He looked up at the overcast sky and knew that nearly two hours had passed since dawn. There was light behind the pale gray clouds in the west; sunlight had returned to Venus, but part of the parasol remained in place to prevent too much sunlight from reaching the planet. Night would come twelve hours from now and last for fourteen hours. Antigravitational pulse engines had increased the spin of the planet; Karim could remember hearing of the decades of work by artificial intelligences and machines in erecting those massive engines at Venus’s equator. There had been more quakes after Venus had begun to spin more rapidly, and its many volcanos had become even more active, but there had been no lasting damage, only the tectonic throes of a world at last coming to life.
A boulder as bright and hard as a diamond sat near him on the reddish-brown sand and rock of the shore. Other shining stones were on the shore, some nearly as large as the boulders, others small bright gems. He picked up one of the tiny stones and knew the jewel for what it was, a bit of calcium carbonate that had been precipitated out of the Venusian atmosphere.
He turned and saw the sheer escarpment of the Maxwell Mountains to the northeast. Patches of green covered the rock; through the mists that veiled the top of the scarp, he glimpsed more green. Forests, he thought, inhaling the cool air, and understood then that the self-replicating machines of the project, tiny devices no larger than molecules, were still at work on the high plateaus of Ishtar Terra turning the Venusian regolith into soil. The history of this terraformed planet was alive inside him, coherent and whole.
He saw then that he was not alone on the beach. A few meters to his right, a man, woman, and child were walking toward him. The woman had long light brown hair, much like Greta’s in her youth, while the child clinging to her hand had the man’s black hair. The three were strangers, and yet he felt that he should know them.
“Greetings,” the woman said as she approached; the man smiled at Karim. “I see you’re out for an early walk, too.” She looked away to gaze out at the ocean. “We’re still not used to it here,” she continued, “but the others say it’s always like that for new settlers. One moment we’re in awe by how much like Earth it is here, and the next we’re struck by the differences.”
“It’s new,” the man said. “That’s how it feels to me, entirely new.”
Karim was about to ask them where they lived, and then it came to him: they were from a community on the Lakshmi Plateau, one of the newer settlements that had been raised in the young forests near the old settlements that were still enclosed by protective domes. Some had remained in the old settlements, preferring their unchanging climate and managed environments, but more people were leaving them, while the newer arrivals embraced living in the unspoiled outside world. The family standing with him had come to the shore in a small flying craft, to acquaint themselves with this part of their new home.
“Come with us,” the child said to Karim, and suddenly he was inside their craft, flying south over the ocean. They sat in a half-circle, viewing the outside through the craft’s wide windows. The wrinkles of the tesserae that had marked this area of Venus were hidden under the grayish-blue ocean; the volcano of Tellus Regio was now a black mound, red at its center, surrounded by green. They left the island of Tellus behind and flew on.
There was another continent on Venus besides the highlands of Ishtar Terra, and that was Aphrodite Terra, a scorpion-shaped landmass on Venus’s equator. As that thought came to him, Karim caught a glimpse of green land to the south. Frost sometimes came to the highest parts of Ishtar, but Aphrodite was a tropical land of heat and jungle and the feral descendants of once-domesticated creatures. Aphrodite was a place for visitors and adventure seekers, not for settlers.
“Not yet, anyway,” the woman said, “but that will change. People will settle here, too.” Their craft descended –
– and he was standing on a hill amid a profusion of flowers, surrounded by the engorged blossoms of orchids, by bright red peonies, by beds of pink, blue, and yellow roses and tulips. The air was filled with the fragrances of lilacs, roses, traces of cinnamon, and an elusive musky scent.
No, Karim thought, and his vision seemed to sharpen. These flowers were not the ones he had known on Earth, but only resembled those plants. The roses were much too large; the orchids were fading from purple to lavender and then darkening again.
The sky was growing dark, too; night was coming to Venus. The brown-haired woman who reminded him of his wife stood near him, near a vine-covered tree. “There’s nothing more for us to do here,” she said, “except to take root here with all the other life of this world, the life we’ve transplanted and the life that has developed here, and to live out our lives as part of it all.”
“That was the hope long ago,” Karim said, “to make this a world that could ultimately sustain itself without our intervention. But we’re not there yet, not as long as the parasol is needed. That will require maintenance, and if it ever fails, the increase in sunlight may return Venus to her earlier self. The oceans might boil away again. The atmosphere–”
“The parasol won’t fail,” she said. “The artificial intelligences maintaining it will see to that.” She laughed. “And maybe a time will come when we won’t need the parasol, when we’ll have the power to move Venus into a new orbit farther from the sun. Our work would be completed then. Venus could truly become the sister of Earth and follow her in her orbit around the sun.”
Again he recalled all the centuries of effort that had brought him to this world, and to this garden. He lifted his head as the sky darkened, and wondered if, when this side of Venus was turned away from the shield of the parasol, he would be able to glimpse the stars, if he would see Earth.
Then the garden vanished, and he was again in his chair.
Karim lifted the band from his head. Greta was murmuring a few words to Pablo; she fell silent as they both looked toward him.
“I hope that was enough,” Pablo said, “to give you an idea.”
“More than enough,” Karim replied. “You have exceeded my expectations, Pablo. It’s quite beautiful even in this form.”
“Beauty’s part of what’ll give this tour its punch. I’ll have to do more, of course, work in more of the history. That’s what will give it more of the sense of reality, being able to feel yourself in the future, but a worked-out future, looking back, remembering each part of the history, having it be more than just the passing illusion of reality. The mind-tourist becomes convinced it can be real, and maybe that can inspire others to work toward making it real.”
“It’s my fellow Mukhtars that I’ll have to convince,” Karim said.
Greta shook her head. “No, my dear, not only them. Your project would have to be something in which everyone can share.”
His wife was right, as she so often was. That was also part of what he had sensed at the edges of Pablo’s tour, that sense of a new world open to everyone, in which people were finally free of the old boundaries.
“I’d like you to continue working on this,” he said to Pablo.
Pablo looked pleased. “I’d be honored,” he said.
“I can’t offer you any official position, at least not yet, so you’ll have to work on it in your own time. But I’ll see that you get everything you require, God willing, along with enough credit to make it worth your while.”
“That might be better for me,” Pablo said. “I might be able to find a way to make it part of a museum exhibit eventually, so that others can share it. That’s what you want – to build a constituency, so to speak.”
“Yes,” Karim said.
“They might make a mind-tour about you some day,” Greta said. “Karim al-Anwar, master planner in a ruined world, reaching out to encompass his dream of progress in the terraforming of Venus. We see his heroic and creative journey reviving his world as his people win a new world and use that knowledge to resurrect the old.”
“That sounds most far-fetched, Greta,” Karim said, but allowed himself to f
ully feel his pride and hope. He would fight for his dream, and if he failed, others would reach out for it, younger Mukhtars and all of the people who would experience the realized world of Pablo’s completed mind-tour and look beyond it. “And now,” he went on, “if you don’t mind, I think I would like to return to the gardens of Venus for a few moments.”
He slipped on the band. For a few seconds he was lost in the darkness, and then he saw the flowers again, their colors faded but still visible, as night came to Venus and swallowed the light.
Only for a while, he thought; the dawn would come again.
Shrinker
One of us had to get small. It was getting too expensive to go on as we were.
Alvin was the one who brought it up. We were in the middle of dinner when he suddenly jabbed his bluefish with his fork. “Look at this. Just look at this.”
“Is something wrong with it? I know – too much rosemary.”
Alvin shook his head. “If we could just cut everything in half. You know – get half as much food, half as much of everything – maybe we could get by. I don’t know.”
“I’m doing the best I can,” I said woefully. “Do you think I wanted bluefish? I wanted halibut.”
“You don’t have to serve martinis almost every night, and we don’t need a glass of wine with every meal.”
“It’s Gallo, for God’s sake. I don’t even buy the kind with corks anymore. And I need a drink after a day at the store.” I pushed my plate away. “I don’t mind cutting back on things, but how much more can we do? We eat what’s on sale or what I can get with coupons. I haven’t bought any new clothing in a year. We never go out, and the cable’s been disconnected. The car is five years old, and you’ve even cut down on your smoking. What’s left?” I felt fur against my leg and looked down. “We’ll have to get rid of Meowser. That’s what you’re going to say, isn’t it? No more vet bills, no more cat food. Well, I won’t. If we can’t afford kids, we can at least have a cat.” Meowser sprawled on the floor, licking a tawny paw. He was fat, lazy, disdainful, and preferred Alvin’s lap to mine, but it was the principle of the thing.
“Meowser can stay. I have a way out of our problems. I’ve been giving it a lot of thought.”
I had been married to Alvin for five years, and in all that time, I had never known him to be practical. “We may be dead tomorrow,” he would say as he and MasterCard took me out for a steak dinner. “There may be a nuclear war next year, and then you’ll be sorry I didn’t bring you flowers,” he would murmur as he handed me roses. “They can’t take it away from you when you’re six feet under.”
We had bought what we wanted, figuring we would pay for it later. We were, indeed, paying for it, though not in the way I had anticipated. We were barely keeping up with the bills, and our finances resembled the Polish balance of payments.
“I know your solution,” I said bitterly. “Another line of credit. Or kiting checks.”
“You’re wrong, Jessie. I’ve got a better idea. One of us has to get small.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Remember my Uncle Bob?”
Alvin’s uncle, Robert Lewiston, had died a year earlier. We had taken turns sitting with him in the hospital while he placidly waited for death, saying he would be glad to be out of it. Alvin’s mother had died while he was in college, and Bob had been his only remaining relative. He had, like Alvin’s mother, left a few debts and no assets to speak of, and we had inherited nothing except a large cardboard box; I had never seen its contents.
Bob had made a modest living selling old books and tiny hand-painted marble eggs. The books had been sold to pay off his debts, and the eggs had become collectors’ items, bringing ten times the amount Bob had sold them for. We had sold the five he had given us and had nothing to remember him by except the box, which Alvin had stashed in our closet.
“Don’t you ever wonder how Uncle Bob painted those eggs?” Alvin asked.
“I figured he used a magnifying glass.”
“Well, he didn’t. He used his shrinker. He was always tinkering with something, but most of his gadgets didn’t work. The shrinker was one of his early inventions and the most successful.”
“You never told me this before.”
“He only told me about it before he died.”
“I get it,” I said. “He bought big marble eggs, and painted them, and then shrank them.”
“Come on, Jessie. He wouldn’t have made a profit that way. He bought tiny eggs, and shrank himself.”
“Oh, my God.” I poured myself more wine. “He shrank himself. To what size?”
“About five inches. Then he’d paint the eggs. That’s how he was able to put in all those little details. Of course, he had to shrink his paints and brushes, too.”
“Oh, my God.”
“And when he was done, he’d get big again.”
“Wait a minute.” I was suddenly suspicious. “If he was that small, how could he work that shrinker or whatever it is?”
“Oh, he put in an automatic control, too. Then he’d sit in front of it while he worked, and after a while, he’d be enlarged again. He said it usually took him about two hours per egg – one hour a side.”
“I don’t believe it.”
“It’s true, Jessie – I swear.” He tilted his head and gazed at me earnestly with his brown eyes. “It works, too. I tried it out once, while you were at work. I shrank some books.”
“Things like that don’t happen. There aren’t lone inventors nowadays. They’re all research teams in industry or something. Besides, if he had something like that, why didn’t he sell it to somebody? He could have made a mint.” I leaned forward. “Hey, we can sell it. Just think of the money.”
Alvin shook his head. “Think of the misery. Industries shrinking people to work on microchips. The Defense Department deciding we should have only tiny Russians. All the people in power would shrink everyone else – and if you didn’t behave, squash.” He slapped his hand on the table. “Uncle Bob didn’t want that, and he knew I felt the same way. He never told anyone else.”
I sighed. “What are you going to do?”
“Well, we can’t shrink you. You’d lose your job.” He smiled uneasily, as if knowing how absurd that sounded. “I work at home. So I’ll have to shrink.”
Alvin was in the middle of work on a thriller. He had written two books before – a factual account of his year with migrant farm workers, and an autobiographical novel about a boy growing up in Princeton, Indiana. The nonfiction book had received good reviews and a modest paperback sale, while the novel had received mixed reviews and had been remaindered, with no paperback sale at all. Exasperated with this lack of success, he had proposed a thriller to his publisher about a man from Princeton, Indiana, who was working with migrants only to discover a complicated mess involving the CIA, the Mexican government, and a couple of mysterious landowners. This had netted him a good advance, most of which we had already spent, and he had only finished a first draft.
He explained his plan. He would live in my old dollhouse, which I kept on top of the dresser in our bedroom, shrinking himself, his Smith-Corona manual, and his writing supplies. If he shrank his clothes, I would save on laundry and have fewer loads. Our food bills would be cut in half. He would use only the electricity from one small bulb, which I would place near the dollhouse, and he wouldn’t need heat during the day because the bulb would provide that as well. He would use little hot water, and would finish his book in three months. Then I would enlarge him and the manuscript, our debts would be under more control, and we would pay off the rest with the second half of his advance.
A few things were still bothering me. “How are you going to use the john?”
“I’ll use the little toilet in the dollhouse, and you can empty it once in a while.”
“Ugh.”
“It’ll be so small you won’t even notice it.
I looked down at the floor. “What about sex?”
&
nbsp; “It’s only for three months.”
“Only three months!”
“Well, if we get desperate, you can always enlarge me for an hour. Look, it’ll work.”
Meowser rubbed against my leg. I shuddered, imagining the cat creeping up on a tiny Alvin, ready to pounce. “What about Meowser?”
“We’ll shrink him, too. I’ll have some company while I work, and you can save on cat food.”
We went into the bedroom. Alvin took out the box, pulled back wads of batting, and lifted out the shrinker. The device, appropriately enough, was rather small, a flat, rectangular object of wire and crystal, no more than five inches long. A tiny lens was embedded in one side; on the other, there was a button and a little switch. I was afraid to touch it.
“Is it as simple as it looks?” I asked.
“Sure is. You pull the switch down when you point the lens at me, and I shrink. You pull the switch up, and I enlarge.”
“What are the numbers for?” The side of the device bore a tiny, moveable arrow and numbers from 1 to 12.
“That’s for the automatic controls, but you won’t need that.” He pulled a long cord out of the box. “You can store a little power in it, but we’ll be doing a lot of shrinking, so we’d better leave it plugged in.”
“You mean it uses electricity?”
“It has to get power from somewhere.” He connected the cord to the shrinker, plugged it in, and set it down on the bed.
“Don’t leave it there.” He picked it up. “Don’t touch it.”
“For Christ’s sake, Jessie.”
“You can’t shrink anything yet. I have to clean the dollhouse.”
I was trying to postpone the inevitable. I wiped out the dollhouse, dusted off the furniture, and arranged it. All of the furnishings, with the exception of the bathroom fixtures and the tiny kitchen sink, were functional; I had always insisted on authenticity in my dollhouse, never imagining how it would be used.
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