The road to Venus apparently led through people, Bik Wu thought as he struggled sideways against the crush of the crowd and vertically against the crush of gravity while strange odors, colorful costumes, and not-quite-lost languages assaulted his other senses. People. Kai was gone now—another man was her widower. But for Bik there had been no one else.
This must be the Earth immigrants lounge, he realized; the soft chairs promised to Mercury immigrants were nowhere to be seen. Nor was there any help; personal comm circuits were saturated. His bones ached with over twice his usual weight. Once on the elevator, he told himself, there would be a soft, form-fitting, reclining chair for the three-hundred-kilometer ride down to the surface. Until then, he just had to endure.
The Venus maglev interplanet port was swamped with late arrivals. Some media types were saying that the opening of the Devana Archipelago south of Beta Regio was the largest new land rush in the history of the human race. Judged by the average standards of big project management, Bik figured that it was probably a textbook success. But from his worm’s-eye viewpoint in the middle of this mob, it looked like a fiasco. Nevertheless, after six decades of living in domes with permafrost below and vacuum above, Bik was going to find some elbow room down there.
Maybe enough to show the custody board that he cared enough to have Junior.
Gravity or no, he was a bigger and stronger man than average, so he bulled his way, with apologies left and right, to the elevator booking counter and slapped his palm on the reader.
“Mercury, Idaho?” The transport receptionist smiled when her local cybe displayed his ID. A big woman with a trace of East Asian heritage in her face, or her smile, she was full of a cheerfulness that didn’t match his mood. Where were the robots when you wanted one? But around here it seemed that any job that could be done by a human was being done by a human. Service was in style. He shook his head. So, apparently, were madhouses.
“No, no,” he groaned. “That’s a Mercury eye dee number. Mercury the planet. Chao Meng-Fu Dome.”
She raised an eyebrow. “You’re in the wrong lounge.”
“I’ve figured that out,” he said with forced evenness, “but this is where they sent me. I’d like a reservation to the surface, surface transportation to Port Tannhauser and a room when I get there.”
Only eighteen hundred kilometers to go! Port Venus was on the Circum-planetary Maglev Railroad, a planet-girding ring of frictionless magnetic levitation railways held above the atmosphere by a dozen trains of mass circulating at greater than orbital velocity. Built to remove the ancient carbon dioxide atmosphere and increase the spin of the planet, the CMR was one of the wonders of the solar system—but it was also a transportation bottleneck.
The receptionist stared at the screen, looked at seating charts, and grinned. “I’m surprised you’re still standing. In fact, I’m surprised to see any immigrants from Mercury. Worked out a bit?”
“Yes.” He shrugged, not wanting to admit his misery. “Some. I would have had more time on the regular transport, but I got pulled back for some unnecessary work at New Loki. I got a friend to get me on the express, so here I am. Their centrifuge time was limited, but I’m in reasonable shape.”
Reasonable? He was maybe ten kilos over his theoretical optimum, and it showed more here than on Mercury. Four days in a centrifuge hadn’t done much more than retain his reflexes from Mercury’s gravity. On the plus side, he told himself, his strength was okay, his bone mass was fine and thirty laps a day in the dome pool gave him an underlying endurance on which he could draw. “I can do this.”
The receptionist shook her head, her long jet-black hair lending a semblance of femininity to a well-muscled, almost masculine, figure. Bik wondered if she might be a swimmer or maybe a climber.
“Grab,” she said, “that there’s going to be a lot of standing around. There are only so many elevators, we have to be fair, and there are—” She got the distant look that people get when they link with the cybersystem for some detail they don’t have immediately. Born with a radio interface gene mod, probably. He shuddered—what if she ever wanted to be out of touch? “—uh, twelve thousand six hundred and fifty-seven would-be homesteaders in port as we speak.”
Bik rolled his eyes up.
She grinned. “Including sixteen from the planet Mercury! So you’re not the only one.”
“Fine,” Bik sighed. “Now, when can I get on an elevator car down?”
Once down he would have to catch an air shuttle fifteen hundred kilometers northeast to Port Tannhauser, where the land rush was being staged. Once there, he could reserve a parcel. Then all he would have to do was to get there within twenty-four hours, universal time—by the local dawn of Venus’s leisurely day. The planet, of course, was spinning like a top compared to what it used to be—once about every fifty days, retrograde, making for thirty days from sun to sun when you included its orbital motion. Before the CMR, it had taken 243 days for Venus to turn under the stars.
Bik kept going through new world things in his mind; so much history, so much background, so many different ways of doing things, so many hoops to jump through, so little time to jump. The way things were going, every boat and aircraft for a thousand kilometers around would be taken by the time he arrived. Then he’d have to try to pick something within walking distance, which, for his already-aching Mercurian feet, wasn’t very far.
Thousands of kilometers. Chao Meng-Fu was hardly 150 kilometers across, and it looked huge.
“The elevators are pretty crowded,” the attendant reminded him. “It should ease up in a couple of hours.”
“Land-parcel registration is first-come, first-serve. I just want to have a fair chance.” He sighed. “I did everything I was supposed to do. Isn’t there any faster way down?”
She pursed her lips and grinned mischievously. “Do you like to walk the edge? Take risks?”
“Citizen, I spent half a decade supervising the Chao Meng-Fu construction job, outside. Something goes wrong outside on Mercury’s south pole and you can freeze your feet and boil your head. Simultaneously.” Bik grinned. He exaggerated a little, but he thought it would impress her.
Impress her? His therapist might consider that progress, Bik thought. It had been a while since he cared about what any woman except Kai had thought of him.
The receptionist smiled. Damn if she hadn’t gotten his mind off his aching feet. “The name’s Suwon and you can take a flying leap.”
Another tease, of course. When would he learn? “Sorry, I didn’t mean to bother you.”
She laughed at his devastated expression. “No, I meant literally. Grab this; a personal evac unit from this far up has enough cross range, in theory, to get you to Port Tannhauser if you jump down line a ways. They have recreational versions, and I’ve used them a couple of times with a boyfriend from farther down the line. The cybes don’t like it, but screw them. It’s my life. I’ll show you the ropes—if you’ve got the nerves.”
He shook his head. He’d been had; he couldn’t read people and had misread her playfulness for something more serious. She’d worked the boyfriend in smoothly, too—a nice warn-off.
A neat woman, he had to admit, and she probably meant to help, but jumping off a three-hundred-kilometer-high railroad wasn’t in his plans. “That’s a last resort. Let’s try to get me on the tube first.”
She nodded and looked off in space for a moment again. “I can get you on the ten-hundred with an earlier standby on the oh-three, standing room only.”
His bones, muscles, ligaments, and cartilage screamed at him, but he grimaced and said, “I’ll take it. Look, if there’s any way you can move me up, it’s important.”
She looked a question at him.
His first thought was that his problems were none of her business, but his aching body had put him in need of some sympathy, so he decided to chance telling her.
“It’s about my kid. His mother just died, and I’m in a custody fight with her second husband. If
I can get a small island, or a cut of a large one, that’ll help me in my custody case. I’ve got a board to impress and I think they’ll think this would be a good place to raise a kid, understand?”
The grin faded and she pursed her lips. “I’ll do what I can. Meanwhile, I’ve cleared your prints for the lounge for low-gravity-world immigrants. They have plenty of recliners. Down the corridor to your left, door RS-3.”
He might get to like the woman, he decided, as he waved a goodbye and headed for relief.
The waiting list for the oh-three-hundred elevator turned out to have more names on it than the elevator cab had seats. He checked registration statistics. There were some ten thousand people down at Port Tannhauser already and only about fifteen thousand parcels, distributed among the several hundred islands. Pickings were getting thin.
The place was beautiful. The archipelago just south of the city was a drowned mountain range less than a century old. Its shorelines still expanded with every wave striking higher or lower as the gentle solar tide completed its monthly cycle. Its vids sparkled with dark green sensuous surf-flecked beaches and shiny green palms punctuated with bright birds and flowers.
Kai would have loved it, if she’d only stuck with him long enough to see it, Bik thought. See, Kai, I do have some romance in my soul.
Staring at the brightly colored wall above the other low-gee couch sitters, Bik’s memory went back to their wedding under the stars at Mercury’s south pole. Then fast-forward to the birth of their son, to weekend visits during the months of separation on the New Loki project, to when Kai told him she’d fallen in love with a starship officer from Ceres named Thor Wendt, was going off with him and was taking Bikki with her.
What had he done wrong? What could he have done differently? As always there were no answers.
Hurt as he had been, he’d never stopped loving Kai—she had just been too beautiful, too bright and vivacious for him to keep up with. He still thought himself fortunate to have had those few years with her. He had to admit he’d been a practical, safe, duty-bound drag on her free spirit.
She’d told Bik that she and Thor wanted Bikki to bond with his new father, and so didn’t want any real-time interaction between Bik and the kid for now. Bik had joint custody, and could have tried to enjoin her from doing that, or sued, for custody himself. But Mercurian courts generally favored two-parent families in such cases. The lawyer he consulted said it would have been a waste of time.
He sent presents and letters out to the belt for birthdays and New Year’s and got receipts, but lightspeed delays made two-way contact difficult, and having to talk to Kai in the process made it even more so. There had never been any acknowledgment. Once he’d gotten a fax of a crayon Father’s Day card from the school, but that had been all in five years. He didn’t hold it against Junior: kids his age didn’t understand that kind of thing. Anyway, his work on New Loki’s three-million-person dome at the Mercurian north pole had made the years go by quickly.
Bik remembered the call. It came from Ceres a year ago. Some suicidal Nihilists had wanted to make a statement about robotics, technology, and what they felt was the general meaningless direction of civilization. That was fine with Bik as long as they wrote their propaganda in their own blood; but their tactics had gotten twisted somehow into rationalizing general mayhem—and Kai had been in the wrong place at the wrong time.
A quiet, sincere gentleman had called to tell him that Thor and “Ted Wendt” had survived a bomb at Ceres Starport, but his ex-wife had not. Until then he had hoped that, somehow, Wendt would go and they would be together again. Hope died with Kai.
Bik had hesitated in filing for custody. Thor Wendt considered the boy his own now; he had raised Junior for five of the boy’s eight years, and felt that Kalinda station in the Kruger 60 system would be a safer place for him. But finally Bik had called legal services. Junior was his flesh and blood, and a living memory of Kai and those few glorious years that he’d shared with her.
It turned out that Thor was well connected in the shady cash world, and had gotten an effective advocate. What it was now down to was that Thor’s starship would leave in three months, and Bik’s government-supplied lawyer had been blunt. Wendt was vulnerable, but just what did Bik have to offer a child beyond a genetic relationship? A sterile apartment and day care while Bik was away being a superfluous supervisor of construction robots smarter than he was?
A tone brought him out of his musings; the oh-three-hundred elevator had departed without taking any standbys. A glance at the overhead showed him the oh-four-hundred didn’t look much better. Stand-by hopefuls were to check in with the attendants.
The original receptionist had said a personal evac unit might reach Port Tannhauser directly from up here. Not making any internal commitment just yet, Bik decided to investigate how a person would get one. Did people really do that for sport? He pulled out his intellicard and asked it to get central data.
Bik pursed his lips and stared at the single glass eye in the wall behind the sport-jumping concession counter. “Lessons?” He hadn’t anticipated that kind of delay.
“The sport units are made for manual operation; that’s the sport of it!” the cyberservant answered in clear standard English as its Waldos handed Bik a heavy bag of gear. “But it is highly advisable that you go through a virtual simulation and pass the evaluation.”
“Highly advisable?”
“You won’t be allowed outside the airlock otherwise, I’m afraid. Now let’s go over the equipment inventory. Aerobrake sled?”
Bik opened the duffelbag and shook his head, “I don’t—”
“It’s the heavy transparent pouch,” a new, but somehow familiar, voice informed him. He spun around and saw the elevator attendant. Out of the uniform and in a skintight vacuum suit with bright diagonal slashes, she looked—not beautiful, he decided, but, well, formidable. “You strap it on your front side and inflate it on the way down. You steer by shifting your body. When you get subsonic, you can pop the tross wing—that’s for albatross—and glide forever.”
“Uh, thanks … .”
She laughed. “Suwon. From the elevator. Look, I said I’d do what I could. I figured I’d find you here; you looked like a guy on a mission. Let’s go through the rest of this stuff.”
It took them the better part of an hour. In addition to the tross wing for long-range gliding, there was an emergency parasail that weighed less than a hundred grams, fluorescent dyes and beacon, a harness that could really chafe if you didn’t put it on just right, and various techniques for putting everything on and then getting at all of it.
Then there was the simulator, a virtual-reality shell with a harness suspended inside. Despite Suwon talking him through it, he burnt up the first time down, stalled to subsonic way too early the second time, and didn’t get the range the third time. On the fourth run he had a survivable burn-through and hit it more or less right on his fifth run.
It was oh-eight-hundred, and he had to register by sixteen-hundred.
“Well, thanks,” he told her. “I’m going to give it a try.”
“You’re going to kill yourself—if not by burning up, by dropping in the ocean so far from anywhere that you’ll drown before anything can get to you.”
She didn’t understand.
“Suwon, I want you to understand, uh, ‘grab onto’ this. There’s a great big hole inside me where there used to be a wife and a son. If there’s a chance to get some of that back, I’ll take it. And if not, well, a simple clean death would be a welcome end to all of this.”
“Crap. I’m coming with you.”
“Huh?” Bik stared at her. Why was she trying to become part of his life? Painful memories extinguished a flicker of biological excitement; the last thing he wanted now was another woman in his life. But he couldn’t just tell her to get lost, not after all the help she’d given him and not when time was running out. “This is my problem,” he said, finally. “I just met you; why should you care?�
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She stared back at him and pursed her lips again, as if she were determined not to let another word out until she’d thought it carefully through. “A fair question. You’re on a mission, doing something other than just trying to amuse yourself. That’s the most excitement I’ve run across in years. I guess I find that attractive. There’s something else. Venus Surface Commission workers aren’t eligible for the land rush. The way around that is to team up with someone who is—easier said than done.”
“Team up?”
“Eligible partners can transfer a portion of their share to others after fifty years, or enter a joint tenancy arrangement … .”
Bik held up his hand. “Okay. Thirty percent of the land if you get me there.”
Suwon smiled and shook her head. “Fifty.”
Damn, she was easy to look at, once you got used to muscles on a woman. Especially when she smiled. Bik finally nodded to her; he was low on options. “Okay, fifty percent.” Bik wasn’t a baggier—he’d let Kai have all his Chao property just to avoid fighting her for it. “Let’s go, then. What about your boyfriend?”
“He got careless on a jump about a month ago. Burned in. Five hundred and twenty years old and he burned in on a jump.” Suwon shrugged her shoulders, but it was clear that she had been hurt.
Maybe she did understand. Bik thought about sympathy, rebound logic, unknown backgrounds, and all the rest of the dangerous stuff and cast it aside mentally. This acquaintance, relationship, whatever it became, would be a calculated risk, one that he was walking into with his eyes open.
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