They walked along the white-tiled path that led away from the workers’ residence where they had passed so many hours together. There, at the side of one wing of the building, was the courtyard in which they had so often sat while talking of their work and their families and their hopes for their future together. They passed a small flower garden bordered by shrubs, the same garden where he had first tentatively hinted that he might seek a lasting commitment from her, and then they strolled by another courtyard, dotted with tables and chairs, where they had occasionally dined. Perhaps Miriam would suffer less by leaving the Island than he would by staying. Wherever she ended up, she would be able to go about her business without inevitably finding herself in a place that would evoke memories of him, while he would have constant reminders of her.
“Have you any idea of what you’ll be doing?” he asked.
“I’ve got passage to Vancouver,” she said. “The expense of sending me there will be added to what I owe the Project, and my new job won’t amount to much, but at least I’ll be near my family.”
If her family were willing to welcome her back, they were showing more forbearance under the circumstances than his own clan would have done. As for her new work, he was not sure that he wanted to know much about it. Her training and education would not be allowed to go to waste, but a disgraced person with a large debt to pay off was not likely to be offered any truly desirable opportunities. If Miriam was lucky, she might have secured a post teaching geology at a second-rate college; if she was less fortunate, she might be going back to a position as a rock hound, one of those who trained apprentice miners bound for the few asteroids that had been brought into Earth orbit to be stripped of needed ores and minerals.
“Don’t look so unhappy,” Miriam said then. “I’ll get by. I decided to accept a job with a team of assayers near Vancouver. It’s tedious, boring work, but I might look up a few of my old associates in the mind-tour trade and see if I can get any side jobs going for myself there. At least a couple of them won’t hold my black marks against me.”
“Administrator Pavel was very pleased with the editing of ‘The Dream of Venus’,” Hassan said, suddenly wanting to justify himself.
“So I heard.”
“If you should ever care to view the new version—”
“Never.” She halted and looked up at him. “I have to ask you this, Hassan. Did you preserve our original mind-tour in your personal records? Did you keep it for yourself?”
“Did I keep it?” He shifted her duffel from his left shoulder to his right. “Of course not.”
“You might have done that much. I thought that maybe you would.”
“But there’s no point in keeping something like that. I mean, the revised version is the one that will be made available to viewers, so there’s no reason for me to keep an earlier version. Besides, if others were to find out that I had such an unauthorized mind-tour in my personal files, they might wonder. It might look as though I secretly disagreed with Pavel’s directive. That wouldn’t do me any good.”
“Yes, I suppose that’s true,” Miriam said. “You certainly don’t want people thinking less of you now that you’ve won the Administrator’s respect.”
Her sardonic tone wounded him just a little. “I don’t suppose that you kept a record of the original version,” he said.
“I didn’t even try. I guessed that my Counselor might go rooting around in my files to see if they held anything questionable, and would advise me to delete anything inappropriate, and I don’t need any more trouble.” She smiled, and the smile seemed to come from deep inside her, as though she had accepted her hard lot and was content. “Let’s just say that the original may not have been completely lost. I have hopes that it will be safe, and appreciated. I don’t think you want to know any more than that.”
“Miriam,” he said.
“You know, I never could stand long dragged-out farewells.” She reached for her duffel and wrested it from his grip. “You can leave me here. You don’t have to come to the airship bay with me. Goodbye, Hassan.”
“Go with God, Miriam.”
She walked away from him. He was about to follow her, then turned toward the path that would take him to his residence.
* * * *
During the years that followed, Hassan did not try to discover what had become of Miriam. Better, he thought, not to trouble himself with thoughts of his former love. His success with the altered mind-tour had cemented his friendship with Muhammad, increased the esteem his fellow geologists had for him, and had brought him more respect from his family on Earth.
Within five years after the release of “The Dream of Venus,” Hassan was the head of a team of geologists, was sometimes assigned to the pleasant task of creating educational mind-tours for Island children, and had taken a bondmate, Zulaika Jehan. Zulaika came from a Mukhtar’s family, had been trained as an engineer, and had an exemplary record. If Hassan sometimes found himself looking into Zulaika’s brown eyes and remembering Miriam’s gray ones, he always reminded himself that his bondmate was exactly the sort of woman his family had wanted him to wed, that his father had always claimed that marrying for love was an outworn practice inherited from the decadent and exhausted West and best discarded, and that taking Miriam as a bondmate would only have brought him disaster.
Occasionally, Hassan heard rumors of various mind-tours passed along through private channels from one Linker on the Islands to another, experiences that might be violent, frightening, pornographic, or simply subversive. He had always strongly suspected, even though no one would have admitted it openly, that his father and other privileged people in his clan had enjoyed such forbidden entertainments, most of which would find their way to the masses only in edited form. It would be a simple matter for any Linker to preserve such productions and to send them on to friends through private channels inaccessible to those who had no Links. Hassan did not dwell on such thoughts, which might lead to disturbing reflections on the ways in which the powerful maintained control of the net of cyberminds so as to shape even the thoughts and feelings of the powerless.
One rumor in particular had elicited his attention, a rumor of a mind-tour about the Venus Project that far surpassed any of the usual cliché-ridden productions, that was even superior to the much-admired “The Dream of Venus.” He had toyed with the notion that someone might have come upon an unedited copy of “The Dream of Venus,” that the mind-tour he and Miriam had created might still exist as she had hoped it would, a ghost traveling through the channels of the cyberminds, coming to life again and weaving its spell before vanishing once more.
He did not glimpse the possible truth of the matter until he was invited to a reception Pavel Gvishiani was holding for a few specialists who had earned commendations for their work. Simply putting the commendations into the public record would have been enough, but Pavel had decided that a celebration was in order. Tea, cakes, small pastries, and meat dumplings were set out on tables in a courtyard near the Administrators’ ziggurat. Hassan, with his bondmate Zulaika Jehan at his side, drew himself up proudly as Administrator Pavel circulated among his guests in his formal white robe, his trusted aide Muhammad Sheridan at his side.
At last Pavel approached Hassan and touched his forehead in greeting. “Salaam, Linker Pavel,” Hassan said.
“Greetings, Hassan.” Pavel pressed his fingers against his forehead again. “Salaam, Zulaika,” he murmured to Hassan’s bondmate; Hassan wondered if Pavel had actually recalled her name or had only been prompted by his Link. “You must be quite proud of your bondmate,” Pavel went on. “I am certain, God willing, that this will be only the first of several commendations for his skill in managing his team.”
“Thank you, Linker Pavel,” Zulaika said in her soft musical voice.
Pavel turned to Hassan. “And I suspect that it won’t be long before you win another commendation for the credit you have brought to the Project.”
“You are too kind,” Hassan said.
“One commendation is more than enough, Linker Pavel. I am unworthy of another.”
“I must beg to contradict you, Hassan. ‘The Dream of Venus’ has been one of our most successful and popular entertainments.” A strange look came into Pavel’s dark eyes then; he stared at Hassan for a long time until his sharp gaze made Hassan uneasy. “You did what you had to do, of course, as did I,” he said, so softly that Hassan could barely hear him, “yet that first vision I saw was indeed a work of art, and worthy of preservation.” Then the Administrator was gone, moving away from Hassan to greet another of his guests.
Perhaps the Administrator’s flattery had disoriented him, or possibly the wine Muhammad had surreptitiously slipped into his cup had unhinged him a little, but it was not until he was leaving the reception with Zulaika, walking along another path where he had so often walked with Miriam, that the truth finally came to him and he understood what Pavel had been telling him.
Their original mind-tour might be where it would be safe and appreciated; Miriam had admitted that much to him. Now he imagined her, with nothing to lose, going to Pavel and begging him to preserve their unedited creation; the Administrator might have taken pity on her and given in to her pleas. Or perhaps it had not been that way at all; Pavel might have gone to her and shown his esteem for her as an artist by promising to keep her original work alive. It did not matter how it had happened, and he knew that he would never have the temerity to go to Pavel and ask him exactly what he had done. Hassan might have the Linker’s public praise, but Miriam, he knew now, had won the Linker’s respect by refusing to betray her vision.
Shame filled him at the thought of what he had done to “The Dream of Venus,” and then it passed; the authentic dream, after all, was still alive. Dreams had clashed, he knew, and only one would prevail. But how would it win out? It would be the victory of one idea, as expressed in the final outcome of the Project, overlaid upon opposed realities that could not be wished away. To his surprise, these thoughts filled him with a calm, deep pleasure he had rarely felt in his life, and “The Dream of Venus” was alive again inside him for one brief moment of joy before he let it go.
AFTERWORD FOR “DREAM OF VENUS”
In his introduction to “Dream of Venus” in his anthology Worldmakers: SF Adventures in Terraforming (St. Martin’s Griffin, 2001), Gardner Dozois wrote: “Terraforming a planet is like creating a work of art, although on a scale vastly grander than even the boldest twentieth-century landscape artists ever dreamed of. But as with every work of art, the vision of the artist may not agree with the wishes of the patron who commissioned the work—sometimes, as the deceptively quiet story that follows demonstrates, with tragic results.”
“Dream of Venus” was written when I was still under the spell of much rereading of Edith Wharton, when I saw that there might be a story I could write about a very privileged young gentleman, someone from the upper circles of my imagined future society who becomes involved with the effort to terraform Venus. Only after I began writing the story did I realize that Hassan might possess the makings of an artist’s soul.
UTMOST BONES
At first, Kaeti did not know where she was, although her surroundings looked familiar. She lay on a soft mossy surface that seemed to be a bed of some kind; as she sat up, she glimpsed green hills through an opening in a pale wall. A tent, she thought as she glanced up at the opaque white expanse overhead. Then she lowered her eyes to gaze at the landscape outside the open tent flaps.
Kaeti had been in a place like this before, perhaps many times. Just as she was about to call out to the net, she restrained herself. She had come here to explore, to see if she could find some of what she had lost. Again she had the odd and irrational sensation that her link was concealing important data from her, perhaps in an attempt to protect her, but from what?
Kaeti had shed much of her past, and would soon have to dispose of her more recent memories to make room for new experiences. She had performed this task intermittently for so long that she could no longer recall exactly how many times she had done so, although it would be simple enough to find out. Lately, she had been feeling as though she might have given up too much, that certain details she had retained were now fragments unconnected to anything else.
There was, for example, the persistent image of someone called Erlann. Whenever she thought of his grayish-blue eyes and gentle smile, a poignant warmth rose up inside her, making her think that she had once had a strong attachment to Erlann. But she could not remember exactly what kind of emotional bond theirs had been, how long ago she had known him, when she had last seen him, or where he might be now.
She could open herself to her link and find out everything about Erlann, yet she resisted. More was coming into her awareness as she realized how often she had been calling on her link lately to restore what she had forgotten, to fill in what she had chosen to forget. She had come here, she realized then, to find out whatever she could by herself, to rely on her own efforts instead of depending on the net.
I want to know, she thought with a fierceness that surprised her, but still could not say exactly what it was that she so desperately wanted to rediscover.
She had been in this place, or one much like it, with Erlann long ago. “Erlann,” she whispered, and then realized that she had opened a channel to her link.
Erlann appeared before her, smiling, and was walking toward her when she closed the channel once more. As he vanished, Kaeti felt a strand of the net tugging gently at her through the link. She opened a channel again, willing to listen—she had not yet summoned up enough courage to close herself off from her link completely—but still held most of herself back.
Her link whispered, “We can give you Erlann.”
“But that’s not what I want,” Kaeti said. “Tell me who he is.”
“Erlann was one of those who shared your genes. Long ago, you referred to him as a great-grandson, and later, your term for him was—”
“Was,” Kaeti interrupted. “Every time I ask you to inform me about someone I know, you use the past tense.” So it had been for a while now, ever since she had begun to close the channels to her link more often. She had made further inquiries about others who had been of some importance to her, to whom she had once been tied by strong emotional bonds. How odd it was that so many of those people had apparently been lost; even more striking was the fact that every single one of her queries had yielded an answer in the past tense. He was your great-grandson. She was your dear friend who once collaborated with you on designing mind-tours and various sensory experiences. He was your bondmate; she was your sister. He was. She was.
Kaeti knew that she could have asked for all of them, and they would have appeared to her just as the simulacrum of Erlann had a few moments ago. She could be with anyone she wished at any time, but it seemed to her that others came to her only when she summoned them. Once, that had been enough for her, calling on the net’s memories to present the people she had known. Once, she had been able to imagine that, wherever they actually were, some of them might be calling up a simulacrum of her through their own links in order to reacquaint themselves with the Kaeti they remembered.
Now she wanted more than that.
She had come here to look for others like herself, and suddenly felt fear. The people whom she had known might have left this world altogether. The friends and lovers, the children and their descendants, the ancestors, mentors, and admirers—might no longer exist. There would always be echoes of them, for the net of minds preserved all that was known and had been known; the net could not erase them altogether. But perhaps the echoes were all that remained.
“Are there any of my kind left?” she shouted, opening a channel.
“Yes,” her link replied, “of course.”
She closed herself off again, got up, and went to the tent’s opening to peer outside, feeling as though she was just waking from a long sleep filled with vivid dreams. The scenarios provided by her link never seemed like dream
s when she was experiencing them; only later, when she closed her channels and was left with only her own senses, did she feel them to be subtly and almost undetectably false. And yet there were also those times when she could not tell the difference between her memories of actual events and the experiences the Net had provided. Maybe that difference was unimportant, but she had found herself disturbed by the notion that many of her memories were only net products interacting with her own imagination, rather than being traces of actual events.
Kaeti crept outside the tent and gazed out at a grassy green plain. The tent, made of a silken white cloth, had been pitched near several tall trees; a gently sloping hill led from the tent down to a brook. Even with her channels closed, she seemed to sense her link inside her, a tiny gemlike node glowing near her cortex, her bond with the Net. What must it have been like for her distant ancestors to be without links, completely imprisoned in the shells of their own bodies, with only their senses and the intermittent and imperfect fancies of their imaginations to guide and divert them? Even in the scenarios through which she had experienced simulations of past lives, she had always been distantly aware of her link, and it had seemed to her afterward that this might be a slight flaw in those simulations, that her awareness of her link should have been temporarily excised from those experiences for the sake of more verisimilitude.
How reckless of me, she thought. Even to pretend that she was cut off from the net completely might be too frightening to endure. She shivered reflexively, and noticed then for the first time that her body was entirely encased in the silvery skin of a protective suit, and her feet covered by thick-soled boots.
“You’re certainly not taking any chances,” a soft voice murmured.
Kaeti started, knowing that the voice had not come from her link. She turned and saw a small gray-furred animal with green eyes. The animal’s tail flicked back and forth as the creature slowly padded toward her. A cat, she thought, and felt pleased that she could identify the animal by herself without automatically retrieving the information through her link.
Dream of Venus and Other Science Fiction Stories Page 13