Seas of Venus

by David Drake

  * * *

  July 2, 379 AS. 0101 hours.

  Wilding watched Francine's coiffure echo the fireworks with increased intensity. Charged strands woven among the hairs trapped and re-emitted the light a band higher on the spectrum.

  When the fireworks flashed silver, Francine's hair sparkled with all the colors of the rainbow.

  She turned to face him. Her body moved against the balcony rail like that of a cat rubbing itself, and the smile on her broad lips was feline as well.

  "What are you thinking about, Prince Hal?" she asked in a purring chuckle which admitted she knew what any man was thinking about when he looked at her.

  She was here with Tootles. Neither she nor Wilding wanted to arouse the hostility of the Callahan Family; but she would flirt and he—

  He had invited her out on the roof of his penthouse.

  Members of the Twelve Families and their entourage partied two levels below. A drunken mob of common people spilled onto the street from the ground floor of Wilding House, keeping Carnival in their own way.

  More fireworks burst against the dome. Sparks spun down in varicolored corkscrews, and the crowd howled.

  Wilding grinned, cat-smooth himself. He pointed a languid finger toward the boulevard. "Oh," he said, "I was thinking about them, Francine. What is it that they really want?"

  The woman's stance did not change, but all the softness went out of her features. "Why ask me?" she said in a brittle voice. "How would I know?"

  They were no longer flirting.

  "Because you should know," he said. "Because I want to know."

  Since he was host, he had not drunk heavily. There was enough alcohol in his brain to free the sharp-edged knowledge that he usually hid under an urbane exterior: he was a Wilding. For all practical purposes, he was the Wilding.

  While Francine was a tart whom Tootles, Chauncey Callahan, had lifted from the gutter.

  Her dress was a metallic sheath. It fitted Francine's hard curves as a scabbard of hammered silver would fit a scimitar. The natural color of her hair was black, and she wore it black tonight. It formed a pair of shoulder-length curls to frame her face, heart-shaped and carefully expressionless at this moment.

  A door opened onto the balcony below. Half a dozen slurred, cheerful voices prattled merrily. "And then," Glory McLain trilled, "he wanted her to lie in cold water, I mean really cold, before she came to bed, and—"

  The McLain girl's voice lowered into the general babble. The balcony was thirty feet below the penthouse roof; the partiers were unaware that there was anyone above them.

  Francine moved away from the railing with a sinuous motion. She did not glance down to betray her concern about being seen—by Tootles, by someone who would mention the fact to Tootles.

  Wilding stepped to the side also. "Don't they ever want a better life, Francine?" he said softly.

  Fireworks began to spell letters across the dome: W-Y-O. . . .

  Common people cheered and drank, while aristocrats gossiped about necrophilia.

  The penthouse roof was planted with grass and palmettoes. The seedstock had come to Venus in the colony ships rather than being packed into terraforming capsules. It had not been exposed to the actinic radiation and adaptive pressures which turned the Earth-sprung surface life into a purulent hell.

  Francine spread the fingers of one hand and held them out against a palmetto frond, as if to compare her delicacy against the green coarseness.

  "They don't want anything better," she said. She turned to look at Wilding. "They don't deserve anything better," she added fiercely. "If they did, they'd have it, wouldn't they? I bettered myself!"

  There was a pause in the fireworks and the sound of the crowd in the street. " . . . and I don't mean young girls, either . . ." drifted up from the balcony.

  Wilding turned to look out over the railing. He stayed back from the edge so that he could see the half the width of the boulevard while remaining hidden from the partiers on the balcony. In the boulevard women who might have been prostitutes danced a clog-step with partners of all ages, accompanied by a hand-held sound system.

  "They've got energy," Wilding said. "They could do. . . . something. Instead, what they get is a constant round of shortages and carouses."

  He felt the warmth of Francine's body. When he turned, she was standing next to him again.

  "Artificial hatred of neighboring Keeps," he went on, astounded at the harshness in his own voice. "Artificial wars, fought by mercenaries—"

  Francine's dress had a high neck and covered her ankles. The fabric was opaque but so thin and tight that the shimmering fireworks displayed her nipples with nude clarity. She was breathing rapidly.

  "—under artificial conditions," Wilding said, "so that war can be entertainment but not destroy the planet the way Earth was destroyed. But that's not the only way Mankind can die, is it?"

  "Prince Hal," the woman said in whispered desperation. She took his hands in hers. Her palms were clammy.

  He'd drunk too much, or—

  But he must have drunk too much. "Those people down there could colonize the surface some day," Wilding said. He enfolded the woman's tiny hands in his own, trying instinctively to warm her. "They could colonize the stars. All they need are leaders."

  "Prince Hal," Francine begged, "don't talk like this. Please? You're scaring me."

  "You're afraid of change," Wilding said. "The mob's afraid of change, everybody's afraid of change. So Wyoming Keep has the Twelve Families, and all the other Keeps have their equivalents. Comfortable oligarchies determined to preserve the status quo until the whole system runs down. And no leaders!"

  Francine lifted Wilding's hand to her mouth. She pressed it with her teeth and lips, an action somewhere between a kiss and a nibble. He could feel her heart beating.

  More fireworks went off to amuse the Carnival crowd.

  "It's nothing but a jungle life," Wilding whispered.

  The woman stepped back and raised her hands to her neckline. There was hard decision in her eyes. "All right, Prince Hal," she said. "You want a leader? Then I'll lead you!"

  Francine touched a catch. Her garment slid away to become a pool at her feet. She was nude beneath it. Her body was hairless and perfect.

  "And you'll like where I take you, honey," she added with practiced enthusiasm.

  EPILOGUE

  September 5, 387 AS. 1751 hours.

  "Here ye go, buddy," said the short, grinning thug with the scarred face. He tapped on the door marked chief of staff. "Mr Brainard'll fix you up just fine, I'll bet."

  The Callahan kept his face impassive, though a vein stood out from his neck. He never lost his temper in front of underlings.

  The man who had brought him from the guarded entrance to here, when he had demanded to be taken directly to the Wilding, was named Leaf. The Callahan knew him by reputation—rather better than he wished were the case.

  The Chief of Staff's office was opened from the inside by another thug. This one was named Caffey, and the Callahan knew of him also.

  "Gen'leman to see Mr Brainard, Fish," Leaf said with a broad smile.

  He was play-acting; both of them were. This was nothing but a show, with the Callahan forming both the straight man and the audience.

  Caffey raised an eyebrow. "Alone?" he said.

  He was a marginally smoother character than Leaf. At any rate, the muted beige tunic and trousers affected by all the Association functionaries had a civilian appearance on Caffey, while the garments seemed to be a prison uniform when Leaf wore them.

  Looks were immaterial. Leaf and Caffey had equal authority as the Association's Commissioners of Security. They were equally brutal, equally ruthless; and equally dedicated to their job.

  "There's half a dozen more come with him," Leaf said, "but one at a time seemed safer. The rest 're cooling their heels in the guardroom. Unless they got smart with Newton, in which case they're just cooling."

  Caffey chuckled. "Takes a real d
irect view of doing his job, that boy. Too dumb to get tricky, I s'pose."

  "The men you're talking about are the Council of the Twelve Families," said the Callahan, finally stung to a response. "Not a street gang! We're here to meet with the Wilding."

  Leaf grinned. "Not a street gang, I guess," he said. The soft change of emphasis made his words a threat.

  Caffey looked over his shoulder. His stocky body still blocked the doorway. "D'ye want to see Mr Callahan, sir?" he called, proving he had known perfectly well from the beginning who he was dealing with.

  "Of course, Fish," answered the unseen within. "I'd be delighted."

  Caffey stepped aside, gestured the Callahan mockingly forward, and closed the door behind himself.

  Brainard sat behind a desk which was large and expensively outfitted, but cluttered with hard copy. He had the tired, worn appearance of a man older than his chronological age. His face and hands was flecked with minute dimples. Plastic surgery had not quite restored the texture Brainard's skin had had before jungle sores ate into it.

  The Wilding's chief of staff looked hard and dangerous. The Callahan had reason to know that Brainard was both those things, and more.

  "I didn't come to talk with you, Brainard," the Callahan said. "My business—our business—is with the Wilding."

  Brainard shrugged. "Have a seat," he said, gesturing the Callahan to one of the comfortable chairs facing the desk. "Since you're going to talk to me anyway."

  He smiled at his visitor. The expression was as precise as the click of a gunlock. "And as a suggestion, Mr Callahan . . . unless you refer to him as Director Wilding, I'm the only one you are going to talk to this afternoon."

  The walls of the Chief of Staff's office were decorated with holographic projections of the surface of Venus. The images were not retouched for propaganda purposes.

  To the Callahan's right, huge land-clearing equipment tore at the jungle. On the wall over the door, other machinery formed barracks blocks and small bungalows from stabilized earth. On the visitor's left, humans of both sexes inspected an experimental plot of vegetables growing beneath an ultraviolet screen.

  The wall behind Brainard did not carry a hologram. An automatic rifle hung there in a horizontal rack. To even the Callahan's inexperienced eye, the weapon was in poor condition. The metal surfaces were scarred, and fungus had pitted the plastic stock and fore-end.

  The Callahan grimaced, then sat down. Forcing himself to look Brainard in the eyes, he said, "All right. What is it that he really wants?"

  Brainard smiled. This time the expression was almost gentle. "Just what he says he wants, Mr Callahan," he said.

  The Council had—the Callahan had; he was the Council and they all knew it—offered Brainard a bribe early on in the process. Brainard had sent back a polite note with the money—enough money to have set him up for life in any Keep on Venus.

  The next night, a mob of thousands of Association supporters had sacked and burned Callahan House. A Patrol detachment stood by and watched. They were outnumbered fifty to one by the rioters.

  Patrol Headquarters directed the detachment to open fire. The on-site Patrol commander countermanded the order immediately. He realized that the men on the mob's fringes had the deeply-tanned skin of Free Companions—and that the objects outlined against their cloaks were surely automatic weapons.

  "Listen, Brainard," the Callahan snarled, "the time for playing games is over! You're a practical man. You know that the notion is impossibly expensive."

  "Expensive, of course," Brainard said. "And while we pay Free Companions to defend large surface settlements, neighboring Keeps will raid our fishing grounds." He leaned forward. His tunic touched the papers on his desk and made them rustle. "But the fishing grounds are played out, and the settlements will be exporting protein in a few years." Brainard's eyes were hard and empty, like a pair of gun muzzles.

  "It's not impossible, Mr Callahan," he said. "And it's not expensive at all, compared to the centuries of phony war that you and yours have kept going!"

  The Council made approaches to Leaf and Caffey after the attempt to subvert Brainard failed. This time the money did not come back—but neither did the agents carrying it.

  Three days later, one male member of each of the Twelve Families was kidnapped. The operations were simultaneous and went off flawlessly, though several guards were killed in vain attempts to interfere.

  The victims were dumped in front of the Council Building the next morning. They were alive, but they had been shaved bald and their skin was dyed a bright blue.

  After that debacle, the Callahan shelved what he had thought of as his final contingency plan. He was afraid to think about what would happen if he attempted assassination—and failed.

  "Phony wars, Brainard?" the Callahan sneered. "It's real lives your master's scheme will cost, and there'll be a lot of them. Has he thought of that?"

  Brainard's fingers gently explored the dimples on his cheek. It was a habitual gesture, an unconscious one. "We've seen death before, Mr Callahan," he said tonelessly. "People die no matter what. This way—" His eyes had gone unfocused. Now they locked on the Callahan. "This way they have a chance to die for something. And they're willing to. By God they're willing to!"

  "Yes, because you've stirred them up!" the Callahan shouted. He gripped the arms of his chair fiercely, as if to hold himself down.

  Brainard chuckled unexpectedly. He slid his chair back and stood up with an easy motion. "That's right, Mr Callahan," he said. "Because we stirred them up. Because we're leading them. But—" The relaxed voice and posture vanished as suddenly as it had appeared. Brainard pointed his index finger at his visitor and went on, "—the common people are willing to go. And they're going to go. The only choice the Twelve Families have now is to support the process." Brainard's features changed. For the first time, the the Callahan saw the face of the man who directed the activities of killers like Lea and Caffey. "Or be burned out of the way," Brainard said, voice husky. "Like so much honeysuckle."

  The Callahan stared across the desk at Brainard. He had never before in his life hated a human being as much as he hated this one—and his master.

  But he had not ruled Wyoming Keep for twenty years by being a fool.

  The Callahan stood up. "All right," he said quietly. "Then I suppose we'd better support the process, hadn't we? May I see Director Wilding now?"

  The two men walked down the hallway together, toward the office of the Director of the Surface Settlement Association.

  THE REAL JUNGLE: Belize, 2001

  My wife Jo and I got up at 4:30 am on July 13 and drove to our son and daughter-in-law's (Jonathan and April) house in Burlington, where we loaded all the luggage into April's Rodeo and went to RDU airport. The flight to Miami was on a full 727 (no problems, though I hadn't realized American still operated 727s) and the flight to Belize a 757 with lots of empty seats. International flights (which I take rarely) are strikingly upscale, providing cooked food on china with steel flatware instead of plastic containers and utensils.

  International Expeditions, the tour organizer, provided a guide in Miami to make sure we got from one flight to the other. That gave me a correct notion of how careful they are with their clients.

  Our first guide in Belize, Martin, had come to there as a mahogany company executive in 1975. He took us through Belize City (the capital and largest city with 70–80 thousand people in a country of 250–260 thousand total) while we waited for the other six of our party (who were flying in through Dallas). The houses reminded me of older Brunswick County (NC) beach houses: colorful, run-down, and frequently on stilts because of hurricanes. Some of the oldest places in the city are built of bricks carried over in the 19th century as ballast for mahogany ships. There are also "drowned cayes" in the bay where ships dumped ballast on which mangroves then took root, though they're underwater at high tide. (The lift is only 18 inches in Belize.)

  The educational system works very well. The churches b
uild the schools and choose the teachers, but the government pays those teachers. People whose faith doesn't have schools of its own (the big ones are Roman Catholic, Anglican, and Baptist) send their kids to some other church's school, but the kids aren't required to take the religious instruction. Literacy was 96% until the recent influx of refugees from El Salvador and Guatemala (some 80 thousand illiterate Spanish speakers) dropped it to 64%.

  Twenty-five percent of the country's Gross Domestic Product comes from tourism, and they really do care about visitors. There are "Have you hugged a tourist today?" posters and tourist police to make sure only licensed guides are operating (we ran into a checkpoint of tourist police later in the afternoon).

  Most cars are used sub-compacts from the U.S., generally from Texas and California. Used tires are imported from the U.S. also. Gas is about twice the U.S. price.

  Then back to the airport, where there's a Harrier GR.3 on static display. The British sent a squadron of Harriers to Belize in 1976 when Guatemala was threatening to invade. They flew non-stop from Britain, refueling repeatedly. Castro allowed them to overfly Cuba: nobody but CIA likes Guatemala. (I will have more bad things to say about Guatemala in the course of this account, I suspect.)

  We were switched to a different guide—Edd, a Creole who'd been an officer in the defense forces—and separate driver, Peter, also a Creole who'd been in the defense forces. Peter drove us from the airport in a Toyota Coaster, a 28-seat diesel bus with a five-speed manual transmission. It was a very rugged and satisfactory vehicle with two seats to the left and one to the right of a center aisle which could be filled by jump seats. It was comfortable, holding ten tourists, the guide and driver, and all our luggage without crowding. Peter took us places on it that I'd have wondered if a jeep could get through.

  After his stint in the defense forces, Peter had worked for many years with ornithological projects. He was a really exceptional birder and communicated his enthusiasm to me.