by Sarah Zettel
“Dr. Hatch, thank you for coming.” He shook Vee’s hand with a nicely judged amount of firmness. “I’m Edmund Waicek.”
“Pleased to meet you, Mr. Waicek,” said Vee, extricating her hand.
“Call me Edmund,” he said, as Vee guessed he would.
“Edmund,” she repeated. “This is Rosa Cristobal.”
“Delighted to meet you, Ms. Cristobal. Allow me to introduce you both to Ms. Yan Su. She is the Venus work group’s resource coordinator.”
“Pleased to meet you both.” Ms. Yan’s voice was light and slightly hesitant, giving the impression that English was not her first language. Underneath that, though, lay a feeling of strength and the awareness of it. “You will forgive me if I ask your field of specialty, Ms. Cristobal. The nature of your relationship with Dr. Hatch is not exactly clear.”
Rosa gave a brief laugh. “No, it is not, even to me, some days. Primarily, I am Dr. Hatch’s manager. I coordinate her projects and her contracts. Demand for her skills is very high, as I’m sure you know, but you would be amazed at the number of people who try to pay less than those skills are worth.”
“And this is Mr. Sadiq Hourani, whose province is security,” interjected Edmund smoothly.
Weird way of putting it. Mr. Hourani gave them a small bow. Vee noticed that his eyebrows were still raised and his expression was still amused.
Rosa laid her briefcase on the conference table and sat next to Ms. Yan. “First of all, let me say that we are extremely excited to be considered for this project.” She jacked her case into the table, which lit up the clear-blue data displays in front of each of the participants.
“As we are to have you here,” beamed Edmund. “We have reviewed Dr. Hatch’s credentials in both the engineering and information fields and found them very impressive. Very impressive indeed.”
“Thank you.” Vee inclined her head modestly.
Edmund’s smile grew fatherly. Vee kept her face still. “Our questions here will be of a more personal nature,” he went on.
“What? Rosa didn’t get you my gene screens?” Vee’s flippancy was reflexive, and she regretted it even before Rosa’s toe prodded her shin.
Ms. Yan laughed dryly. “No. Health issues, if there are any, will be addressed later. These are more questions of political outlook, approach, and general attitude toward—”
“Political outlook?” interrupted Vee.
“Yes,” said Ms. Yan. “I wish this mission were purely a question of research and exploration, but it is not.”
A spark of suspicion lit up inside Vee. She tried to squash it but was only partially successful. She’d grown up in the remnants of the old United States. Her grandfather had talked almost daily about the Disarmament, when U.N. troops went house to house confiscating guns and arresting the owners who would not peacefully hand them over, and worse. Personally, Vee thought her grandfather was nuts for romanticizing the freedom to shoot your neighbors, but his distrust and distaste for the “yewners” had taken root in some deep places, and she hadn’t managed to shake it yet.
“Of course,” Rosa was saying smoothly. “An effective team is more than just a collection of skills. Personalities have to mesh smoothly, and there must be a unified outlook.”
“Exactly.” Edmund’s chest swelled, and Vee knew they were in for a speech.
Apparently, Ms. Yan knew it too because she quickly asked, “Have you ever been to Venera before, Dr. Hatch?”
“Once, about eight years ago.” Vee did not miss the dirty look Edmund shot Ms. Yan, but she suppressed her smile of amusement. “As part of my Planets project.” Vee’s initial fame and the basis of her fortune was made by her creation of the first experiential holoscenic. It was a tour of the solar system, set to the music of Hoist’s The Planets. She had taken people inside the clouds of Venus, the oceans of liquid ice on Europa, the storms of Jupiter, and the revolt in Bradbury, Mars, for the movement “Mars, Bringer of War.”
It suddenly hit Vee what they must be leading up to.
“I have always particularly liked the Veneran segment of The Planets,” said Ms. Yan. “Most people see Venus as hellish. You made it beautiful.”
“Thank you.” Tension tightened Vee’s back. When are they going to say it? When are they going to say it?
“Your section on the Bradbury Rebellion was rather less beautiful,” said Edmund.
Vee caught Rosa’s “be careful” glance and ignored it. “I strove for accuracy,” she said, aware her voice had gone tart. “And comprehension.” The “Bringer of War” segment showed the people being marched into the patched-up ships which were launched without regard to their safety, but it also showed the crowds rallying around Theodore Fuller and his cause, the shining faces, the great hopes of the dream of freedom before that dream had tarnished and twisted.
Edmund’s expression fell into a kind of hard neutrality. “Yes, some of your images were quite…sympathetic.” He glanced at a secondary display on the table in front of him. Vee wished she were close enough to read the items listed there. “What are your feelings about the separatist movements here on Earth?”
This is it? Vee looked incredulously from one face to the other. Both Edmund and Ms. Yan were perfectly serious. Even Mr. Hourani, who had not uttered one word since the beginning of the meeting, had lost his little amused smile. They want to judge my fitness based on how I feel about separatists?
Rosa’s warning prod against her ankle grew urgent Vee dismissed it and heaved herself to her feet.
“You want to know how I feel about Bradbury? I was seven years old when that mess happened. I didn’t have an opinion, just a few vague feelings. The Planets show was for money and to show off what you could do with my new holography tricks.” She planted both hands on the table and leaned toward the yewners. “You want a political yes-sir, pick one of your own. You want an Earth Über Alles, find a Bradbury survivor. You want somebody who can take a look at your Discovery and just maybe come up with something useful to say about it, then you want me. But I will not”—she slammed her hand against the table—“sit here and be interrogated because I may have had a thought or two.”
She turned on her heel and stalked out of the room.
The corridors passed by in a blur. She slapped her audio badge down on the counter at the security station without breaking stride. She saw nothing clearly until she found herself up on the deck in the blazing sunlight, staring out across the blue-gray waters and clenching her hands around the warm metal railing.
Well, Vee, you crashed that one pretty good, didn’t you? She bowed her head until it rested on the backs of her hands. What the hell were you doing? Did you really think they were looking for the dilettante?
Vee was not going to whine about her fate. She had made her choices for money, yes, but also for love. She was good at her art. She understood light and the machines that manipulated it. She could shape light like a potter shaping clay. She knew how to blend it and soften it to create any color and nuance the human eye could detect. She knew how it controlled shadows and reflections. She knew how it scattered and bounced and played mischievous tricks on the senses. She knew nine-and-ninety ways it could be used to transmit messages. The lab had become mind-bogglingly boring right about the time the money from her patents and the resulting holo-scenics had really started to come in. She’d taken off for the artistic life, along with the ability to buy her college debts away from her parents’ bank and keep her brothers and sisters from ever having to go into debt for themselves.
But sometimes she felt she’d missed the chance to do something real, the chance to explore as well as create, to question the nature of the universe in ways art couldn’t reach by itself, to say something that would last, even if it was so obscure only ten other people understood it.
An accomplishment her family back in its naturalist, statist town wouldn’t have to feel ambivalent about.
“You know,” said Rosa’s voice beside her, “there’s this old saying t
hat goes ‘Be careful what you pretend to be; you may become it.’”
Vee lifted her head, blinking back tears of pain as the light assaulted her eyes. “How fast did they throw you out of there?”
“They didn’t, actually.” Rosa leaned her elbows against the railing. The salt breeze caught her silver scarf and sent it fluttering across her face. She pushed it away. “I spread some fertilizer about sensitive geniuses, which they seemed willing to sit still for. They, or at least Ms. Yan and Mr. Hourani, seemed impressed by your strong political neutrality.” The wind plastered her scarf against her cheek again, and she brushed it back impatiently. “I’m less sure about Mr. Waicek, but I do believe he’s leaning in our direction.”
Hope, slow and warm, filled Vee’s mind. “You’re kidding.”
“I have one question.” Rosa rubbed her hands together and studied them. “Do you really want to do this?” She lifted her gaze to Vee’s face. “They were giving you purity in there. This is going to be a political situation. You’ve seen the news. Everybody’s got a position. Everybody wants referendums. You’re going to be quizzed and dissected and watched, and you’re going to have to put up with it. Quietly. No more scenes like that one.” She jerked her chin back toward the glide-walk mouth. “So, I’m asking you, Vee, as your friend and your manager, do you really, honestly, want to be a part of this mission?”
Vee stared out across the blue water under the brilliant sky. Nothing on Venus was blue. It was all orange and gold and blazing red. Yet someone had been there, had set up their base there, and then left. Where had they gone? Who were they? Why had they come in the first place? They might have left the answer behind them. It might be in that laserlike device.
Do I really want to be a part of finding that answer?
“Yes,” she said, to sea and sky, and Rosa. “Oh yes. I want Oris.”
Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Rosa nod. “Okay, then. I think you’ll get it.”
Vee’s smile spread across her face. “If I do nothing else real in my life, at least I’ll get to do this,” she said softly.
For a moment, she thought she heard Rosa mutter, “Whatever this is,” but then she decided that she didn’t.
The image of a spring meadow high in the Colorado Rockies surrounded Yan Su as she sat behind her desk. She paid no attention to it. Instead, she focused on the wall screen, which she had set to record her message to Helen Failia on Venera Base.
“Hello, Helen. I just saw the latest commentary from out your way. Now, you know I don’t interfere.” Pause for Helen to insert whatever comment she had on that score. “But you’ve got to sit on Ben Godwin for the duration. I’ve done my best with the investigative team makeup. They are as close to what you asked for as I could manage. But this will not, I repeat, will not, hold up to certain types of scrutiny. Assure Dr. Godwin that if he lets the spinners do their job and is patient, this will all blow over and your people can get back to work.
“I’m doing my part down here, and we’re making progress. You will all get what you want, but you’ve got to keep quiet.” She paused again, tapping her fingernails against the glass of iced tea sitting on her desk. “I know this isn’t easy, Helen, but believe me, it’s the only way. You also need to keep your security chief on the alert. Every single cracker on three planets is going to be trying to get into Venera’s systems, trying to get ‘the real story.’” She made quotation marks with her fingertips. “The rumors in-stream are bad enough without that.” She sighed softly. “Take care of yourself Helen. You’ve inherited quite a situation.”
A quick keystroke faded the recording out and shunted the message into the queue for the next com burst out to Venus. Helen would receive the message in an hour or two.
Su finished her iced tea and rattled the ice cubes a couple of times as she stared at the sunlight on the distant snowy peaks. God, how long until she’d see the real thing again? She felt certain there would be nothing in her life but Venera and its Discovery at least until the “investigative team” came home, and maybe not even then. A lot would depend on how well Helen was able to handle her people and her sudden fame.
Su remembered the first time Helen Failia sailed into her office. Forty years ago, no, forty-five years ago, and she still remembered.
It had been a long day of in-stream meetings and screen-work. A headache was just beginning to press against her temples. None of this had left Su in the best of moods.
“Thank you for agreeing to see me, Ms. Yan.” Helen Failia was not yet forty then. She wore her chestnut hair bundled up under a scarf of dusky-rose silk. Her handshake was firm, her smile genuine, and her movements calm and confident. Despite that, Su got the strong impression of restless energy brimming just below the surface of this woman.
“Now, what can I do for you, Dr. Failia?” Su asked as she handed Helen the cup of black coffee she’d requested. The woman was a very traditional American on that score.
“I’m building a research colony on Venus,” said Helen, taking the seat Su waved her toward. “I want to know what governmental permissions I need.”
Just like that. Not “I’m exploring the possibilities of…” or “I’m part of a consortium considering building…”
“You’re building on Venus?” Su raised both eyebrows. “With what?”
She hadn’t been able to get another word out for thirty minutes. Helen had brought scroll after scroll of blueprints, encyclopedic budget projections, and lists of potential donors. Everything was planned out, down to which construction facilities could supply which frame sections for the huge, floating city she had designed.
When Dr. Failia finally subsided, Su was ready to admit, privately, she was impressed. In an ideal world, Dr. Failia’s proposal would be quite feasible. Unfortunately, Su had already been on the C.A.C. long enough to know this was not an ideal world.
Perhaps a gentle hint in that direction. “Wouldn’t it be more practical, Dr. Failia, to start with a temporary facility funded by perhaps one or two universities?”
“No,” said Helen at once. Su raised her eyebrows again, and Helen actually looked abashed. “I’m sorry, but no. Venus is a vast, complex world. It’s active in many of the basic ways that Earth is active. It has an atmosphere, weather, and volcanic activity.” Dr. Failia’s eyes shone. At that, Su remembered where she’d heard Dr. Failia’s name before. Helen Failia had been a member of the Icarus Expedition that had gone out, what was it? Two? No, three years ago. She was now one of the four people who had actually walked on the Venusian surface.
It also looked as though she had fallen in love down there.
“In a temporary facility,” Dr. Failia was saying, “a few researchers could study a few aspects of the planet for a few months at a time. But in a real facility, such as Venera”—she tapped the screen roll—“people could specialize. Careers could be dedicated to the study of Earth’s sister without requiring people to remove themselves from their families. The work could be made practical and comfortable for years at a time. We would not be limited to snapshots; we could take in the entire panorama.”
Earth’s sister. It is love. Su shook her head. “And the industrial applications? Are there any commercial possibilities?”
Helen didn’t even blink. “In all probability, industrial and commercial applications would be limited. Mining or other exploitive surface operations would remain prohibitively expensive due to the harsh conditions.”
All right, at least you’re willing to admit that much, Dr. Failia. Su folded her hands on the desk and mustered her “serious diplomat” tones. “You do realize that the colonies which have paid off their debts and become going concerns all have some kind of export or manufacturing base?”
“Until now, yes.”
Su found herself having to suppress a laugh. The question hadn’t even ruffled the surface of Dr. Failia’s confidence. “So you are hoping the research value will offset the economic liabilities?”
“Research and publicity
.” Helen thumbed through the screen rolls on the desk, pulled out the one labeled “University Funding” and presented it for Su’s inspection. “Research departments in both universities and private industry are fueled by their papers as well as their patents. From a publications standpoint, Venus is more than ready to be exploited.”
Su nodded as she skimmed the numbers again. It was all true and reasonable, as far as it went. But the fact was that the pure-research colonies had never worked. The small republics, and even the big universities, were unable to keep them funded. The United Nations was unwilling. Nobody said it out loud, of course, but the established wisdom was that the planets should be saved for industry, and now for the long-life retreats that the lobbyists were proposing as a way for those who had children but wanted extended life spans to have it all. They could live in specialized colonies with continued gene-level medical treatment without straining the balance and resources of Mother Earth.
Su found herself extremely ambivalent about that idea. But this one…Su liked the vision of this gigantic bubble of a town, sort of a U.N. City in the Venusian sky. She liked Helen’s enthusiastic and detailed descriptions of not an outpost but a real community, as self-supporting as any off-world colony could be, given over to exploration and research. True, this vision ignored most of the political realities and historical examples, but that did not lessen its attractiveness. Su did not get much chance to dream anymore, and she found herself enjoying the opportunity.
Still, no politician could afford to dream for too long. It’ll be shot down by the rest of the C.A.C. if it gets in their line of sight, she reminded herself with a sigh. They did not like approving doomed projects. It made for snide comments in-stream and low scores on the opinion polls.
But maybe, maybe there was a way around that.
“I will be honest with you, Dr. Failia,” said Su. “Without the money in account, this is not going through.”
To her credit, Helen Failia did not say “But…”
Su leaned forward, making sure the other woman met her gaze. “However, if you can get at least some of the start-up money, I think its chances are very good. Very good.”