Child of Venus

by Pamela Sargent

  She thought about one carving she had seen, of her own face, and wondered when Ragnar had carved it and why he had given her an expression that seemed both pensive and implacable.

  “I was thinking,” Chike said, “of asking you something before we leave Turing. Maybe this is the time to ask you—” He paused. “To ask you if you would consider becoming my bondmate.”

  “Chike—”

  “Let me finish, Mahala.” He reached for her hand. “The reason I haven’t asked before is that I was almost certain you’d say no, not because you don’t care for me but because you’ve decided that we have a bond already.” He shook his head. “That isn’t what I meant to say. I meant that whether we have a bond or not, we’ll be together, that there will always be something between us.”

  Mahala said, “That’s exactly how I feel. You didn’t have to say it.”

  “It was time to say it.”

  “I love you,” she said, “and I always will love you in some way, and that’s enough right now.”

  “That’s just the way I feel.”

  Mahala thought of Dyami and Balin. Balin had said little to her uncle’s housemates except that he would be staying at Turing’s Habber residence while setting up some new educational programs for Turing’s children and young people. Balin had hinted that he might seek Dyami’s advice and that the new programs would be a more radical departure from the standard primary curriculum. Presumably Balin’s efforts were a part of the new era, and she hoped that the work would keep him here for a while.

  “Maybe I need you more now,” Chike said, “because everything’s going to change. A few years ago, I could look ahead and the alternatives were fairly clear. I’d finish my schooling and become a specialist in chemistry, or I would be advised to leave and apprentice myself, probably as a lab assistant, and I’d live on an Island or maybe in a settlement and bring up however many children my bondmate and I could get permission to have and live out my life in service to the Project. Now I can’t be sure of anything.”

  “You don’t regret that,” Mahala said.

  “Not at all. You know that. But it does make me feel that I need just one thing that is certain, that you’ll be there for me.”

  “I’ll be there.” She leaned against him, suddenly grateful for his love.

  21

  May 655

  From: Harriett Teresas, Commune of Teresa Marias,

  Lincoln, Nomarchy of the Plains Communes

  To: Mahala Liangharad, East Dome,

  Cytherian Settlement of Sagan

  Greetings from Earth!

  If you don’t know who I am and haven’t checked any records yet, I’m a kinswoman, a cousin of yours, Harriett Teresas. In case you haven’t looked at a genealogical chart or called up a recitation of our list of ancestors, I am a descendant of your great-great-grandmother Angharad’s first cousin Elisabeth, who had a daughter, Lilia. Lilia’s daughter was Sylvie, who took over this farm back in 593. Sylvie merged our farm and household with—well, a Plainswoman can spend hours going through her line of ancestors, so I won’t go into all of that.

  Sylvie had a son, Gregor, who left Lincoln, and then much later in life a daughter, Maria, who’s my grandmother. Maria’s still alive, but she’s well into her middle years, since she didn’t give birth to my mother Teresa until she was in her late twenties, but a fair number of Plainswomen are becoming mothers later in life these days, instead of following old custom and having their children in their teens. And my name is Harriett Teresas, and as I said, I am your cousin, but it must seem like a very distant relationship to you.

  If you’d like to view a mind-tour of Lincoln, please feel free to call one up, and bill it to my account, I already gave permission for that. In the meantime, I can tell you that this town has changed quite a bit since your great-grandmother Iris Angharads left for Venus over a century ago.

  For one thing, it’s smaller, and Lincoln wasn’t any too populated to begin with; over three thousand people live here now, which is actually more residents than we had here a few years ago—but I’ll get to that.

  My mother, Teresa Marias, who was elected as mayor of Lincoln a couple of years ago, is head of this household and in charge of our farm, and we still live in the same house—with some improvements, needless to say— where your great-grandmother Iris grew up. We’ve probably got more room than she and her housemates had, though, because there aren’t as many of us. Our regional Counselors are stingy about granting permissions to have children, and the fact is that the Nomarchies don’t need as many of us to run our farms. In the old days, many women could get permission for at least two children, a girl to run the farm and continue the line and a boy to wander off to other places to work and spread the line’s genes around, but I can think of only a few women who ever got permission for more than one child, and some who never get permission at all, and if you’re told to have a boy, you just have to leave it to a sister or a female cousin to carry on your line.

  I’m going to tell you about myself now and a little more about Lincoln, and then you’ll understand why I’m sending you this message. I’m twenty years old, and I grew up in Lincoln. By the time I was six, I had learned how to read and was spending a good deal of my credit on screen lessons. You probably know how unusual that is here, since farmers don’t need lessons except for subjects that are related to agriculture or running a farm, but my mother actually encouraged me in my studies.

  One reason was her pride in knowing that Iris Angharads was part of our line. I grew up hearing stories about how Iris learned to read in secret, even when her friends made fun of her, and how she was chosen for the Cytherian Institute and later gave up her life for the Venus Project. Our line may not have as many branches as it once did, but at least we know we have one branch on Venus, and we are very proud of that. But Teresa also encouraged my lessons because she saw that a time might come when I’d have to know more than how to run a farm. “Things can change,” she always said. “They’ve been the same for a long time now, maybe for too long.” And as it turned out, she was right. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

  About seven years ago, our regional Counselor, Torie Crawfordsville, called us all to a meeting in the town hall Everybody in Lincoln—farmers, shopkeepers, the older boys and any men who happened to be passing through, and all of the children who were old enough to behave properly and understand what was being said— went to the meeting, because Torie had said that it was going to be really important. That was when she told us that the Administrative Committee for our Nomarchy had been directed by the Council of Mukhtars to open a primary and secondary school in Lincoln. Some of the older students would come here from other Plains towns and live in houses with some of the teachers while the school was in session, but any child in Lincoln who had the aptitude and was willing to do the work would also be admitted to the school. And they really did mean anyone—boy or girl, the child of a shopkeeper or a farmer— everybody would have a chance at an education.

  After Torie Crawfordsville made that announcement, there wasn’t a sound in the room. People were stunned; I was wondering if some of the old women might even drop dead from the shock. Torie went on to speak about the curriculum and the teachers and how some of the young people in Lincoln might go on to become teachers to another generation of children, and I was thinking: I’ll be able to go to school, they’ll have to let me in, and I’ll be prepared because of all those screen lessons I took. It won’t be just teaching images giving me lessons anymore, it’ll be real teachers and people from other places and students like me who want to learn new things and are curious about the world and who won’t make fun of me because I know how to read and want to get something more from a mind-tour than a mindless adventure and want to grow up to be more than a farmer and Plainswoman who sits around gossiping, drinking whiskey, and bedding any attractive man who comes through Lincoln and is willing.

  It didn’t turn out quite that way, and most of the children from Lincol
n who entered school with me either dropped out or were asked to leave after a year or so, but the ones who came after us did better at their lessons. I was able to go to school and get more training, and now I’m instructing some of the youngest children in reading and mathematics and also showing them how to locate and call up educational mind-tours they might not have found out about by themselves. And next autumn, I’ll be going to a university, something I thought could never happen to me. There are still people here who think too much schooling is a waste of time and will only addle your brain, but there aren’t as many of them as there used to be, and the children entering now are more prepared for school than we were.

  That was the first shock for everybody in Lincoln, having a school set up here. The second, of course, was the announcement by Mukhtar Tabib al-Takir that a new era of cooperation among the peoples of Earth, Venus, and the Habitats was at hand and that the Habbers would be providing more aid to the Cytherians and the Venus Project and that an alien race had sent a signal from the stars. That nearly sent some people over the edge. But all of that would have come to us as an even bigger shock without the school; it was almost as though the Lincoln Academy were deliberately set up to prepare us for more changes later on.

  So now we have students who come here from other towns to attend our Lincoln Academy, and we have teachers, and even the old women who still shake their heads and cluck disapprovingly about it all admit that Lincoln is a lot more interesting than it used to be. At mass in our Marian Catholic Church—that’s where most of our household goes, although there are a lot of Muslims and Spiritists in town, too—we actually fill all the pews now, and the mosque draws more people, and the Spiritists had to move out of their building next to the town hall into a larger structure. That’s partly because there are more people living here now, but I think it’s also because more of us are trying to hang on to some of our old customs in the middle of all this change. There’s a kind of comfort in going to mass and lighting candles for Mary and Her Son and knowing that some things won’t change, even when you aren’t really sure you believe in any of that.

  I don’t know how much you Cytherians keep up with what happens on Earth. Most people here know little more about your lives than what they might hear about in progress reports about the Project, and of course we know about the major political events, such as your uprising and how Mukhtar Kaseko Wugabe so cleverly allowed the oppressors among your own people to think that he was willing to deal with them when he was actually just waiting for the Cytherians to rise up and overthrow—

  Mother of God, forgive me. I forgot that your mother Chimene Liang-Haddad was one of the leaders of the cult that caused all that trouble. I know that your record says you never knew her, but it was still tactless of me to mention that. Well, she was a cousin of mine, too. Our line made its mark on Venus, for good and for ill, but mostly for good, I think.

  As I was saying, you may know little more about what’s going on here than most of us do about what’s happening there, and the North American Plains aren’t exactly a center of Earthly culture, so you wouldn’t have much reason to concern yourself with our doings. We have our school, and five of our young students have gone off to universities for more training, and we all know that everything is changing. Fortunately, things aren’t changing so quickly that our lives are too disrupted for us to adjust.

  Lincoln isn’t the only place that’s being transformed, either. I did some digging around and discovered that a lot of small towns and isolated communities that never had schools until a few years ago now have them. There also seems to be an increase in the number of Counselors being trained and given assignments in all of the Nomarchies, which makes sense. Even if the Administrative Councils and the Mukhtars are cautious and go slow, a lot of people are going to feel increasingly disoriented.

  This message from a stranger, even if she is a kinswoman, has gone on much too long already, and I still haven’t told you what impelled me to send it to you. I’d been meaning to contact you for a while before the Habbers came. That’s what this message is about, actually—the Habbers.

  A month ago, Torie Crawfordsville told us that three Linkers and three Habbers were coming here. The Linkers were to be from our Nomarchy’s Administrative Council, and the Habbers were supposedly coming here simply as observers. Every household got her message, and within a few minutes after Torie was off the screen, my mother was getting calls from everyone in town. I mean, having Linkers here, especially people so highly placed, would have been enough of a shock, but Habbers—we couldn’t believe it, and maybe it’s just as well that Torie didn’t leave us too much time to think about it, because within three days after her announcement, a floater arrived here, landed in our one airship cradle, and the door opened, and there on the ramp were the Linkers and the Habbers.

  Everybody was there to greet them. There was a crowd at the cradle and another crowd in the town square, and Teresa was waiting at the cradle with a small delegation of heads of households to welcome them. I don’t know what we expected to see, but some of the old women had been spreading tales about Habbers coming here to steal children for their Habs or to put implants in our brains in order to make us do their bidding. You would think they’d know better, and luckily most of us know such stories are ridiculous, but I think there was a moment, while we were standing by the floater cradle, when some of us were wondering whether the stories might be true.

  The Linkers and Habbers have been here for a month now, and they’ve gone out of their way to be friendly and reassuring and to adapt to our ways—or at least to keep from offending anyone. But it’s taken Teresa and me, and my grandmother Maria, most of that time to come to terms with the fact that one of the Habbers is part of our line.

  We had known about him earlier, of course, and that he had gone with his mother to Venus and then abandoned Venus for the Habs, but nobody talked about him, and we certainly never thought we would ever see Benzi Liangharad in Lincoln. He was born here, he spent the first years of his life here, but we never expected to meet him here. He’s over a century old, and yet he looks like a man of thirty or so at the most. Whatever rejuv techniques the Habbers have must be a lot more advanced than ours.

  But you know him, so I don’t have to tell you all of that. Anyway, that’s why I’m sending you this message, because of Benzi. He suggested it to me and said that we should establish some contact now. And he asked me to say, though I’m not sure why, that he hasn’t forgotten you and his other kin on Venus.

  The quake struck when Mahala was on her way to Sagan’s airship bay, which lay at the southern end of the east dome. The seismologists had been expecting a quake on Ishtar Terra’s Lakshmi Plateau for a few days now, although their predictions of the quake’s magnitude had varied.

  Speeding up the rotation of Venus one hundred years ago with the antigravitational pulse generated by the three pyramidal surface installations had unlocked the planet’s tectonic plates. There had been violent quakes after that, and domes able to withstand even the most powerful quakes had been manufactured to cover and seal in the settlements. For the past two decades, the plateau and mountain ranges of Ishtar Terra had been shaken by only a series of minor quakes, some of them too small to be perceptible to human beings, but many of the seiomolegists had been predicting a much stronger quake than usual within a month, while others anticipated one of the most severe they were ever likely to experience.

  The jolt threw Mahala forward, as if the ground had suddenly been pulled out from under her feet. On the flat land to the south, tents swayed violently, sails moving over a sea of grass. She clawed at the grass. The ground heaved under her until it seemed that it would never stop.

  Quakes had never caused a breach in a dome, and Mahala knew enough about the specs and the ceramic-metallic alloy of the domes to be certain that all of the domes would hold, but was terrified all the same. The installations near Sagan’s two digger and crawler bays might be damaged. Conduits in several of t
hose bunkers held oxygen extracted from the atmosphere of carbon dioxide, which was combined with nitrogen drawn from Venus’s misty rains and then used to replenish the air inside the domes, and there had been explosions inside bunkers before. A few of the diggers and crawlers the settlers used for their external mining operations might have been buried under rockslides. Even after two years of living in Sagan, most of the people here still lived either in tents or in dormitories with walls and ceilings of light materials; anyone inside them was unlikely to suffer any injuries. But the other settlements, even with all the precautions people had taken in the construction of their dwellings and other structures, were likely to have injuries, even deaths.

  The ground trembled and shook. Mahala pressed herself against the ground, waiting out the long moments until

  Venus was still once more, then pulled a palm-sized pocket screen from her physician’s bag.

  A number appeared on the screen: 8.3 on the scale, about as bad as it could get. The epicenter of the quake had been only fifty kilometers south of Turing and Hypatia and the other settlements in the Freyja Mountains to the north of the Lakshmi Plateau. She wondered how much damage Turing had suffered.

  She dragged herself to her feet. A soft voice was speaking to her from the screen she held in her hand. Two men were down in the airship bay, one dazed and the other unconscious. She shut the screen off and thrust it into her pocket. She was close to the bay; she would head there first and take care of the injured men before seeing who else might need her.