Arthur C Clarke's Venus Prime Omnibus

by Paul Preuss

  The shuttleport turned out to be a livelier place than he’d expected. The marshaling yards and motor depots for the big trucks that drove the Tharsis highway were here. This was where they transferred the off-planet goods from the freight shuttles to the truck caravans—tools and machinery, sheet metal and plastic pipe, shoes and clothes and food and medicine and all the other necessities that weren’t produced on Mars. Warehouses and commissaries and shops and fuel depots were here, and barracks for workers and researchers and half the population of Labyrinth City, in fact, who referred to the glass houses on the cliffside as the “showcase.”

  If the transients who passed through the hive had little to entertain them besides the canned viddies on their ’plates, the locals had a hangout they didn’t talk about much with strangers. Yevgeny had told Blake where to find it. Trudging through the drifted sand between the half-buried hangars and warehouses, Blake had been walking head down into a forty-knot breeze, and he almost missed the long narrow shed tacked onto the back of a spaceplane hangar.

  A yellow spotlight illuminated a torn-off scrap of titanium aluminide which hung over the pressure-lock door, a chunk of metal only an expert could recognize as part of a rocketplane’s vertical stabilizer, with a name sintered onto the metal in black carbon script: My Pain.

  The name of the place was officially the Park-Your-Pain, but Yevgeny said everybody called it Porkypine, or just ’Pine.

  Blake pushed through into the lock, waited for the green, and opened the inner doors. He slung his helmet back. The unique atmosphere of the place hit him in the head, a really special stink compounded of rademas, tobacco smoke, perfume, spilled beer, pressure-suit sweat, disinfectant. The noise was at rocket-test-stand level, and this was still early in the week; the synthekord was programmed for a melody like the anguished shriek of a shuttle disintegrating in the upper atmosphere, supported by a complex basso that sought to suggest the sound of the first moments after the Big Bang. No lyrics, though. Pure introspection.

  Blue runway lights lit the place, helped out by a dozen surplus videoplates tuned to rolling color bars; it would have been a lot darker if the walls hadn’t been sheathed in stainless steel and slagglass. The burnt-out steel casings of penetrator rockets and spent RATO bottles hung from the ceiling.

  Getting from the door to the bar was fun too, sort of the way rugby is fun. Blake wished he were invisible, but every eye in the house was staring at him. He moved as cautiously as he could, inching toward the bar. He didn’t want to bump anybody’s beer bottle too hard, and he didn’t want to brush against any of the local women at the wrong angle—even when they looked at him the way they did. One set of problems at a time.

  He made it to sanctuary. “Let me have a Pilsner,” he said to the barman, whose bald scarred head had suffered at least as much damage as the torn rocketplane fin outside—in the same wreck, maybe? Well if the wreckage had anything to do with the name of the place and the fact that the owner was supposed to be a retired pilot, this guy behind the bar was so crazy-mad-looking Blake was not about to ask.

  When he got his beer he tried to find a corner where he could stand out of the flow of the crowd. He kept his elbows in and his beer at chest level.

  Yevgeny was supposed to meet him, having promised to do a bit of job scouting for him. Blake wasn’t really all that eager to get a job, but he’d just recognized three faces, the two men and the woman from Nevski Place who’d jumped him, and he wished Yevgeny would hurry. He didn’t want to have to repeat his flimsy story again. He’d dribbled out bits of the plumber business here and there, although he’d been forced to improvise, shifting the background of his employment from Mars Station to Port Hesperus.

  He moved along the bar, waiting for something to happen. The men closest to him were yelling at each other over the music.

  “…bust the PWG. They think they can make it bad enough to make us walk.”

  “What good does that do ’em?”

  “When we get hungry they invite the STW in. We have to sign or starve.” The speaker’s creased and sun-blackened face seemed to belong on a much bigger man, but this was a long-time resident of Mars, with the light build of an old-timer.

  His pale opponent still wore a lot of extra one-gee fat. “Noble’s never gonna talk to those crooks in the STW. His ass is too tight.”

  “Noble’s not the saint you think he is,” a third guy put in.

  “I didn’t say he was a saint, I said…”

  “Noble’s the biggest capitalist on the planet. He doesn’t give a damn about the PWG or the STW. He’s out to bust the MTP.”

  “That’s the dumbest theory I every heard…”

  The beery debaters confirmed what Blake had already picked up in a couple of hours of scrounging around the shuttleport. The local Pipeline Workers Guild was under siege; the huge Space Transportation Workers union, one of the first workers’ consortiums to extend its influence beyond Earth, was trying to swallow it up. According to some barstool analysts, the entrepreneurs who ran the private businesses on Mars wouldn’t mind seeing the PWG, tinged as it was by old-style syndicalism, broken once and for all, even if that meant cutting a deal with the corrupt STW. Others claimed that the real aim of laissez-faire capitalists like Noble was to undermine the Mars Terraforming Project—of which Noble himself was a board member.

  “What’s a waterworks for?” The pale one was pressing his case. “It’s for people. For houses, industry, development. And who’s stopping development? The MTP…”

  “Man, have you got it backwards! The project is developing the whole planet … the project is contracting with Noble for the pipeline! So what would he have to gain…?”

  “That kind of development is too real. The MTP measures development in centuries—and meanwhile don’t disturb the fossils, all that crap. Look, friend, they say capital accumulates in the long term. Maybe, but where it comes from in the first place is short-term scams. What Noble and the rest of the honkers are looking for is a land rush…”

  Too much political theory in the absence of fact made Blake’s head spin. He sidled further along the bar and tuned in another high-volume conversation.

  “…a coupla’ months ago they got a case of cyclines. Last month half a metric tonne of copper wire…”

  “Merde…”

  “You’re not kidding. And a week before that, a crate of survey rockets.”

  “Penetrators?” The questioner was a tiny brunette whose brown hair fell in straight bangs to her heavy brows.

  “Three to a crate.” Her friend was a tall sandy blonde whose eyes shifted to catch Blakes’s.

  “That’s in my department. How come I never heard that?” the brunette demanded.

  “Nobody reported it. I came across it in manifests and my supervisor said to keep my mouth shut. I think the company wants to keep it quiet.”

  “Why?”

  “So other people don’t get ideas, I guess.” The blonde studied Blake while sucking her beer and, in a gesture that was at once crude and oddly delicate, wiped her mouth with her thumb.

  “Who’s doing it?” The brunette was persistent. “I mean, what would you want with a crate of penetrators?”

  “Depends on how desperate I was,” the blonde said, still watching Blake—

  —who decided it would be a good idea to sidle back the way he’d just sidled from.

  “Mike! Mike Mycroft! Tovarishch!” Yevgeny’s baritone cut through the shouting and the whistle and mud of the synthekord music, and for an instant Blake saw every eye in the house flicking his way again.

  So much for establishing an identity.

  He grinned as Yevgeny plowed toward him. He hadn’t figured out exactly what Yevgeny did for the union, but it was something important: a path was opening before him through the packed bodies. The big man had his right arm around a slender woman’s shoulders and was crushing her affectionately against his ribs. “Look who I brought to see you,” Yevgeny roared, with a wink that would have done
credit to Long John Silver. “Lydia, here is my good friend I have been telling you about so much…”

  Big brown eyes, bold eyebrows, high cheekbones and a generous mouth, long blond hair tied in a practical knot at the nape of her neck—what was that name again?

  “Mike, here is Lydia Zeromski, whose praises you have been hearing from me. We are lucky to have her with us. She is to leave tomorrow, but had delay. She will be gone soon, though.”

  Actually Yevgeny had mentioned Lydia Zeromski once, while reeling off a list of currently unattached women he should keep an eye out for, but Blake knew very well who she was.

  He went along with the gag. “Nice to meet you.” He smiled his most charming smile at Lydia and got back a stare that went straight to the back of his head.

  “Sure,” she said, shifting her penetrating gaze to look past him at the wall.

  From Ellen’s files, Blake knew that the man Lydia had supposedly been in love with was one of the victims who had been murdered two weeks earlier. It was a bit early to expect her to have recovered her cheerful disposition—even if she’d killed him herself.

  “Mike, very best of news,” Yevgeny said, turning back from the bar with two sweating beer bottles in his wide hands. He handed one to Lydia. “Mm,” he said to Blake, meaning wait, and poured half of the other down his throat. “Ahh … news! You have job, my friend!”

  “I have job … a job?”

  “Grade eight mechanic, at pipeline head. Even though you are not of our union, I was able to arrange you to enter at appropriate level.”

  “Yevgeny, not that I’m not grateful, but I’m already a grade six plumber. A grade eight mechanic’s a swabber, a gofer…”

  “Be glad you don’t have to enter as apprentice, tovarishch, according to strict interpretation of bylaws. Also, because I pull strings, no written exam for you. Start day after tomorrow.”

  “Day after tomorrow!?”

  “Report eight in the morning at waterworks motor pool. Crummy leaves for Tharsis at eight-thirty sharp.”

  Blake stared at the big grinning Russian for several seconds before he found his voice. “What’s a crummy?” he croaked.

  “Personnel carrier,” said Yevgeny. “Ten of you in back. Will be four days on road. Food is standard spacepak—well, almost. Don’t worry, tovarishch! Is job, eh? And good job! You save much money—no place to spend it!” Yevgeny’s laughter was a bark. “Have one more beer from me.”

  Blake looked at Lydia, who seemed to be profoundly absorbed by one of the bright senseless videoplates on the stainless steel wall. “How long does it take you, the run to the pipeline head?” he asked.

  “Three days,” she said, without looking at him.

  “All by yourself?”

  “Usually we do it in convoy. This trip I’m doing it alone.”

  “Doesn’t anybody ever go with you?”

  “Never.” She turned to him. “Hardly ever. Only when the honkers make me take him.”

  PART

  2

  PEOPLE

  WHO DIE

  IN GLASS HOUSES

  5

  “Inspector Troy reporting, Lieutenant.” Sparta threw a neat salute at the man behind the steel desk in the tiny cubicle.

  Polanyi, the local chief, was a pudgy fellow with pale skin and an officious manner, a newcomer to his job and at most five years her senior. “Sit down, Inspector Troy.”

  She didn’t really want to sit, but she had to let him play his role. She took the steel chair facing his desk.

  He peered down at the flatscreen on his desk. “We have everything you requested, I think. Our people have been on it full time.”

  “You know what I really want, don’t you?”

  “I beg your pardon?” He looked up.

  She smiled, trying to reassure him. “I want you to tell me you don’t need me. Then I can go home.”

  His smile was thin. “I think we do need you, though. You’ve made quite a reputation for yourself in just the few…”

  “Lieutenant, excuse me, but I start itching when people read my resume out loud. I think it’s hives.”

  He seemed to relax a little. “My point is, maybe some of your famous luck will rub off.” He shoved the desktop flatscreen toward her. “While you’ve been en route we’ve conducted a couple of hundred interviews, anyone who could have been in the neighborhood at the time of the robbery and murders. We even managed to account for most of the tourists.” He and his people had done their work by the book, and he wanted her to know it. “The three locals we named earlier are still on the list. They had opportunity, anyway. Motive…”

  “Let’s not be too concerned about motive for now.”

  “I take it you’re referring to the connection with the sabotage of the other Culture X materials.”

  “I mean that if we develop the means, the motive will follow,” she said, quoting from the manual.

  Lieutenant Polanyi nodded. He liked things by the book; what he didn’t realize was that Sparta knew the motive behind the motive and had no intention of sharing her knowledge with Space Board functionaries like him.

  “What’s your unit’s relationship to the local patrol force, Lieutenant?”

  “The patrol force does what it can to keep the peace, and we handle anything that gets complicated.”

  “Such as?”

  “Black market, that takes up a lot of our time. Drug smuggling is a problem. Occasionally we see contraband items of artistic, historical, or cultural value. Also there are labor questions—this so-called socialist government seems to have had difficulty adjusting to the notion of unions—but short of sabotage or financial finagling, we let the patrollers handle the brawls between the workers and the state. Or the corporations. Whichever.” The state and the corporation were evidently equivalent concepts to Lieutenant Polanyi; in that, he was a typical Euro-American, a typical good soldier of the Space Board, willing to do what he was told wherever he was posted.

  Sparta glanced at the graphic display on the flatscreen and slid quickly through a few screensful of data. She pushed it back to him and said, “I’ll study this later.” When she got some privacy she could tap the system memory and absorb what she needed in a few seconds, rather than slog through hundreds of pages of police prose. “Right now I’m still vague on the geography.”

  “I have a model of the crime scene right here.” He took a holo unit from the shelf behind him and set it on the desk.

  “Good, bring it with you. Let’s look at the real place first.” She stood abruptly.

  Polanyi was taken by surprise, but jumped up quickly. “Sounds like a good idea,” he said heartily, as if he’d been just about to suggest it himself.

  They walked through the busy halls of the Council of Worlds executive building, where all the administrative functions of Mars that couldn’t be handled from Mars Station were centered. They passed a courtroom and a library. Glowing signs pointed to the detention center, the clinic, the cafeteria. Through the glass walls Sparta could see people moving, talking, communing with their computers; through the thin green floors and ceilings she could see even more people.

  She remembered a toy she’d played with once, a plastic maze made of stacked sheets of clear plastic; the objective was to roll a steel ball bearing around and down through the whole stack—through each of the single bearing-sized holes in each deck. She wondered how easily she could find her way down through this vertical maze at night, unless she already knew it well.

  A few steps through a busy, echoing connecting tube brought them into Town Hall. All of Mars wasn’t big enough to require two jails, two well-equipped clinics, two master libraries, so Labyrinth City’s Town Hall held only offices.

  With one exception.

  She stopped inside a dome of clear green glass. People brushed by on both sides, their heels clicking on the glass floor, some wearing pressure suits, others in indoor clothes, but with their pressure suit bags slung easily over their shoulders.

>   Sparta looked around, intrigued. The architecture was Palladian inspired but stretched in the vertical dimension; here again the building material was almost all glass. The glass dome was perhaps thirteen meters high and six meters across, cast in a single bell-shaped paraboloid; arches on four sides of the central dome led into vaulted corridors, also of glass, through one of which they’d just come. The other wings could vaguely be seen through the glass walls, although with the increasing thickness and distortion, it was rather like looking into deep green water. But overhead, where the thickness was minimal, the roof was transparent. The improbably high sandstone ceiling of the cave in which the upper town nestled was clearly visible.

  “The glass is so clear,” Sparta said, studying the dome. “I’d have thought that your infamous sand storms would have etched it to translucence.”

  “Martian dust isn’t like Earth sand,” Polanyi said. “The individual grains are more like clay particles, only a thousandth the size of typical terrestrial sand. They tend to polish the glass rather than etch it.”

  Her neck was still craned back. “Dust carved that arch, it looks to me.”

  “Maybe. Melting and freezing water did the rough work—and think how long ago. Keep in mind, most of these buildings are only about ten or twenty years old; in the long run you can polish a hole through anything.”

  Sparta lowered her gaze to the floor. “Not through that,” she said. “Wherever it is, it hasn’t been scratched.”

  Centered beneath the dome stood a display case capped with a hemispheroid of Xanthian crystal that mimicked the dome above it. There was nothing inside the case except a red velvet cushion and a hand-lettered cardboard sign: “Exhibition temporarily removed.”

  Temporarily, eh? Someone was optimistic.

  She looked around at the busy foot traffic, heard the echo of voices and footsteps. “If you wouldn’t mind waiting here a minute, Lieutenant.”