Dream of Venus and Other Science Fiction Stories

by Pamela Sargent

  This so unnerved me—my made-up future world seemed insistent on casting its shadow into my present—that I wasn’t able to continue writing until at least a month or so later. But I got past that, and finished the story.

  As it happens, the opening pages of Venus of Dreams mention the World Trade Center, when one of my characters tells another about a trip to Manhattan, by then a drowned island with only the tops of its skyscrapers above water. My prognosticating abilities obviously failed me there.

  FOLLOW THE SKY

  Alonza’s earliest memory of her mother was also her last.

  They crouched together in a shadowed space near a wall, Alonza and her mother Amparo, looking out at a brightly lighted corridor filled with people. Men and women hurried past them, a few chattering at the people nearest them, others striding along without speaking while staring straight ahead. On the other side of the corridor, holo images of meat pies, pastries, fruits, flatbreads, and colorful bottles appeared over the heads to the passers-by, hung there for a few seconds, then vanished. Occasionally a hovercar filled with people floated past, scattering the crowds with a sharp whistling sound.

  Amparo clutched a small satchel. Her hand trembled slightly as she handed her daughter a bracelet. “Listen to me,” she whispered to Alonza, leaning closer. “Hang on to that bracelet for now—don’t drop it.”

  Alonza tried to put the bracelet on, but there was no clasp, and she was unable to bend the thin band of metal tightly enough to secure it around her wrist. “It won’t stay on,” she said.

  “It doesn’t have to go on. Put it in your pocket—just make sure you hang on to it until—”

  “Amparo,” Alonza said, suddenly afraid. Her mother’s forehead glistened with sweat, and she was panting, gasping for air. Maybe she was ill. Alonza thrust the bracelet into one of the side pockets of her tunic.

  “Listen to me, child,” Amparo said. “Go down this corridor, and look for a bin. Make sure no one sees you when you ditch the bracelet, then keep walking. When you get tired, sit down somewhere and act like you’re waiting for somebody. I’ll find you later. Got that?”

  Alonza nodded.

  “Then go.” Amparo pushed her toward the stream of people.

  Alonza darted among the forest of trousered legs, and was almost struck in the face by an arm swinging a small bag. There was no clear path through the throng. She slowed her pace, but kept going, breaking into a sprint whenever a space opened up, then slowing down again.

  Amparo had sent her after the woman whose satchel they had taken. Alonza had gone up to the woman to distract her while Amparo got ready to grab the stranger’s bag, but this time something had gone wrong. Amparo had moved too quickly, knocking the woman to the floor. The woman had tried to get up and had struck Amparo in the knee, and then Amparo hit her over the head with the pouch full of small stones and pebbles she usually carried in case she had to stun somebody from behind with a quick blow. Alonza remembered her mother standing over the woman’s still body, looking angry and then frightened.

  Sometimes Amparo just grabbed a duffel or a bag from her target right away. Sometimes she waited nearby while Alonza pleaded with the mark for directions to a gateway or whimpered that she was lost and couldn’t find her mother, and then Amparo swiped the bag while her mark was still talking to Alonza. Once in a while, Amparo was able to back someone into a corner and threaten her victim into giving up an identity bracelet and personal code before knocking the mark out with a drug implant slapped against an arm. That kind of job was riskier, but often more rewarding.

  “Always pick somebody smaller than you who looks nervous and afraid,” Amparo had explained to a couple of her younger friends who were visiting a few nights ago. “Best luck I’ve had is with students who look like it’s their first time away from home, or with old people. They’re so scared of getting hurt that they’ll give you their codes as soon as you ask.”

  Alonza thought of the time when her mother had come back to their room with three necklaces and two jackets bought with the credit and codes of a stolen identity bracelet. Usually Amparo might be able to make one or two purchases before a victim came to and reported a bracelet stolen, but there had been more loot that time. Amparo had been in the middle of her sixth transaction when she had seen that funny look in the merchant’s eyes that told her that her stolen credit was now blocked and that a security guard was on the way.

  Always know when to run: Amparo had often told her that.

  She had gone far enough by now. Alonza looked back; she could no longer see the place where she and her mother had been. There was a recycling bin to her right, but too many people were loitering near the shiny metal receptacle. She turned away and kept going until the corridor branched into two more long gated hallways. People were lining up at the gates for the suborb flights.

  At last she came to a stretch of gates and waiting areas that were nearly empty of people. She hurried to the nearest bin and dropped the stolen bracelet into a slot, then continued down the long lighted passageway. Her feet were beginning to hurt. Amparo had traded a stolen belt for the shoes, which were made of synthaleather, but the leather had molded itself to its former owner’s feet and had never fit Alonza’s very well.

  She was far enough away from the bin now. Alonza moved toward one of the empty waiting areas and sat down on one of the smaller cushions, wondering how long it would take Amparo to find her.

  “Stay in one place,” Amparo had always told her, “and sooner or later I’ll find you.” Alonza sat there, listening to the announcements in Anglaic, Arabic, Español, and other languages. “Twelve-twenty suborb to Toronto, gate fifty-two, now boarding.” “Two zero five, suborb to Damascus, gate forty-seven, now boarding.” “Sixteen thirty-one, shuttle flight to the Wheel, leaving at thirteen-oh-two from gate ninety-five.”

  The Wheel! Alonza thought of the space station high above the Earth and was soon lost in a familiar daydream. Someday, when she was older, she would board one of the shuttles and travel to the Wheel herself, to wander its curved corridors and loiter in its lounges before boarding a torchship to another place, maybe Luna or the Islands of Venus. Her daydream was formed mostly of images and experiences drawn from a mind-tour called “Journey to the Wheel,” one of the mind-tours anyone was free to call up without having to spend credit, even people like her and her mother who had to live on Basic and steal anything else they needed. Most of the free mind-tours she had seen bored her; either they were designed to teach some sort of skill like homeostat repair or else they were filled with action scenes that tired her out and were often hard to remember later.

  But “Journey to the Wheel” was different. It kept her interested even when there wasn’t really that much going on, when she was feeling and seeing what it was like to travel in a shuttle, floating weightlessly up against the harness that held her to her seat while viewing the distant pale circular tube with spokes that was the Wheel. The end of the mind-tour always left her with a tired but happy feeling of expectation, of feeling that something wonderful was about to happen to her.

  Maybe people who went to other places, who didn’t just do their traveling with bands around their heads so that the cybers could feed them a mind-tour’s images and sensations, had that kind of happy feeling all the time. She imagined leaving the room she shared with Amparo and never having to return to the maze of apartment buildings, cubicles, and shacks where the homeostats rarely worked and the air was always too hot and smelled of sand and dust. Maybe—

  “Going to Shanghai, child?” a woman’s voice said in Anglaic.

  Alonza looked up. A woman with short dark hair and a kindly smile was gazing down at her.

  “No,” she replied hastily.

  “But this is the waiting area for that suborb flight.”

  “I’m waiting for my mother,” Alonza said. “She told me to wait here.” She glanced down at her hands and saw, too late, that she had forgotten to pull the long sleeves of her tunic over her wrist
s. The woman would notice that she was not wearing an identity bracelet. But the stranger did not look down at her hands, but continued to stare at Alonza’s face.

  “I see,” the woman said.

  “She didn’t want me to get lost,” Alonza added.

  “Of course. Well....” The woman turned away and sat down on a cushion near the wall.

  Alonza waited as more people entered the lounge and settled themselves on the cushions around her. Among them were two Linkers, dressed in long white formal robes and kaffiyehs, each with the diamondlike gem on his forehead that marked him as one of the few who had a direct Link to Earth’s cyberminds; the two men sat together, and those making their way past them nodded respectfully in their direction. A few of the people were eating small rolls and pieces of fruit, and drinking from small bottles; Alonza, feeling very hungry, wondered if she could risk begging or stealing some food. Nearly every seat was taken by the time she started worrying about Amparo.

  Her mother should have been here by now, Alonza thought. Soon all these people would begin to board the suborb, and somebody else would wonder what she was doing here. Already a gray-haired man was watching her with a puzzled look on his face, while a guide wearing dark blue overalls and a badge hanging over his chest had come by a couple of times already, slowing down to glance at her both times.

  A space in the back wall opened. A man came through the opening and stepped to a counter as the doorway behind him closed. He wore a dark blue shirt; like the guide, he had a badge that said “Port of San Antonio” on the top and “Nueva Republica de Texas” on the bottom. Alonza knew how to read a little, and she had seen those words often enough to recognize them immediately.

  The man peered at the screen of his console, apparently checking the passenger list. That meant that everyone here would be lining up in a few minutes, having their bracelets scanned and their identities and credit confirmed and then heading for the doorway that led to the field outside.

  She was suddenly frightened, afraid to move from her cushion. Then she saw the guide walking toward her with another man at his side, a tall thin pale-haired man in the black uniform of a Guardian, with a stun wand hanging from his belt.

  “Is your name Alonza Lemaris?” the man in the Guardian uniform asked.

  She nodded. If he knew her name, it meant that her mother had been caught.

  “Come with me,” the man said.

  They took her to a small room. The guide left them there alone, and the Guardian asked her a lot of questions, keeping his hand around his wand the whole time, but terrified as she was, she knew that Amparo would want her to say as little as possible. “I’m waiting for my mother. She told me to wait there for her. She told me not to get lost.” She kept saying the same thing over and over and at last the Guardian stopped pacing and sat down in front of her.

  “Listen to me, you little bitch,” he said angrily. “We’ve already got your mother on assault, credit theft, and ident theft. If we put her to the question, we can probably get a lot more out of her, but she wouldn’t be the same afterwards, and you’re the only one who can stop us from doing that kind of damage to her. So you can begin telling me about what kinds of things she’s been up to, and we’ll find some work for her to do while she’s serving her sentence that won’t be too hard on her, or else we can start interrogating her until she breaks down and confesses. She won’t be of much use to anybody after that. Some people get so messed up in their minds afterward that they end up killing themselves.”

  “I want to see her,” Alonza said softly.

  “You won’t see her until after she’s finished her time, and that’s going to be long from now. Get this through your head—you’ll probably never see her again. The only favor you can do for her now is to tell me exactly what she’s done, what you’ve seen her do, what you’ve done together.”

  Amparo had always been terrified of getting caught, of being interrogated by Guardians. They would put a band on your head, her mother had told her, one of the slender silver ones like the ones people used to access a mind-tour, and then they would dig into your mind, force you to confess, find all kinds of ways to hurt you and make you scream in pain until you told them the truth. That was why it was so important never to get caught; better to be dead than in the custody of Guardians preparing to question you.

  “She didn’t do anything,” Alonza insisted, staring at the gold lieutenant’s bars on the man’s shoulders. “She told me to wait for her, that’s all.”

  The Guardian stood up and slapped her in the face. The blow shocked her more than it hurt her. “You’re a stubborn one,” he muttered, sounding almost pleased. “I guess we’ll let you visit with your mother after all.”

  He led her out of the room, gripping her arm tightly. A hovercar with another Guardian was waiting for them. They rode through the hallways of the port to another room, where two more Guardians were waiting with Amparo.

  Her mother was bound to a chair. A console with a screen sat in front of her. “I didn’t say anything,” Alonza cried out, trying to free herself from the man holding her arm, but Amparo did not seem to hear her. Then one of the men in the room stepped toward Amparo and held out a circular silver headband.

  Amparo screamed. Her scream was so sharp and piercing that Alonza froze.

  “Tell them!” her mother shrieked. “Tell them anything they want to know!”

  Alonza told the Guardians about the woman and how Amparo had struck her and where she had ditched the bracelet they had stolen from her. The men asked her more questions about other marks they had taken things from, and Amparo, who was sobbing by then, told Alonza to answer those questions, too. When Alonza had finished telling the Guardians about what they had stolen over the past months and how they had obtained the goods, the pale-haired Guardian told her that her mother would be doing useful labor for the Nomarchies of Earth while serving out her sentence. They did not say anything about a hearing, how long a sentence Amparo would get, or how unpleasant the useful labor would be.

  “What about my daughter?” Amparo asked hoarsely.

  “That’s none of your business, woman. We’ll take care of her. She’ll be a lot better off than she was with you. She’ll be a better citizen of her Nomarchy when she grows up, and by then she’ll forget about you.”

  The Guardian had been right. Alonza had been cared for afterwards, and supposed that she had grown up to be a better citizen than she would have been otherwise.

  Her memory of her mother grew fainter over time. In the first years after her mother’s arrest, while she was still living in the children’s dormitory, Alonza had occasionally tried to find out where Amparo was being held, but the cyberminds always blocked those channels so that she could not get an answer, and then the teaching image on her screen would order her to get back to her lessons. After a while, she stopped asking about Amparo. When she was older, after the officers in charge of the dormitory had decided that she and a few of her friends showed enough promise to be sent to a school for more lessons in academic subjects instead of being trained for satellite repair, she rarely thought of her mother.

  The pale-haired Guardian had been right when he told her that she would be better off in the dormitory than with Amparo. There had been the opportunity for schooling, and since the Guardians often recruited from the children housed in the dorms while their parents served time, she had eventually been trained at an officers’ academy for the important work of being one of the protectors of Earth’s biosphere and its peace. Had she remained with her mother, she would have grown up to be another one like her, a mosquito as they were called in their crowded neighborhood near the port, one of those who lived by stinging any unwary travelers passing through San Antonio. Had she stayed with Amparo, she would never have made it to the Wheel, certainly not as an officer and as an aide to Colonel Jonas Sansom, the commander of the Guardian detachment at the Wheel, and also the pale-haired Guardian officer who had detained her at the San Antonio port so man
y years ago.

  * * * *

  Alonza Lemaris stood in the small waiting area just beyond the shuttle dock’s bay. Another group had just arrived, passengers from Earth bound for Venus. Most of the people coming to the Wheel could be left to find their own way to the lounges and bays in the hub where they would wait to board their freighters or passenger vessels, but this group of travelers, who came from a camp outside Tashkent, was an exception.

  Guardians were stationed at that camp to keep order, and Guardians traveled with any settlers who left the camp on the shuttle flights to the Wheel. Usually Alonza or one of the other officers met the new arrivals and ushered them to a bay near the dock holding the Habber ship that was to take them on the next leg of their journey to Anwara, the vast space station that circled Earth’s sister planet, but that was not why she had come here this time.

  Settlers, Alonza thought; traitors to Earth was what many would call them. She had nothing against the scientists and specialists and workers who were trained for the terraforming Venus Project, who had been chosen to go there and who had proven their worth. But the people from the camp outside Tashkent were another matter. They abandoned their homes and their work and even gave up all of their credit, to go to the camp and wait for passage until a few more workers might be needed inside the domed settlements that were being raised on the still inhospitable surface of Venus. They were, most of them, malcontents willing to leave their own Nomarchies to gamble on getting a chance at making a new world and a new life for themselves. Maybe the Project needed such people, and perhaps the Council of Mukhtars that governed Earth’s Nomarchies had been wise to allow such camps as a social safety valve, but Guardians had to keep order in the camps, and Alonza considered that a waste of their resources.

  A door opened and a Guardian pilot in a black uniform entered the waiting area, followed by a man and a woman who wore pins of silver circles on their blue tunics, pins that such people were required to wear in Earthspace so that anyone seeing them would know at a glance what they were. Alonza looked away from the pair as the pilot saluted her.