Arthur C Clarke's Venus Prime Omnibus

by Paul Preuss

  He left it there. Blake looked at Sparta. She smiled.

  “Did you ship it like this?” Darlington said abruptly. “This beautiful book might have been … badly soiled.”

  “We’re keeping the carrying case in evidence,” Sparta replied. “I asked Mr. Redfield to inspect the book and vouch for its authenticity.”

  “I wanted to see it safely into your hands, Mr. Darlington.”

  “Yes, indeed. Well!” Darlington smiled cheerily, then glanced around the room with sudden inspiration. “The reception! What do you know, it’s not too late after all! I’m going to call everyone at once.”

  Darlington started off toward his office, got two steps, and remembered that he’d left The Seven Pillars of Wisdom sitting in the open. Sheepishly, he returned.

  He fiddled with the complex locks of the display case and carefully arranged the book on velvet pillows inside. He slid the case closed.

  When Darlington had reset the magnetic locks he looked up, simpering at Sparta, and she nodded approvingly. “We’ll be going, then. Please keep the book available in the event it may be required in evidence.”

  “Right here, Inspector! It will be right here!” Darlington patted the display case, then dashed to one of the tables and pulled off the shroud with a flourish, unveiling a mound of cracked prawns. He was so excited he almost clapped.

  Blake and Sparta walked to the doors.

  “Oh, by the way, you must come to the party,” Darlington called after them as the entrance slid open. “Both of you!… After you’ve had a chance to freshen up.”

  The concourse outside the museum was crowded with pedestrians. They were opposite the Vancouver garden; they walked swiftly across metal paving and down a path among fern-covered granite rocks, seeking the shelter of arching pine branches and totem poles. When they were alone Blake said, “If you won’t let me come with you, I’m going to take Darlington up on his offer. I’m starved.”

  She nodded. “I notice, Blake, that you’re as accomplished a dissimulator as I am. ‘Involved in the incident…’”

  “It’s a distinction without a difference, isn’t it? Knowingly conveying a false impression is lying, period.”

  “It’s the nature of my job,” she said shortly. “What’s your rationale?”

  As she turned he seized her gently by the elbow. “Guard your back. I don’t know what they fixed you up with, but they left out the killer instinct.”

  She recovered the package she’d hidden in the transformer room, then pressed the commlink in her ear, whose insistent chiming she’d switched off half an hour ago.

  “Where have you been?” Proboda’s half-concern, half-panic, was almost touching.

  “I underestimated our quarry, Viktor. I went to Star Queen hoping to…”

  “You were aboard?” he shouted, so loudly she yanked the commlink from her ear.

  “Dammit, Viktor… I was hoping to catch the culprit in the act,” she resumed, gingerly bringing the link to her ear. “Unfortunately, I ran into a large robot.”

  “My God, Ellen, did you hear what went on inside that ship?”

  “I just told you I was there,” she said, exasperated. “I want you to meet me at the offices of the Ishtar Mining Corporation. By yourself. Right now.”

  “Commander Antreen is terribly angry, Ellen. She wants you to report back here immediately.”

  “I have no time. Tell her I’ll make a full report as soon as I can.”

  “I can’t—I mean, on my own initia—”

  “Viktor, if you don’t meet me at Ishtar I’ll have to handle Sondra Sylvester on my own. And I’m much too tired to be polite.” She disconnected. This time she wasn’t lying; to her dismay, she found herself trembling with fatigue. She hoped she wasn’t too tired for the task remaining.

  The two major mining companies on Port Hesperus provided the economic base for the entire colony; Ishtar and Azure Dragon were cordial but serious rivals, their headquarters located opposite each other in projecting arms on the planetward end of the station. Outside, these facilities bristled with antennas that transmitted and received coded telemetry. Only spies saw the interiors of their competition’s armored ore shuttles, and the smelting and finishing facilities were located on satellite stations several kilometers away.

  After displaying her badge to a videoplate monitor, Sparta was allowed to enter Ishtar through its bronze-studded front doors, the so-called Ishtar Gate, which opened on a long spiraling corridor, paneled in dark leather, leading outward from the weightless core toward Earth-normal gravity. No guards were in evidence, but she was aware that her progress was monitored throughout the approach.

  At the end of the corridor she found herself in a room lavishly paneled in carved mahogany, carpeted in Chinese and Persian rugs. There was no other apparent exit from the room, although Sparta knew better. In the center of the shadowy room a small spotlight illuminated a gold statuette of the ancient Babylonian goddess Ishtar, a modern interpretation by the popular Mainbelt artist Fricca.

  Sparta paused, taken by it, her macrozoom eye drawn to a microscopic inspection. It was a stunning work, tiny yet swelling with power, supple yet knotted, like one of Rodin’s studies in wax. Around the base were carved, in letters meant to suggest cuneiform, verses from a primeval hymn: Ishtar, the goddess of evening, am I. Ishtar, the goddess of morning, am I. The heavens I destroy, the earth I devastate, in my supremacy. The mountain I sweep away altogether, in my supremacy.

  “How may I assist you?” The question, phrased not helpfully but with disdain, came from a young woman who had stepped silently from the shadows.

  “Inspector Troy. Board of Space Control,” Sparta said, turning to her. The tall receptionist was wearing a long purple gown of something with the texture of crushed velvet; Sparta was acutely conscious of her own singed hair and smudged cheeks, her torn, stained trousers. “Please inform Mrs. Sylvester”—she cleared her throat—“that I’m here to talk to her.”

  “Is she expecting you, Inspector?”—smooth and cold, definitely uncooperative…

  The receptionist’s name was engraved on a solid gold pin beneath her throat, a pin that would have been invisible to ordinary eyes. Not to Sparta’s.

  One talent of a better-than-average cop is to be able to say more than one thing at once; some simple statements carry a wealth of implication (obey me or go to jail), and the first-name trick never hurts, even if it only makes ’em mad. “I require your full cooperation, Barbara.”

  Barbara responded with a jerk, freezing the image on the handheld videoplate she’d been consulting.

  “I’m here to see Sondra Sylvester on urgent official business,” Sparta told her, “regarding The Seven Pillars of Wisdom.”

  The receptionist stiffly poked out a three-digit code and spoke softly to the gadget. A moment later Sylvester’s lush, husky voice filled the room. “Bring Inspector Troy to my office at once.” The young receptionist lost her hauteur. “Follow me, please,” she whispered.

  Sparta followed her through double locking panels that slid silently aside. One curving hall led to another, and that soon opened upon scenes of Escher-like ambiguity: below Sparta and beside her, curving smoky windows overlooked control rooms peopled by dozens of operators in front of green and orange flatscreens and videoplates. Other curving glass corridors crossed above and below, and other control rooms were visible through distant windows. Many of the screens Sparta could see displayed graphics or columns of numbers, but on others live video pictures of a bizarre fishbowl world unreeled like the view from a carnival ride.

  Somewhere on the surface of the planet below—on the bright visible side or away in the darkness beyond the terminator—radio signals relayed by synchronous satellites moved robots by remote control, to prospect, to delve, to mill, and to stockpile. The views through the moving screens were robot-eye views of hell.

  Abruptly they were past the control rooms. Sparta followed the receptionist through a door, down another corridor, a
nd finally into an office of such opulence that Sparta hesitated before entering.

  A desk of polished chalcedony stood before a wall of rough-textured, curving bronze. Ruddy light fell fitfully over the surface of the wall, illuminating statues in their niches, exquisite works by the solar system’s major artists: a duplicate cast of Fricca’s Ishtar, flanked by Innanna, Astarte, Cybele, Mariana, Aphrodite, Lakshmi. Another wall contained shelf upon shelf of books bound in colored leather and stamped with gold and silver. Through heavily filtered windows the sulfurous clouds of the planet rolled in twilight.

  It was a room that spoke, paradoxically, of despair—a prison, its static luxuries meant to substitute for the random simplicities of freedom.

  “You may leave us, Barbara.”

  Sparta turned to find Sylvester behind her, wearing the same dark silk gown she’d worn disembarking from Helios. And when Sparta glanced around, the receptionist had gone; these women had an uncanny trick of moving silently. Sparta found herself wishing that Proboda had made his appearance.

  “You’re much smaller than I expected, Inspector Troy.”

  “Videoplate images have that effect.”

  “And I have no doubt you intended the effect,” Sylvester said. She crossed the carpeted room to her stone desk and sat down. “Normally I’d ask you to make yourself comfortable, but in fact I am extremely busy just now. Or perhaps you are ready to release my cargo?”

  “No.”

  “What can I tell you about The Seven Pillars of Wisdom?”

  Sparta realized that she was too tired to work at subtlety; the directness of her question surprised even her. “How much did you spend counterfeiting it? As much as you would have paid for the real thing?”

  Sylvester laughed, a startled bark. “An ingenious question—for which there is no answer.” But unlike Sparta, Sylvester was a bad liar; she held herself on a tight leash, and what passed for coolness was the result of long practice at restraining a tempestuous nature.

  “You left your rented villa on the Isle du Levant the day after you arrived there, took a magneplane from Toulon to Paris, a ramjet to Washington, D.C., where you spent a day in the Library of Congress recording on chip the entire contents of the only remaining Oxford edition of The Seven Pillars of Wisdom still accessible to the public. You then flew to London, where with the help of the bookseller Hermione Scrutton—whose record of involvement in literary fraud might almost be considered distinguished in some circles—you arranged to meet certain parties in Oxford, a city where the craft of printing is cherished and its ancient tools preserved, where even the working typefonts of the past are displayed as treasures in museums, where the revered techniques are still occasionally practiced. With the help of several printers and a bookbinder, people whose love of the making of books is so great they allowed themselves to engage in counterfeiting for the sheer joy of practicing their skills—although the very substantial amounts you paid them didn’t dampen their enthusiasm—you made an almost perfect copy of The Seven Pillars of Wisdom. It was even easier to bribe a notoriously luxury-loving member of Star Queen’s crew to practice his calculating skills on a locked case and steal a book from the cargo of his own ship, replacing it with your counterfeit.”

  As Sylvester listened to this recitation the color in her pale cheeks deepened. “That is an extraordinary scenario, Inspector. I can’t imagine what comment you wish me to make.”

  “Only confirm it.”

  “I am not a pond for you to fish in.” Sylvester willed herself to relax. “Please leave now. I have no more time.”

  “I was very careless on my first inspection of Star Queen—I knew that one of your robots had been field tested; I thought that explained its residual radioactivity. I didn’t bother to examine the fuel assemblies.”

  “Get out,” Sylvester said flatly.

  “…but sometimes a little knowledge is dangerous. If I’d checked the hot robot I would have seen that McNeil had reinserted the fuel rods so that he could open the machine. The oversight almost cost Blake Redfield and me our lives. At your hands.”

  “You’re talking utter nonsense…”

  In two quick steps Sparta was at the desk. She raised the package wrapped in plastic she’d been holding at her side and slammed it down on the polished stone. “Here’s what’s left of your book, Mrs. Sylvester.”

  Sylvester froze. She stared at the package. Her indecision was so transparent, so agonizing, that Sparta could feel the woman’s apprehension and pain.

  “A bluff will gain you nothing but a little time,” Sparta said. “I may not have all the details right, but I’ll get at your financial records, I’ll talk to the people who know. McNeil, for starters. The details and the witnesses will be along shortly. And there’s your book.”

  It lay there, a rectangular bundle wrapped in plastic.

  “Difficult to recognize in its present condition,” Sparta said harshly, her own fear and resentment for the attack on her life finally spilling into anger, wiping out the empathy that had threatened her judgment, “so perhaps you will be good enough to tell me which of the two copies it is.”

  Sylvester sighed. Trembling, she reached to the flimsy plastic, threw it back… The charred block of pages lay in flakes of ash, in the crumbling fragments of its slipcase. “This is too cruel,” she whispered. Sylvester steadied herself in her chair, grasping the edge of her desk so tightly that her knuckles whitened. “How can I know?”

  Sparta pulled the book around and pried open its baked pages. “ ‘The dreamers of the day are dangerous men,’” she read, “ ‘for they may act their dreams with open eyes, to make it possible.’ ‘Dreams’ should be ‘dream,’ singular.” Sparta turned the wrecked book and, leaning over the desk, pushed it toward Sylvester. “Blake Redfield informs me that the text contains many similar errors. This is the counterfeit. The original has been returned to its owner.”

  “To Darlington?”

  “That is corr…”

  In her near exhaustion, in the heady rush of revenge on the woman who’d tried to take her life, Sparta had not been listening… Her reaction to the black pistol that appeared in Sylvester’s hand, arcing toward her, was woefully sluggish.

  20

  Blake Redfield spent a few quick minutes in his Venus-view room at the Hesperus Hilton; then, in a white shirt, maroon tie, and dark silk suit of stylish cut, he sallied forth to make a second, more respectable appearance at the Hesperian Museum.

  His adventures of the past hour had left him curiously undecided, unsettled. His chance sighting of Linda on that Manhattan street corner had awakened something in him, a feeling not urgent at first, but insistent and increasingly intense.

  He’d found it a simple matter to combine his researches into his childhood friend’s mysterious disappearance with his own collector’s passion, for he was nowhere more at home than in old bookstores and library stacks and data files, whether electronic or “fiber-based.” Thus he had stumbled upon the long, deliberately obscured trail of the shadowy international cult he had only recently been able to tie to the prophetae of the Free Spirit. With his nose for inference and testable hypothesis, he’d learned more than he’d expected.

  Long before that, other, more savage passions had been awakened, ones he’d indulged as a teenage boy playing half-serious secret-agent games with his peers in the Arizona mountains. Smearing themselves with shoe polish. Sneaking up on each other. Plinking at each other with capsules of red paint. Blowing things up. Etc.

  He’d resumed his lessons, privately. No more games with paint.

  But tracking down Linda, Ellen as she called herself, had lacked something of the fantastic quality he’d anticipated. When he finally found her—a nice surprise he’d arranged, too—he’d expected to be greeted as a kindred soul; instead she’d seemed preoccupied by matters she was unwilling to share, layers of concern, woven branches of potential—so many crimes, so many villains, doing an invisible gavotte. So many loyalties to balance. So many
corners to watch. She’d grown skilled at hiding her thoughts and feelings from people, too skilled. And he had hoped to touch her feelings.

  Now he wondered how much of a surprise his dramatic revelations had been. She was mysteriously adept at things he was hardly aware of.

  Vincent Darlington, giddy with social success, greeted Blake lavishly and ushered him into the ersatz chapel. Space station society was a hothouse affair, fluid and incestuous, and gaudy display was part of the game. Plumes and trapezes of glitter bobbed on heads whose hair, when not shaved off altogether, had been tortured into extraordinary shapes, wagon wheels and ratchets and Morning Star maces, ziggurats, corkscrews. The faces below came in every natural color and several artificial ones, enlivened by splashes of paint and, on the men, odd swatches of whiskers. The room was filled to capacity and it seemed like everybody was trying to stand in the same place, next to the food tables. These were obviously people who appreciated Darlington’s taste, if not in art, then in champagne and hors d’oeuvres.

  Blake recognized a few of his recent companions aboard Helios, including, to his mild surprise, Sondra Sylvester’s companion Nancybeth, who welled up in front of him as he tried to push closer to the display case containing The Seven Pillars of Wisdom. Nancybeth was resplendent in green plastic kneeboots, and above them a miniskirt of real leather, dyed white and hanging in fringes all the way from her raw hemp belt. Her top was thinly veiled in low-slung, purple-anodized aluminum mesh, which went well with her violet eyes.

  “Open your mowffy,” she coaxed, her chin raised and her lips pooched, and when he started to ask her “what for” he got no further than the “what,” which gave her the opening she needed to shove a tube of something pink and orange and squishy between his teeth. “You looked hungry,” she explained as he masticated.

  “I was,” he said, when he’d swallowed, wincing.