Arthur C Clarke's Venus Prime Omnibus

by Paul Preuss

  She raised her arms, feeling for their wave patterns. Her belly burned for an instant, and three quick bursts disarmed Blake’s alarms. Leaving her duffel bag in the hall, she stepped tentatively into the room.

  There was a mullioned bay window to her left, shadowed by a big elm outside. Heavy rain continually rustled the elm leaves. The pallid green light of late afternoon filtered through the rain-streaked panes and gave the interior of the flat the watery feel of an aquarium.

  The walls of the room were lined with bookshelves; the books were stacked on their shelves like vertical irregular bricks, their spines a faded spectrum from ruddy brown to slate-blue. There were albums of recent book chips and older books recorded on disk and tape, and an impressive number of real books made of paper and cloth and leather, many crumbling inside their clear plastic envelopes, others in pristine condition.

  Where the walls were not obscured by bookshelves they were painted with creamy enamel and hung with framed manuscript pages and early 20th-century European oils.

  Sparta retrieved her duffel and left it inside the door, which she closed carefully behind her. She moved through the quiet rooms. Blake lived well on his consulting fees, not to mention the income from a sizable trust fund; these gave ample play to his collector’s passion and his taste in Chinese furniture and Oriental weavings.

  Her eye zoomed in on surfaces and textures, probing shadowed crevices. Her ears listened beyond the human frequency range, below the human threshold of audibility. Her nose sniffed for chemical hints. If there were booby traps or hidden transmitters or receivers in the room, she would home in on them.

  Blake had left his apartment at least two weeks ago, perhaps much longer. There was no sign that the circumstances of his leaving were unusual. But everywhere the prints of his woman visitor were more recent, if only by a few days; nowhere did his prints overlay hers.

  Sparta looked into the bedroom. His bed was made with fresh sheets, and his closet was full of suits and shirts and shoes, everything from black leather pumps to red high-top moon boots. Blake was quite a dandy, but if anything was missing from this extensive wardrobe, Sparta would not know. She noted that the woman had pawed through his things.

  His bathroom cabinet was fully stocked: Blake’s cordless toothbrush was there, and a chemosonic shaver, and shelves full of deodorants and aftershaves and other nostrums. The woman had been here too, since Blake had left.

  The refrigerator in the kitchen alcove held a six-pack of Czechoslovakian lager—his taste for cold beer confirmed that Blake was, after all, American—but it held no eggs or milk or vegetables or other perishables, only a few hard cheeses and a jar of mustard. The stove was spotless. There were no dirty dishes in the sink. The recycling chute hadn’t been used for a week. Either Blake had planned his departure, or someone had cleaned up after him.

  His back porch—a tiny enclosed landing, really—had been converted to a workshop; through its single window she could make out a row of brick-walled back gardens, trim and middle class. Rows of neatly labeled bottles of chemicals lined the wall above a table that was anything but neat; its surface was crowded with scraps of microlectronic substrate. There were traces of numerous nitrogen-based compounds and splashes of solified metal on the carbon-fiber work surface. All of the debris was cold.

  The copper pipes of the kitchen plumbing to Blake’s flat and the ones above and below his were exposed in one corner of the little workroom, next to a small laundry sink. But Blake didn’t do his laundry here. The round metal gadget stuck on the end of the faucet was a mainframe computer, a micro-super smaller than the water filter it was packaged in. The computer worked through complexification and decomplexification of artificial enzymes; the thing got so hot when it was working at capacity that it needed a steady flow of coolant.

  Blake’s woman visitor had twisted the faucet handle, and she’d played with the remote keyboard on Blake’s desk. Sparta wondered if she’d gained access to its memory.

  Sparta turned on the cold water. She slipped the glove off her right hand and thrust her spines into the ports on the back of the keyboard. She got past the computer’s quite competent security in a split second, and its informational guts started to spill faster than the steaming water that was already pouring into the sink. From one sprung booby trap in Blake’s security—and several yet unsprung—Sparta knew that no snoopers had gained entry.

  The flatscreen glowed. Anyone watching Sparta would have seen a woman staring as if hypnotized at a meaningless jumble of alphanumerics and scrambled graphics spilling across the flatscreen, but she was not seeing it; the data was flowing directly into her neural structures.

  The little computer was so capacious that it took Sparta several seconds just to read the directory of its stored programs and files. There were knowledge based programs for chemical analysis, some having to do with explosives, corrosives, incendiaries, poison gases, and other such pleasantries, others having to do with the analysis of papers and inks. There were powerful programs for modeling the complex interactions of shockwaves, programs so intricate they showed that Blake’s interest in making things go boom was more than a mischievous hobby.

  Of the files, the biggest were bibliographies. Sparta would not have been surprised if every edition of every book known to have been printed in English for the past three hundred years was listed here.

  But one miniscule file called attention to itself. Its name was README.

  She smiled. Blake knew Sparta as few others did. One thing he knew about her was that she could crack any computer almost effortlessly, although he didn’t know how she did it, and she had no intention of telling him. She had no doubt that README was meant for her.

  README, however, turned out to be unreadable. Not that it was inaccessible, but it contained nothing except an apparently meaningless list of numbers. The numbers were arranged in groups: 311, 314, 3222, 3325, 3447, 3519 … a total of 102 such groups in all, none with less than three numbers or more than six, and none repeated. The first few groups began with the numeral 3, the next few began with 4, and so on, in increasing numerical order. The last groups all began with 10.

  Sparta smiled. She recognized the list for what it was and instantly committed it to memory.

  So Blake wanted to play hide-and-seek, did he? She replaced her glove, turned off his computer, and left his workshop precisely as she had found it. She slipped quickly and quietly into the main room of the flat, moving like a shadow in the deepening shadows, grinning a cat’s satisfied smile.

  Outside, the rain still drummed on the elm leaves. The light was greener.

  By pushing her nostrils close to the books on their shelves, she could inhale the residual odor of the hands that had touched them, the amino acids and other chemicals that were as distinctive to individuals as their fingerprints. Only Blake had handled the plastic sleeves in which they were protected—Blake and, in a few cases, the mysterious woman.

  The woman had handled only a few books. She’d pulled books from the shelves here and there, apparently at random—unlike Sparta, she had evidently had no idea what she was looking for.

  Sparta was looking for a specific book. Blake had left Sparta a message hidden in a book, a book he knew Sparta would recognize as unique in a way that one else could. The list of numbers in README was a book cipher.

  A book had drawn them both to Port Hesperus and had served to reintroduce them, a copy of the fabulously valuable privately printed first edition of The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, by T. E. Lawrence. There were no copies of any version of The Seven Pillars of Wisdom on Blake’s shelves, but they had shared many other books in the past, when both of them had been children in SPARTA. Among Blake’s collection of 19th- and 20th-century fiction, memoirs, travel journals, essays, and other literary letters, one book was an anomaly, an anomaly only someone who knew Blake’s collection intimately—or someone who had been part of SPARTA—would recognize.

  She pulled it from the shelf and looked at it. The eye
printed on the jacket stared back at her. In the more than one hundred years since it had been published, the bright red of its dust jacket had faded to pale pink, but its bold title was clearly visible through the plastic: Frames of Mind, The Theory of Multiple Intelligences, by Howard Gardner. It was a gifted psychologist’s exposition of what he called “a new theory of intellectual competences,” and it had been a major influence on Sparta’s parents when they conceived the SPARTA project.

  Sparta removed the book from its plastic sleeve, studied its cover a moment, then carefully opened it. She smiled at the dedication, “For Ellen.” That was a different Ellen in a different century—a real Ellen, unlike the fictitious Ellen Troy—but she had no doubt that Blake meant her to take it personally.

  Yes, she was now “in the mood”—the right frame of mind.

  She turned to the first chapter, “The Idea of Multiple Intelligences.” It began, “A young girl spends an hour with an examiner…” Sparta knew the passage well, a brief parable of a youngster whose diverse gifts are summed up in a single round number, an I.Q. The thrust of Gardner’s argument, and of the program Sparta’s parents had created, was to lift the dead hand of I.Q.

  The first page of this chapter was numbered 3 in the book. And the first letter of the first line was A. It was the letter to which README had directed her. The first group of numbers in README was 311, indicating page 3, line 1, letter 1. The next group of numbers in README was 314; it directed her to the fourth letter in the same line, which was u.

  README’s next group was 3222, which could be read as page 3, line 2, letter 22, but could also be read as page 3, line 22, letter 2, or even as page 32, line 2, letter 2. The steady increase of the initial digits told Sparta that Blake had used the simplest form of the cipher, taking each letter serially. Thus the first digit or two would always be the page number, from page 3 to page 10. The second one or two digits would count down the lines of the page, and the remaining digit or two would indicate the placement of the letter on the line.

  There was little chance of ambiguity in this system—but it was bad cipher practice, the kind of regularity that instantly reveals the existence of a book cipher even to an amateur cryptanalyst. If the hidden message had been in plain language, the cipher could have been largely solved without even knowing which book was the key.

  The message was not in plain language. When, after a few seconds of concentration and page flipping, Sparta had deciphered the last group, 102749, the entire message of 102 letters read thus:

  a​u​k​c​f​k​u​c​a​q​n​s​r​t​g​a​l​d​x​q​z​l​h​o​f​a​i​k​t​b​h​o​b​o​d​k​u​p​k​c​d​u​t​s​e​k​a​v​t​v​r​b​k​q​h​o​l​s​k​c​d​l​t​p​a​u​d​z​d​l​y​b​e​k​y​b​j​t​a​l​q​o​r​v​q​m​x​h​j​z​h​u​d​y​f​e​s​i​q​z​e​f.

  Sparta was not surprised. In fact, this is what she had expected. Blake’s invitation to play hide-and-seek had enjoined her to “play fair.” The Playfair cipher was one of the most famous in history.

  Even if a cryptanalyst knew that a message was enciphered in Playfair, the text was exceedingly difficult to decipher without the key. But Sparta already had the key. The key to Blake’s every move in this game of hide-and-seek was their shared experience of SPARTA.

  With this key she mentally constructed a Playfair alphabet square:

  S P A R T

  B C D E F

  G H IJ K L

  M N O Q U

  V W X Y Z

  She broke the string of book-cipher letters into pairs and swiftly performed the transformation. The first pair in the cipher was au. The line in the square that contained A intersected with the column containing U: the letter at the intersection was T. The line containing U intersected with the column containing A: the letter at the intersection was O. The first pair of letters in Blake’s message was TO.

  Pairs of cipher letters in the same line of the square were exchanged for the letters to their left. Pairs of cipher letters in the same column were exchanged for the letters above them. Soon Sparta had Blake’s prepared plain text: TO HE LE NF RO MP AR IS IF YO UF IN DT HI SF IN DM EI NT HE FO RT RE SX SZ SE EK IN GT HE FI RS TO FX FI VE RE VE LA TI ON SY OU WI LX LN EX ED AG UY DE.

  With the extra letters eliminated, the message read, TO HELEN FROM PARIS IF YOU FIND THIS FIND ME IN THE FORTRESS SEEKING THE FIRST OF FIVE REVELATIONS YOU WILL NEED A GUYDE.*

  She laughed with delight. Blake was indeed leading her on a merry chase, and this time the clues were a little less obvious. She slipped Frames of Mind back into its protective envelope and replaced it on the shelf. She curled up in Blake’s big red leather armchair and stared out the window at the falling rain, and the perpetually moving leaves and the shadows pooling in the branches of the elm, while she pondered the riddle.

  TO HELEN FROM PARIS. Why Helen instead of Ellen? Because Helen of Troy was from Sparta—and Paris was her lover.

  Where was this FORTRESS in which she was supposed to find him? Surely not Troy itself, the mound of Hissarlik on the Asian shore of the Dardanelles; two centuries after Heinrich Schliemann had devastated the ruins of ancient Troy, leaving what he found exposed to the elements, the towers of Ilium had melted to a featureless pile of mud. In this they shared the fate of almost every ancient site that eager archaeologists had laid bare in the 19th and 20th centuries.

  The myth of Troy had nothing to do with it. Blake was not referring to himself as Paris, he was in Paris.

  The Bastille having been torn down, the fortress of Paris, begun in the late 12th century, must be the Louvre. Blake was at the Louvre, SEEKING THE FIRST OF FIVE REVELATIONS. Sparta had heard of people seeking revelations, or enlightenment, or whatever, but it seemed odd to seek five of them. And in order?

  Her eye sought out the antique Bibles that rested on a bottom shelf of Blake’s bookcase. In a moment she was out of the chair and had one of the weighty books open, turning the pages until she had found the Book of Revelation, chapter five, verse one. In the translation she had selected, the Jerusalem Bible, the verse read, “I saw that in the right hand of the One sitting on the throne there was a scroll that had writing on back and front and was sealed with seven seals.” A footnote explained that the scroll was “a roll of papyrus in which God’s hitherto secret decrees are written.” It seemed doubtful that Blake was on the trail of God’s secret decrees, but he might well be looking for a papyrus in the Louvre’s vast collection of Egyptian antiquities.

  But if Blake was in Paris, working in the Louvre’s Egyptian collection, why would she NEED A GUYDE to find him? Why was GUYDE misspelled?

  Perhaps somewhere in the process of switching one letter for another, tediously counting tiny letters in a big book, writing down all those numbers, Blake had made a mistake. But the Playfair system rendered an accidental substitution unlikely in this case, for in the alphabetical square based on the keyword SPARTA, the letter Y and the letter I are not in the same row or in the same column: moreover, one lies above and one lies below the other member of the plaintext pair, the letter U. Thus they could not have been mistaken for each other under any of the rules of transformation, which change the pair UY to qz, as found by Sparta, but would have changed the pair UI to lo.

  So either Blake was being cute and fake-medieval, or he was telling her something. She knew she would not be able to push the last bit of the jigsaw puzzle into place just by sitting here and armchairing it. Sparta jumped up. She spent three minutes insuring that everything in Blake’s apartment was exactly where she’d found it, then picked up her duffel, reset the alarms, and went out the door, hurrying to catch the next magneplane to Paris.

  She had no way of knowing that she was already a week too late.

  A week before Sparta left London, Blake spent the night in a Paris closet…

  Dawn seeped under the closet door in a thin gray plane of light. Through the thin wood panel Blake heard footsteps, a
grumbled curse. He yawned and shook his head vigorously. He’d been awake for two hours, and before that he’d dozed fitfully among the mops and brooms. He was hungry and sleepy and stiff. He wished he had a cup of espresso, rank and black.

  He was also nervous. He’d half-hoped Ellen would show up and extricate him from this fix, but it looked like he was going to have to go through with it.

  He opened the door and backed carefully out of the closet, carrying a bucket of varnish remover and a fistful of rags and brushes. His long blue dustcoat was covered with paint smears. With his head down, fiddling with his grip on his thinner can, he fell in with the other painters and carpenters on their way down to the repository.

  It was a Monday morning; the Louvre was closed to all but scholars, workers, and staff.

  “Bon matin, Monsieur Guy,” someone said to him.

  “Matin,” he grumbled. He didn’t look at the man. Presumably he was the foreman with whom things had been “arranged,” the man who’d been bribed—or blackmailed, or terrorized—not to notice the extra man on his crew.

  The workers went down the broad sandstone stairs. There were five men and women ahead of him, all dressed as he was in blue smocks. A security guard followed, a gray-haired gentleman in an old-fashioned black uniform that was shiny with age. They walked down an echoing basement hall, three of them continuing toward rooms where stacks of stored paintings gathered dust, Blake and the others turning into a long, low-ceiling room, fitted with ancient incandescent light bulbs that burned yellow on the low current. Rows of heavy wooden cabinets stood in the center of the room. Fading lithographs of Egyptian ruins hung on the dingy walls.

  After a few minutes of grumbling and stalling, the workers set about their task of removing three centuries of blackened varnish from the woodwork. Blake let his companions work their way away from him, toward the distant dark corners of the file room. The foreman ignored him.