Arthur C Clarke's Venus Prime Omnibus

by Paul Preuss

  There were more cliffs below it.

  When at last Blake managed to persuade himself he would not die, he began to appreciate the scenery.

  For the next five hours they descended without incident, down a series of rock terraces three kilometers high from plateau to valley floor.

  Reaching bottom, the truck sped across a field of dunes that spread randomly across the crumbling banks of ancient superimposed gullies. Then it began slowly climbing another cliff as high as the one they had come down.

  Going up, Blake could see the road without leaning forward, but seeing it, seeing that narrow, uneven track, was almost worse than hoping something unseen but substantial was under the treads. The red rock wall was on his side of the cab now, and when he looked at Lydia all he saw was the dazzling pink sky beyond her, silhouetting her stern profile.

  They reached the top of the hogback ridge while the sun was still high. Lydia stopped the truck in the only flat place on the ridge, the middle of the road itself, and powered the turbines down.

  In silence they ate their lunches—shrink-wrapped sandwiches and apples, grown in the greenhouses of Labyrinth City—and took turns visiting the pressurized privy behind the cab, reached through the little tunnel beneath the sleeping box.

  Lydia revved up the turbines and they moved on. The road crossed the hogback and descended at a frightening pitch. Before long they came to a place where the road seemed to run straight forward off the cliff. Blake stared at the rapidly approaching edge in horror—there must be some trick to this, but he could not see it.

  “What happened to the road? Landslide?”

  “Later,” she said. She kept the truck rolling, right to the end of the road. Far below them the wrinkled and scarred valley floor stretched away under serrated cliffs.

  Lydia flicked on the dashboard videoplate that showed the view behind the aft trailer. Now he saw it: the narrow road continued on down behind them. They had passed the branch point, like the fork of a wishbone; there was no room on the cliff for even a rover to turn around.

  “We back down this stretch,” said Lydia.

  “How do you…?”

  She looked at him contemptuously. “We’re built that way, Mycroft. The trailer treads are steerable. The computer does the work. I just aim.”

  She just aims, Blake thought, by looking into a videoplate—steering forward while moving backward. He found a little wisp of cirrus cloud high in the sky and studied it intently as the marstruck crept slowly backward.

  Within a few minutes the road ended at another cliff. Lydia kept backing up until the view in the videoplate was of empty air and distant cliffs. By then, the next switchback had revealed itself in front of them. She put the treads in forward and the truck lurched ahead. Blake felt the tension gradually drain out of his neck and shoulders.

  Three more times they had to back down stretches of road with no turnarounds. Blake felt almost blithe about the last one.

  This time the terraced cliffs and talus slopes descended deeper into the Valles than they had before. When Lydia and Blake reached the floor of the mighty chasm it was all in shadow, though the sky overhead was still bright.

  They drove on an hour past sunset, their floodlights picking out the route through high dunes and scattered boulders. When they reached the edge of a geologically new lava flow—its edges of frozen splattered magma were still as sharp as broken glass, despite years, perhaps decades, of sandblasting—Lydia stopped the truck.

  “I’m getting tired. We’ll spend the night here. Do you want chili and onions or dragon stew?”

  “What’s dragon stew?”

  “Textured protein and vegetables, Asian style.”

  Not too exciting, but chili and onions in a confined space with a person who really didn’t want to know him all that well … hm. “Dragon stew sounds great.”

  She reached into the food locker, dug out a couple of plastic packages, and tossed him one. He detached the fork and spoon from its cover, unzipped the self-heating package, waited ten seconds for the dinner to heat itself, and then dug in.

  They ate dinner in silence, the same way they had eaten lunch.

  Midway through the bland meal Blake snuck a look at the taciturn woman who had now driven fifteen hours with only one break and had said perhaps a couple of hundred words in that time. Her most succinct statement, shortly after he’d launched himself upon what he thought was going to be a cheerful process of getting-to-know-you, was “I don’t want to talk.”

  Now Lydia was staring straight ahead into the starlit night, just as she had been for the whole long day. Her eyes were still fixed on the road.

  Blake settled back into the cushioned seat, easing his safety straps. Things weren’t working as he’d planned. His scheme had been to get Lydia alone, to befriend her and gain her confidence, and then to learn what had really happened between her and Darius Chin on the night of the murders.

  The name Darius Chin had never come up. Blake hadn’t even had a chance to indicate that he knew about the murders. If she were innocent—even if she weren’t—her grief and loss might have kept her from reaching out to anyone. Certainly she would find it hard to express her feelings to a stranger.

  Something nagged him. She’d agreed to give him a lift, but now he was beginning to wonder why. It wasn’t because he’d charmed her into wanting his company, that was plain enough.

  Had that been Yevgeny she’d talked to in the ’Pine? Was this just a favor to Rostov? If so, Blake’s trashing of the motor pool may have been unnecessary, even wanton…

  Lydia threw the plastic debris from her dinner into the waste bin. She shoved a loose strand of blond hair out of her eyes and unlatched her harness. She climbed over the middle seat, up into the sleeping box.

  “Here’s a pillow,” she said, tossing one down. “Sleeping sitting up’s not bad in this gravity. Not for somebody from Earth.” She yanked her lace curtains closed.

  So much for good night.

  Midnight. Mars Station was high in the sky.

  Khalid trudged across an expanse of windscoured quartz sand that glittered blue-white under the stars. The plain of whiteness extended all the way to the horizon, like the dry salt bed of an ancient sea. Blue silhouettes of distant buttes and mesas raised themselves against the sky.

  Khalid had enough food and water for two days—not very tasty food and not easy to eat, since he had to suck it through a valve in his faceplate, but high enough in energy content to keep him going. His heaviest burden was the oxygen generator on his back, a unit that made it possible for someone in a pressure suit to walk around in the open without carrying bottled air. The heart of the generator was biomechanical, a culture of tailored enzymes that broke carbon dioxide from the Martian atmosphere into oxygen and carbon, a sort of artificial forest in a backpack.

  But the reaction needed input from batteries. Khalid estimated he had less than two days’ charge remaining in his. He could never walk to Labyrinth City in two days, and he had never planned to. He was walking toward an easier landmark.

  As he walked across the crusty plain of quartz he entertained himself with mathematical exercises. How many square kilometers of desert were there in the Tharsis Plateau? Draw a diagonal across that expanse, label it the pipeline road…

  He consulted his astrolabe and checked the stars. The thing had been made for Earth, but surely there were coordinate transformations one could perform … a sphere is a sphere whether it’s called Earth or Mars, and Khalid knew his approximate position, his longitude and latitude, on this one. The position of the stars was the same for both.

  But his mind kept wandering. Was there a rational relationship between so-many-kilometers-of-sand-dunes squared and the volume of lava in the cone of Mount Ascraeus? He doubted it, but if he let his mind drift a little farther out into the glassy night, he might discover one…

  Long before the sun rose above the awesome cliffs the marstruck was climbing the rim of the Valles Marineris, winding its
way out of the colossal valley through one of its head-eroded dry tributaries, climbing the final kilometers across sliding slopes of talus before at last gaining the open desert of the Tharsis Plateau.

  Once across the Valles, Lydia and Blake had truly begun their trip. Ahead of them stretched more than 2,500 kilometers of meteorite-blasted sand, scarred with ancient lava flows, pitted with sinkholes, faulted with slumping permafrost. They journeyed into the wilderness together, a man and a woman who had nothing to say to each other.

  11

  What satellite sensors could not know with certainty was the condition of the ground beneath the visible surface of Mars. And so, two days out, driving blind in a windstorm, the track having already vanished in the blowing dust, the marstruck plunged into an enormous sinkhole of decayed permafrost.

  The tractor went straight in and automatically decoupled from the trailers behind it, leaving the first of the two flatbeds dangling half over the edge of the hole, its cargo of pipe threatening to spill forward. Meanwhile, nimble as a gymnast, the big computer-stabilized tractor had landed on an uneven ledge of ice with its forward treads. Lydia and Blake found themselves staring down from their safety harness into depths of dirty ice.

  The dashboard lit up yellow in front of her, and Lydia hit the switches that powered the turbines down and put the tractor’s systems on battery.

  “We’ve got a problem,” she said.

  “If you say so.”

  For the first time in two days she looked him in the eye, both of them hanging there in their harnesses, and he thought she came very close to smiling.

  They sealed their pressure suits and climbed out of the cab and up the sides of the slanted tractor to the edge of the hole. The wind at the surface wasn’t quite strong enough to knock them off their feet. They couldn’t see each other very well in the blowing dust, but they had the commlink between their suits, and Lydia was good at giving orders.

  “Forward tool locker, your side. Slide the shackle left and down. Inside on the left you’ll find a dozen rock bolts, about a meter long. Yellow barrels with red tags.”

  “I see ’em.”

  “Take out three. Mount one forward of the sinkhole on your side. I’ll do the same on mine. Then we’ll put two out to the sides and two aft. Try to find good rock, sandstone. Otherwise, sound ice.”

  “Will do.” Blake was as good at following orders as Lydia was at giving them, particularly when they made excellent sense.

  They found solid rock forward of the tractor, and prepared to sink the explosive anchors.

  “Have you used these?” she asked.

  “Looks easy.”

  “Easy to blow your head off.”

  “I’ll be careful.” He ripped off the tag, pulled the pin, and stepped away. Seconds later the recoilless charge spewed fire and sank the steel shaft deep into the stone.

  On her side of the truck Lydia was doing the same. With the forward bolts in place, they looked for dependable anchorage to the sides and rear. They had to go farther for it, but when they found good rock they were still within range of the truck’s winch cables.

  “What’s the plan?” Blake asked.

  “Cable sling. We’re going to lift the whole thing out of the hole till it’s hanging on the cables, then let it pull itself forward on the cables until it gets its treads on the ground. Computer knows this trick pretty well—we’ve done it a few times already—it will keep the tension adjusted.”

  “All by itself?”

  “More or less. I ride with the truck. You stand clear, in case.”

  With all cables payed out and taut, the four winches began to wrap in synchrony. Lydia was leaning half her body out of the cab, checking the tension on the lines. The front of the big tractor came up slowly until the whole mass of it was suspended over the sinkhole on a net of fine cables. Then the tractor began to inch its way across the open pit, trembling toward the edge.

  Suddenly and silently the left rear cable anchor let go, like a broken guitar string—what had looked liked good rock holding its anchor was fractured. For a moment Blake thought maybe it wouldn’t matter, because the tractor already had its front treads half on the dirt and the three good lines that were left could carry the tractor’s mass.

  But the loose cable whipped into the jury-rigged lashing of the pipe load on the first flatbed and sliced through it, and the pipe came loose and spilled slowly into the hole. The enormous mass of it cut through two of the remaining cables.

  Things fall a little slower on Mars and even the inevitable comes on a like a flood of molasses. Standing-by where he was there was nothing Blake could to do stop the tumbling rack of pipe, but he had time to leap onto the front right tread and reach up to the door of the bubble cab even as Lydia tried to get through it. He grabbed her outstretched arm and held on as she came out. Just before the sliding pipes sliced the cab door off, the two of them made the desperate leap to high ground.

  They lay there in the blowing dust, face down and side by side. Their suits still had pressure. Neither of them was hurt.

  “Now we’ve got a problem,” he said.

  “Very funny.”

  But it was still pretty much a routine problem. They spent some hours winching the loose pipe out of the hole and stacking it back on the flatbed. They rerigged the tractor, and on the second try the cable scheme worked; the tractor climbed back onto solid ground.

  It wasn’t until the day was ending and the Martian sun was setting in the western desert that they got the whole outfit reloaded and recinched, and got the detached cab door patched with big olive-drab splotches of quicksetting polymer and put back on its hinges. It was nightfall by the time Lydia pronounced the rig ready to roll.

  “Now?”

  “Don’t be silly, Mycroft, I’m not a masochist. What do you want for dinner, chili and onions or, let’s see here … chili and onions?”

  “Who does the shopping for these trips?” he asked.

  “Chili and onions it is,” she said, tossing him a plastic tray. They pulled the tabs and for a few minutes they ate in silence.

  “You came through on that,” she said while she ate. It wasn’t thanks, exactly, but it was an acknowledgment.

  “Self-interest,” he said. “Without you, I’d be stuck.”

  “No you wouldn’t. The whole planet knows where we are. I don’t think you did it just to save your skin.”

  “So I’m a bleeding heart.”

  “Sure.” She looked at him with eyes full of doubt and suspicion. “What do you want from me, Mycroft?”

  “What I’ve got—a ride.”

  “And what?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe an idea of what I’ve gotten myself into. What’s it like here? On Mars, I mean. You’re an old-timer by Martian standards. Excuse me, not old. I meant…”

  “I’m not old, but I’m a bitch, Mycroft. So’s life on Mars. It’s worth living anyway. We’re building a whole planet out of dead sand. Even the bosses are taking a chance.”

  “The bosses? You mean like Noble?”

  “Oh, they’ve got their stashes back on Earth if things go wrong—still, they’re taking their chances along with the rest of us.”

  “Doesn’t sound like a good union member talking,” he said.

  “What union you in?” she asked sharply.

  “Yours,” he said, “thanks to Yevgeny.”

  “Right enough. In this local we like people who play our game our way. We get rid of the ones who don’t.”

  What was that about? “I like Yevgeny.”

  “Yeah? Well, I love him,” she said passionately. “Even though he’s an ugly big S.O.B., I love him for what he’s done.”

  “Love?”

  She looked at him with eyes that were red-rimmed with fatigue. “Not that kind.”

  “You loved Darius Chin, didn’t you?”

  Lydia’s expression hardened.

  “…I mean, that’s what I’ve heard around,” he finished lamely.

&nb
sp; Lydia threw the remains of her dinner in the disposal chute and turned to climb into the sleeping box. “Tomorrow we’ll make up for lost time,” she said.

  She climbed into the box without looking at him. A second later the spare pillow dropped lazily toward him through the lace curtains.

  Darkness.

  Somewhere in the freezing dark Sparta was sleeping. Her head throbbed with waves of pain, pain that brought whirling, spinning, spiraling patterns of dark color to her vision and a high-pitched ringing to her ears. Something shadowy and desperate flitted by in the sucking spirals, something rich in meaning that continually escaped her because she could not concentrate.

  She could not concentrate because of the pain.

  Worse than the pain in her head was the pain in her belly. Her diaphragm was a band of fire, clenching her abdomen. Her dreams filled with blood now, and with wet, staring eyes and glistening textures that could have been fur or hair or scales or feathers. She clawed helplessly at her rib cage, unable to reach the gnawing creature within.

  She screamed, and screamed again…

  12

  Hard light poured into Sparta’s eyes, glistening like the tracks of daylight meteors across the pink sky. It was morning. The light was from the far yellow sun. The meteor tracks were tiny scratches in the plastic canopy of the marsplane.

  She was half sitting, held erect by her harness, and her head was resting awkwardly on her shoulder. She raised it—it felt like a cannon ball on the wilted stalk of her neck—but while the cramped muscles of her shoulders protested, she found that much of the pain in her head had been dream pain. The burning in her stomach had subsided until it was not much worse than the aftermath of a spicy dinner. Difference was, she was hungry.

  She moved her head cautiously, taking in her surroundings, looking at the canopy under which she sat, perched wingless on a sand-dusted lava slope. She was alone. The instrument screens were cold and dead, and the position of the sun in the clear sky told her no more than that it was morning somewhere on Mars.