Arthur C Clarke's Venus Prime Omnibus

by Paul Preuss

  “Dare didn’t want to talk. He apologized for the way he’d been acting, said he’d talk to me later but he couldn’t right then. There was something about the other guy, Morland. He talked as if something about the guy wasn’t right. Anyway, he practically threw me out.”

  “And you went?”

  “Sure, what else? I sealed up and went outside. I hung around Town Hall awhile, but I couldn’t see Dare inside.” She looked at Khalid and almost said something, but changed her mind. Did he know she’d seen him that night, at that moment?

  Lydia sighed. “Anyway, I went out to the port and drank a lot of beer at the ’Pine. I’d been there half an hour or so when somebody told me the news.”

  “Do you remember what Dare Chin had against Morland?”

  “No. He wouldn’t say.” She stared out at the packed dunes, crosslit by the setting sun. “I’d better concentrate on my driving.”

  Blake nodded. The turbines rose another octave in pitch and the tractor leaped ahead, charging the dunes.

  Khalid turned thoughtfully to Blake. “Do you know anything about this man Morland?”

  “Not a thing, except the official resume. I don’t even know what he looks like.”

  “He was an unpleasant person. An arrogant and insincere character. He had a taste for the high life. A heavy drinker.”

  “Is that prejudice talking, Khalid?”

  “You know me better. I have no objection to the moderate use of alcohol, although I do not use it myself. Morland, however, was an addict. And something else, my friend…”

  “Yes?”

  “I am not convinced that Morland was really the expert on Culture X that he pretended to be. He played his role with great panache—indeed made a spectacle of it…”

  “His role?”

  “The role of a typical xenoarchaeologist concerned for the preservation of the natural treasures of Mars. Yet when I made reference to certain specific finds—anything that did not directly concern the Martian plaque—his replies were vague.”

  “You think he wasn’t an archaeologist?”

  “He was an archaeologist, but his interest in Culture X was superficial. Or so it seemed to me.”

  “A new interest for him, perhaps.”

  “Perhaps,” said Khalid. “Do you know what killed him?”

  “Sure, it’s common knowledge, isn’t it? He was shot.”

  “With…?”

  “A target pistol, a twenty-two.”

  “Did you know that Morland bragged of being an excellent pistol shot?”

  “Interesting. Does Ellen know that?”

  “Our conversation was interrupted…” Khalid paused and abruptly changed the subject. “How far away are we from the target area?” he asked Lydia.

  “From the estimated position you gave us, we’re still fifty kilometers away,” she said. “You can read it on the screens.”

  “She’s already been out there two days,” Blake said.

  “She’ll be all right, Blake,” Khalid said.

  “I wish I was as much of an optimist as you.”

  “If she regained consciousness, she’ll be all right.”

  Maybe she was all right. They wouldn’t know right away.

  Under moonlight, Blake and Khalid stood on the saddle between the lava cones. The wind had been light all day. Sparta’s footprints, and the depressions where the wings and fuselage had rested, were still visible in the sand-dusted ash.

  “She is an ingenious person,” said Khalid.

  “Lucky, too,” said Blake.

  “I’m sure she will be safe.”

  They avoided each other’s gaze as they trudged back to the tractor. Lydia had kept the turbines turning.

  PART

  4

  PROTT’S

  LAST CHIP

  14

  Noon in Labyrinth City. The sun was high and the wind was strong out of the west.

  The lost marsplane sailed in gracefully and kissed the sandy runway. It rolled a few meters to a stop in front of the Terraforming Project’s hangar. Within moments, ground crew in pressure suits were swarming over it. Sparta pointed at her helmet and shook her head to indicate she had no radio communication. The hangar’s outer doors slowly opened and the crew dragged the plane out of the wind.

  Inside, Sparta climbed from the cockpit and ran in loping strides across the expanse of hangar floor. Inside the lock of the ready room, she yanked her faceplate open.

  “Khalid is somewhere in the desert,” she said to the startled operations officer behind the counter. “We’ve got to go after him—he’s been out for more than three days. I’ll show you where he left the plane.”

  “Dr. Sayeed is safe, Inspector,” the ops officer replied, relaxing a bit. She said, “He was picked up yesterday by a marstruck going to the pipeline head. He told us what happened.”

  “So he did find help,” Sparta murmured.

  “The people in the truck went looking for you and found that you’d already left.”

  Sparta took a moment to pull her helmet all the way off. “Frankly, I didn’t think he could make it.”

  “You did the right thing. But if we were in the habit of giving out medals, Khalid would get one. We’ll just throw him a party when he gets back.” The woman smiled at Sparta. “You’re invited.”

  “Thanks. Accepted with pleasure.”

  The officer had been studying Sparta intently. “We’ve heard stories about your luck, Inspector Troy. What you did, most of us would have said was impossible—over two thousand kilometers without holo, without radio link, without even a compass—and three days ago you’d never flown one of these things at all.”

  Sparta shrugged. “I’ve got a knack for machines,” she said huskily.

  “Some knack. A knack for navigation, too.”

  “No, just a good memory. I’ve been studying maps of Mars for the last two weeks.”

  “I’ve been studying maps of Mars most of my adult life. I couldn’t have done what you did.”

  “Don’t underestimate yourself,” Sparta said irritably. “It’s amazing what you can do when you have to—look at Khalid.” She fiddled with her suit straps. “Well—I’ve got rather pressing business. Do you need me here?”

  A clerk who had been staring at her in admiring awe now suddenly guffawed. The ops officer grinned and pointed at a flatscreen. “See all the blanks on that incident report? If I let you go before they’re all filled in, the locals are liable to arrest me.”

  Sparta sighed. “All right.”

  The pressure lock had been constantly popping and sighing; the hangar office was crowded with mechanics and other men and women from the ground crew who were eager to get a look at the luckiest woman on three planets.

  “What’s the damage assessment?” the ops officer asked one of the men who’d just entered.

  “Every unshielded electronic system in the thing is fried, like Dr. Sayeed reported,” the man replied. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

  “Dr. Sayeed said he found something in the autopilot,” the ops officer told Sparta. “A steel sphere about thirty millimeters in diameter. He took it with him.”

  “It’s a pulse bomb,” Sparta said.

  “What’s a pulse bomb?”

  “A very expensive device designed to do just exactly what it did—destroy microcircuitry. Somebody wanted the plane to disappear off the screens, to lose itself in the desert and never be seen again.” And that somebody knows how I’m made and wanted to give me a severe tummy ache, she thought, but she kept it to herself.

  “So, this blank that says ’cause of incident’—what do I put in there? Sabotage?”

  “Yes.”

  “Mr. Prott has been trying to reach you for two days,” said the breathless young man at the hotel desk.

  “Really?” Sparta thought that a bit odd. “I’ve been away.”

  “He hopes you will join him for dinner. Perhaps tonight?”

  Sparta needed to see Prott, to
o, but dinner? Her stomach leaped. The fire in her belly was banked but not dead. “Tonight will be fine.”

  “At six-thirty? Mr. Prott will meet you in the Phoenix Lounge for an aperitif.”

  She was too weary to argue. What she needed above all was sleep. “All right.”

  She pulled the drapes closed and turned off the lights. She stripped off her pressure suit and all her clothes and fell facedown onto the soft bed. Within seconds she was unconscious.

  Two hours later she forced herself awake. Dazed and groggy, she dressed herself in her one of her two outfits of civilian clothes. They did not soften her appearance. While she had yet to go into battle in real armor, the yellow net stuff the Space Board issued in case of a fire fight, her slick black pants, tight black top, and high-collared shiny white tunic were armor enough for the social world; they broadcast a blunt message: noli me tangere.

  As she sealed the seam of her tunic, the fire under her breastbone seared her again, so severely that she cried out and stumbled to the bed. Within half a minute she knew she could not ignore the persistent attack. She leaned over and reached for the bedside commlink. “I need to talk to somebody at the hospital.”

  The ruptured structures in her abdomen were poisoning her. Whatever the risk to her safety, she had to get help from outside.

  “You say this was tissue replacement for trauma?” The doctor was peering at a three-dimensional graphic reproduction of Sparta’s guts, concentrating his attention on the dense layers of foreign material spread beneath her diaphragm.

  “That’s what I told you, didn’t I?” Sparta had spent a lot of time in clinics and hospitals, and although they were hardly the torture chambers they’d been a mere century before, she hated them.

  “What sort of trauma?”

  “I was in a ‘ped accident ten years ago. I was sixteen. A drunk driver ran me into a light pole.”

  “Your abdomen was punctured?”

  “I don’t know that. All I know for sure is that some of my ribs were crushed.”

  “Yeah. You’ve got a big staple right in your sternum. Not exactly elegant work, but at least it doesn’t show.”

  Sparta grunted. Maybe she wasn’t the nicest patient a doctor might wish for, but this young doctor needed to brush up on his bedside manner, and as for the staple in her sternum, it was elegant enough considered as a microwave oscillator, which is what it really was.

  “Well, I don’t know what the hell these people had in mind, but whatever it was it wasn’t such a bright idea,” said the doctor. “That stuff is deteriorating. Your pH is so low it’s practically falling off the scale—no wonder you’re complaining of stomach aches.”

  “What can you do?”

  “Best thing would be to excise it. We can replace it with modern tissue grafts, if you really need them. Probably you don’t. I’d guess your abdominal structures have already healed themselves. In fact you look in damn good shape except for that foreign gook in there.”

  “No operation,” she said. “I don’t have the time.”

  “I’m telling you what you’re going to have to face sooner or later. For now we can give you local implants to balance the pH.”

  “Good, let’s do it.”

  “But I want you back here within two days. You’ve got a complex internal environment. I don’t feel comfortable letting it go unattended.”

  “Whatever you say.”

  The procedure to insert the subcutaneous implants took ten minutes. When it was over Sparta shivered as she closed her tunic. She tightened the plastic sheath of her jacket around her torso and left the clinic, feeling an irrational attack of loneliness.

  Irrational, or merely submerged? As she walked along the wide, green-glass pressure tube that led to the hotel she tried to bring to consciousness a thought, a feeling, that was playing at the edge of her mind.

  There was no doubt her implanted polymer batteries were ruptured; she’d been able to interpret the scan with less confusion than the doctor, who didn’t know what he was seeing. The structures were not natural tissue; they would not heal themselves; they were long dead, long gone. They had never been truly alive.

  She should have the stuff removed, as the doctor urged. Those gooey battery implants were part of what she resented most about what had been done to her; they were part of what made her other than human, a prisoner of what others had wanted to do with her body.

  But lately she had begun to master the arcane power they conferred upon her, the ability to beam radio signals within a wide band of frequencies, which she could use—among other things—to control remote machinery. Action at a distance. Some part of her wanted not to remove the batteries but to have them repaired, replaced.

  She was unsettled to recognize this temptation in herself—instead of resentment, a desire—to be more than human. Some controlling, power-seeking part of her did not wish to relinquish the ability to command the material world by fiat, by merely taking thought.

  But at the cost of her humanity itself?

  This was not the time for these thoughts. She snugged her plastic armor about her and walked faster toward the hotel.

  “Mr. Prott? I’m afraid he’s not here just yet. I’ll be happy to show you to a table.”

  She looked the place over. The far wall was a sweep of hardened glass looking out upon the Labyrinth, its otherwise sublime view spoiled by reflections. To her right was a long glass bar and glass tables, lighting the customers greenly from below. To the left, in a corner under spotlights, a woman with stiff black hair sat at a synthekord keyboard, crooning smoky old favorites in a fetchingly hoarse voice. The enchanting Kathy.

  “All right,” said Sparta.

  The waiter took her to a glowing glass table for two with a good view of the entertainment and the scenery. When he asked what she wanted to drink she said water.

  She endured the cool and curious glances of the other patrons while she waited for Prott. Approximately every two minutes the waiter reappeared, inquiring if she would care for something else. A drink from the bar? A glass of wine? Another glass of water, perhaps? Would she like to see the hors d’oeuvres tray? Nothing, mademoiselle? You are sure? Certainly…

  Ten minutes passed this way, and the next time a waiter descended on her she asked for a house-phone link. The waiter brought it and Sparta keyed the number of Prott’s office.

  Prott’s robot answered and offered to take a message. She keyed off. Next she keyed Prott’s suite of rooms in the hotel. Another recording machine answered. She keyed off.

  Prott was not the sort to put a guest in the spotlight and then embarrass her. That could be bad for the hotel’s image. If Prott were anything like the ambitious and slightly paranoid middle manager he appeared to be, unpleasantness would be the very last thing he would wish on anybody in his vicinity.

  “Excuse me, I’ve left something in my room. When Mr. Prott arrives, please tell him I’ll be back within a few moments.”

  “But of course, mademoiselle.” The steward who heard this bowed deeply. Sparta did not miss the amused contempt that lurked behind his carefully neutral mask.

  She was past the simple lock of Prott’s outer office in as much time it took for her to sense its magnetic fields.

  She did not turn on the light. The flatscreen on his assistant’s desk still glowed faintly from the day’s use, warm in the infrared. No normal eye would have noticed the glow, but Sparta’s read the last image readily. Nothing of interest, only a routine manifest of rooms and reservations. She had already ransacked the hotel’s computer, of which this unit was a terminal.

  No one had been in the room for half an hour or more. There were no glowing footprints on the floor, no glowing handprints on the walls.

  She listened…

  The air ducts and the solid walls brought her the gossip and complaints of the hotel’s staff, the murmurs and cries and bored chatter of its guests, the rattle and thrum of its mechanical innards; she clearly heard the whisper of the outside wi
nd.

  She sniffed the air, analyzing the chemical traces that lingered: strongest was the alcohol and perfume of Prott’s cologne, but through the air vents she could smell kitchen grease, burned coffee, germicide, soap, cleaning fluid, stale booze, tobacco smoke—the concentrated essence of hotel.

  And faint within it, a subtler essence. Something tugged at the edge of her consciousness, a presence, distant but menacing…

  Sparta reached for the door of Prott’s inner office. The lock was disguised as a standard magnetic type with an alphanumeric pad identical to the lock on the outer office. But the alphanumerics were dummies; the lock was actually keyed to its programmer’s fingerprints in the infrared. Only a precise pattern of warm and cool fingerprints ridges on the pad, his fingerprints, would open the lock.

  Sparta did not have Prott’s fingerprints in her memory, but she had the means to reconstruct them.

  Every human touch is unique; the skin secretes a mixture of oils and acids that ultimately depends on the genetic makeup of the individual—shared only in the case of identical twins or other clones. Sparta’s senses of touch and smell, combined with the processes of her artificial neural structures, analyzed Prott’s unique chemical fingerprints and produced a mental map of the whorls and spirals of his most recent touch on the pads—two fingers and the side of a thumb.

  Reproducing the prints was trickier. It needed warmth, precision, and speed. No human could wield a tool freehand with the precision required to draw another human’s fingerprint to exact scale, but Sparta was not quite human. The dense soul’s eye beneath her forehead was orders of magnitude more capacious than the control computers of the world’s most sophisticated industrial robots.

  And for warmth she needed only her own hand wrapped around a steel paperclip. Heating it in her palm, she used the curve of the clip as a stylus to reproduce Prott’s latent prints with lithographic accuracy, laying the copies lightly and swiftly on top of the originals. Then gentle pressure…