Arthur C Clarke's Venus Prime Omnibus

by Paul Preuss

  A hand touched his sleeve; he jerked it away and stumbled back, his face twisting in a snarl. “Don’t touch.”

  “Don’t be frightened. All is well.” It was the woman. Up close, her height was impressive. Her face was tan and round, with high Slavic cheekbones and gray almond-shaped eyes under invisibly fine brows. White-blond hair, straight and unfettered, fell to the waist of her white cotton dress. She was muscular, leggy, with a predatory beauty emphasized by lips that seemed swollen from sucking at her slightly protruding incisors. “We can help you.”

  “I don’t need your…”

  “They’re almost here.” She pointed her round chin at the blue light bouncing off the street’s stucco walls and shuttered windows; the police oscillator burped again, closer, impatient with the crowds. “We can help you better than they can.”

  “So? How?”

  “All is ours to give,” she said. Her voice was pitched low; she spoke urgently and intimately, only to him. “Food, a place to live, friends if you want them—other things. Don’t be afraid.”

  She touched his sleeve, grasped the soiled fabric with her colorless fingertips. She tugged gently, and he took an awkward step forward.

  “Don’t let them take you,” she said. “You were meant to be free.”

  “Where are we going?”

  Her companion had watched expressionlessly until now. He said, “With me. Stay close.”

  They turned and pushed into the crowded street. The man opened the way and the woman followed, holding the bum’s arm in a tighter grip, her fingers surprisingly strong around his elbow as she steered him.

  As the police van halted in front of the Librairie de l’Egypte it was immediately surrounded by curious onlookers. Meanwhile, half a block away, the fugitive and his rescuers ducked into a courtyard off the rue Bonaparte and hurried across the cobbles to a black-enameled door. A brass plaque identified the offices of Editions Lequeu. The man pushed it open and they went quickly in.

  The narrow hall was paved with gray marble. To the right were tall double doors, firmly closed; on one, an engraved card in a small brass frame bore the words “Societé des Athanasians.” To the left, a warped staircase wound around the shaft of a caged elevator, which stood open.

  They got in, pulled the grille closed, and waited silently as the two-hundred-year-old car ascended; it sang softly as it passed each floor, its squeaking electrical contacts sounding like the call of a dove.

  “Where’s this?” the bum demanded edgily.

  “We’re going to the registrar,” said the woman. “Then we’ll get you something to eat.”

  “Rather have something to drink,” he said.

  “We don’t mind that. Let us feed you first.”

  They stopped at the top floor. The black-jacketed man pulled back the grille and let the other two off, then closed it and rode the elevator down, his chores apparently complete.

  The woman led her charge to the end of the hall, where a doorway stood open. They entered a high-ceilinged office lined with bookshelves. Tall windows opened onto a balcony; the tower of Saint Germain des Pres was prettily framed by lace curtains.

  “Ah, here is our scholar.” The man lounged comfortably against the corner of an Empire desk, swinging a polished slipper at the end of a corduroy-clad leg. He was fifty-ish, sun-tanned, elegant in a white knit shirt. “And what would his name be?”

  The woman said, “I’m afraid we didn’t have time to become acquainted.”

  The bum stared at the man. “You call me a scholar?”

  “You are a student of Egyptian antiquities, are you not? You have been studying the poor objects in our friend Monsieur Bovinet’s window with such passion these several evenings now.”

  The bum blinked. A perplexed look crossed his face, wiping off the belligerence. “There’s something about them,” he mumbled.

  “They speak to you, perhaps?”

  “I don’t read that writing.”

  “But you would like to,” the older man said, confirming what had been left unspoken. “Because you believe some secret is hidden there, some secret that might save your life, set you free.”

  The bum’s expression hardened. “What do you know? You don’t know me.”

  “Well…” The man’s smile was very alluring and very cool. “You are right, of course”—he leaned back across the desk and tapped the keys of a filescreen—“I don’t know your name. And if we are to enroll you we will need that, won’t we?”

  The bum stared at him suspiciously. The woman, whose hand had never left his arm, leaned close, encouraging him. “I’m Catherine. This is Monsieur Lequeu. What is your name?”

  He blurted it out: “My name is Guy.”

  “Don’t worry, Guy,” said Lequeu. “All will be well.”

  Unlike the purse-seining tactics that other fishers of men have employed since antiquity, Lequeu and the Athanasians were highly selective. They were uninterested in anyone over thirty, anyone badly sick, anyone with an apparent physical or mental disability, or anyone so far gone into drugs or drink that organic damage was likely. They cared nothing for repentance, and hardly more for need. The Athanasians proselytized not so much as a fisherman fishes but as a rancher buys calves. Had Blake’s derelict disguise been too persuasive, they might have passed him over completely, and Monsieur Bovinet of the Librairie de l’Egypte might not have bothered to alert Lequeu before calling in the police—a move that had the desired effect of forcing Blake into a quick choice, or so the Athanasians thought.

  The first thing “Guy’s” saviors did for him, after they fed him and gave him a glass of rather good red wine and showed him to a room in the limestone-walled basement with a bed, a locker, and a change of clothes, was to escort him to a nearby clinic for a thorough physical examination. The technicians treated him with that special Parisian hauteur Blake had to get reaccustomed to every time he visited Paris, but they quickly declared him grade-A beef.

  Then came long days as a pampered guest of the Athanasians, spent getting to know the staff and his fellow inmates, who were also referred to as “guests.” There were five other guests in the basement dormitory, two women and three men. One had been there for six weeks, one for only a few days. Blake gathered that the basement was a staging area; after a period of time one passed on to greater things—or went back to the streets.

  Each guest had a separate cubicle in the low-ceilinged basement. There was a shower and water closet at one end of the narrow hall, and at the other end, a kitchen and laundry. Guests were invited to volunteer to help with the work. Blake refused at first; he wanted to see what would happen if he didn’t try to ingratiate himself. No one seemed bothered. Starting the second week, he began doing his share in the laundry. This too was apparently normal, and the only remarks were simple thank-you’s.

  Meals were served in the big room on the ground floor, whose windows overlooked the courtyard. The food was good and simple: vegetables, breads, fish, eggs, occasionally meat. People with business in the other buildings that fronted the court were thus assured by a glance inside that the Athanasians were going about their meritorious work of feeding the hungry.

  In the same room each morning and afternoon, after the dishes were cleared away, there were “discussions” led by members of the staff—discussions very like group therapy sessions, except that their only stated purpose was to let the guests get to know each other. Blake was not pressed to tell more about himself than he wanted to.

  Catherine was never far from Blake’s side in the first days, although the suave Lequeu had vanished from sight. Blake counted three other staff members, the big man who had effected his rescue from the police, whose name was Pierre, and two other men, Jacques and Jean, who along with Catherine led the discussions or sat in to keep one or more of the guests company. All were in their late twenties. Blake had no doubt that all were using assumed names.

  Perhaps the guests were, too. Certainly “Guy” was.

  Vincent had b
een there the longest; he was an Austrian, a self-styled troubador who scraped along by playing classical guitar and nine-stringed karroo at various restaurants in the Quarter, singing whatever he thought the patrons were hoping to hear but specializing in the folk songs of the workers who had built the great space stations. “My dream someday is to go into space,” Vincent said, “but the corporations will not take me.”

  “Have you applied for the programs?” someone asked.

  “As I have explained, I do not dare. Because of things, you know, in my past…”

  “We don’t know, Vincent, you haven’t explained.”

  Blake listened to Vincent speak about his dreams and realized that he was a seducer, so well armored behind his charm that no amount of mere talk would reach him. Which is probably why he was still in the anteroom of the program. Blake wondered how much more time the Athanasians were willing to give him.

  Salome came from a farm near Verdun. She was a dark, tough girl who had borne her first child at fourteen, married at sixteen, and had three more children but never found enough time for an education. Her mama had the children now; Salome, twenty-one, was making her way in the streets of Paris.

  “How?”

  “Doing what I have to do.”

  “Stealing?”

  “When I have to.”

  “Sleeping with men?”

  “Only if it feels like the right thing to do.”

  And dreaming of joining the theater. Salome was writing a play; she had a manuscript of ragged pages she offered to read. Her aggressive, intelligent style in conversation did not transfer to the page. No one criticized her work, but as the days passed, Salome described a change in her goals, from playwriting (she admitted that her writing was hampered because she did not read that well) to helping spread the good work of the Athanasians.

  Salome had arrived in the program only a few days before Blake. He was not surprised when, two weeks after he arrived, she was gone; he knew she’d already been promoted.

  “I admit that when you approached me, I hadn’t eaten for four days. I was beginning to hallucinate.” The speaker was Leo, a thin, quick Dane, a wanderer and diarist who sent long letters by radioing to his friends around the world whenever he could scrape up the tolls, and who had washed ashore in Paris after crossing North Africa on foot. “I should worry that I’m not worried, but what can I do?” He gave everyone a sunny smile.

  Blake saw that Leo had an ego problem—his ego wasn’t as big as he pretended it was, and he depended absolutely on constantly being rescued. Leo would probably respond quickly to the processes of the group, but whether he was the sort of material the Athanasians were looking for was yet to be seen. Of all the guests, Leo was the only one who did not profess a goal beyond the present. He maintained that he was happy with his life the way it was.

  Lokele was muscular and tall, a West African black who’d been brought to the Paris suburbs as an infant. His parents had died in the influenza epidemic of 2075—“And then I met many, many nice people, but never did they stay long enough to let me get to know them,” he said, smiling, “so I began to hit them to keep them from running away”—until at last he ended in a rehabilitation camp after being convicted of robbery and assault. The Athanasians had picked him up a week after his release, after a week of fruitless job hunting, just as his hunger and despair and determination to stay out of work-shelter were tempting him to rob again.

  Of wit and deftness Lokele had plenty. He needed education. He needed socialization. His family and his culture had been destroyed; the bureaucracy had failed him. Blake wondered if and how the Athanasians would pick up the pieces.

  Bruni was German, broad-shouldered and blond. She’d been living in Amsterdam for the past two years because work-shelter there involved little or no work, but she’d become bored and moved to Paris.

  “Would you like to tell the other guests how we met you, Bruni?”

  “That pimp tried to force me to work for him, but I refused.

  “You said, ‘No thank you’?”

  “I broke his arm.”

  “And when his big friends tried to help him?”

  “I broke their knees.” She said it without humor, her arms crossed, staring at the floor.

  In fact the Athanasians had whisked her out of the way of the police, who thought they were responding to a riot.

  Bruni’s anger was held on a spring catch, and in discussion it sometimes exploded into insults and obscenities. But it was clear enough what Bruni wanted; she wanted simple love. Blake wondered how the Athanasians were going to give her that.

  And when it was Guy’s turn…

  “I am from Bayonne, the Pays Basque. My parents speak the ancient tongue, but I did not learn it. I was not home much because I was with the circus.” The circus, as subsequent confession revealed, was a cheap carnival that worked northern Spain, and while with it, Guy had learned a great many ways to cheat. “I was very good at telling fortunes, but they arrested me for that in Pamplona and I had to spend a week in their filthy jail before they sent me back.” His post-deportation adventures, getting from the border to Paris, were intricate but not interesting, he claimed, but he expressed a confused desire, inspired by the pseudo-Egyptian hocus-pocus of his fortune-telling act, “to learn the true language of the ancient Egyptians. For I have heard that the Basques are the descendants of a colony of Egyptians…”

  At which earnest pronouncement, everyone nodded politely.

  In the few days Blake had spent in the Basque country before coming back to Paris, he had prepared this cover story as carefully as he could. If the Athanasians bothered to check, they’d find that there really was a disreputable little carnival with a clandestine “Egyptian” fortune-teller—Blake had encountered it on a previous trip to the continent—presently in Catalonia, if it had kept to its flexible itinerary. Blake hoped that denials of Guy’s existence on the part of the carnies would be taken by any interrogator as convenient lapses of memory.

  Blake sat through two weeks of these discussions, playing his role with as much skill as he could muster, watching the others play theirs, observing the techniques of Jean and Jacques and Catherine. Group leaders have their agendas, and Blake was impressed by the united purpose of these three, their skill in shaping the eclectic talents and temperaments of the guests toward acknowledgement of a common goal—the goal Jack Noble had expressed to Blake a year ago as “service.”

  Each night after supper there were classes. Three nights a week these involved the entire group, and one of the leaders would talk about the aims and methods of the Athanasians. The language was mild, the message as radical as it had been for centuries: humans were perfectible, sin did not exist, the just society—“or Utopia, or Paradise as we sometimes call it”—was a matter of inspiration and will. Hunger would be eradicated, war was a fading nightmare. What was needed was Inspiration. Will. Service. The reward was Freedom, Ecstasy, Unity. Light. These principles were embodied in the ancient wisdom of many cultures, but one source was most ancient…

  Other nights of the week there were private instructions, held in the guests’ own cubicles or in one of the empty offices of Editions Lequeu upstairs. During Blake’s second week, Lequeu himself reappeared and casually offered to teach Blake to read hieroglyphics. An offer that may have been made out of idle curiosity quickly turned serious when Lequeu discovered a ready and gifted pupil.

  They worked in a small conference room, spreading out the beautiful hand-colored codexes and the holo reproductions of wall carvings on a well-worn table. Lequeu not only knew the sounds, the syllables, the idiograms—he spoke the language. But he cautioned Blake that no one knew how it really sounded. “The last native speakers of ancient Egyptian were the Copts, the Christians of Egypt,” he told Blake. “I am very much afraid that by the end of the 19th century they all had died. Who can say what transformations their language had already undergone?”

  Under Lequeu’s tutelage Blake quickly learned to
sound out texts in hieroglyphs, in the corresponding hieratic script, and in the later, bastard-Greek demotic. “Guy, you have a gift,” he said, smiling, “and perhaps you will soon find in the texts the secrets you have mystically divined must be there.”

  Lequeu disappointed him in only one matter: “I regret that there is no connection whatever between the Egyptians and the Basques—your ancestors were living in the Pyrenees ten thousand years, maybe more, before the first pyramid rose beside the Nile.”

  Thus the Athanasians tangled Guy and the others in a net of dependencies: food, clothing, shelter, friendship, cooperative labor, the gentle stripping away of ego defenses, the subtle substitution of a common goal. They neglected nothing. Before Lequeu began his lessons in hieroglyphics, Blake’s evenings had been administered by Catherine; he’d been there only a week when she announced that the night’s lesson would be held in his cubicle. She brought no books.

  The yellow reading lamp beside the bunk emphasized the pitted blocks of raw limestone that were the basement’s outer wall. Catherine’s hair was liquid in the light; her clinging dress molded her bold figure, until she began to pull the dress away.

  Blake could not pretend aversion or even surprise. But as Catherine’s gray eyes and swollen lips descended toward him, as her cool and expert body joined his, Blake felt a passing shiver of anger, dissolving into sadness. There was another woman he loved, who cared deeply for him, but who had never allowed him more than a child’s kiss.

  After Guy had spent three weeks as a guest of the Athanasians, Catherine told him he had been chosen to learn the deeper mysteries.

  6

  Suddenly “Guy” was on the street again. They’d fixed him up with an ID sliver and enough credit to buy clothes and rent a room of his own. They’d even arranged a job for him, as a superped messenger. He was expected to show up at weekly discussion groups, held in the same room on the courtyard, but beyond that he was free.

  It was a test, of course. What would he do with his freedom? How thoroughly had they managed to bind him to them?