The Mountain Cage

by Pamela Sargent

  “No,” Miriam said again, “I won’t do it. You said yourself that it was a masterpiece, but I knew that before we came here. You can do what you like with ‘The Dream of Venus,’ but I won’t be a party to defacing my own work.”

  “Miriam,” Hassan said weakly, then turned toward Pavel. “She doesn’t know what she’s saying.”

  “I know exactly what I’m saying. Edit our mind-tour however you please, but I’ll have nothing to do with it.”

  “My dear child,” Pavel said in an oddly gentle tone, “you know what this will mean. You know what the consequences may be.”

  Miriam stuck out her chin. “I know. I don’t care. I’ll still have the joy and satisfaction in knowing what we were able to realize in that mind-tour, and you can’t take that away from us.” She regarded Hassan with her hard gray eyes. Hassan realized then that she expected him to stand with her, to refuse to do the Administrator’s bidding.

  “Miriam,” he said softly. You bitch, he thought, Pavel’s given us a way out and you refuse to take it. “I’ll begin work on the editing,” Hassan continued, “even if my colleague won’t. Maybe once she sees how that’s going, realizes that we can accomplish what’s needed without doing violence to our creation, she’ll change her mind and decide to help me.” He had to defend her somehow, give her the chance to reconsider and step back from the abyss. “I’m sure Miriam just needs some time to think it over.”

  Miriam said, “I won’t change my mind,” and he heard the disillusionment and disgust in her voice. She got to her feet; Pavel lifted his head to look up at her. “Salaam aleikum, Administrator.”

  “If you leave now, there will be severe consequences,” Pavel said, sounding regretful.

  “I know,” Miriam said, and left the room.

  Hassan found himself able to complete the editing and revision of “The Dream of Venus” a few days before Pavel was to view the mind-tour again. This time, he went to the Administrator’s quarters with more confidence and less fear. The mind-tour now evoked the pride in the terraforming of Venus and the sense of mastery and triumph that the Project Council desired, and Hassan was not surprised when Pavel praised his work and assured him that “The Dream of Venus” would become a memorable and treasured experience for a great many people.

  Hassan had done his best to keep some of Miriam’s most pleasing scenes and effects, although he had cut some of the more haunting landscapes of early Venus and the brooding, dark scenes that seemed to deny any true permanence to humankind’s efforts. It was also necessary to add more of the required scenes of the Project’s current state and recent progress. He had tried not to dwell on the fact that his editing and his additions were robbing the mind-tour of much of its beauty, were taking an experience suffused with the doubt and ambiguity that had made “The Dream of Venus” unique and turning it into a more superficial and trite experience.

  In any case, Hassan knew, the merit of the mind-tour did not lie in what he thought of it, but in how Pavel Gvishiani and the other Administrators judged it, and they believed that he had made it into a work that would bring more credit to and support for the Venus Project, as well as the approval of the Mukhtars.

  Miriam, with reprimands and black marks now a part of her record, and a debt to the Project that would drain her accounts of credit, had been advised by a Counselor to resign from the Project, advice that was the equivalent of a command. Within days after the Project Council had approved “The Dream of Venus” in its final form, which had required a bit more editing, Miriam Lucea-Noyes was ready to leave for Earth.

  Hassan knew that it might be better not to say farewell to her in person. That would only evoke painful memories of their brief time together, and it could hardly help him to be seen with a woman who was in such disgrace. But he had dreamed of sharing his life with her once, and could not simply let her go with only a message from him to mark her departure. He owed her more than that.

  On the day Miriam was scheduled to leave, Hassan met her in front of the entrance to her building. She looked surprised to see him, even though his last message to her had said that he would be waiting for her there and would walk with her to the airship bay.

  “You didn’t have to come,” she said.

  “I wanted to see you once more.” He took her duffel from her and hoisted it to his shoulder.

  They walked along the white-tiled path that led away from the workers’ residence where they had passed so many hours together. There, at the side of one wing of the building, was the courtyard in which they had so often sat while talking of their work and their families and their hopes for their future together. They passed a small flower garden bordered by shrubs, the same garden where he had first tentatively hinted that he might seek a lasting commitment from her, and then they strolled by another courtyard, dotted with tables and chairs, where they had occasionally dined. Perhaps Miriam would suffer less by leaving the Island than he would by staying. Wherever she ended up, she would be able to go about her business without inevitably finding herself in a place that would evoke memories of him, while he would have constant reminders of her.

  “Have you any idea of what you’ll be doing?” he asked.

  “I’ve got passage to Vancouver,” she said. “The expense of sending me there will be added to what I owe the Project, and my new job won’t amount to much, but at least I’ll be near my family.”

  If her family were willing to welcome her back, they were showing more forbearance under the circumstances than his own clan would have done. As for her new work, he was not sure that he wanted to know much about it. Her training and education would not be allowed to go to waste, but a disgraced person with a large debt to pay off was not likely to be offered any truly desirable opportunities. If Miriam was lucky, she might have secured a post teaching geology at a second-rate college; if she was less fortunate, she might be going back to a position as a rock hound, one of those who trained apprentice miners bound for the few asteroids that had been brought into Earth orbit to be stripped of needed ores and minerals.

  “Don’t look so unhappy,” Miriam said then. “I’ll get by. I decided to accept a job with a team of assayers near Vancouver. It’s tedious, boring work, but I might look up a few of my old associates in the mind-tour trade and see if I can get any side jobs going for myself there. At least a couple of them won’t hold my black marks against me.”

  “Administrator Pavel was very pleased with the editing of The Dream of Venus,’“ Hassan said, suddenly wanting to justify himself.

  “So I heard.”

  “If you should ever care to view the new version—”

  “Never.” She halted and looked up at him. “I have to ask you this, Hassan. Did you preserve our original mind-tour in your personal records? Did you keep it for yourself?”

  “Did I keep it?” He shifted her duffel from his left shoulder to his right. “Of course not.”

  “You might have done that much. I thought that maybe you would.”

  “But there’s no point in keeping something like that. I mean, the revised version is the one that will be made available to viewers, so there’s no reason for me to keep an earlier version. Besides, if others were to find out that I had such an unauthorized mind-tour in my personal files, they might wonder. It might look as though I secretly disagreed with Pavel’s directive. That wouldn’t do me any good.”

  “Yes, I suppose that’s true,” Miriam said. “You certainly don’t want people thinking less of you now that you’ve won the Administrator’s respect.”

  Her sardonic tone wounded him just a little. “I don’t suppose that you kept a record of the original version,” he said.

  “I didn’t even try. I guessed that my Counselor might go rooting around in my files to see if they held anything questionable, and would advise me to delete anything inappropriate, and I don’t need any more trouble.” She smiled, and the smile seemed to come from deep inside her, as though she had accepted her hard lot and was content. “L
et’s just say that the original may not have been completely lost. I have hopes that it will be safe, and appreciated. I don’t think you want to know any more than that.”

  “Miriam,” he said.

  “You know, I never could stand long dragged-out farewells.” She reached for her duffel and wrested it from his grip. “You can leave me here. You don’t have to come to the airship bay with me. Goodbye, Hassan.”

  “Go with God, Miriam.”

  She walked away from him. He was about to follow her, then turned toward the path that would take him to his residence.

  During the years that followed, Hassan did not try to discover what had become of Miriam. Better, he thought, not to trouble himself with thoughts of his former love. His success with the altered mind-tour had cemented his friendship with Muhammad, increased the esteem his fellow geologists had for him, and had brought him more respect from his family on Earth.

  Within five years after the release of “The Dream of Venus,” Hassan was the head of a team of geologists, was sometimes assigned to the pleasant task of creating educational mind-tours for Island children, and had taken a bondmate, Zulaika Jehan. Zulaika came from a Mukhtar’s family, had been trained as an engineer, and had an exemplary record. If Hassan sometimes found himself looking into Zulaika’s brown eyes and remembering Miriam’s gray ones, he always reminded himself that his bondmate was exactly the sort of woman his family had wanted him to wed, that his father had always claimed that marrying for love was an outworn practice inherited from the decadent and exhausted West and best discarded, and that taking Miriam as a bondmate would only have brought him disaster.

  Occasionally, Hassan heard rumors of various mind-tours passed along through private channels from one Linker on the Islands to another, experiences that might be violent, frightening, pornographic, or simply subversive. He had always strongly suspected, even though no one would have admitted it openly, that his father and other privileged people in his clan had enjoyed such forbidden entertainments, most of which would find their way to the masses only in edited form. It would be a simple matter for any Linker to preserve such productions and to send them on to friends through private channels inaccessible to those who had no Links. Hassan did not dwell on such thoughts, which might lead to disturbing reflections on the ways in which the powerful maintained control of the net of cyberminds so as to shape even the thoughts and feelings of the powerless.

  One rumor in particular had elicited his attention, a rumor of a mind-tour about the Venus Project that far surpassed any of the usual cliche-ridden productions, that was even superior to the much-admired “The Dream of Venus.” He had toyed with the notion that someone might have come upon an unedited copy of “The Dream of Venus,” that the mind-tour he and Miriam had created might still exist as she had hoped it would, a ghost traveling through the channels of the cyberminds, coming to life again and weaving its spell before vanishing once more.

  He did not glimpse the possible truth of the matter until he was invited to a reception Pavel Gvishiani was holding for a few specialists who had earned commendations for their work. Simply putting the commendations into the public record would have been enough, but Pavel had decided that a celebration was in order. Tea, cakes, small pastries, and meat dumplings were set out on tables in a courtyard near the Administrators’ ziggurat. Hassan, with his bondmate Zulaika Jehan at his side, drew himself up proudly as Administrator Pavel circulated among his guests in his formal white robe, his trusted aide Muhammad Sheridan at his side.

  At last Pavel approached Hassan and touched his forehead in greeting. “Salaam, Linker Pavel,” Hassan said.

  “Greetings, Hassan.” Pavel pressed his fingers against his forehead again. “Salaam, Zulaika,” he murmured to Hassan’s bondmate; Hassan wondered if Pavel had actually recalled her name or had only been prompted by his Link. “You must be quite proud of your bondmate,” Pavel went on. “I am certain, God willing, that this will be only the first of several commendations for his skill in managing his team.”

  “Thank you, Linker Pavel,” Zulaika said in her soft musical voice.

  Pavel turned to Hassan. “And I suspect that it won’t be long before you win another commendation for the credit you have brought to the Project.”

  “You are too kind,” Hassan said. “One commendation is more than enough, Linker Pavel. I am unworthy of another.”

  “I must beg to contradict you, Hassan. ‘The Dream of Venus’ has been one of our most successful and popular entertainments.” A strange look came into Pavel’s dark eyes then; he stared at Hassan for a long time until his sharp gaze made Hassan uneasy. “You did what you had to do, of course, as did I,” he said, so softly that Hassan could barely hear him, “yet that first vision I saw was indeed a work of art, and worthy of preservation.” Then the Administrator was gone, moving away from Hassan to greet another of his guests.

  Perhaps the Administrator’s flattery had disoriented him, or possibly the wine Muhammad had surreptitiously slipped into his cup had unhinged him a little, but it was not until he was leaving the reception with Zulaika, walking along another path where he had so often walked with Miriam, that the truth finally came to him and he understood what Pavel had been telling him.

  Their original mind-tour might be where it would be safe and appreciated; Miriam had admitted that much to him. Now he imagined her, with nothing to lose, going to Pavel and begging him to preserve their unedited creation; the Administrator might have taken pity on her and given in to her pleas. Or perhaps it had not been that way at all; Pavel might have gone to her and shown his esteem for her as an artist by promising to keep her original work alive. It did not matter how it had happened, and he knew that he would never have the temerity to go to Pavel and ask him exactly what he had done. Hassan might have the Linker’s public praise, but Miriam, he knew now, had won the Linker’s respect by refusing to betray her vision.

  Shame filled him at the thought of what he had done to “The Dream of Venus,” and then it passed; the authentic dream, after all, was still alive. Dreams had clashed, he knew, and only one would prevail. But how would it win out? It would be the victory of one idea, as expressed in the final outcome of the Project, overlaid upon opposed realities that could not be wished away. To his surprise, these thoughts filled him with a calm, deep pleasure he had rarely felt in his life, and “The Dream of Venus” was alive again inside him for one brief moment of joy before he let it go.

  Afterword to “Dream of Venus”:

  Back in the 1970s, partly inspired by Thomas Mann’s youthful masterpiece Buddenbrooks, I had the idea of writing a family saga set on another planet. Since I wanted to use a background with some roots in reality and not just a made-up planet, I checked out our own solar system for likely prospects. Mars didn’t make the list, mostly because I wasn’t about to compete with H.G. Wells, Ray Bradbury, C.S. Lewis, Robert A. Heinlein, and the legions of other science fiction masters (including, more recently, Greg Bear and Kim Stanley Robinson) who have made the Red Planet their own. Venus suggested itself, and also presented some opportunities for female imagery, but this planet had the major drawback of being completely uninhabitable by our species. Happily, the possibility, however distant, of terraforming a world, of transforming an alien planet into another Earth, could overcome this obstacle. Terraforming also opened up my story, changing it from a generational story of a family in decline to one about the problems faced by generations of terraformers.

  Originally, I intended to write only one novel about Venus, but that one novel grew into three. Had I known in the beginning how long the first novel, Venus of Dreams, would be, and that the second, Venus of Shadows, would be longer still, I might never have undertaken the project. Had I seen that over twenty-five years would pass between my first Venusian inspiration and the publication of the third and final volume in this group, Child of Venus, in 2001, I would have abandoned the whole business back in the 1970s without writing a word. Perhaps not being able to
see into one’s own future is a mercy, or maybe this simply means that it takes a certain amount of obsession, determination, and insanity to undertake any long-range project, whether it is terraforming a planet or writing a trilogy of over two thousand manuscript pages in length.

  “Dream of Venus” was written after I had finished Child of Venus and was under the spell of much rereading of Edith Wharton, when it occurred to me that there might be a story for me about a very privileged young gentleman, someone from the upper circles of my imagined future society, who becomes involved with the effort to terraform Venus. But there were probably other unconscious reasons for writing this story, among them a desire to return for a while to a world that I had been writing about for nearly half my life.

  TOO MANY MEMORIES

  I wasn’t the first to practice my profession, but I was one of the pioneers, before we understood the scope of the problem we faced. My first client was Mamie Lagerfelt, and her memory files were in such disorder that she had even forgotten how many other names she had used. What she did remember very clearly (and I was struck by the irony of this later) was a headline she had seen on a news item a century earlier—“No More Senior Moments,” on a story about the first successful testing of the gene therapy for Alzheimer’s Disease. Mamie’s great fear had always been that she would fall victim to Alzheimer’s, as had several of her relatives.

  “We used to call it a senior moment,” she explained, “when you did something like forget the name of one of your children, just drew a complete blank.” She no longer had to worry about Alzheimer’s and having her last years filled with “senior moments.” Her memory and her sense of herself would remain intact. You’re smiling, but as I said, we didn’t yet know what we were facing. We were still calling ourselves “memory coaches” or “personal organizers,” as our clients were put off by the term “therapist.” And back then, most of us thought that the problem we were treating was largely one of untidy and disorganized minds that only needed some straightening up.