Thumbprints

by Pamela Sargent

  “You don’t even know if there is a next stage,” she said. “You don’t know if there’s anything at all.”

  “I have to take that chance, or keep going back and forth like an amphibian forever. You’ve got to help me, Lilly. Tell me you can let go.”

  The mist was beginning to lift, but her face still felt wet; then she realized that she was crying. “Dad, I don’t want you to go. If I could know there’d be something for you, maybe I could–”

  “You can’t know. I don’t know. I have to take the chance.” He rose to his feet and held out his arms. The cove seemed muffled in silence; she could not even hear the water lapping at the nearby shore. The bay had become solid, an unmoving, wrinkled gray surface; the mist felt as thick as foam.

  “Lilly,” he called out.

  “Goodbye!” The farewell tore itself from her throat. “Goodbye!” She clutched at the oars, wanting to row toward the rock and grab him, but forcing herself to be still. “I love you. Goodbye, Dad, goodbye.”

  He disappeared into the fog, his limbs and torso fading as the mists enveloped him. Lillian saw him smile before he vanished. Maybe that meant that there was something ahead, that he had glimpsed a world he could now enter. She would hold on to that hope, even knowing that there would be no certainty for her until she faced such a passage herself.

  Water slapped at the boat’s hull. In the east, over the hills behind her mother’s bungalow, the sun was a pale disk floating in the haze. The turtles were gone, but she had heard no splashes as they entered the water. This was not the weather for them. Perhaps they would come out when the mist cleared.

  She rowed back across the bay. In an hour or so, Martin would be back at his apartment, and she would call him then to tell him what she had decided to do.

  Venus Flowers at Night

  The escarpment to his northeast was the sheer face of mountains taller than the Himalayas, a range of peaks sustained by the upwelling of Venus’s mantle. Karim gazed up at the vast wall of the cliffside. Masses of dark gray clouds hid the top of the escarpment, but patches of mossy green were visible against the black and gray face of the cliff. To the west, a pale glow could be seen behind the thick clouds; the sun was rising.

  The scarp was the southwest side of the Maxwell Mountains. To the north lay the high plateaus of the landmass of Ishtar Terra. Life, although precarious, had already come to the cliffs; soon people would travel to the Venusian surface to live in the enclosed settlements of the high plateaus.

  No, Karim thought, and the cliffside disappeared.

  Now he stood on a rocky shore, looking out at a wrinkled gray ocean. In the east, the setting sun was no more than a smear of white light against the thick gray mist of the sky; another month would pass before it disappeared below the horizon. No birds flew above this shore; no life lived in this sterile and acidic sea.

  No, Karim thought again, and the gray ocean vanished. He lifted his arms and removed the silver linking band from his head.

  He sat in the small room that adjoined his sleeping quarters aboard the Beverwyck. The floor rocked almost imperceptibly under his feet. He would have preferred a large hovercraft, or perhaps an airship, for this journey, but Greta had insisted on hiring the Beverwyck. The small watercraft’s functions were controlled by an artificial intelligence, so its crew of three would be all they required, meaning that he and Greta would have more privacy. Greta also believed that the citizens of North America’s Atlantic Federation would be more reassured by a visiting Mukhtar who was traveling slowly upriver in a simple vessel and spending time at places along the way, instead of speeding past towns and villages in a hovercraft or floating above them in an inaccessible airship, stopping only to talk with the occasional high official.

  “You have to show some sensitivity and respect,” Greta had told him. “Many of the people in my home Nomarchy still haven’t forgotten what their place once was in the world.”

  Karim al-Anwar usually heeded his wife’s advice on such matters, having learned that her political instincts were often superior to his own. But he suspected that Greta also preferred a journey aboard the Beverwyck because that would allow her more proximity to the places of her childhood. Greta Gansevoort-Mehdi had grown up along the Hudson River, in a home that overlooked the Albany port, watching ships move up and down the waterway while dreaming of her escape from a region of Earth that now counted its wealth in history and monuments to the past and little else.

  I should go to sleep, he told himself. Instead, he crossed the sitting room and climbed the short flight of steps to the deck.

  A small human form topped by a mass of dark curls was silhouetted against the railing; Lauren, the female steward, was on watch tonight. She turned toward him.

  “Is there anything you require, Mukhtar Karim?” she asked in badly pronounced Arabic.

  “No, thank you.” He leaned against the railing. They had passed under the Verrazano Bridge and come through the narrows and now lay at anchor in Upper New York Bay. In the moonlight, he was able to glimpse a long low black wall astern of the Beverwyck: the dikes of Staten Island. That morning, he had paid visits to the seawall workers in Asbury Park and Perth Amboy along the Jersey shore, and recalled the wary, suspicious look he had glimpsed in the eyes of many in the crowd as their supervisor introduced him, how they had stared blankly at him as he assured them of the Council’s good intentions and concern for the people of North America.

  After their arrival in Washington several days ago on a suborbital flight, he and Greta had taken a train to Atlantic City, where they had boarded the Beverwyck after a reception hosted by that city’s officials and a town meeting with some of its citizens. They were given a private car on the train from Washington; their sitting chairs had holes in the red upholstery and the blue and red carpeting was nearly threadbare. The car had rattled as it moved, sometimes so loudly that he and Greta had to shout at each other to be heard. The Atlantic Federation and its sister Nomarchies on the North American continent had the worst trains in the world, perhaps because so many of these people clung to their electric and ethanol-powered automobiles, personal hovercraft, and other forms of private transportation, still holding on to the illusion of being entirely free to go anywhere at will.

  “How long have you served aboard the Beverwyck?” Karim asked the young woman.

  “Served?” At first he thought that she had not understood that word. “But we own the Beverwyck,” Lauren continued, switching to Anglaic, “my brother Zack, my bondmate, and myself. Zack and I bought her five years ago, and not long after that Roberto and I made our pledge, so Zack and I cut him in for an equal share.”

  “I see,” Karim replied in Anglaic, wishing that Greta had told him the three young people were the craft’s owners and not just a crew hired to see to their comfort. But perhaps his wife had not known that. He would have to adjust his manner, treat them with a bit more friendliness and a little less reserve.

  “But it is assuredly less of a drain on our purses for us to look after our passengers ourselves instead of hiring others.” Lauren had switched back to Arabic. “There is not so much to be made with the Beverwyck that we would be able to amply reward any hirelings.”

  “Please.” Karim gestured with one hand. “I don’t mind if we speak in Anglaic, and the practice will be useful for me.”

  “Doesn’t sound to me like you need much practice, Mukhtar Karim. Your Anglaic’s a lot better than my Arabic.” Lauren cleared her throat. “As I was saying, we don’t make all that much, but it isn’t such a bad way to live your life, going up and down the Hudson, taking our time and going slow and not rushing to get up to Troy in a day with a cargo, and we’ve had some interesting passengers. None so interesting as you, of course.”

  “I am flattered,” Karim said.

  “Your wife drove a hard bargain, but a fair one. It also can’t hurt us to have such a prominent passenger. It’ll certainly be good advertising.”

  “I’m grateful to be o
f some small service to you, then.”

  “Sure there’s nothing I can do for you, sir?” Lauren asked.

  “No, thank you.” He should go back below, force himself to get some sleep.

  Karim left the deck, descended the steps to the sitting room, and closed the door behind him. He had left his linking band on the small table next to his chair; he sat down and put the thin band around his head once more.

  “Mukhtar Karim,” the soft alto voice of the Beverwyck’s cybermind whispered, “do you wish to call up another mind-tour?” The voice was faint; he was still having some slight trouble interfacing with the artificial intelligence properly through his band. “I have quite an extensive archive of virtual experiences,” the mind went on. “Most of them are far more entertaining and detailed than what you have been accessing.”

  “No doubt they are,” Karim said. His mind-tours of Venus were barely more than sketches and rudimentary designs he had pulled together by himself, and he knew only the rudiments of mind-tour production. His vision lived more fully inside him than in his mind-tours. He wondered if it would ever live in reality.

  “You also need not limit yourself to the subject of the planet Venus,” the AI continued.

  “Ah, but that’s the subject of most concern to me these days,” Karim replied.

  “Perhaps you will tell me why.”

  “Because Earth is of so much concern to me.”

  “That does not seem to cohere with your retreat into your mind-tours,” the AI said. “Nor does it seem consistent with your present assignment of visiting parts of this Nomarchy to assure the people here that the Council of Mukhtars has their best interests at heart.”

  “That assignment,” Karim said, “was given me partly to get me out of the way.”

  The AI had nothing to say to that. Karim thought of how delicately Mukhtar Hassan Tantawi had broached the subject of this tour. Someone had to be sent to the Atlantic Federation, and perhaps to a couple of the other Nomarchies of North America after that, on a diplomatic mission, the object of which was to listen to any grievances and appeals for additional aid and to report any interesting observations. Given that those particular regions of Earth were still among the more suspicious and distrustful of the New Islamic States, they were especially in need of reassurance, and the appearance of a member of the Council would do much to convince them that the Mukhtars who now ruled Earth wanted only to cooperate with them and see that their needs were met.

  Karim did not doubt the purpose of his mission, only the reasons Mukhtar Hassan had given for choosing him to carry it out. He was fluent in Anglaic, but several other members of the Council knew that language well, and most educated people had at least some familiarity with the tongue. His wife had grown up in the Atlantic Federation, which could be useful, but the fact was that Greta’s presence on this trip was not really necessary.

  The truth, he admitted to himself, was that he and his allies were losing their influence on the Council to a group of younger, more practical men. More farmland was being lost to climatic changes, and more coastal areas to the rising oceans fed by the melting polar icecaps. The Council had to see that Earth’s people were fed, clothed, housed, and trained for the work to which their individual talents were best suited, and to indulge in other dreams was a luxury they could not afford, especially a dream as grandiose as the one Karim harbored. People with the task of healing their own wounded planet could not be distracted by the vision of transforming another world, especially one that presented the challenges of Venus. Even Mukhtar Ali bin Oman, once a strong ally of Karim’s, had seen which way the sands were drifting and had begun, however gently and shamefacedly, to mouth the phrases of the doubters.

  The Council had not sent him here only to soothe the North Americans, a task any of the Mukhtars could have performed and for which at least a few of them were better suited than he. His mission was also a warning to him, and Hassan’s words, however artfully phrased and ambiguous, had delivered that warning: You will have a chance to think and reconsider your thoughts while we will be free of your efforts to win more supporters for your cause. If you return and insist on pressing for your dream again, we can find another mission for you, perhaps one not as pleasant. And if you persist after that, then, God willing, it may be time to relieve you of some of your responsibilities.

  Karim did not fear expulsion from the Council or exile, or even the disgrace such a punishment would bring to his family; the stronger among his brothers, sisters, and cousins would eventually overcome the dishonor, and the weaker would glean what crumbs they could for themselves, as they always had. It was powerlessness that he feared, being deprived of any influence, unable even to hope that the Council, soon or in times to come, might come to share his vision.

  “We can’t go on this way, you know,” he murmured through his linking band to the mind of the Beverwyck, “just trying to repair the damage and living in the fantasy that we are the future, that human history has at last passed into our hands. We’re certainly better off than we were a century or two ago, but maybe our past sufferings have so marked us that we’re willing to settle for what we have and be grateful we have survived.”

  “Human beings have not only survived on this planet,” the AI said, “but also in space.”

  “The habitat-dwellers have survived in space,” Karim replied. “Some among my brothers on the Council would say that they have already diverged from the stream of human history, and others would call them cowards and traitors to their kind. But they are looking outward, beyond simply conserving what they have, while we stopped looking outside ourselves some time ago. Maybe when we were a poor people and still fighting for the scraps the more powerful threw to us, that was necessary. When we were salvaging what we could from this world and doing the work of rebuilding, we had no choice but to concentrate on practical matters. But if we never look to anything greater–”

  “– your culture will stagnate,” the AI interrupted. The mind had heard him say that often enough, aloud and through the band, during the trip from Atlantic City, and now it repeated his words. “It will again become a backwater. You are immersing yourself in your mind-tours in order to convince yourself that the great endeavor you dream of is possible.”

  “Oh, I can convince myself,” Karim said, “or at least I can do so intermittently. It’s how to convince others, that is the problem.”

  He was aboard a small shuttlecraft, moving away from the space station orbiting Venus toward the parasol shading the planet from the sun. Constructing the parasol had cost both resources and lives, but now, after nearly a century of effort, a hyperthin umbrella of aluminum would allow the hellish planet to cool.

  As his craft approached the parasol, Karim could make out a series of slats designed to reflect sunlight outward and away from Venus. To design the parasol, to build it, to stabilize it so that the vast umbrella would neither drift closer to the sun nor threaten Venus, had been the greatest feat of construction ever undertaken by humankind, and yet it was only a first step in the work of terraforming Venus.

  “And also only the first step,” a voice added, “in mastering the tools we may need to restore Earth’s biosphere.” The disembodied alto voice speaking to him was that of the shuttlecraft’s AI, and yet it sounded oddly familiar.

  It would take some two hundred years for Venus’s surface temperature to drop enough to allow for surface settlements, and even then the first settlers would need to live in protected and closed environments. An effort to terraform Mars would have proceeded more quickly; if Karim had not lived to see the end of such an effort, his children or grandchildren surely would have. But the refugees from Earth, the habitat-dwellers, had claimed Mars for themselves, making habitats of its two satellites, bases from which they occasionally ventured forth to explore the Red Planet.

  Once, Karim had resented the habitat-dwellers’ claim on Mars, but he had eventually come to understand that Venus might be better soil for the flowering of h
is dream. Venus might have been another Earth, might have more closely resembled humankind’s home world during the first five hundred million years of their planetary histories; to terraform Venus would be to restore her to what she might have been. Human settlers born there in the distant future would not become exiles from their home planet, since Venus’s gravity was close to that of Earth’s, but any Martian settlers would be exiles; their bodies, adapted to the gentler gravitational pull of Mars, would cut them off from ever being able to return to Earth.

  His shuttlecraft passed through the umbra of the shadow cast by the parasol, and then a spear of light caught him. Karim covered his eyes reflexively as the viewscreen darkened, then peered at the screen again.

  “One of the parasol’s fans has begun to drift away from the shade’s main body,” his craft’s AI said softly as more light filled the screen. “Do not fear. This craft is not in danger.”

  But the Venus project is, Karim thought apprehensively. The fan would have to be replaced; more resources and lives would be lost to that work. That of course was assuming that the parasol did not become unstable and begin to drift away from its L1 point between Venus and the sun. If it moved closer to the sun, more of the planet would eventually be left unshaded; closer to Venus, and the metallic umbrella would be caught and torn apart by fierce winds – if the sulfuric acid of the poisonous atmosphere did not dissolve the parasol first. He trembled in his seat. They might have to rebuild the entire shield.

  “My calculations tell me–” the shuttlecraft’s mind began.

  “No,” Karim replied, and the shuttlecraft suddenly vanished.

  For a moment, he did not know where he was, then recognized the familiar surroundings of the Beverwyck’s sitting room. He felt the pangs of disappointment and loss.

  “You asked me,” the Beverwyck’s mind whispered through his band, “to provide you with an emotional sense of a past in your sketches, so that you would experience each mind-tour as an achieved reality.”