“Benzi’s coming back here, to Venus. His message came to me rather suddenly, just after he informed the Administrators of the fact. He said nothing about what he’d be doing here, only that he expected to stay for a while.”
“It’ll be good to see him again,” Dyami said. Mahala clasped her hands together; Benzi was keeping the promise he had made to her after all.
“There’s more I have to tell you,” Balin went on. “Malik Haddad will be accompanying him to the Islands.”
Mahala nearly dropped her spoon. Why, after all this time, had the grandfather she had never met decided to come back? She looked around at the others, who seemed just as surprised as she was.
“Well.” Dyami set down his cup. “Is Malik Haddad coming here temporarily or permanently?”
“He chose to become one of us,” Balin replied, “so I must assume he’ll eventually leave Venus again, as we all do.”
Dyami leaned forward; he and Balin gazed at each other in silence. Frania nudged Mahala. “Nothing happens for ages,” the brown-haired girl said, “and then everything happens all at once.”
Mahala poked at her food, too overcome to eat, uncertain about how she felt. Too much was changing, she thought, and too fast, before she had time to think about what it might mean. She felt that her future, whatever that might be, was hunting her, and there was nowhere to hide.
After supper, Ragnar sat down at his small table; Mahala had forgotten that he now had some time off from work. He beckoned to Frania, who quickly sat down in front of him. The boy began to mold clay with his hands, glancing from time to time at Frania’s face. Mahala felt a pang as she seated herself near Ragnar, thinking of what lay ahead—her studies, a new place to live, expectations that she might fail to meet, and a grandfather who would be a stranger. It might have been easier to face it all knowing that Ragnar was waiting here for her.
The adults sat together, drinking tea as they murmured among themselves, and then Dyami led Balin to his room. Mahala stared after them as Dyami’s door slid shut. Something was wrong; she could feel it. Her uncle never went to bed without saying good night, and he had not said anything about planning a celebration for her ever since Amina had suggested that idea at supper.
Frania yawned. “Can’t you stay still?” Ragnar asked.
“I’m exhausted.” The other girl blushed slightly, looking apologetic.
“Then go to sleep.” He scraped at the clay with a chisel.
“Good night, Ragnar,” Frania said as she stood up. He grunted, intent on his clay. Mahala lingered for a few moments, but he seemed unaware of her. He had not said whether he would meet her outside before first light.
At last she went to her room. As she prepared for sleep, she told herself that she could not expect Ragnar to wait in the absence of any promise from her. She had not given him the pledge he wanted because she was afraid she could not keep it, so she could not hope that he would wait patiently for her in the meantime.
Mahala slept, waking from habit at the time when she usually met Ragnar. Frania was asleep, her long hair fanned around her head. Mahala pulled on trousers under her shift, then crept toward the door.
Ragnar was not in the common room. Perhaps he was waiting for her in the usual place. She crossed the darkened room, hurried outside, and was halfway down to the lake when she saw him walking along the shore, shoulders slumped, his hands inside his trouser pockets.
He turned as she came toward him. “I wasn’t expecting you to meet me,” he said.
“I came anyway.”
“Maybe you shouldn’t have bothered. It might be easier if we break it off now.”
“I thought maybe you’d try to make me change my mind.”
“Shit, Mahala—don’t toy with me now.” He halted and stared out at the lake. “Balin’s going back to his Hab.”
“What?”
“He and Dyami must have thought I was asleep,” he said. “I didn’t mean to listen, but I couldn’t help it. They came out of Dyami’s room, and your uncle said something about always knowing Balin would have to leave, but not really believing that he ever would. Then Balin was saying he’d stayed too long as it was, that he was in danger of losing his balance. Dyami asked him if he was ever coming back, and Balin said he didn’t know. I didn’t hear what they said after that, because they were at the door by then. I figured I’d better go on pretending I was sleeping until Dyami went back to his room.”
This news should not surprise her. Balin had already spent more years on Venus than nearly any other Habber. She had known that he would leave eventually, but had refused to dwell on that.
“Benzi’s coming back,” she said. “Balin might return later on.”
“What’s Dyami supposed to do in the meantime? By the time he sees Balin again, if he ever does, Balin will still be the way he is, but Dyami’ll be older, maybe a lot older.” Ragnar let out his breath. “That’s probably one of the reasons Balin’s leaving.”
“Because it’s hard for him to watch someone he loves age when he doesn’t?”
“You sound more sentimental than I thought you were,” Ragnar said. “That wouldn’t be the only reason, maybe not even the most important one. The Habbers can’t get too attached to us or they might think of changing the way things are for us here, and they can’t let themselves do too much of that, because there’s no way of telling where it might lead.”
Mahala recalled what Balin had said a few nights ago. She had come in after weeding a few tiers of beans in their greenhouse to overhear Balin say, “Isn’t it obvious why we’re here?”
“Because of your curiosity, of course,” Dyami had replied. “A way to remain connected with the home world and your own humanity. A way to keep an eye on Earth and the Mukhtars. That’s what we’ve always thought.”
“There are other reasons to involve ourselves with the Project,” Balin had continued. “You’re working to make this planet habitable. We build our Habitats in space. But the one assumption we share is that we believe we will always be able to maintain those environments, that the knowledge and civilization that created them will never be lost. Because if it ever is, our Habs would become dead shells, and Venus would grow hot and poisonous and unlivable again.”
Balin’s words had evoked a sudden vision of the Parasol falling into a decaying orbit, of lava and hot gas melting the lithosphere and forming new crust, of domed settlements disappearing during a catastrophic resurfacing, of moss-covered cliffsides sinking into vast subduction trenches. It came to Mahala then how shortsighted they were, to think only in spans of hundreds of thousands of years, or millions, when the life of a planet had to be measured in billions. But the Habbers; who lived such greatly extended lives, might be growing more accustomed to such extreme long-term thinking. Balin might be even older than she knew, with a mind becoming as layered as the strata of an ancient cliffside.
“Perhaps we won’t maintain them ourselves,” Dyami had said. “Maybe that task will pass to the children of our artificial intelligences.”
Ragnar spoke again, interrupting Mahala’s thoughts. “If I were your uncle, I would have asked Balin to find a way of taking me with him.”
“Dyami couldn’t have gone with him, and you know it.”
“I would have asked Balin anyway, faced him with it, made him give me a yes or a no. Maybe Dyami did that, after they went outside.”
“I doubt it,” Mahala said. “He wouldn’t leave Venus even if he could. He went through too much to give up on the Project now.”
“The Project.” Ragnar spat. “I’m heading back to the house. I should pick out something to give Balin as a farewell present.”
“I’ll come with you.” She slipped her arm through his. “Ragnar, I do care about you. I wish I weren’t going to Island Two now.”
“Don’t tell me that, Mahala. You wanted to go, and you’re going. Don’t ruin things for yourself by being sorry about it now.”
They climbed toward the house in silence. As
they approached, the door slid open. Dyami stood in the doorway; Mahala went to him and slipped her arms around him, pressing her head against his chest.
11
The airship bound for Island Two rose slowly from Turing’s open bay through the still and stagnant atmosphere. There were few passengers aboard, only Mahala, two Linkers she did not know, and three Islanders who had been visiting relatives in Turing. They sat in the seats up front, just behind the two pilots; this was an older airship, with no partition separating the passengers from the crew.
The passengers had greeted one another politely but distantly, exchanged a few words, then settled down in their seats. In the back of the airship cabin, crates of cargo, most of them filled with bolts of merino wool to be traded on the Islands for imported goods from Earth, had been lashed to many of the seats; a few households in Turing had a profitable trade going with Islanders for the prized wool. Mahala checked the straps of her safety harness, then watched the large screen above the pilots as the airship climbed toward the Islands. By the time Turing’s domes had shrunk to small bright spots in the misty blackness below, her fellow passengers were asleep.
The airship moved south as it rose toward the Islands that floated just north of Venus’s equator in the upper atmosphere. Lulled by the silence outside the vessel, Mahala drifted into a dream: She was in Turing again, standing near Dyami’s house on a slope overlooking the lake, knowing that she was leaving the settlement and would never return. She had to turn back, she suddenly realized; her place was there, not on an Island, not in a place far from her home.
It was the whine of the wind outside that woke her. The airship cabin shook, buffeted by the wind. The other passengers slept on, but Mahala tensed in her seat. The pilots, their bands around their heads, would be monitoring the sensors, alert to any sign of trouble. Outside, the wind just below the Islands would be shrieking, whipping around the planet at nearly three hundred kilometers an hour; riding that fierce wind earned the pilots their credit. Mahala forced herself not to think of the few airships that had crashed, crippled by failing pumps, leaking helium cells, or sensor malfunctions, ships that had failed to ride the wind, reminding herself that almost all of the vessels made it safely to port.
In the distant future, the wind would die, and the Islands would slowly fall toward Venus, finally coming to rest on the surface of a transformed world. But for now, the wind raged, and in its scream Mahala heard the cry of Venus as her child, the new world, struggled to be born.
Solveig was waiting for Mahala just outside Island Two’s airship bay. She rushed forward and grabbed Mahala’s hands.
“I just found out a couple of hours ago,” Solveig said. “I’m going to be your student adviser. I didn’t know if they’d put you in my group, but at the last minute, there you were on my list.” She reached for one of Mahala’s duffels. “You’re the first one to get here. The other new students won’t arrive until tomorrow.”
Mahala hefted her other duffel to her shoulder. “Benzi said he would meet me.”
“He was here, waiting for you, and then a Guardian came up to him and said Administrator Jamilah wanted to see him. So he asked me to take you to his quarters.”
Mahala frowned. Her grandmother had often muttered bitter words about Guardians after returning from a meeting on Island Two. Getting used to the presence of those military forces on the Islands was one of the adjustments she would have to make while living here. There were few of the Guardians on the Islands now, fewer than there had been before the Revolt; even Risa would concede that they were largely a token force. But the Administrators did not care to provoke more bad feeling with Earth by asking the Mukhtars to withdraw their soldiers altogether.
She took a breath and noticed that the air here seemed drier that that of Turing and Oberg; perhaps that was because there were no large bodies of water on any of the Islands. There were also none of the familiar smells of cooking food, of leaves and pine needles, of the compost the settlers collected from their kitchen compacters to use as fertilizer for their gardens, only a slight scent of grass and traces of the fragrance of flowers. Near the entrance to the bay, a colorful banner celebrating the new year of 649 fluttered from a pole; apparently no one had yet bothered to take it down.
Dyami and his household had followed their celebration of Mahala’s sixteenth birthday with a party to mark both the New Year and her departure for Island Two. She and her friends had sat outside Dyami’s house to watch the traditional light show on the dome, which always ended with an image of a green and blue globe representing the terraformed Venus. Only after she had turned her attention away from the reflection of the globe on the mirrorlike surface of the lake had she noticed that Ragnar and Frania were sitting together, their heads dose.
She and Solveig walked along a white stone path. Island Two was a landscape of tended gardens and expanses of grass clipped so short that the grass resembled a soft green carpet. Slender trees stood on either side of the path, and a few people were dining at tables set outside a pavilion near a small pool; a tiny apelike creature moved toward one group with a tray of teacups. Risa disapproved of such genetically engineered animals, feeling that their simple tasks of gardening and food preparation should be performed by people or machines and that their places might better be taken by new settlers. There had never been any such creatures allowed in the surface settlements.
In the spaces between the trees, Mahala glimpsed the ziggurat that housed the Administrators; a tiered tower reaching toward the soft yellow glow of the light disk in the center of the dome that enclosed Island Two. The Islanders marked their days as the surface settlers did, with twelve hours of light and twelve of darkness. She was in a tidy environment, a pruned and weeded and cultivated garden that made it easier not to think of where she actually was—on an Island that had been built atop giant helium cells and floated above thick acidic clouds, under a protective dome that bore the scars of small meteorites that had been able to penetrate the thin upper atmosphere where the Islands sailed.
“Have you seen Malik Haddad yet?” Mahala had almost called him her grandfather, but referring to him that way still seemed strange. Sef was more truly her grandfather than this man she had never met, whose only tie to her was genetic.
“I haven’t seen him at all,” Solveig replied. “The story is that as soon as he arrived, a couple of Guardians met him and took him and your great-uncle to the Administrators’ residence. I saw Benzi briefly today, but there wasn’t a chance to ask him what was going on.”
Benzi, according to the message he had sent to Mahala before she left Turing, had arrived on Island Two from An-wara only three days ago. He had, much to his surprise, been given quarters in the pilots’ residence instead of in the Habber dwelling; because there was the usual shortage of space on the Island, Mahala would be allowed to live with him there. He had said nothing about Malik Haddad, and she, distracted by having to notify the school authorities that she would not need a single room after all and by gatherings of friends in Turing to mark her departure, had not thought to ask.
“Some of the older Administrators might have known Malik before,” Mahala said. “Maybe they just wanted to visit with him.” She hoped that she was right. Being so abruptly taken to the Administrators, to the most powerful people here, those who negotiated with Earth and the Project Council members on Anwara to get the resources they needed, was not likely to make any new arrival feel at ease.
“You’re probably right,” Solveig said, “and he must have gone to the Habber residence afterward. I assume that’s where he’ll stay.” She shortened her long stride; at eighteen, the blond young woman was taller than many men. “After we get you settled, we can do whatever you like. Tomorrow, I’ve got to meet an airship as soon as I’m up and then two others later in the day—that’ll be the rest of our group. I’m supposed to share a meal with all of you and answer any questions you have. The day after that, I’ll take you around the school, introduce you to some peo
ple, and give you some advice.”
“What kind of advice?” Mahala asked.
“The usual do’s and don’ts. Never greet Administrators unless they greet you first. Otherwise, just bow or touch your forehead with your fingers, then walk on. Don’t be too friendly to any of the Guardians—that kind of thing.” Solveig lowered her voice. “To be honest, except for some of the workers, Islanders are a bit haughty. Maybe that isn’t the right word. What I mean is that they’re always aware of what they are and who you are, and we’re just a pair of grubbers, a couple of students from the surface.”
“So Risa’s told me.”
“By the way, how’s my brother doing?”
“He’s fine.”
“I was wondering. The only time I had a chance to say a few words to him were those times you called. He hasn’t sent me any messages since he started living in your uncle’s house.”
Mahala had suspected as much. She had been worrying about how much to tell Solveig about what had happened between her and Ragnar. Solveig, who must know her brother better than almost anyone, might be able to advise her on what to do.
He had hurt her deeply by cutting things off as completely as he had. There had been no more meetings under the trees, not even a few moments alone to talk. He had wished her well before the trip here and had seemed sincere, but his words had been those of a friend, not someone who had wanted her as a bondmate.
Maybe it was better that way, and best not to tell Solveig what had passed. It was useless to hope that Ragnar might relent.
The pilots’ dwelling had a large common room filled with a few low tables and cushions that looked well used and two triangular wings of residential rooms. Mahala and Benzi had been given two tiny bedrooms adjoining a slightly larger room equipped with cushions, a table, and a wall screen.
“I had more space in Risa’s house,” Mahala said as she looked around her small quarters.
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