A year and a half after the dawn of the new era, Mahala grew increasingly aware that others shared many of her thoughts and her doubts.
“It’s only a few people,” Chike said to Mahala as they made their way along a path through the woods. He had brought a light wand with him. She was beginning to feel foolish, slipping away with him in the dark to a mysterious gathering. “I’ve only gone to a couple of these discussions, but this isn’t the only group that gets together. There are others.”
“You make it sound like some sort of conspiracy,” she said.
“It’s not a conspiracy, Mahala. We’re just people trying to sort things out and discuss them freely, but privately.”
“Did you tell Solveig about any of this?” Mahala asked.
“No, and you probably shouldn’t, either. It isn’t that I can’t trust her, but she might inadvertently say something to Rag-nar.”
And you can’t trust him, Mahala thought. She had known Ragnar much longer than had Chike, but now felt that she barely knew Ragnar at all. During the few times Frania had invited her and Chike and Solveig to her home, Ragnar had sat with them saying almost nothing, as if simply marking the time until they left, or else he had quickly retreated to the open area outside the house’s entrance to make sketches on a screen. Occasionally he visited Dyami’s house, but only to show her uncle a few of his sketches or carvings. Frania had sold a few of his carvings and sculptures to her fellow pilots and had even secured credit for a sculpture of their two cats from a Linker on Island Seven. That was as much as Mahala knew of Ragnar’s life now: that he went to his shifts and worked on his art and spent much of his time by himself. He was so closed to her that she could not even tell if he was unhappy or had finally found contentment.
She and Chike came to a clearing. More of the wooded land bordering the lake had been cleared for dwellings, and two small houses now stood on the slope overlooking the lake. “Isn’t that Gino’s house?” she asked, recalling that her former schoolmate Gino Hislop-Carnera had moved there not long before.
“Yes. He’s the one who started this group.” Chike paused. “That makes this all sound more organized than it is. About two months ago, Gino and I got to talking after our shift, about the Project and what might happen now. A couple of nights later, he invited me over, and a few other people were there, and soon we were all talking about how our lives might just drag on here while the new era proceeded without us. It isn’t enough, Mahala, living this way, not now. People are getting impatient.”
She had entertained the same thought too many times to object. “I know,” she said.
They walked toward Gino’s house, which was little more than a plain square structure of prefabricated walls and two wide windows facing the lake. The entrance opened as they approached. Gino stood in the door; he motioned them inside.
They came into a small common room furnished with cushions and a small table. There was Josef Feldshuh, another one of her former schoolmates; he was the head of his team at the ceramics plant and had just been elected to Turing’s Council. Seated next to him was Dianna Su, a geologist who had moved to Turing to work at its refinery not long after Chike’s arrival, but the presence of the man sitting next to Dianna surprised her.
“Suleiman,” she murmured as she sat down next to Dyami’s old friend. Suleiman Khan still came by at least once every month or so, to share a meal with Dyami and to ask after the rest of his household. They had both been prisoners during the uprising; together, they had lived through the violence and death neither of them had ever discussed in front of her.
“This is it,” Gino said as he seated himself.
“This is the group?” Mahala asked, glancing at Chike.
“Everybody who’s likely to show up,” Gino said. “This isn’t an organization, Mahala, or a cabal, just a few friends who like to get together and talk. A couple of people who met with us before told me they wouldn’t be here tonight. That may mean they don’t have much to contribute to the discussion right now, or else they may be somewhere else talking with another group.”
“Another group?”
“Another informal group of friends,” Suleiman said. “We aren’t sitting around hatching schemes or constructing plots. We’re just people who share a dissatisfaction with our present situation and who now have some reason to hope for change.”
The younger people were all looking at him now. “When my parents came to Venus,” Suleiman continued, “it was enough for them to leave Earth and to know that they had come to a place where their children might be freer and able to have more education and to feel that they were part of a great enterprise. When the first settlers came to the domes, it was enough for them to have the work of creating new communities and to see them grow and develop. And for people like me, who were the first to be born and grow up on the surface of Venus and who lived through a time when everything we had created here might have been destroyed, it was enough to win a small measure of freedom and to know that the Project would continue. But that isn’t enough for you, and perhaps it shouldn’t be.”
“Maybe we’re just not properly grateful for what we have,” Dianna Su said. “The Habbers are doing as much as they’ve ever done to aid the Project, even with their hopes for the interstellar expedition. We have the Mukhtars and the Project Council cooperating instead of being used by their members for various political ends. According to the statistics I’ve seen, our settlements are as peaceful and nearly as free of social problems and disorders as they’ve ever been.”
“So the best we can hope for,” Josef Feldshuh muttered, “is to go on the way we are, doing our work and bringing up our children and living out our lives. Is that what you’re saying?”
Dianna shook her head. “Of course not. There is the alien signal. We can hope to be part of that. People who are courageous, cooperative, intelligent, and adaptable—those are the qualities they’ll need.”
“Along with something else,” Mahala said. “They’ll have to be people who are willing to leave this system knowing that they may be leaving everything they know for good, that even when they come back, everyone they remember will be long gone. The kind of people—the kind of civilization— that they return to, assuming they even want to come back, may be completely unrecognizable.”
Suleiman leaned forward. “They’d come back to share whatever they discover—that’s one of the expedition’s purposes.”
“But they could send back smaller vessels, even probes and cyberminds with records of what they’ve found,” Mahala said. “They wouldn’t have to come back themselves. Maybe, after a while, they won’t want to come back, and the longer they continue on their voyage, the fewer reasons they’ll have for ever returning.”
“Maybe the Habbers aren’t being honest about what they’re really after,” Gino said. “Maybe they intend for it to be a one-way trip. We don’t know what they want—can we really trust them? They all got away from Venus as fast as they could during the uprising, didn’t they?”
“Gino could be right,” Chike said. “Whatever the people planning this voyage hope for now, their goals could change later on. The spacefarers might decide not to return after they’re light-years away from this system.”
“In other words,” Gino added, “what’s in this space voyage for us?”
“The opportunity to contact another civilization,” Suleiman said. “The chance to see our species embark on a new stage in its history, to gain more knowledge about the universe, knowledge we might have had long before now if Earth hadn’t had to rebuild and reclaim all that was lost centuries ago. But maybe I should be more specific than that. Maybe having the chance, however small, to become a space-farer will be enough for some of you. Maybe that’s what you must look forward to now, as those who came before you looked toward settling this world and making homes here. And those of you who are left behind can still look forward to the messages those spacefarers might send back about the alien intelligence we know is out there,
to knowledge that will enlarge our view of the universe. And there’s something else.”
Suleiman looked around, as if wanting to make certain that he had everyone’s attention. “When the voyagers do return, and I believe that they’ll hold to that purpose, Cytherians who are alive today can know that their children might actually return to see the Project’s fulfillment—their own children and grandchildren, not distant descendants. People alive now can hope that people who remember them, instead of unknowable descendants who may be nothing at all like us, may come back here to stand on the surface of a terraformed Venus.” His thin lips curved into a smile. “That’s something else to inspire us all, isn’t it?”
By the time Mahala left Gino’s house with Chike, the discussion of the inspirational value of the space expedition had degenerated into a venting of personal discontents. Gino was finding his work as a maintenance worker in the ceramics plant increasingly tedious and was thinking of volunteering for Bat duty for no better reason than to have a change in his routine and to earn more credit. Josef’s brief time as a member of the Turing Council was already making him exasperated with the petty complaints people brought to his attention. Mahala had nodded and listened and remained largely silent, as had Chike.
She held Chike’s hand as they walked. He had become her closest friend while living in Turing, as close to her as Frania had once been, as Solveig was now, perhaps even closer. He was living in a small dormitory in the east dome with a few other young men who were waiting until they found bond-mates before erecting their own homes.
Chike had never even hinted that he might ask for a pledge from her, although the people closest to both of them seemed to assume that they would become bondmates in time. She did not know if she loved him, but mulling over whether she truly did or not seemed pointless. He was kind; he challenged her intellectually; she cared deeply about his welfare and his happiness. He saw her as an intelligent, responsible, and decent person, so she tried to live up to his impression of her and that probably made her a better person than she might have been otherwise. Maybe that was what love was.
“What did you think?” Chike said as they climbed the hill to Dyami’s house.
“I don’t know,” she replied. “Sitting around and talking doesn’t do any harm, but it doesn’t do much good, either.”
“Everybody there wants a chance to be a spacefarer,” Chike said, “whatever complaints they may have otherwise.”
Mahala shook her head. “The interstellar expedition will need specialists, astronomers and physicists, people with Solveig’s interests, people with a lot of training and education.”
“They’ll need all kinds of people. You’re not talking about a crew on a smaller vessel like a torchship—these spacefarers will have to become a community. We don’t know how they’ll be selected or what the criteria might be.”
“We don’t even know who’s doing the selecting,” she said. “The Habbers? I don’t think the Mukhtars and the Project Council would settle for that. And they’ve been conspicuously silent about their plans ever since that first announcement.”
“They’re probably just waiting until they have more to say.”
“And you think there’s something to accomplish in the meantime by sitting around talking about it.”
“All I know is that I want to be one of those spacefarers, Mahala, and so do you. Maybe exchanging ideas with people who have the same ambition will help us think of ways to achieve it.”
They had come to Dyami’s house. Chike sometimes stayed over with her, since Solveig did not mind sleeping in the common room when they wanted to be together. But Solveig would already be asleep, and Mahala had to be up in a few hours to see patients.
“I wonder how many of the people we know would actually go if given the chance,” she said.
“Some of them wouldn’t. Most of them might even turn down the chance in the end. But they’d still know that others were going.”
The ship, or worldlet, would be a Habber vessel. Ever since the announcement, she had pondered the probable duration of the journey. The spacefarers would be a kind of community, as Chike had said. Some assumed that this meant that children, and perhaps more than one generation, would grow up inside the voyager and come to consider it their home.
But there were other possibilities that might not be openly acknowledged but which had been in her mind for some time. Habbers would be among the voyagers; they might even constitute most of the spacefarers. In any case, whatever their numbers, they could hardly expect to have a stable, functioning community aboard their vessel while living out their greatly extended lives in the midst of much shorter-lived companions. Those who became spacefarers would not only be gaining a chance to explore the universe; they were also likely to gain a life span that might be measured in centuries.
If a new era was truly coming for her world, for Earth, and for the Habbers, how much longer would Earthfolk and Cytherians remain content with their shorter lives?
“I don’t think many would refuse to go,” Mahala said, “not with a chance at a lifetime of hundreds of years. That’s also what’s at stake here. Longer life spans for all the voyagers are almost a necessity for such a mission to succeed.”
“I know. It’s easier to tell yourself that you don’t mind having a reasonably good century and a quarter or so if you know that’s all there’s going to be. I don’t know how many people would settle for that if they had a real chance for more.”
She thought of the patients whom she scanned and treated and advised on their habits and occasionally counseled. The work had its satisfactions. Relieving chronic pain, replacing prematurely worn out or damaged organs, doing gene therapy on an afflicted fetus or infant, ridding people of infections and taking precautions so that contagious infections would not spread—everything she did, however frustrating and exhausting it might be sometimes, made life better for those around her. But there were times when it seemed that she and Tasida were only practicing an imperfect, stunted art, a medicine that a Habber might view as barely superior to the chants and spells of a shaman.
“When you think about it,” she said, “you have to wonder why the Habbers decided that this interstellar mission should be a unified undertaking, why they didn’t just decide to go by themselves.”
“It could be simply that they’re as naive as they seem,” Chike said, “and thought this was the best way to do it. Maybe it’s what you claimed once, that they fear becoming too different from the rest of the species and need other people among them now. Mahala—” He paused. “You might as well know. Gino asked me if your Habber relatives had told you anything, if you might know something we don’t. I told him you didn’t know anything, that they hadn’t contacted you in a while, so now he knows that you don’t have any influence with them. I thought you ought to know that.”
“It’s all right. You can tell them that Benzi hasn’t had a message from me in almost a year, since he never bothered to reply to the ones I sent.” She did not even know if Malik was still aboard the Habber ship orbiting Venus or had returned to his Hab. “Nothing I do can possibly improve Gino’s chances at being chosen to be a spacefarer. Strange how things turn out. Once I got trouble from others for my Habber connections, and now they may actually improve my social status.”
He laughed, then kissed her.
The announcement came over a public channel, just as Mahala was preparing to leave for Oberg. The statement was delivered by one of Masud al-Tikriti’s aides. The two domes of Sagan, one of the new settlements in the Akna Mountains, were ready to receive their first settlers. Prefabricated dormitories had been set up as temporary living quarters, and workers and specialists of all kinds were needed. Cytherians between the ages of twenty and fifty were preferred, but all settlers looking for more space and a role in establishing a new community were encouraged to apply. Fifty Habbers were also planning to join the settlers, and other Habbers would soon be joining them to assist in the landscaping of the d
ome environments and in subsequent tasks.
Dyami blanked the wall screen. “Nothing unusual about that,” he said, “except the number of Habbers. There won’t be more than a thousand settlers in the domes during the first year. One Habber or more for each twenty settlers is a higher percentage than usual.”
Mahala stood up. She was twenty now; maybe it was time for her to move out of Dyami’s house. He had welcomed Amina and then Tasida; he had made a home for her, for Frania, and had given Ragnar and then Solveig a place to stay. He had originally built his house as a refuge for himself and then had willingly opened up that refuge to others. He deserved some of the solitude he had once sought.
“Maybe I should apply for a place in Sagan,” Mahala said. “Haroun Delassi is almost through with his apprenticeship to Tasida, so he might be willing to take my place as her assistant.”
Dyami looked up at her from his cushion. “Tasida tells me that you could be a fine physician yourself. Maybe it’s time you took the test and became a specialist.”
“I should try for that. I’d still rather work with an older physician for a while, though.”
“It might be interesting for you,” Dyami said, “being in the new settlement. With the number of Habbers that will be there, it sounds a bit like Turing used to be when I first came here. There were two hundred Cytherians, and about fifty Habbers, and we lived in the simplest of prefab shacks and dormitories, and whenever we weren’t working, we sat around with the Habbers and discussed all manner of subjects. I suppose you could call those talks seminars, in a way. I always felt that I had learned more by going to Turing than to the Island school that had accepted me, and when I think back on those early days now, it seems the happiest time of my life.”
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