Arthur C Clarke's Venus Prime Omnibus

by Paul Preuss

  “Call me Forster,” I said.

  “Forster?”

  “Forster, yes. Think of it as my given name.”

  “If you wish.” Muller was silent again, and I was afraid my impatience had scared him off.

  “Well?” I said, trying to sound gentle and unthreatening.

  “How do you think I came aboard this craft?” he asked.

  “Didn’t the Amaltheans bring you?” I asked tiredly, expecting no surprises.

  “When this thing you call a medusa came at my Lobster, I thought it was one of Joe’s giant squids, about to devour me. I wrote what amounted to a last will and testament.”

  “So you told us.”

  He looked at me through those thick round glasses of his, with a look that told me I was not nearly as smart as I thought I was. “Then I saw the woman,” he said.

  “The who?”

  “The woman. The man joined her a bit later. And then the others.”

  I thought I understood his words, but I certainly did not understand his meaning. “Where did this happen?”

  “At about eight hundred meters. She was very thin. Much of that will have been compression. At first I was uncertain how she could survive—well, to tell you the truth, I was sure I was hallucinating—but when I saw the dark slits along the sides of her chest, and the water intakes near her collar bone, I began to understand.”

  “And the man?” I asked.

  “Like her. He had the intakes and the slits in his sides.”

  “Gills.”

  “You know these people?”

  “We’ve been talking about them all night.” I looked at him with a great feeling of pity. What he read on my face, I can’t imagine. “Troy and Redfield.”

  “Ah.” He was silent, wondering if he’d made a mistake by bringing up the subject. Who would confirm this story?

  “What happened?” I insisted.

  “They signaled to me through the glass. They and the squids carried me toward the vessel. The humans stayed in front, making faces and gestures … trying to convince me they were human, I think. And then I was inside the vessel. That was the last I saw of them.”

  “You said something about ‘others’,” I said.

  He studied me, his blue eyes magnified by his round glasses. “They kept well back. Only after I turned my lights on again could I see them, hanging back there in the darkness.”

  “Can you tell me anything about them?”

  “Only that they were exactly like the first two.”

  “Exactly?”

  “Exactly. Men and women who could have been their twins, happy as fish in the cold, dark deep. The pressure would crush an ordinary submarine. A week ago you could have described that sight to me, and I would have said it was my worst nightmare come true. But they smiled at me. They made funny faces at me, tried to make me laugh. It was almost as if they were dancing to entertain me. And—no doubt I was out of my mind—I took comfort from them.”

  “That’s what they wanted,” I said. “To save you. To save us all.”

  “Where are they now? That’s what I keep wondering. From what you’ve all said, I think I know where they came from. But where are they now?”

  They had all vanished, I was on the verge of saying—either vanished or were about to. I pictured them wheeling in beams of watery light. Maybe they could see each other, but they knew they couldn’t touch each other or exist in the same reality together. When the collapse of the wave function finally occurred, they would all (probably all—all but one couple, anyway) cease to exist. A thin apotheosis.

  So, while I thought I knew the answer to Muller’s question, I wasn’t sure enough to defend my answer—or take the responsibility of making a myth of it. Instead I gave him a half-truth. “They’ve evolved into sea creatures,” I said. “I don’t think we’ll see them on land again.”

  Or, I might have added, anywhere else.

  29

  “Those others…” A look of horror distorts Ari’s face, and even Jozsef looks as if he has tasted something bitter.

  “I have nothing more to say about them,” Forster says firmly. “Nothing but this: Troy told me that, when she refused to murder Nemo, Thowintha said to her, ‘Denial of sameness is a heavy burden.’”

  “Which means?”

  “Supply your own meaning. But consider that Thowintha was one with his’er world-ship. Perhaps we must learn to accept oneness with our world, which is also our ship. Perhaps Troy and Redfield, and even Nemo, in his way…”—and here Forster gives the commander a strange look, which goes unnoticed by the others—“have learned it already.”

  A hint of gray dawn pushes heavily at the tall library windows. The commander pokes at the last embers of the fire; the firewood is all gone, used up in the long night. “We will never know the details, then? They are all lost in the holocaust at the red limit?” Embers fall and shatter on the stone floor of the fireplace, and quick rhythms of transparent flame flutter over the brick red coals.

  Forster has gotten the last of the smoky old Scotch whisky into his glass. He swirls it thoughtfully and sips. “If I have understood the formalism correctly, Penrose and the rest…”

  “Penrose?”

  “A twentieth-century mathematician and cosmologist. He suggested that information is lost in singularities—black holes. Whereas information is created everywhere at the quantum level, because at that level a single input has many potential outputs.”

  Jozsef is never more eager than when trying to understand the abstract. “You mean after the collapse of the wave function? At the same macro-level.”

  “Yes.”

  “So that all these matters will be determined when the objects that persist in our skies will have become extremely red-shifted objects…”

  “Forgive me, Jozsef,” Forster interrupts. “The issue will be decided much more quickly than that.”

  “But what happened to you?” Jozsef insists. “Those of you aboard the ship that became Amalthea? Those … others?”

  Forster shrugs. “We live out our lives, I suppose. Somewhere on this rich Earth. Or an Earth like it.” His smile creeps back, a soft, sad smile. “Back then, when the first world-ship went to ground … it was the Oligocene then. It must have been the real paradise.”

  “The first Designates were Linda and Blake, visiting Thowintha—the Amalthean Thowintha—in the distant past?” Ari wants to know.

  “I think so.”

  “But Thowintha must have known to expect them,” says Ari. “Gills and all.” The concept of her daughter having suffered such a sea change was still repugnant to her.

  “So then … different realities can communicate?” Jozsef asks, surprised. “Without annihilating one another?”

  “Apparently this occurs routinely at the quantum level. I can give you the references—all the way back to Sidney Coleman, if you like.”

  “You spoke of a conspiracy between Nemo and Troy.” The commander is silhouetted against the window; his features are lost in black shadow.

  “At the risk of repeating myself… Nemo had failed to prevent the evolution of the human race. He realized his only hope was to confront us at a place and time he knew we must appear. We realized this too. We got here first and hid—among the asteroids, and in the water.”

  “How did you good guys prevail?”

  Forster smiles, but avoids the commander’s gaze. “I’m new to the study of quantum mechanics.”

  “Forget that; put it in the notes,” the commander growls. His voice is a rattle of stones.

  “I can picture him living for thousands of years under the sea, spawning all sorts of myths. But there is only one reality, at the crucial junction, and Nemo finally realized that.”

  “Why are you so sure?” Jozsef asks.

  “As a practical matter, Nemo’s ship could have emerged from the black hole close to the last time we did, could have followed our ship as it went to Jupiter, could have destroyed it like a butterfly in the cocoon
. Consider that Nemo and the Traditionalists certainly did find the world-ship orbiting Jupiter—Amalthea—and destroyed it. Many times.”

  “And…?”

  “Ignore Bell’s inequality. Assume Nemo’s attack succeeded at least fifty percent of the time—which must have happened. And by the same reasoning, in half the cases it didn’t happen. Therefore the four of us are here now, around this fire.”

  “You mean half of Nemo’s attacks failed?”

  “In the sense that half the potential versions of him, half the potential world-ships he was riding, ceased instantly to exist, ceased to achieve reality—yes. Only half, though.”

  “Therefore you—and the rest of us—had to exist,” says Jozsef.

  “Evidently we do,” Forster replies, and he can not prevent a self-satisfied grin. “Nemo came to understand that the only definitive intervention would come at the opening of the time loop. Which means that the decisive intervention must come as all the contending world-ships—every possible version of reality—simultaneously enter the sun. On their way to Nemesis.”

  “He has lost his gamble?” Jozsef asks.

  Forster shrugs. “We will know when the sun rises. Then every contending world-ship will collide.”

  The commander presses him, her tone astringent. “How did our heroes assure this great good outcome?”

  “We haven’t assured it,” Forster replies. “We only did what Nemo did—we did our best to insure that history was exactly as we knew it. Free Spirit, Salamander, everything. As for the rest … it is the outcome.”

  The fire is low; the light in the library has faded. The big window at the end of the room is a framed picture of the universe, where dozens of mirrored world-ships still speed outward on columns of fire.

  A few minutes pass, and Ari stands at the window, gazing at a morning sky spangled with blazing mirror-ships, a sky filled with strange angels.

  One of those ships—one at least, more likely many—is carrying her daughter and her daughter’s mate to the stars. Many more of her daughters are living under the sea. But as those ships vanish, so will the humans they have spawned.

  “There they go,” she whispers, too quietly for anyone but herself to hear. And she begins to cry.

  There they go, Traveling at the speed of light.

  Perhaps, if they survive the passage of the singularity, they will emerge into the Garden. And perhaps, if they have managed to marshal the resources of the aliens—the Amaltheans, the care-givers, the tenders of the Garden—they would undo what Ari had done … had done to her own daughter. And her daughter will then be able to conceive, and will conceive, and will give birth to a child, to children, and the children will truly be the children of a new age.

  All of that is a day away, one day in the future. Then all the world-ships will meet within the fiery envelope of the sun; only one will emerge from that refiner’s fire. That is the moment of origin. That is the moment when the photon meets the mirror.

  All that is yet in the future, one day away … a potential future. Ari and her husband Jozsef and their friends, Forster and the commander among them, live on, on Earth. It is an Earth different from what it might have been, one different from what strict probability might have dictated.

  This Earth witnesses the extraordinary flight of a giant medusa to join its mother ship, which it seeks out among a fleet of mirrored ships then crossing Earth’s orbit.

  It is an Earth upon which Bill and Marianne try again and have children. They have more than one, and they raise them more or less peacefully—at Oxford, where Bill has landed the sort of job for which he has always been best suited, in a universe of bicker and strut and mastery of the library catalogue. It is a world in which Marianne feels very much at home, knowledgeable and witty when she wants to be, diffident when she prefers.

  This same Earth has many richer options to offer. It is, for example, a world in which Angus and Jo find themselves famous, the recipients of awards, publishing contracts, consulting stints, and other compensations which partially make up for the reality that they are no longer young enough to take to space.

  And it is an Earth in which Klaus Muller, having repaired the Trincomalee Power Project, returns to his family in Switzerland. As the years unroll, his business takes him away from them from time to time; his boys do not not grow up without difficulty; his old own age and that of Gertrud, his wife, are full of human troubles. Nevertheless, Klaus and his wife do grow old, and his boys grow to be adults in a world whose skies get no fouler (and even began slowly to clear again), and whose land is tended with more care by those who live on it, and whose seas become cleaner.

  Humanity, perhaps, has seen how close it has come.

  For this, Ari can thank her daughter. Her daughter—all versions of her, she who knew herself as Sparta, all versions of her, diving boldly and with courage into the final holocaust—has in no predictable way, or imaginable way, nevertheless proved herself truly to be the Empress of the Last Days.

  AN AFTERWORD BY

  ARTHUR C. CLARKE

  And so, after six volumes, it’s time to say farewell to the durable and resourceful Ms. Sparta, not to mention her wide spectrum of friends and enemies. I am extremely impressed by the way in which Paul Preuss has created a whole universe out of half-a-dozen short stories of mine, and I am delighted that the Venus Prime series has been so well received.

  On re-reading the “Afterwords” to the previous volumes, I find that there is little that needs changing. The electromagnetic launcher which is the key element of Maelstrom (Vol. 2) now seems to be making an unexpected comeback, partly due to the Star Warriors, who have carried out some (so far ground-based) experiments with ‘Railguns.’ And, surprisingly, there is serious interest in such devices for launching payloads from Earth. For certain applications they would be much cheaper than rockets, and at least one company has been formed to exploit these possibilities. It is unlikely, however, that passengers will rush to buy tickets; accelerations will probably be in the kilogee bracket.

  The hope I expressed for the Russian space-probe “Phobos 2” in the afterword of Hide and Seek (Volume 3) was, alas, unfulfilled. For reasons that are still uncertain, this failed to complete its mission—though unlike its hapless precursor “Phobos 1,” it did return much valuable information from Mars. But the fascinating inner moon remains untouched; there may still be a black monolith lurking there…

  I am more than happy to report that the much-delayed “Galileo” space-probe, mentioned in The Medusa Encounter (Volume 4) is at last on its way to Jupiter, via one Venus and two Earth flybys. All systems appear to be operating normally, and if it produces even a fraction of “Voyager” ’s surprises when it starts reporting in 1995, I fear there may be no escape from a Final Odyssey. We may also learn the truth about the strange inner moon Amalthea, scene of much of the action in Volume 5.

  The short story “The Shining Ones”, which Paul Preuss has neatly embedded in this final volume, appeared originally in Playboy in August, 1964. It was reprinted in my collection The Wind from the Sun (1972), and with any luck, it may soon become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

  The concept of Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion (OTEC) has been taken very seriously ever since the twin spectres of fuel shortage and the Greenhouse Effect started looming over the future. A number of experimental pilot plants have been built (notably off Hawaii, an obvious candidate), and there is little doubt that such a system can be made to work.

  Whether it will be economically viable is another question: I still like the slogan I coined in the late 70s: “OTEC is the answer to OPEC.” And if the sea level is indeed rising as a result of man-made global warming at the rate some scientists predict, we will need all the nonpolluting energy sources we can find. Thanks to the enormous thermal inertia of the sea, OTEC is the only solar-powered plant able to work twenty-four hours a day; it won’t even notice when the sun goes down.

  More than a decade ago. Dr. Cyril Ponnamperuma, the distinguis
hed NASA and University of Maryland biochemist (consultant on the Apollo and Viking Missions) and Science Advisor to the President of Sri Lanka* read “The Shining Ones” and declared: “We must make this happen!” Largely as a result of his enthusiasm, proposals have already been received from a number of engineering firms to build OTEC plants at the precise location I specified a quarter of a century ago—Trincomalee, on the northeast coast of Sri Lanka. Unfortunately, the mini-civil-war which until recently affected that area has prevented any further progress. As of early 1990, a fragile peace prevails in this region, and one can only hope that when reconstruction begins, priority will be given to tapping one of the ocean’s most valuable—yet still unused—resources.

  The giant squid which gives this story its name is one of my favourite animals, though I would prefer to make its acquaintance from a safe distance. By great good luck I was able to do the next best thing during the shooting of the Yorkshire TV series, Arthur C. Clarke’s Mysterious World, which still makes frequent appearances on cable. We were able to film a specimen which had been washed ashore in Newfoundland, and even though it was only an immature female, a mere twenty feet long, it was an awesome sight. And the marine biologist who displayed it to us believes that adults may reach one hundred and fifty feet in length!

  Some years after writing this story about deep-sea operations, I had the pleasure of snorkeling off Trincomalee with the man who has descended further in the ocean than anyone else—except his companion Jacques Piccard. When Commander Don Walsh, USN, took the Trieste down to 36,000 feet, he made one of the few records which will never be broken—at least until someone finds a deeper hole in the seabed than the Marianas Trench. On our dive (maximum depth twenty-five feet) we met no giant squids; but I did encounter for the first time a creature which is a much more serious menace—the coral-reef-destroying Crown of Thorns starfish, Acanthaster planci.

  Before winding up the Venus Prime series, I would like to answer a question I’ve been frequently asked: “Do you propose to do any further collaborations?” Well, it depends what you mean…