Child of Venus

by Pamela Sargent

  Farewells, Mahala thought; much of her life now involved preparing herself for leaving behind forever all of the places and many of the people she had known. She had left Lincoln and her cousin Harriett knowing that she would never see them again. Her farewells to those she loved on her own world would be far more painful. Even during her first months back in Sagan, a few of her friends had admitted that they had grown reluctant to sever themselves so completely from their home. With each of her farewells, she felt an increasing sympathy for those who had decided to turn away from the dream of interstellar travel.

  Her grandmother Risa and her grandfather Sef welcomed her to their house in Oberg as they always had, with a large supper shared with the rest of the household. In the middle of the meal, Kyril Anders, the nineteen-year-old son of Risa’s housemates Barika Maitana and Kristof Anders, announced that he was going to volunteer for the interstellar expedition as soon as he turned twenty. No one seemed surprised at the announcement, although Kyril’s parents shook their heads at him regretfully.

  Akilah Ching spoke of her interstellar intentions. “I want to be part of it, too,” the beautiful young woman said in her musical voice.

  “You’re only seventeen,” her father, Jamil Owens, replied. “You’ve been chosen for an Island school—are you going to throw that away?”

  “Of course not. I’ll get my education and then apply later, when I’m old enough.”

  Sef frowned. “So many young people want to leave,” he said. “Makes you wonder what we built our settlements for. There won’t be anybody left to keep things going.”

  “Sef,” Akilah said gently, “you’re exaggerating.”

  “More settlers will come here from Earth,” Mahala said, “to replace any people you lose.”

  “I suppose.” Sef looked away. “Somehow, that isn’t much of a comfort.”

  “Sef.” Risa put a hand on her bondmate’s wrist. “You chose to come here, after all. Better that others have the choice of whether to stay or go.”

  They finished the meal listening to Grazie’s recital of the latest Oberg gossip. After dinner, as Mahala expected, Risa asked her to accompany her on a walk. As they left the house, Risa hooked her arm through hers.

  “I have the day off tomorrow,” Risa said. “You can help me with some weeding in my greenhouse.”

  “Of course.”

  “You’re staying with us for less than a month. Seems to me that you could have taken more time, seeing as it’s likely to be your last visit.”

  Mahala felt a sharp pang of remorse at those words. “Well be able to exchange messages,” she said. “We won’t be leaving the solar system for at least a few years, maybe longer. They want to make sure that people who might change their minds will have plenty of time to reconsider.”

  “Don’t try to comfort me with that, Mahala. You’ve made your choice. You’ll have to start separating from us. When you leave for that Habitat, you’ll be gone for good.” Risa slowed as they came near the tunnel that led into Oberg’s main dome. “I won’t make this harder for you—if I were younger, I might have done the same thing you’re doing. And maybe you’ll come back eventually to see what we made here. Anyway, I’m an old woman now, so you’d be saying your final farewells to me soon enough even if you stayed here.”

  That was an exaggeration; her grandmother had not yet turned ninety. “Risa,” Mahala said, “you’ll be around for another three decades at least—maybe longer, given what our biologists may be able to do now.” She had been keeping up with some of Earth’s medical research, the pace of which had noticeably increased, now that more information was flowing from the Habber cyberminds to those of Earth. Human life spans on Earth and on Venus might increase dramatically and soon. The promise was not only one of an indefinite life span, but also of social disruption on a massive scale. Death might come to be seen not as an inevitable and necessary event, but as an enemy.

  “We’ll go to the memorial pillars now,” Risa said, as if picking up some of her thoughts, “and pay our respects. You might as well do that now, and not when you’re about to leave Oberg. I want you to leave us with memories of our life here, and not only with memories of the dead.”

  Mahala’s farewell to Dyami was a return to the life that she had once lived in Turing, a life that she could still have if she turned back. She slept in the bedroom she had once shared with Frania; at first light, she went with Tasida to the infirmary to help the other physician and Haroun Delassi with their medical duties. In spare moments, the three of them shared a meal and talked of recent medical developments.

  “Implants,” Tasida muttered a few days after Mahala had returned. “They seem so clumsy and inefficient compared to the nanomeds we’ll be trying out soon.” Tasida and Haroun were already learning as much as they could about those therapeutic molecule-sized devices from a few of the Habbers in Turing. Clearing out protein cross-linkages, preventing aneurysms from developing, healing and strengthening bones a moment after a fracture—there seemed no limit to what the tiny mechanisms could do. That the Habber nanotechnology might also make much of their work as physicians unnecessary was apparently a matter of indifference to Tasida and her assistant.

  In the evenings, Mahala visited a few old friends, discovering that she would not have to say farewells to some of them after all. Josef Feldshuh was still determined to become a spacefarer, as he had told her after the end of the Lincoln Conference before leaving Earth. According to him, several of their old primary schoolmates had the same intention. It had been much the same in Oberg; she had come to see why Sef worried that Venus might lose much of its younger generation. Perhaps it was natural that the descendants of people who had left humankind’s home world would want to go on this journey. But she also knew that some of the hopeful spacefarers would decide to remain on Venus in the end.

  After last light, in the days before the celebration that would mark the beginning of the year 659, Mahala took a walk with Balin along the shore of the lake near Dyami’s house. The Habber was living with Dyami while teaching at the primary school and instructing any of the children who were interested in mathematics. He and Dyami seemed bound together, content with their lives and at peace with each other. She had thought that Balin would want to join the interstellar community, but suspected that he might now be having qualms about that.

  “I was talking to Dyami earlier,” she said, hoping to elicit some of his thoughts. “I asked him if he was thinking of being a spacefarer himself. He’s only a bit over fifty, and his old friend Suleiman Khan told me that he wants to be a part of the expedition. But Dyami said that he thought there’d be enough challenges for him here, that he’d given too much of himself to this place to leave it.” She had not known if her uncle had been referring to Venus or simply to Turing, the place of his youthful imprisonment and the settlement where he had rebuilt his life.

  “I assume you haven’t been reconsidering your decision,” Balin said.

  “Oh, no.”

  “Even if perhaps you might be a bit young to make such a decision?”

  Mahala laughed softly. “I’m twenty-six. I’m not a child.”

  “I thought perhaps we should set the age limit higher than that, perhaps at thirty or forty, when a person has had more experience with life. But there’s also something to be said for having younger and fresher minds aboard, and there will be some years of maturation before the Habitat begins its journey. And there are those of us who are perhaps too old to go, too—” He paused. “I was going to say too weary, but that isn’t the right word.”

  She said, “You aren’t going, then.”

  “No, I’m not. I’ve decided to stay here.”

  “Until you go back to your own Hab.” She hoped for Dyami’s sake that Balin would not leave for many years.

  “I’m free to live on this world now, for as long as I like. I may never go back to a Hab.”

  They came to a stop and gazed out at the flat black surface of the lake and the disk
of faint reflected light that floated upon it “There have been so many reasons for many of us to come to live among your people,” he continued. “Some of us are altruists. Some of us welcomed the opportunity to practice some planetary engineering. A few of us were curious about a life that was different from our own. And some of us felt it was a way to hold on to the humanity we might otherwise be in danger of losing. But some of us had fallen into a trap. Our times on Venus, difficult as they sometimes were when compared to life inside a Habitat, were a way of escaping that trap.” Balin was silent for a while. “I was caught in that trap.”

  Mahala waited for him to go on.

  “You know how seductive a mind-tour can be, or any virtual experience, but the time comes when you have to remove your band and get on with your life. A Linker here or on Earth can connect himself directly to any number of experiences and scenarios, but sooner or later, he is called back to himself, either by his duties or else by the controls Earth’s people have imposed on their cyberminds. But a Habber is free to lose himself in a mental labyrinth of realized imaginings and desires and never find his way out again. I was in danger of becoming one such lost wanderer, before I found my way to Venus. And every time I went back to my Hab, I felt the temptation again. It was our great weakness—and something we kept hidden from Earth. There are Habbers who have died in their virtual worlds. There are Habbers who have been there for centuries and who will never find their way out again.”

  “Balin,” she said, and took his hand.

  “It’s harder to get drawn into the trap here,” he said. “I still have my Link, I can escape whenever I please, but that’s more difficult when you have ties to others and various obligations. On a Hab—well, it’s very easy to retreat. The net of the Hab will maintain you physically, and in your mind you can have whatever you desire. There are hundreds of thousands of Habbers who have forgotten that there is a reality outside of the one they and their Links have created for themselves.”

  Mahala shuddered. “It sounds,” she said, “like a kind of living death.”

  “If you saw the dreamers, you wouldn’t feel that way. Don’t imagine rows of ghoulish half-dead physically degenerate creatures. What you would see are people who would look as though they were meditating or as if they’re asleep, all of them wearing the same serene expression on their faces.”

  “Is that what Habbers mean when they speak of bringing themselves into balance?” Mahala asked.

  Balin shook his head. “No, that’s a way of shedding disturbing thoughts without losing your memories completely. It’s a discipline of sorts, while the other is an escape. It is unfortunately true that some find the escape much easier and more pleasant than the discipline.”

  “And there’s nothing your people can do to stop this?” she asked.

  “How should we do that? Have human beings ever been able to prevent others of our kind from all kinds of destructive indulgences? Trying to stop them can cause even more problems than allowing others to do as they please, even if it means ultimately losing those people.” They turned back toward the hill that led to Dyami’s house. “That is another reason for keeping the spacefaring Habitat within this system for a time, so that those most susceptible to the trap can be weeded out before that Hab departs.”

  As the airship dropped toward the lighted open bay of Sagan, Mahala continued to gaze at the screen. The next time she saw an image of the bay from an airship, she would be leaving this settlement for the last time. Saying farewell to Dyami had brought her close to changing her mind; it had been a struggle to keep from turning back, from deciding that her life belonged to this world and its future after all.

  Dyami had known what she was thinking. “You think that you may be making a mistake,” he had told her as they walked together to Turing’s airship bay. “You’re thinking of staying on Venus. And if you do, you may feel, for a few years anyway, that you made the right decision. But I have a feeling that deep regrets would overtake you later on, when that starfaring Hab begins its journey and you realize that you won’t be one of the voyagers.”

  “This won’t be the only voyage,” Mahala replied. “It will only be the first.”

  “In the long run, that may be likely. In the short run, during my lifetime, for instance, I have my doubts. I’ve been reading some of Malik’s writings since his death. History is an area I hadn’t explored much until recently, and your grandfather made some interesting points. He argued that the Venus Project, and the great efforts that were required for such a monumental and long-term project, had shackled other possible developments. So many of Earth’s resources flowed toward the terraforming of Venus that anything that wouldn’t further that end was held back. For example, we have interplanetary travel, our torchships and freighters and other such vessels, because those were necessary to the Project. But interstellar travel and the disciplines connected to its realization, astronomy and astrophysics and the development of relativistic propulsion systems, were ignored, except by the Habbers, who didn’t have to be restrained by our practical considerations. If it hadn’t been for the aid of the Habbers, we wouldn’t even have come this far with the Project.”

  “You’re saying,” she said, “that we’ll be shackled to the Project for some time to come.”

  “I’m saying that, even with Earth’s new policy, even with full cooperation and communication between Earthpeople, Cytherians, and Habbers, there’s only so much we can do. There are indications that the Habbers may, now that they’re free to do so, show us more ways to speed up the process of terraforming. They may become as shackled to this Project as Earth has been. We may all come to feel that any future interstellar expeditions should be postponed for a while.”

  That, Mahala thought, was apart from the possibility that Earth might be torn apart during this period of transition. The Project might be left entirely to the Habbers and the Cytherians. They might be forced to choose between finishing their work here or abandoning it for the stars. She pondered what Balin had told her about the Habbers who had retreated into their imagined sensory worlds; more Habbers might join them in their black hole of dreams, which might even in time pull in everyone.

  “I’ll miss you,” she had said to Dyami then. “I think I may miss you more than anyone else here.”

  “I’ll miss you, too,” he said. “If I were younger, if my life hadn’t left me with some of the scars I still have, I would have made the choice that you’ve made.”

  The airship had landed. She heard the sound of the cradle’s clamps as the cabin was secured and waited as the roof closed and air began to cycle into the bay. She left her seat, shouldered her duffel, and followed the other passengers out of the dirigible, still thinking of Dyami as she descended the ramp. He and Risa had both been telling her that they had accepted her decision, that they were at peace with their farewells and willing to let her go.

  She had passed the row of cradles and was nearing the open doorway when someone called out her name. She turned to see Ragnar coming toward her. She had seen little of him after returning here from Earth, but had heard from others about some of his recent pursuits. He was devoting himself to more study of physics, with Solveig, a couple of specialists in physics, and a Habber all helping to guide him in his studies. A group of Administrators from the Cytherian Institute, now undergoing a transformation that would turn that university into the Interstellar Institute, had offered him a commission to design a sculpture to commemorate the new era. In the meantime, he was occupying himself by designing houses; even within the limits of the housing materials and prefab components allotted to Sagan, the people of this settlement would, through Ragnar’s efforts, be able to leave their dormitories and tents for dwellings with gardens and greenhouses that would complement the open, grassy spaces and the wooded regions of young trees, instead of living in homes that had been hastily thrown up wherever there was space for them on the blank landscape.

  “Greetings, Ragnar,” Mahala said, happy at the sigh
t of him. His blond hair had grown longer and was tied back from his face. The haunted, haggard expression that had become so characteristic of him was gone; he had stopped mourning Frania at last. “I didn’t know you had bay duty.”

  “I don’t,” he said. “I was waiting for you.” She glanced at him in surprise as he took her duffel from her. “Solveig told me that you might be coming back here today, and Dyami confirmed that when I sent a message to him.”

  “I didn’t know Solveig was back here already.” Mahala had thought her friend would be spending more time saying her farewells to her parents in Hypatia.

  “She’s been here for ten days. She says she’ll come by and see you after her shift.”

  A path of flat white flagstones led to the main roadway that now encircled Sagan’s east dome. On the other side of the road, the path branched into three paths. Ragnar took the middle path, leading her north toward her dormitory. They passed six houses that stood around a common greenhouse and garden; two of the houses had roofed courtyards outside their entrances, as Ragnar’s former home in Turing did.

  “We’re going to be having some interesting discussions fairly soon,” he continued. “The Habbers are already running models showing ways in which they might create molecular machines that would be able to metabolize Venus’s carbon dioxide rapidly. I haven’t described that very well, but then I’m still filling in the gaps in my education.”

  “I know a little about it,” Mahala said. Chike had been sending her records of some of the projections, clearly fascinated by the possibilities. Converting carbon dioxide to some useful form of carbon, either metabolizing the oxygen or converting it to a less volatile form—not only would the process of terraforming be speeded up, but it might also be possible to shut down the Bat operations altogether. There was the hope that people would be freed from those dangerous tasks, since Habbers and Project engineers were already designing AI-operated systems for those operations; the Project would no longer have to save on costs by putting those workers at risk.