“I’ll tell you what the problem actually is,” Ali bin Oman said. Karim abruptly found himself sitting on a cushion in front of a low table. Ali sat across from him, sipping from a cup.
“The problem?” Karim asked.
“Why this project is stalled. Why we’re likely to be here just long enough to see the next stage through to its conclusion before they suspend operations and haul us back to Earth. It’s as I’ve always said – sooner or later, we’ll have to reach out to our brethren in their space habitats. They wouldn’t have been able to survive and to build their habitats without developing technologies superior to ours. They could help us in our work here, God willing, if we can swallow our pride long enough to ask them for their aid.”
“Our fellow Mukhtars would force you off the Council if you voiced such ideas,” Karim said.
“They’d probably do worse than that to me.”
“You’re also forgetting that the habitat-dwellers don’t approve of terraforming planets.”
“That may be overstating the case,” Ali said. “They don’t see the need for such efforts, since they’re able to engineer their own environments in their artificial worlds. But I think they might be interested in contributing to a project that would add to their store of knowledge. That would be their only reimbursement from us – what they might learn. We have little else to offer them.”
“The Council would never agree to that,” Karim said. “This project was to be our refutation of that space-dwelling culture, our jihad, our moral equivalent of a war against them. To turn to them now means to admit that we’ve failed.”
Ali grew translucent, then faded out. The room slowly darkened, and became again Karim’s cabin aboard the Beverwyck.
Karim watched from the prow with Greta until the basalt cliffs of the Palisades were behind them, then went below as more boat traffic began to crowd the waterway – ferries crossing between New York and New Jersey, water buses moving north and south, sailboats, small hovercraft, patched-together vessels riding so low in the water that it seemed they might sink.
Lauren’s bondmate Roberto was in the sitting room, drinking coffee. The young man got to his feet and bowed slightly, pressing his fingers to his forehead.
“Please sit down,” Karim said as he settled himself on the couch across from Roberto. “It’s good that we got an early start,” he continued. “The traffic is going to slow us up.”
“Only for a while, sir. This is rush hour, but in a couple of hours, we’ll have clear passage. You’ll be at West Point by midafternoon, if not sooner.” Roberto poured more coffee for himself and a cup for Karim. “Uh, I have to ask you for a favor, Mukhtar.”
Karim waved a hand. “Ask it, then.”
“Of course you’re free to refuse it.”
“Of course.”
“I had a message this morning from my brother Pablo. He’s been living in Poughkeepsie for the past two years, but he’s been offered a position in Albany. He asked if he could come aboard and travel there with us.”
“What kind of position?” Karim asked.
“Designing educational mind-tours for the New York Museum and the Albany Institute. He trained as an engineer, but he got interested enough in mind-tour design to learn something about that and do some work on the side for a couple of tour producers.” Roberto sipped his coffee. “He wouldn’t be in your way, and Zack said he’d put him up in his room. And there’s no black marks on his record, so you can clear him with the police if you’re worried about security.”
Karim frowned. “I am here on a mission of friendship,” he said softly. “My wife is a native of this region. I have no worries about our personal safety.” He tactfully refrained from mentioning the implant in his arm that would summon both medical personnel and a squad of Guardians to his side if danger threatened, and the pin-sized camera on his headdress that would preserve images of any assailant.
“But if you’d rather not have Pablo aboard, we can just go upriver as planned and head back for him later after we leave you and your wife off.”
Karim raised a brow. He had not expected the stolid Roberto to have an educated brother. “Would Pablo lose his chance at his new position if he didn’t travel with us?”
“No, sir. He wasn’t supposed to start his new work right away. It’s more that he wanted time to find new quarters and get settled. Anyway, I shot a message back to him saying I’d ask, but I didn’t promise him anything.”
Karim made his decision immediately. “Tell your brother that he’s welcome to come aboard.”
Roberto grinned, then stood up. “Thank you, Mukhtar Karim.” He bowed deeply from the waist. “You don’t know how much–”
“It’s nothing.” Karim retreated from the young man’s effusive gratitude into the bedroom.
If Venus was ever to acquire Earthlike weather patterns, the planet would have to rotate more rapidly; keeping the Venusian “day” of two hundred and forty-three days meant an inhospitable world of hot and cold extremes. Any human beings living there would have the undesirable alternatives of either living in completely enclosed environments or being constantly on the move in order to stay within a narrow habitable band between scorching heat and excessive cold, in the twilight between sunlight and darkness.
Ali bin Oman and Greta occupied themselves with a game of chess while Karim perused the report they had presented to him. The choices proposed by the engineers to solve the problem of Venus’s climate seemed equally problematic. The parasol could continue to shade Venus entirely while a soletta and mirror orbited the planet to provide reflected sunlight, or a large asteroid or object of similar size could be hurled at Venus to speed up its rotation.
When Karim looked up from his screen, Ali and Greta were watching him, ignoring their game. “The soletta and mirror design is ingenious,” Karim began, “but it would require constant maintenance by a civilization that would have to endure over millions of years while sustaining its interest in this project. That’s expecting rather a lot of a species that’s managed only a few thousand years of continuity in its cultures at most.”
“A continuously maintained artificial environment,” Greta murmured. “That’s what we’d have, not a natural Earthlike world. That isn’t what our terraforming project was supposed to be about.”
“Then we should aim an asteroid at Venus,” Ali said, “and when it hits, God willing, the impact will increase its spin.” He peered at his pocket screen. “If it hits near the equator–”
“That powerful an impact would dissipate a lot of energy,” Karim said, “perhaps enough to destroy what we’ve accomplished so far. That is unless we settle for a Venusian day that would last for a couple of months or even longer.”
“What we need,” Greta murmured, “is some sort of planetary spin motor that can greatly speed up the rate of rotation but without damaging Venus.”
Karim shook his head. “In other words, a technology that doesn’t exist.”
Greta and Ali flickered, then disappeared. Karim stood at the edge of the island, gazing down at shadowed Venus. A bright spot suddenly appeared near the equator, then blossomed into a flare. His pocket screen was still in his hands, but he already knew what the screen would tell him. Venus was beginning to turn more rapidly, but the crust near the impact point was melting. How long would it take for the heat generated by the collision to dissipate? Long enough, perhaps, to stall the work of terraforming until an increasingly impatient Council decided to abandon the project altogether.
We’ve failed, he thought; after all this time, we’ve destroyed our work.
Something brushed against his hand. “Karim,” someone said from far away; he recognized Greta’s voice, and remembered. He lifted his band from his head, returning to the Beverwyck.
“Karim,” Greta said again. She wore a long blue robe, dark blue tunic, and scarf; she took the linking band from him and handed him his formal headdress. “It’s time to go.”
“Yes, I know.” He was
already dressed in his formal white robes. He stood up and followed her out to the deck.
General Michael Yamamura, the commandant at the West Point Military Academy, was a small gray-haired man with erect posture and a piercing gaze. He met Karim and Greta at the north dock just beyond a sharp bend in the river, listened without comment as Karim rattled off his ceremonial greeting, then left them with two cadets to guide them on a tour of Kosciusko’s Garden. Karim and his wife were still there admiring the roses when General Yamamura rejoined them. The two cadets left with Greta while the commandant outlined their upcoming schedule of events: dinner that night with the commandant’s staff, a luncheon the next day with a few members of the faculty, a question-and-answer session with their most promising cadets.
Throughout the dinner and the walk back to the hotel near Gees Point where Karim and Greta were being housed, the commandant avoided any mention of the issue that had to be uppermost in his mind. Karim finally had to bring up the subject the next day, just before lunch. Although the graduates of West Point were to be absorbed into the Guardian force that served the Mukhtars, the Council would not interfere with either their course of study or with Academy custom. The cadets would be free to wear their gray uniforms until they won their commissions and donned the black uniform of the Guardians. Any officers serving at the Point would also be allowed to wear gray, and the Council had no objection to their continuing to fly their ceremonial flags, even though the country represented by the red, white, and blue banners no longer existed. The commandant had not been able to completely conceal his gratitude and relief.
Greta was part of his audience in the auditorium. Karim was peppered with so many questions by the young men and women that General Yamamura finally had to declare the session over. Even after that, several cadets followed Karim and Greta back to the Beverwyck, anxious perhaps to impress a Mukhtar who might later consider them for a post on his staff. Their questions, on various subjects, had soon revealed the central concern of the cadets: that as officers in the Guardians, they might be reduced to being little more than part of an international police force, there to keep the peace and rein in anyone who threatened their world’s precarious security. Even those officers who eventually won their way to a post on one of the orbiting space stations would not be looking beyond their own world, as their predecessors had done. They would be there only to monitor resources and changes in the weather, to repair satellites and to patrol spaceports and industrial satellites; their only purpose in looking to the heavens at all would be to track and divert any interplanetary body that might threaten Earth. Their mental universe would forever be enclosed by practicalities.
The sea to the south of Ishtar Terra was a wrinkled gray surface that only occasionally swelled into waves. The water reflected a patch of dim yellow-white light, all that could be seen of the sun through the open slats of the parasol that still shaded Venus. Karim could walk along the shoreline without having to fear the crushing atmospheric pressure that had once existed here, but he supposed that any future settlers would have to wear much the same protective clothing as he did. His suit protected him from the heat of the day, because even with the parasol limiting the amount of sunlight that reached the planet, a day that lasted two months meant a steady rise in temperature, while the equally long night resulted in frigid cold. The helmet over his head and the tank on his back were necessary because the atmosphere was still too rich in carbon dioxide to be breathable.
There was life now in the Venusian ocean, a stew of microbial life forms, but he wondered how many would ever evolve on the dry and barren landmasses. Hundreds of years for this, Karim thought, and vast numbers of lost lives that he would not care to enumerate, and what they had won for themselves was a sterile world, not the new Earth of their dreams.
Venus would change in time, become something else, but not soon enough for the Council, for whom a wait of thousands of years might as well be a million. They had wasted resources and lives in remaking this planet, and now, as if to punish Venus for their failure, they had turned it into a prison. The domes on the plateaus of Ishtar Terra had quickly filled with those who offended the Mukhtars, who were a danger to others, or who were simply inconvenient. If Venus was to be ugly and barren, the Council would make it uglier still, and any people exiled here would never escape.
No, Karim thought, and tore his band from his head.
He was still in the Beverwyck’s sitting room, but found himself standing in front of his chair. He sat down again and thought of the kind of report he might write when he had completed his tour of this Nomarchy. He could write of the Washington functionaries whose lives had shrunk to the management of ever-decreasing resources, the Jersey seawall workers whose labor was largely designed to postpone the inevitable, the New York mayor who looked forward to little, the West Point cadets who would never see glory or true accomplishment, and of the need for a dream that might give all of them some hope and enlarge their universe. Or he could note that the Atlantic Federation was under control, that its people had finally come to see the necessity for being ruled by the Council, that the old hatreds and animosities had finally died in their defeated hearts.
He knew which of those reports his fellow Mukhtars would prefer, and which report was likely to guarantee that his old age would be one of powerlessness and exile.
In Poughkeepsie, Karim was scheduled only for a brief meeting with the mayor and a town meeting with a few hundred of the small city’s residents and anyone else who cared to participate on the public channels. Unlike the cadets of West Point, the citizens of Poughkeepsie asked few questions, and most of their inquiries were about practical concerns: renewed efforts to rid the Hudson of the pollutants that had plagued it even before the Resource Wars, insect control and disease prevention, aid for their rapidly failing farmlands. Karim assured them that the Council was already drawing up plans to help them.
His day ended at the riverfront, where, north of an old bridge that spanned the river, the Beverwyck was docked next to several ramshackle boats. A few people were on the decks of their sailboats and cruisers; they stared at Karim and Greta with the same lack of interest they had shown that morning. Out on the Hudson, a sloop with triangular sails glided past, a graceful reminder of an earlier age.
Karim let Greta board first, then followed. Lauren and Zack nodded at them from the stern. “We’ll have our supper after we’re underway again,” Karim said to the couple, “and perhaps my wife and I will dine on deck.” It would be a pleasant way to pass the evening, moving slowly past the forested hills while dining.
“I wouldn’t advise that, sir,” Zack said, glancing heavenward. “It looks like we might get a storm.” Karim looked up and then noticed the thickening clouds. “I’m thinking of waiting here to see how it goes.”
“I’m supposed to be in the town of Hudson tomorrow by noon,” Karim said.
“You needn’t worry about that, Mukhtar Karim. Storm isn’t likely to last all night, and if it was going to be a bad one, they would have put out a warning and told us to get you ashore. We’ll be on our way before dawn with plenty of time to spare.” Zack brushed back a strand of his long blond hair. “Roberto’s below with his brother. It was mighty kind of you to say he could come along.”
“It’s no trouble at all.” He went below, Greta just behind him, to find Roberto in the sitting room with another tall, broad-shouldered, dark-skinned man who strongly resembled him.
The two quickly rose to their feet. “My brother, Pablo Mainz-Aquino,” Roberto said. “This is Mukhtar Karim al-Anwar.” Karim was about to extend his hand when Pablo bowed slightly and touched his fingers to his forehead. “And his wife, Greta Gansevoort-Mehdi.” Pablo nodded in her direction.
“Please sit down,” Karim said. The two men sat down again on the sofa. Karim and Greta seated themselves in two of the chairs.
“I’m grateful you let me come aboard, sir,” Pablo said.
“Your brother is part owner of this craf
t. I wasn’t about to refuse passage to one of his people as long as there was room. He tells me that you will be working as a mind-tour designer.”
Pablo nodded. His gaze was more direct than his brother’s, the expression on his broad brown face more alert. “It’s what I’ve always wanted to do, but the only way you can actually train for it, at least now, is by working with a producer and picking up skills along the way.”
“I suppose that’s why you studied engineering,” Karim said, “so that you would have something to fall back on.”
“That’s part of it, sir, but it was mostly because I thought some training in mechatronics and bioengineering might make me a better designer. Any real knowledge a designer can bring to a mind-tour, whether it’s engineering or biology or a background in history, can help him bring more detail and reality to his creations. Most mind-tours are either adventure scenarios or virtual tours of museums and other sites, and most of them are put together by people who are largely trained in audio and visual arts.”
“There are a number of educational mind-tours,” Karim said.
“I’d call most of them training sessions rather than educational virtuals,” Pablo said, “since they’re designed to take someone through the steps needed to perform certain tasks. And the others, the historical mind-tours and such, are mostly variations on adventure scenarios. All they teach you is how to escape while pretending you’re actually learning something. Serious students don’t spend much time with them.” He paused. “We’re still a long way from what mind-tours might become as an art form.”
“An art form?” Greta asked.
Pablo nodded. “We’ve reached the point where the mind-tourist doesn’t run into as many of the glitches that destroy the illusion of reality, where the experience almost seems as detailed as the actual world. That’s an accomplishment in itself, but there’s still the potential for much more.”
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