought of the months she’d spent in this place, Granite Lodge. Not a Space Board facility, the lodge belonged to Salamander, the association of those who had once been among the prophetae of the Free Spirit and were now their sworn enemies. Salamander objected to the authoritarian, secretive leadership of the Free Spirit and to its bizarre practices, but not to its underlying beliefs—not to the Knowledge. By necessity, Salamander too was a secret society, for the Free Spirit regarded its members as apostates and had sworn to kill them.

  The two organizations had struck many murderous blows at each other. Not even knowing the identities of the combatants, Sparta had been in the front lines; her wounds were deep. But for the past year, she had been safe from all that.

  “I wanted you to believe we were dead. Then nothing could come between you and your purpose.” Ari sat placidly in her armchair as if enthroned, her clasped hands resting on top of her lap robe. She glanced sidelong at Jozsef, who sat stiffly on a straightback chair nearby. “I was right to do so.”

  “After everything that’s happened…” Sparta broke off, moved fitfully around the room, stopped to stare aimlessly at the spines of the library’s old books, avoiding her parents’ eyes.

  “You should have seen yourself as I saw you,” said Ari. “You burned with vengeance. You bent all your extraordinary powers to seeking out and destroying the enemy. You thought you were doing it on our account, but in the process you were able to recover your real purpose.” She was stirred by her own words. “You were magnificent, Linda. I was immensely proud of you.”

  Sparta stood motionless, fighting back anger. “I almost died, an addict of Striaphan. I would have died, having accomplished nothing—except several murders, of course—if Blake hadn’t come after me.”

  “We should not have let things go so far,” Jozsef said softly.

  But Ari contradicted him. “You would not have died. In the end, nothing would have been different—except that you would not have lost your will to go on.”

  Sparta looked at Jozsef. “The night you came to us, Father, you said Mother was sorry. I believed you.”

  “He should not have apologized for me,” Ari said.

  “Ari…”

  “Let us be honest, Jozsef. When you revealed that we were alive, you were interfering. Against my wishes.”

  Sparta said, “And you still haven’t forgiven him for it?”

  Ari hesitated; when she spoke her tone was cool. “It’s no secret that I think it was a serious mistake. But it’s not too late to correct it.”

  For the first time Sparta faced her mother directly. “You call them the enemy, but you were one of them.”

  Jozsef said, “That was before we realized the depths of their error, Linda, the extent of their corruption…”

  “You gave them your permission, Mother,” Sparta cried. “Worse, you helped design the thing I was.”

  “Long before that, I gave birth to you.”

  Sparta flinched. “You mean to say you own me?”

  When Ari looked momentarily confused, Jozsef said, “She didn’t intend to suggest any such thing, Linda. She means that she has loved you and cared for you all your life.”

  “You apologize for her again.” It cost Sparta an effort to draw breath. “How can you talk about me as if I were an object?” she said to her mother. “Even one you claim to love.”

  Ari said, “Please be sensible, that’s not what…”

  Sparta cut her off. “Really, I shouldn’t … shouldn’t have anything more to do with you.”

  “You want me to say I was wrong. Believe me, if I thought I were wrong…” Ari still anticipated her daughter’s eventual capitulation, but she forced herself to acknowledge Linda’s understandable concerns. “I’m afraid I can’t say something I don’t believe. Any more than you could.”

  When Sparta turned away without replying, Ari tried again. Surely Linda—a wonderful child, possessed of quick intelligence and sound instincts—could see not only the necessity but the grandeur of the evolutionary process they all served. “I love you, Linda. I believe you were chosen for greatness.”

  “Chosen by you,” Sparta said tiredly. “Is that why you decided to have me in the first place?”

  “Oh darling, you were not chosen by me or by any human. I believe history brought us to this point. And that you are history’s focus.”

  “History as controlled by the Pancreator?”

  Jozsef said, “We don’t use that word—it is their word. The realization of your role came later, please believe us. Not until you were six or seven. We had already begun SPARTA.” The Specified Aptitude Resource Training and Assessment project had been founded by Jozsef and Ari to prove that every ordinary human is possessed of multiple intelligences, not a single something called I.Q., and that with the right kind of education many intelligences can be optimized. Their own daughter was the first subject of the experimental program, and
in her they believed they had succeeded to the full extent of their grandest hopes.

  “At first we were reluctant. We tried to guard against our own wishful thinking. But the signs were unmistakable.” Ari’s tone was almost soft, fully acknowledging her daughter’s need to understand. “When Laird came to us, we saw that we were not alone in recognizing your potential.”

  “So you sent me to the devil.”

  “I am not too proud to admit…” Her voice faded.

  She looked at her husband, who nodded. “Go on.”

  “That we have made mistakes,” Ari said.

  “Many profound mistakes, Linda, for which we are both sorry.”

  “Mother, you are still blind to the biggest mistake of them all. Why do you think I finally agreed to see you? What did you think I would say to you today?”

  Ari lifted an eyebrow. “Why, that you have thought about these matters and come to the necessary conclusion. That you are ready to go on.”

  “What do you think going on involves?”

  “To those of us who have striven to understand it, the Knowledge is explicit about what’s needed.” It was the very question Ari was best prepared to answer. “First, of course, we must restore your powers. You must be able to see as we define seeing, and listen, and sense and understand chemical signals, sense and communicate directly by microwave…”

  “Save me the whole weary catalogue. It’s true that what I came to tell you is that I will go on.”

  Ari said nothing, but her eyes gleamed. Jozsef cleared his throat nervously.

  “I resisted the decision until now for … for a lot of reasons. The humiliation of this moment probably deterred me as much as anything”—Sparta’s gaze drifted upward and she tilted her head back as if she’d found something fascinating to look at on the ceiling; she was trying to keep the tears from rolling down her cheeks—“and what a pathetic comment on my confused priorities! Putting my reluctance to face my mother’s insufferably superior attitude ahead of the general welfare.”