Arthur C Clarke's Venus Prime Omnibus

by Paul Preuss

“‘Indeed, we have been pleased to make her acquaintance,’ the professor said to him with a straight face, throwing his insincerity back in his face. ‘And what brought you here? A spot of trouble, obviously. Why don’t you tell us about it?’

  “Mays went on to tell us a tale of innocence and modest heroics—about his Herculean efforts to improvise a program for the capsule’s malfunctioning maneuvering system, in hopes of bringing them down softly on Amalthea. We already knew it to be a pack of lies. And no doubt Mays knew we knew he was lying, but there was nothing he could do about that, for he also well understood that the ship’s recorders were picking up his every word and that anything he said could be held against him at the inevitable Space Board inquiry into the crash.

  “The professor blandly let him hang himself. When Mays finally ran out of steam I waited for Forster to confront him with his lies; instead the professor said, ‘You’ll be up and about within a few hours, I’m glad to say. Unfortunately we won’t be returning to Ganymede for a while, and Amalthea is still under Space Board quarantine. So I’m afraid you are stuck here with us.’

  “Mays did his unconvincing best to appear crushed by this news. The professor went on, ‘But when and if you feel up to it, we will welcome any help you and Ms. Mitchell care to give us’—you can imagine my consternation, hearing this!—’ for you see, Sir Randolph, we have recently made a most extraordinary discovery. And by an even greater coincidence, here you are to share it with us…’

  “I glanced at Marianne, who floated in her life-support harness almost as naked as the day she was born—a fact I would not mention were it not for my acute awareness that the horrid and ancient Mays hovered in that same state beside her. Something atavistic in me was stirred. I wanted to cover her, a throwback to the attitudes of the last century. I was reminded of my humiliation, and I resolved not to let matters stand where they stood when we left Ganymede.”

  Hawkins paused long enough to rub his sweating face. “But that’s off the track. In any other circumstances, given what we’d stumbled upon, we would have been glad of the extra help, but Sir Randolph Mays was a snake, and the professor knew it. Granted, Mays wasn’t going anywhere without the Ventris, but there was some question as to whether we could legally deny him access to communications.

  “The professor grasped that nettle firmly. As soon as he was back in the wardroom, out of earshot of the people in the clinic, he took us aside and said, ‘I hope we can all get along together. As far as I’m concerned they can go where they like and record what they like, as long as they don’t take anything—and as long as they don’t transmit anything before we get back to Ganymede.’

  “‘I don’t see how we can stop them,’ McNeil said, in that deceptively languid way he has, so that you know he’s scheming something. ‘What if he tries to fix his capsule’s radio? Especially since it’s not really broken.’

  “‘Out of the question,’ Forster said with relish. ‘For one thing, that would be tampering with evidence.’

  “I’d been woolgathering, still stewing over Marianne, but at about that point I rejoined the conversation. ‘Aren’t we even going to let Ganymede know what happened to them?’

  “Foster allowed me a hint of a smile. ‘No, Bill, I suspect we too are going to suffer a communications breakdown—of the same kind that Sir Randolph’s capsule did. Unfortunately the news will get out, within a day or so, that we are no longer under Space Board protection here. But meanwhile, if we can delay interference from the outside worlds, we’ll have an opportunity to get to know our guests better.’

  “Ever since the whole incident began, I’d been playing the moralist—for Marianne’s sake, or so I’d told myself. Until this point. For suddenly I found myself confronted with new possibilities. Marianne and me, incommunicado…

  “But Forster wasn’t through; he had another trick up his sleeve. ‘Before we lose communication with the rest of the solar system, however, I’m going to register a claim to Amalthea. It will be back to Ganymede and on to Manhattan and Strasbourg and the Hague before Mays and his, hm, assistant get themselves free of their medical accoutrements.’

  “‘How can you do that, sir?’ Me again. Leave it to me to state the obvious. ’Space law prohibits private parties from claiming astronomical bodies.’

  “Forster gave me that patented crooked grin of his, one bushy brow up and one down. ‘I’m not annexing an astronomical body, Mr. Hawkins. The core of Amalthea is a derelict spaceship. In the name of the Cultural Commission, I’ve put in a claim for salvage. If Mays tries to take any souvenirs, he’ll be stealing from the Council of Worlds. I’ll explain the situation to him before he gets any bright ideas.’

  “And that was that. For the last three days the professor has been working all of us so hard I’ve hardly exchanged a private word with Marianne.”

  Through the hull of the Ventris Hawkins heard hatches banging and the hiss of gasses. Shift change already. It was time for him to drag himself into his spacesuit. He made a final remark into his recorder: “But I haven’t had time even to think as much about her as I expected I would. The levels of the world-ship we’ve seen so far will require a lifetime’s exploration. And this afternoon we found the Ambassador…”

  21

  Diving through the now shallow water to the core was like diving through bouillabaisse, thick with life. The core’s great heating towers simmered and stirred the soup steadily, as if they had been working in the kitchen since eternity. Fewer than a dozen revolutions of Jupiter remained before the mirrored surface of the core lay sterile in space, all the life it had spawned having boiled away and perished in vacuum.

  Inside the cool core the Manta—iridescent black, gill-breathing, its skin slick with slippery goo to make it slide easily through the waters, its searchlights like cold eyes in the night—was at home in the liquid darkness. Alongside, explorers in bulky, white-canvas spacesuits bobbed like drowned dolls.

  They were the most fortunate archaeologists in human history; they had come upon a spaceship as big as a dozen cities of Earth, each wrapped onto a sphere as thin as a balloon, one inside the other, and all these nested spheres filled with water. Frozen to near-absolute zero for a billion years, this ship-as-big-as-a-world had been perfectly preserved.

  Now it seemed utterly deserted; the simple aquatic life that swarmed in the water outside was nowhere evident in the sterile, warmer water inside. Presumably the inhabitants of the great ship had set forth to colonize our solar system more than a billion years ago, yet so vast was it that no one could say whether some recently thawed specimen of alien intelligence would be found just around the next bend of one of its endlessly looping, winding, cavern-like corridors. Thousands of huge chambers gave an impression of natural undersea formations, except that there was no life in them. Left behind were quantities of artifacts—tools and instruments and what may have been furnishings, and inscribed objects, and plain objects, some simple, some complex, some whose purpose could be guessed, some baffling … too much for a mere half dozen humans to begin to catalogue.

  Forster, with Sparta piloting the sub, discovered the “art gallery” on the morning of the second day, during a rapid survey of the south polar hemisphere. The term came spontaneously to his mind, and indeed there was no better name for the building, because there seemed no mistaking its purpose. “As somebody or other said,” he grumbled to the group—his fatigue was beginning to rub up against his enthusiasm, and he was uncharacteristically imprecise—“the art of a people reveals its soul. In these compartments we might find a key to the soul of Culture X.” He decreed that the expedition should concentrate all their energies upon it.

  They took six precious hours to move the Michael Ventris as close to the south pole as they dared without exposing themselves to the constant onslaught of Jupiter’s radiation. Then they used the Old Mole for the last time, to punch another opening in the markedly thinner ice.

  Forster split his people into three teams; for an archaeologist,
he was capable of occasional insights into the behavior of living humans, so he made it a point to separate Mays and Marianne Mitchell and to separate Marianne from Bill Hawkins. Two of the Ventris’s crew—Walsh, McNeil, and Groves—always stayed aboard, one asleep, one awake, while the remaining crewmember worked with the others. Inside the core, the “world-ship,” one person was always supposed to stay in the Manta while the other two worked in their spacesuits. It was a good plan, and it worked—for at least the first couple of shifts.

  Forster and Josepha Walsh and Randolph Mays made up the first team, Blake Redfield and Angus McNeil and Marianne Mitchell the second, Tony Groves and Bill Hawkins and Ellen Troy the third. The Manta’s trips to the surface grew ever shorter as Amalthea’s arctic-like ocean rapidly boiled away.

  Then the Ventris developed a problem in its superconducting radiation shield. Even in the shadow of Amalthea the shield was vital to the safety of all of them, and if out of commission would require their immediate departure for Ganymede—so Walsh and McNeil had to be detailed to work it out, a process which took up a whole day and stretched into a second.

  Forster’s schedule was soon in shambles; he made up exploration teams from whoever was fresh enough to work.

  The structure he called the art gallery was huge, even by the standards of the race that had made the world-ship. There was nothing cold or mechanical about its architecture, although like the other structures in the world-ship it was constructed of the gleaming semi-metallic stuff that had defied human analysis for decades, since the first sample of it was found on Mars. The building’s topmost peak climbed half the distance between the two innermost levels—the greatest open space in all the core—and though it was easily taller than the Eiffel Tower it was shaped like the apse of Notre Dame, buttresses and all.

  Sir Randolph Mays, his natural tendency toward grandiosity stimulated by this chance resemblance, insisted upon calling it “The Temple of Art.” No one had found any trace of anything that looked even vaguely religious aboard the world-ship, but Mays’s name for the place seemed not inappropriate, and it stuck.

  After a day of exploration, Forster was ecstatic. “Empty out the best museums of Earth, empty them of all their legitimate, indigenous treasures and all their ill-got, stolen loot as well, and you could not begin to approach the numbers of pieces at the levels of quality we are finding here.” His rough estimate put the number of exhibits in the temple at between ten and twenty million; what slice of the cultural variety of an alien civilization these represented no one could know, but at the least presumptuous guess they were the best harvest of a race whose history had been much longer, before it vanished, than the history of humans upon Earth.

  Two more days passed. With Forster’s original schedule inoperative, Tony Groves was in the sub and Bill Hawkins was in the water with Marianne. It was the first chance he’d gotten to be completely alone with her since the crash—although underwater, with both of them in spacesuits, even a last century patriarch would have found a chaperon redundant.

  Their work gave them plenty to talk about without trespassing on the sensitive subjects. Hawkins was grateful for her warmth, approving of her grasp of the subject, tremendously impressed by the skill and competence she demonstrated, having in short order learned to maneuver in her suit and do the work required of her. Like him, she had started at a disadvantage; if anything, she was a faster learner.

  They were recording a long frieze of colored metals, bronze and gold and silver and green-encrusted copper, partly incised, partly fused, an effect that reminded Hawkins of the late 20th-century technique of high-explosive bonding. Hawkins made a note to ask Blake about that; in casual conversation Blake had revealed that he knew quite a bit about explosives. The frieze depicted an ocean floor and a rich assemblage of sea creatures—a scene from nature, not the artificial interior of the ship—but though it looked as familiar as a coral reef off Australia, nothing depicted in it was quite the same as one would find in the seas of Earth. Beside many of the plants and animals were incised words—names, perhaps, like the names in spiky old Greek letters beside the portraits of saints in gilded icons—here labeling corals and worms and spiny things and fishes of the reef and the floating umbrella-like and ribbon-like and many-armed creatures in the waters above, and the teams of big animals like sharks or dolphins, diving together, which displayed the universally streamlined, torpedo-shaped bodies of fast swimmers. Hawkins easily read off the sounds of the words, but the results had no equivalents in any of the languages of Earth with which he was familiar.

  The glinting images of the wall reflected his dancing torchlight back to Hawkins as he drifted silently past them in the dark water, entranced. Before he noticed, he’d gotten himself into a space too narrow for the Manta to follow.

  “Tony? Where’d I lose you?” He got no reply. And at the same moment he noticed that Marianne was no longer with him.

  He turned back. The spacesuits weren’t equipped with sonar, and the suitcomm radios didn’t work well underwater, especially among highly reflective surfaces. Hawkins wasn’t worried; he couldn’t have strayed too far from the Manta. And Marianne would be near the sub. As game as she was, and as quick to learn, she was sensible too, and generally careful to stay within easy reach of help.

  The narrow passage bifurcated, then bifurcated. All the surfaces of the diverging corridors were covered with intricate metallic relief and intaglio. The angle of Hawkin’s torch fell on the walls in the opposite direction from a moment before, and although everything looked familiar nothing was the same.

  He was sure he must have come through … where? That left-hand passage. But just as he was about to enter it, he thought he caught a flicker of white, at the edge of vision and at the farthest extent of his torchlight, some ten meters down a different corridor. “Marianne?”

  He pushed his way into a different passage, following a will-o’-the-wisp that might be nothing more than his own reflection, and a moment later came into a small circular chamber, which was itself the meeting place of six radiating corridors. He felt the first stab of worry—

  —just as his beam fell upon the statue.

  The moment when one first meets a great work of art has an impact that can never again be recaptured; the alien subject of this work exaggerated the effect, made it over-whelming. Here, cast with superb skill and authority in metal whose soft color and luster resembled pewter, was a creature obviously modeled from life. Hawkins was the first human, so far as he knew, to see what a representative of Culture X actually looked like.

  Two refracting eyes gazed serenely upon him—eyes made of crystal, as the Greeks had made the eyes of their incomparable life-sized bronzes. But these eyes were thirty centimeters apart, set in a face three times the size of a human face, a face without a nose and with a mouth that was not human, perhaps not a mouth at all, but rather an intricate folding of flesh. Nevertheless, the effect was one of serene and embracing emotion.

  If there was nothing human about the face or body, the figure moved Hawkins profoundly, for the artist had spanned the barriers of time and culture in a way he would never have believed possible. There were many things humans did not share—could not have shared—with the builders of this world, but all that was really important, it seemed to Hawkins, they would have felt in common. “Not human,” he thought, “but still humane.”

  Just as one can read emotions in the alien but familiar face of a dog or horse, so it seemed to Hawkins that he knew the feelings of the undersea being whose unseeing eyes stared into his own. Here was wisdom and authority, the calm, confident power that is shown—Hawkins’s art-historical mind rummaged for a suitable example from the great oceanic powers of Earth—in Bellini’s portrait of the Doge Leonardo Loredano of Venice, diffused with pearly light from unseen windows overlooking a foggy sea. And there was sadness also, the sadness of a race which had made some stupendous effort and had made it in vain.

  Hawkins floated transfixed before the creatur
e, which appeared hooded in its own flesh. Like a giant squid, a tall mantle stood up above its face, and it was girdled with tentacles, but unlike a squid its body plan was long, a narrow ellipsoid, its lower half equipped with powerful fins. Gills marked its mantle with chevrons; their water intake was above the face, separate from the seeming mouth, crowning the being’s “forehead” like a diadem.

  Why this solitary representation of the Amaltheans, as Hawkins had come to think of them? He did not know; he only knew that this one was set here on purpose, to bridge time, to greet whatever beings might one day enter the great ship. That it was set inside this chamber, isolated from the exterior by narrow corridors, suggested that creatures no bigger than themselves were expected—or were to be permitted inside.

  “Bill, it’s lovely,” said Marianne’s voice in his suitcomm.

  Startled, he made a floundering attempt to turn. She was floating only three meters behind him, having approached in silence.

  “How did you get behind me?” he asked abruptly. “I thought I saw you going that way.”

  “Oh? Well, you couldn’t have been following me. I’ve been following your torchlight.” She sounded a bit miffed. “You scared me to death. I was all alone for … it seemed like an hour.”

  “More like five minutes,” he said, “but I do owe you an apology. We’ll have to be more careful. I… I’m afraid I was simply carried away.”

  Marianne’s shining gaze was fixed on the statue. “It’s wonderful,” she breathed. “Just think of it waiting here in the darkness all those millions of years.”

  “More than a few million. At least a thousand million … a billion, as you say in North America.”

  “We ought to give it a name.”

  “That seems a bit presump—”

  “It’s a kind of envoy, I think, carrying a greeting to us,” she went on, ignoring his objections. Her attention was fastened on the statue. “Those who made it knew that one day someone else was bound to come here and find this place. There’s something noble about it, and something very sad, too.” She turned her enraptured gaze on Hawkins. “Don’t you feel it?”