Child of Venus

by Pamela Sargent

  Harriett told her a little of what had happened in the tavern after Mahala had left with Edmund. They had waited, expecting Allison’s tavern to be searched within the hour. Jeremy and Chet had been talking about giving themselves up when they heard the muffled sound of an explosion. The workers inside Allison’s had run from the tavern and were in the square right after the second blast, pulling out concealed weapons from their shirts and shooting at the Guardians in front of the town hall. Harriett had seen one man slap a disk that looked like a sensor patch on the top of a hovercar in the square; the vehicle had suddenly glowed with a bright light. Mahala thought of the bodies lying next to hovercraft that she had scanned, that had shown no signs of life.

  By dawn, six people who were too badly off to be moved lay on futons in the hallway of the town hall; other injured townsfolk had been sent home with members of their households. Twenty members of Commander Lawrence’s force were among the wounded, most of them the victims of shotgun blasts or bullets fired from pistols. The women of Lincoln, once they had realized that a battle was under way, had been quick to join in the fighting with their old weapons, firing upon the Guardians who had come to search their homes and shops.

  Mahala had seen how much damage a shotgun or pistol could do to a human body. She reminded herself that the members of Commander Lawrence’s force had followed him willingly, either out of belief in his cause or because of personal devotion to him. She would not pity the more grievously wounded of his Guardians too much.

  She finished scanning a man in workers’ clothes who had been stunned by a wand beam, then gave him an injection for his nausea. “Stay here,” she said as she eased him back against his futon, “until you feel well enough to get up. That shouldn’t be more than an hour or two.”

  “Thanks,” he said. This young man and some fifty other workers, she had discovered during the course of her therapeutic labors, were actually members of the personal guard of the Council of Mukhtars. She had seen Edmund Helgas striding through the hallway, issuing orders, seeing that the defeated Guardian prisoners were secured and under restraint. Even without a uniform, Edmund—if that was in fact his name, which she doubted—had the air of a Guardian officer.

  Mahala rose and glanced toward the room where Malik had died. His body and that of his fellow Habber had been carried from the room earlier. History had caught up with Malik in this place; that was probably the way he would have viewed his death.

  The door to the mayor’s office opened. Mukhtar Tabib and Administrator Masud came into the hallway, followed by Benzi. The three of them had been in the room all night, after Teresa and the other townsfolk who were not needed here had left with the rest of the delegates to the conference.

  Benzi walked toward her. “You’ve been here all night,” he said.

  “I gave myself something to stay awake.”

  “Tesia is staying with Te-yu. I’m going back to Teresa Marias’s house. We can walk there together if you like.”

  Tabib and Masud were standing by the door. The Mukhtar murmured a few words to the Administrator, then turned to Mahala and Benzi. “I am sorry for what happened to your grandfather,” he said, “and to his comrade.”

  “You knew what might happen,” Mahala said. “You must have known, or Edmund Helgas and those other men wouldn’t have been here.”

  “I knew what might happen—that is true.”

  “Then you might have tried to stop it. You didn’t have to let it happen.”

  “You are wrong, child.” The Mukhtar stepped toward her. “We had rooted out the Guardian officers most likely to oppose this conference or to attempt to put a stop to it. We thought we had them all, but could not be sure, and there were indications that others among the Guardians might be covertly disloyal. We had to find a way to draw them out.”

  “Using us as bait,” Benzi said, and Mahala heard the bitterness and sorrow in his voice. “Knowing that our lives were at risk.”

  “Your lives were at risk as soon as you set foot on Earth,” Tabib said. “When you and the other Habbers among us were left unharmed, treated warmly, or at least courteously, by those among whom you were living, I allowed myself to hope that I might have overestimated the amount of hostility to your presence. But I did not delude myself. I knew that those who hated you and your kind might try to stop this conference.” The Mukhtar drew his black eyebrows together. “Let me point out that my own life was also at risk, that I was part of the bait.”

  “I doubt that those Guardians would have killed a Mukhtar,” Benzi said.

  Tabib shook his head. “You Habbers are even more naive than I thought. You saw Commander Lawrence. I am certain that he was capable of killing everyone in Lincoln if that would have served his purpose.”

  “Maybe he wasn’t the only one,” Mahala said. “Maybe there are others.”

  “There may well be,” Tabib said, “and if so, we now have a means of ferreting them out Those who were opposed to the new era had the choice of abiding by the will of the Council of Mukhtars without complaint or of resigning their positions and having no further role in public life and political matters. Both I and the Guardian Commander in Chief were bound to respect those who chose to resign. We might have taken steps to see if they had knowledge of others in the ranks who might be disloyal, but such interrogations would have set a bad example and damaged morale. Our quarrel was not with those who were open in their disagreement with us and who had honorably resigned their posts, but with those who might be secretly preparing to defy us. Now they have acted against us, and so we are free to regard them as criminals, to use any means of interrogation necessary to find out if they have other accomplices.” His mouth twisted into what seemed a mockery of a smile. “I can assure you that the death of your grandfather will be avenged by the torments his murderer is likely to suffer during such questioning.”

  “Commander Lawrence may not be the only one plotting against you in secret,” Benzi said.

  “I sincerely doubt that he is,” Tabib replied.

  “He may have no knowledge of others who might be your enemies,” Benzi said.

  “Our enemies, Benzi Liangharad. We are in this together, you and I. Commander Lawrence will serve as a useful example in any case. Others may be induced to bow out of our public affairs and to seek retirement.”

  Mahala moved closer to Benzi, suddenly wishing that she had never come to this place.

  “I know what you are thinking, child,” the Mukhtar continued, “that I am ruthless and cruel and a relic of a violent past. That is true, I suppose, but my ruthlessness is being used in the service of the new era—or so I tell myself. You are thinking that you should never have come here. Be thankful that you have. You have had a demonstration of what we are hoping to escape as we struggle to become something better.”

  24

  Mahala Liangharad:

  Excerpts from Journal Entries

  June 14, 657:

  All of the delegates to the Lincoln Conference, as this gathering is now being called, have been asked to keep records of our thoughts and experiences. Mukhtar Tabib al-Tahir has said that we’re free either to keep an oral record or to write our observations down and to use whatever languages come most easily to us. He has also urged us to be completely honest, since only certain scholars will have access to our journals in the near future, and to be mindful of the fact that our words may be an important part of the historical record. Other than that, he hasn’t offered any guidance at all.

  Over two weeks have passed since I arrived in Lincoln, and our first official meeting is tomorrow. We’re still getting past the horror of these past days. Mukhtar Tabib (and presumably the rest of the Council of Mukhtars, although it is increasingly obvious that he has the power to speak for all of them) decided that my grandfather Malik Haddad should be buried in Damascus, with all honor, immediately after Lincoln was secured. Naturally that meant that Mukhtar Tabib had to be present for the funeral, as did Administrator Masud, since he is a k
insman of Malik’s. A man who was once a Linker on Earth, and then a Cytherian settler, and after that a Habber—the Mukhtars could hardly have found a better martyr to the new era. There must have been thousands outside the mosque, and thousands more in the procession when Malik’s body was carried to the graveyard.

  A search through the records revealed that Jeffrey Arnold had kinsfolk in the Atlantic Federation near New York. They were given permission to scatter his remains at sea from a sailing vessel, which made for yet another visual spectacle of mourning for a martyr.

  I didn’t go to Damascus. Given that Mukhtar Tabib was determined to give Malik a traditional funeral, I would have had to remain out of sight with the other female mourners anyway. Jamilah al-Hussaini also hinted that the Mukhtar thought all of the delegates would be much safer staying in Lincoln. That is something else we have to worry about now, our personal safety. The Guardians are still here, and I know that others have been stationed at other points outside Lincoln. I haven’t tried to find out what other measures are being taken to protect us, and perhaps it’s better if we don’t know the specifics.

  I also don’t particularly want to know what his interrogators may have learned from Commander Lawrence, or what methods they used to get the information.

  Benzi has been staying here, with Teresa Marias and her household. For days after the incident, he hardly spoke at all. Most of the time, he would sit in the courtyard, staring at the roses. He had promised me that he would tell Risa about Malik’s end, and he sent her a message right away, and I sat with him and sent her a message of my own to console her, and then after that, Benzi retreated into himself. Harriett heard rumors from other households that the other Habbers here were in the same sort of state, just completely closed off from everything. If they were communing with one another through their Links, they showed no sign of that.

  After a week, I couldn’t bear to see him like that anymore, sitting out there, going back to his room for a few hours, and then going into the courtyard again. Finally I went out to him, and sat with him for a while, and then I said, “I know you’re mourning and that losing someone through death must be even harder for Habbers than it is for us, but I’m worried about you, everyone here is concerned. Teresa doesn’t know what to do, and neither does anyone else.”

  He looked at me then. “I was thinking,” he said, “of what my life might be like now if I had stayed here.”

  “You might not even be alive,” I told him, “and if you were, you’d be an old man, even older than Nona. And you wouldn’t have been living in this house—you would have become another wandering Plainsman.”

  “I might have become a shopkeeper in Lincoln. There are a few men among them. Then I could have stayed.”

  “Are you sorry that you didn’t?” I asked.

  “No. It wasn’t my choice to leave here, but I am not sorry for the way my life has gone. Still, there might have been satisfactions in living it another way.”

  At least he was talking now. “I miss him,” I said. “I miss my grandfather.” I was regretting the times when I might have sought Malik out and had instead avoided him. What I missed was the chance we might have had to build our own personal bridge during this conference.

  “We haven’t lost him entirely,” Benzi said. “A record of some of his memories will remain with our cyberminds. Eventually he might have left more of a pattern of his thoughts and feelings with our minds, but there is at least something of him left.”

  I said, “You sound as though you’re talking of a soul.”

  “Not really. The man we knew as Malik no longer exists.”

  “Would he still exist if there had been time for your cyberminds to hold his pattern?” I was thinking of what Balin and Orban and other Habbers had implied, that their minds might persist, captured by the artificial intelligences of their Habitats, even after their bodies had failed.

  “It’s not quite that straightforward, Mahala. There might have been a mental pattern that I could respond to through my Link as though I were encountering Malik, but whether or not that pattern would be Malik in any true sense is a metaphysical question. I’ve never had much taste for metaphysical speculation.”

  “Maybe I’ve misunderstood some of what I’ve heard from the Habbers I know,” I said. “Sometimes Balin almost made it sound as though Habbers, instead of dying, could choose to become part of your cybernetic net.”

  “Choose to become?” His expression changed; there was something alien, something other in his face. “We already are part of that net.”

  “Through your Links, of course,” I said, “but that wasn’t what I meant.”

  “That wasn’t what I meant, either. Someone like me, someone like Tesia or Te-yu or Jeffrey—” He looked away for a moment, as though he had just recalled that his comrade Jeffrey was dead, too. “We’re not so different from Linkers. Tesia and Balin, being Habbers who have lived among Cytherians for many years and formed strong bonds with them, haven’t diverged that much from other human beings. Te-yu and I weren’t brought up by Habbers—we came to the Habitats later in life. There are still many times when I choose to block my Link, to leave it silent, as many of Earth’s Linkers do. But to describe other Habbers as being only humans who are Linked and who happen to live in Habitats would be inaccurate at best.”

  I told him that as a child, I had assumed that the Habbers whose Habitats were farther out in the solar system might be much more alien than those we had encountered. Solveig and Ah Lin and other friends of mine had speculated that they might even have given up their human bodies and taken on completely different forms.

  Benzi’s face softened at these comments; he looked almost as if he were smiling. “Oh, no,” he said, “their bodies are as human as ours in appearance. In a way, that makes many of them seem even more alien. I used to think that such Habbers weren’t much more than the eyes and ears of our artificial intelligences, but that isn’t quite accurate, either.”

  He seemed to want to say more at that point, while trying to decide how to proceed. I kept silent and waited.

  “When someone has chosen to give up many, perhaps most of his memories,” Benzi said at last, “while allowing the cyberminds to save those memories, and then goes on to live another life, I am not at all sure you can call him the same person. If he can no longer draw any distinction between himself, his own mentality, and the Link within him, perhaps it isn’t accurate to call him human, either. And when I consider cyberminds with the accumulated memories and thoughts and dreams and maybe even feelings of millions of Habitat-dwellers, I wonder if parts of our net of artificial intelligences aren’t more human than some of us are.”

  “Human enough to have hoped for a new era?” I meant that as a joke.

  Benzi stared directly at me. “That is exactly what they want,” he said, “what they—maybe saying that they want this or desire that particular outcome isn’t a precise enough way to speak of it, but it is true that our artificial intelligences are trying to reach out to their cybernetic brethren on Earth. It is also true that Earth’s cyberminds, while treated more as servants and appendages by the Linkers of Earth, seem to be welcoming a chance for closer ties with the Habitats. To put it as simply as possible, our cyberminds are ready to share their information, their date—whatever you wish to call what they are and what is in them—with the minds of Earth. The artificial intelligences of Earth apparently have the same aim. That isn’t their only goal, of course—there is also a universe for them to explore, and an alien mentality for them to contact.”

  “You make it sound as though we’re almost incidental to their plans,” I said.

  Benzi looked grim for a moment, and then he laughed softly. The sound of that subdued laughter unnerved me almost as much as Commander Lawrence had with his rantings.

  “Not yet,” Benzi told me, “not yet. I think human beings may be forgiven the actions of a rogue Guardian Commander. They may even be forgiven several more such spasms. But I don’t thi
nk that we should test the patience—if I may call it patience—of our cyberminds too far. We would not want to give them reasons to decide that they might be better off without their fleshy companions.”

  I could think of nothing to say to that.

  “In other words,” Benzi went on, “let us hope that this conference succeeds.”

  June 22, 657:

  Our meetings are being held in the town hall, in the largest of the rooms off the hallway. Since the room isn’t used that often—the mayor uses it mostly for welcoming visiting officials, for groups of townspeople who have requested a meeting with her, or for lectures and presentations by the Lincoln Academy faculty that townsfolk might like to attend in person—our sessions shouldn’t disrupt the business of the town. There are other places where we might have met, but the Lincoln town hall seems the most appropriate. So far, it seems to be working.

  June 30, 657:

  For many decades, Earth has allowed people to gather in camps near three cities in different regions to await a chance for passage to Venus. Anyone who has been turned away by the representatives of the Project Council, who has been refused a place as a specialist or a worker, may still go to one of the camps and hope to be chosen eventually. My own grandfather Malik made his way to such a camp after his disgrace and won his passage to Venus there, as did my grandfather Sef.

  But the price such hopeful settlers must pay is high. They give up everything to go to those camps. They live in primitive surroundings under the supervision of Guardians, with no guarantee that they will ever get passage. Yet even under those conditions, thousands of people have been willing to take the risk and to seek a new life on Venus.

  At least thousands have been until recently. The Council of Mukhtars considered closing the camps completely just after the new era of peace and friendship was announced, but decided against it in the end. Mukhtar Tabib was quite honest about admitting that it didn’t seem advisable to close off that particular social safety valve until there were signs that the new era might last. As time went on, fewer people traveled to the camps anyway; living through the new era on