Dream of Venus and Other Science Fiction Stories

by Pamela Sargent

  The hologram flickered into existence, and then he saw the two tall towers, translucent and ghostly, take form behind the shorter structures that had replaced them. Karim thought he heard a sigh from the people nearest him. He looked up at the towers, imagining for a moment that they might become solid, that he would be able to enter them and climb up to where they seemed to graze Heaven.

  Karim whispered a prayer, then knelt to lay the wreath at the base of the memorial.

  * * * *

  Shading Venus with a parasol had cooled the planet enough for a steady rain of carbon dioxide to begin. Over the next century and a half, oceans had formed until much of the low-lying Venusian surface was covered with carbon dioxide seas.

  It’s only a beginning, Karim thought. If the planet was kept in the parasol’s shade, the precipitating carbon dioxide would change from rain into snow and ice. He thought of people living on the surface, enclosed in domes like those that covered the islands floating in the Venusian atmosphere, looking out at a dark frozen world that would not be a new Earth, but only a prison.

  Even as that thought came to him, he found himself looking through the transparent wall of a dome at a plain of ice illuminated only by the light from inside this dome and another that glowed in the distance. Suddenly angry, he struck the dome with his fist. Why had he come to this settlement only to imprison himself?

  But he knew the answer to that question. The alternatives he and his fellow Earthfolk faced were fairly stark. They could live here, gaining a precarious foothold on Venus until they solved the new set of problems the terraforming project had presented, or they could return to an Earth growing ever hotter and ever more unlivable.

  Earth, he thought, might eventually resemble the Venus that had existed before terraforming began, with its oceans boiled away, an atmospheric pressure great enough to crush an unprotected man, and temperatures hot enough to melt metals. He imagined feeling such heat even as he gazed out at Venus’s icy wastes.

  “Karim,” Greta said.

  He opened his eyes. He was lying on a bed in a darkened room; his beard seemed damp. Greta leaned over him; strands of her graying hair had slipped from under her scarf. The air around him had grown so warm that he was sweating under his light cotton robe.

  “The homeostat wasn’t working,” Greta went on, “but Zack fixed it just a few minutes ago. The temperature in our rooms should be back to normal in less than an hour. By the way, he and the others told me that they very much enjoyed dining in the city today.” She spoke in Anglaic, as she always did when they were alone; her Arabic was fluent without having ever become truly eloquent or poetic. She moved closer to the edge of the bed and gently slipped his band from his head. “You were to rest, not lie here accessing cyberminds.”

  “I was taking another of my mind-tours.”

  “Are you all right?”

  “Just a bit disoriented,” he replied. “Where are we?”

  “The Beverwyck’s just north of the George Washington Bridge. Zack decided that we should stop at the docks here for the night. We’ll leave before sunrise, before the traffic gets too heavy. I hope you’ll be able to keep away from your mind-tours long enough to enjoy a view of the Palisades.”

  “I wonder if that view will be as impressive as the one I saw in a mind-tour some time ago,” Karim said as the remembered image of a ridge of unbroken rock came to him. That simulation had been of the Palisades as they might have appeared four hundred years ago, but the waters had risen since then, creeping higher up the sides of the cliffs.

  “Mind-tours.” Greta sat down on the bed and reached for his hand. “I’ve never seen you so caught up in such entertainments. You’ve had your band on during almost every free moment we’ve had since we landed in Washington.”

  “I haven’t been seeking mere diversion, Greta. I’m still exploring my terraforming scenarios.”

  “Venus. I see.” For a moment, he expected her to voice the objections he had heard from her before. “I could tell you to give up such hopes,” she continued, “but you wouldn’t listen to me anyway, and maybe I’m no longer so sure of my reasons for arguing against your dream in the past. The effort would be costly, but that has to be measured against the possibility of making an entirely new habitable planet for ourselves. It might be better to leave Venus alone in order to learn what we can about it, but we’d also learn much about that world during any terraforming project.”

  “There is the possibility of failure,” Karim murmured.

  “Of course. There always is. Still, we could fail at making Venus another Earth and yet make many important advances in technology and science. We might even learn enough to restore Earth’s ecology many centuries from now. And—” She was silent for a while. “I think it’ll be easier for you to know that you never have to doubt my loyalty.”

  “If I push too hard,” he said, “you know what the consequences will be.”

  “I don’t care about exile. I don’t care even if they force us to move to some desolate place with just enough to keep us alive, because if the Council punishes you simply for dreaming, there isn’t much hope for any of us anyway.”

  “My dear—”

  “I just wish that you wouldn’t keep escaping this way.”

  “It’s not an escape,” he said, “at least not entirely. You seem to have gained more faith in my dream at the same time I’ve been in danger of losing some of my own. I’m trying to regain my convictions, Greta. I’m afraid that some of the other Mukhtars’ doubts have begun to creep into me.”

  “I hope not, Karim.” She clutched his hand more tightly. “I don’t want to see what you would be like without your dreams.”

  * * * *

  To seed the atmosphere of Venus with microorganisms that would break down its atmosphere of carbon dioxide was a formidable task, but the biologists working on the Venusian islands had lived up to Karim’s expectations. After enough failures to dampen even his confidence, a team of biologists headed by his wife had developed new strains of red and green algae that were capable of ingesting the sulfur dioxide of Venus’s rains, and also a strain of cyanobacteria that could survive without sunlight while oxygenating the atmosphere. Greta’s report had minimized the frustration and expense of all the failed strains, all of the bioengineered microorganisms that had shown early promise only to fail and die in the lethal atmosphere.

  Years had passed since the first seeding, and the new aerial ecosystem of algae and bacteria had survived, even thrived. Karim still saw the same familiar darkness outside the translucent dome of his island station, and the misty acidic rains continued to fall, condensing as the planet cooled, but changes had already been measured—small decreases in the level of sulfur dioxide in the rains and the presence of more iron and copper sulfides, of more carbon dioxide broken up into carbon and oxygen.

  The biologists had begun their bioengineering of new strains of algae at about the same time as a team of engineers, under the direction of Hassan Tantawi, had begun to aim giant tanks of solid compressed hydrogen at Venus from their station orbiting Saturn. As oxygen was freed by the changes in the Venusian atmosphere, hydrogen would be needed to combine with the oxygen to form water. But setting up the Saturnian station and building the giant skyhooks that siphoned off the hydrogen had taken too great a share of the project’s resources. Karim was beginning to worry that some on the Council of Mukhtars might halt the process of terraforming at the stage they had already reached. They would never admit openly that the project had grown too costly, that they might put an end to its work altogether; the Council was much more likely to make noises about “suspending operations temporarily” and “conducting more studies.” The Mukhtars would tell themselves that something could still be learned from what had already been accomplished.

  “I’ll tell you what the problem actually is,” Ali bin Oman said. Karim abruptly found himself sitting on a cushion in front of a low table. Ali sat across from him, sipping from a cup.

 
“The problem?” Karim asked.

  “Why this project is stalled. Why we’re likely to be here just long enough to see the next stage through to its conclusion before they suspend operations and haul us back to Earth. It’s as I’ve always said—sooner or later, we’ll have to reach out to our brethren in their space habitats. They wouldn’t have been able to survive and to build their habitats without developing technologies superior to ours. They could help us in our work here, God willing, if we can swallow our pride long enough to ask them for their aid.”

  “Our fellow Mukhtars would force you off the Council if you voiced such ideas,” Karim said.

  “They’d probably do worse than that to me.”

  “You’re also forgetting that the habitat-dwellers don’t approve of terraforming planets.”

  “That may be overstating the case,” Ali said. “They don’t see the need for such efforts, since they’re able to engineer their own environments in their artificial worlds. But I think they might be interested in contributing to a project that would add to their store of knowledge. That would be their only reimbursement from us—what they might learn. We have little else to offer them.”

  “The Council would never agree to that,” Karim said. “This project was to be our refutation of that space-dwelling culture, our jihad, our moral equivalent of a war against them. To turn to them now means to admit that we’ve failed.”

  Ali grew translucent, then faded out. The room slowly darkened, and became again Karim’s cabin aboard the Beverwyck.

  * * * *

  Karim watched from the prow with Greta until the basalt cliffs of the Palisades were behind them, then went below as more boat traffic began to crowd the waterway—ferries crossing between New York and New Jersey, water buses moving north and south, sailboats, small hovercraft, patched-together vessels riding so low in the water that it seemed they might sink.

  Lauren’s bondmate Roberto was in the sitting room, drinking coffee. The young man got to his feet and bowed slightly, pressing his fingers to his forehead.

  “Please sit down,” Karim said as he settled himself on the couch across from Roberto. “It’s good that we got an early start,” he continued. “The traffic is going to slow us up.”

  “Only for a while, sir. This is rush hour, but in a couple of hours, we’ll have clear passage. You’ll be at West Point by midafternoon, if not sooner.” Roberto poured more coffee for himself and a cup for Karim. “Uh, I have to ask you for a favor, Mukhtar.”

  Karim waved a hand. “Ask it, then.”

  “Of course you’re free to refuse it.”

  “Of course.”

  “I had a message this morning from my brother Pablo. He’s been living in Poughkeepsie for the past two years, but he’s been offered a position in Albany. He asked if he could come aboard and travel there with us.”

  “What kind of position?” Karim asked.

  “Designing educational mind-tours for the New York Museum and the Albany Institute. He trained as an engineer, but he got interested enough in mind-tour design to learn something about that and do some work on the side for a couple of tour producers.” Roberto sipped his coffee. “He wouldn’t be in your way, and Zack said he’d put him up in his room. And there’s no black marks on his record, so you can clear him with the police if you’re worried about security.”

  Karim frowned. “I am here on a mission of friendship,” he said softly. “My wife is a native of this region. I have no worries about our personal safety.” He tactfully refrained from mentioning the implant in his arm that would summon both medical personnel and a squad of Guardians to his side if danger threatened, and the pin-sized camera on his headdress that would preserve images of any assailant.

  “But if you’d rather not have Pablo aboard, we can just go upriver as planned and head back for him later after we leave you and your wife off.”

  Karim raised a brow. He had not expected the stolid Roberto to have an educated brother. “Would Pablo lose his chance at his new position if he didn’t travel with us?”

  “No, sir. He wasn’t supposed to start his new work right away. It’s more that he wanted time to find new quarters and get settled. Anyway, I shot a message back to him saying I’d ask, but I didn’t promise him anything.”

  Karim made his decision immediately. “Tell your brother that he’s welcome to come aboard.”

  Roberto grinned, then stood up. “Thank you, Mukhtar Karim.” He bowed deeply from the waist. “You don’t know how much—”

  “It’s nothing.” Karim retreated from the young man’s effusive gratitude into the bedroom.

  * * * *

  If Venus was ever to acquire Earthlike weather patterns, the planet would have to rotate more rapidly; keeping the Venusian “day” of two hundred and forty-three days meant an inhospitable world of hot and cold extremes. Any human beings living there would have the undesirable alternatives of either living in completely enclosed environments or being constantly on the move in order to stay within a narrow habitable band between scorching heat and excessive cold, in the twilight between sunlight and darkness.

  Ali bin Oman and Greta occupied themselves with a game of chess while Karim perused the report they had presented to him. The choices proposed by the engineers to solve the problem of Venus’s climate seemed equally problematic. The parasol could continue to shade Venus entirely while a soletta and mirror orbited the planet to provide reflected sunlight, or a large asteroid or object of similar size could be hurled at Venus to speed up its rotation.

  When Karim looked up from his screen, Ali and Greta were watching him, ignoring their game. “The soletta and mirror design is ingenious,” Karim began, “but it would require constant maintenance by a civilization that would have to endure over millions of years while sustaining its interest in this project. That’s expecting rather a lot of a species that’s managed only a few thousand years of continuity in its cultures at most.”

  “A continuously maintained artificial environment,” Greta murmured. “That’s what we’d have, not a natural Earthlike world. That isn’t what our terraforming project was supposed to be about.”

  “Then we should aim an asteroid at Venus,” Ali said, “and when it hits, God willing, the impact increases its spin.” He peered at his pocket screen. “If it hits near the equator—”

  “That powerful an impact would dissipate a lot of energy,” Karim said, “perhaps enough to destroy what we’ve accomplished so far. That is unless we settle for a Venusian day that would last for a couple of months or even longer.”

  “What we need,” Greta murmured, “is some sort of planetary spin motor that can greatly speed up the rate of rotation but without damaging Venus.”

  Karim shook his head. “In other words, a technology that doesn’t exist.”

  Greta and Ali flickered, then disappeared. Karim stood at the edge of the island, gazing down at shadowed Venus. A bright spot suddenly appeared near the equator, then blossomed into a flare. His pocket screen was still in his hands, but he already knew what the screen would tell him. Venus was beginning to turn more rapidly, but the crust near the impact point was melting. How long would it take for the heat generated by the collision to dissipate? Long enough, perhaps, to stall the work of terraforming until an increasingly impatient Council decided to abandon it altogether.

  We’ve failed, he thought; after all this time, we’ve destroyed our work.

  Something brushed against his hand. “Karim,” someone said from far away; he recognized Greta’s voice, and remembered. He lifted his band from his head, returning to the Beverwyck.

  “Karim,” Greta said again. She wore a long blue robe, dark blue tunic, and scarf; she took the linking band from him and handed him his formal headdress. “It’s time to go.”

  “Yes, I know.” He was already dressed in his formal white robes. He stood up and followed her out to the deck.

  * * * *

  General Michael Yamamura, the commandant at the West Point
Military Academy, was a small gray-haired man with erect posture and a piercing gaze. He met Karim and Greta at the north dock just beyond a sharp bend in the river, listened without comment as Karim rattled off his ceremonial greeting, then left them with two cadets to guide them on a tour of Kosciusko’s Garden. Karim and his wife were still there admiring the roses when General Yamamura rejoined them. The two cadets left with Greta while the commandant outlined their upcoming schedule of events: dinner that night with the commandant’s staff, a luncheon the next day with a few members of the faculty, a question-and-answer session with their most promising cadets.

  Throughout the dinner and the walk back to the hotel near Gees Point where Karim and Greta were being housed, the commandant avoided any mention of the issue that had to be uppermost in his mind. Karim finally had to bring up the subject the next day, just before lunch. Although the graduates of West Point were to be absorbed into the Guardian force that served the Mukhtars, the Council would not interfere with either their course of study or with Academy custom. The cadets would be free to wear their gray uniforms until they won their commissions and donned the black uniform of the Guardians. Any officers serving at the Point would also be allowed to wear gray, and the Council had no objection to their continuing to fly their ceremonial flags, even though the country represented by the red, white, and blue banners no longer existed. The commandant had not been able to completely conceal his gratitude and relief.

  Greta was part of his audience in the auditorium with the cadets, at which Karim was peppered with so many questions by the young men and women that General Yamamura finally had to declare the session over. Even after that, several cadets followed Karim and Greta back to the Beverwyck, anxious perhaps to impress a Mukhtar who might later consider them for a post on his staff. Their questions, on various subjects, had soon revealed the central concern of the cadets: that as officers in the Guardians, they might be reduced to being little more than part of an international police force, there to keep the peace and rein in anyone who threatened their world’s precarious security. Even those officers who eventually won their way to a post on one of the orbiting space stations would not be looking beyond their own world, as their predecessors had done. They would be there only to monitor resources and changes in the weather, to repair satellites and to patrol spaceports and industrial satellites; their only purpose in looking to the heavens at all would be to track and divert any interplanetary body that might threaten Earth. Their mental universe would forever be enclosed by practicalities.