Arthur C Clarke's Venus Prime Omnibus

by Paul Preuss

  “You!”

  “She needs to get out here. Her life could depend on it.” The man who stood in the darkness had blue eyes that glittered in his dark face. His iron gray hair was cut to within a few millimeters of his scalp, and he wore the dress-blue uniform of a full commander of the Board of Space Patrol.

  “No.”

  “I’m going to take the time to reason with you, Blake…”

  “What a favor,” Blake said hotly.

  “…for two or three minutes. Did you see what they pulled out of her?”

  “I… I saw something, I don’t know what.”

  “You know she’s not like other people.”

  “It doesn’t matter. What she needs is time to get well.”

  “She’s vulnerable here. We’re moving her off Mars. The records are going to show that Inspector Troy had a routine appendectomy, spent the usual eight-hour recovery period in hospital, and walked happily away. That’s what the doctors are going to say, too.”

  Blake’s face darkened. “You’ve got argument down to a fine science, Commander—do it your way or else.”

  “I’ve given you choices before. Think you made a mistake to trust me?”

  Blake hesitated. “Maybe not in Paris.”

  “I promised I’d get you to her and I did. A lot of lives were saved because of it. Trust me again, Blake.”

  “What do you care?” Blake shrugged in frustration. “We both know I can’t stop you. But I’m staying with her.”

  They got her out of town in a sealed van, taking a route that the tourists in Labyrinth City never saw, through the utility tunnel to the shuttleport. They made a quick, silent transfer to the cabin of a sleek spaceplane. In deference to Ellen, the trajectory was low and slow, with minimal gees applied over a long boost out of the thin atmosphere, finally achieving the orbit of Mars Station.

  But the plane didn’t dock with the station. A gleaming white cutter with the blue band and gold star of the Board of Space Control rode “at anchor” half a kilometer from the giant space station’s star-side docking bay. As the spaceplane sidled up to it on maneuvering jets, a pressure tube snaked out from the cutter’s main hatch and slammed tight over the spaceplane’s airlock.

  Ellen and Blake and the commander were the only people who went through the tube. The cutter’s crew made them secure; countdown took half an hour. Ellen slept through it all.

  Just before the cutter lifted from orbit, Blake overcame his resentment enough to ask the commander a question. “Where are we going?”

  “Earth,” he said.

  “Where on Earth?”

  “For reasons you’ll soon figure out, I’m not telling you.”

  PART

  1

  THE WRECK

  OF A QUEEN

  1

  They stood on a precipice of dark rock above a wide river. The air was cold and the sky was clear, washed blue. The light was the color of October.

  Her hair was the color of straw, and it glowed in the October light; her high-collared black wool coat reached from her short hair to her high boots, hiding the rest of her and absorbing all the other light that fell upon her. The blackness was relieved only by a scarf tied loosely around her throat, dark blue raw silk woven with fine stripes of red and yellow thread; her small strong hands clutched at its knotted and tasseled ends.

  She looked at the man who stood close to her with a smile so tentative and hopeful that his heart swelled and hurt him.

  “Will you be with me always?” Sparta whispered.

  “Always,” Blake said. The breeze caught his stiff auburn hair and a swatch of it fell across his forehead, shadowing his face with cool shadow, but his green eyes gleamed with warmth. “As long as you want me.”

  “I do,” she said. “I will.”

  Across the wide waters a shimmer of sunlight danced. If light had sound, they would have heard glass wind bells. Sparta took Blake’s hand and tugged. He walked beside her along the wall, holding her hand lightly, glancing back up the hill toward the big house.

  The steel king’s mansion crowned a tor above the Hudson, a chimneyed pile of basalt decorated with exotic granites and limestones from Vermont and Indiana, roofed with slate, pierced with stained-glass windows. The old freebooter who’d had the place built had made his loot in a different age; he would have been startled but not necessarily disapproving of the uses to which his estate had been put in the two centuries since.

  Clipped green lawns, damp in the October sunshine, sloped away from the house, ending at cliff’s edge and the neat border of the woods. In front, a long gravel drive meandered through the trees and looped around before the main entrance.

  Behind the stone wall that surrounded the place, hidden among the thickly clustered tree trunks and autumn foliage, were lasers, covered trenches, antiaircraft railguns…

  The gray robot limousine moved slowly up the drive, the crunch of its tires in the gravel louder than the whisper of its turbines. As it stopped, the mansion’s big doors swung open and the commander came out. When he saw the much smaller man who got out of the back seat of the car, his face wrinkled into a smile, thin but warm. “Jozsef!” He strode down the steps, hand outstretched.

  Jozsef met him halfway up the steps. “How very good to see you.” Their handshake was prelude to a quick, firm embrace.

  The two men were the same age but in every other way different. Jozsef’s tweedy suit was elbow-patched and baggy at the knees; it and his middle-European accent suggested that he was a displaced intellectual, an academic, a denizen of the classroom and the library stacks. The commander wore a plaid shirt and faded jeans that said he was most comfortable out of doors.

  “Surprised to see you in person,” said the commander. He had a faint Canadian accent, and his voice had the texture of beach stones rattling in receding surf. “But damn glad.”

  “After I analyzed the material you sent, I thought it would be good to share some of my thoughts with you personally. And I… I’ve brought a new drug.”

  “Come in.”

  “Is she inside?”

  “No, they’re both on the grounds. You want to see her?”

  “I … not yet. It would be best if she did not see the car,” Jozsef added.

  The commander spoke gruffly into his wrist unit and the robot limousine rolled off toward the garage. The men walked up the steps into the house.

  They walked down an echoing paneled hall toward the library. White-uniformed staff people nodded deferentially and moved out of their way.

  “Already three weeks since you rescued her from Mars,” said Jozsef. “Astonishing how time slips past us.”

  “Rescued?” The commander smiled. “Kidnapped is a better word. And ‘persuaded’ Redfield to come along.”

  “You didn’t bother persuading her physicians,” Jozsef remarked.

  “I didn’t much like the chief surgeon.”

  “Yes, well … however arrogant, he seems to have done a good job on her,” said Jozsef. “She seems well.”

  “In her body.”

  “Her dreams are not symptoms of illness. They are the key to all that confronts us.”

  “So you’ve explained.”

  “Once we understand what she knows—but does not know she knows—we will triumph at last.”

  “Then maybe you’ll let her know about you,” the commander suggested.

  “I look forward to that day.”

  “You know I’m with you, Jozsef.” The commander fixed the older man with a cold blue stare. “Whatever the cost.”

  Beyond the wall overlooking the river the trees grew to the cliff top. Unseen, screened by the woods below, a magneplane whistled past on the riverside track. A falcon settled in the top of a ruddy oak, carefully folding its angled wings, oblivious to the man and woman who walked a few meters away, at eye level.

  “What did you say when he asked you to join the force?”

  “What I told you. I said no.”

  “You co
uld never resist explanations.”

  “Oh, I made explanations.” He smiled. “I was born rich, I said, and it ruined me. I told him I was insubordinate by nature and disinclined to accept arbitrary discipline from a bunch of … from people not self-evidently more intelligent or more experienced or otherwise more deserving of respect than I. That I already knew all I wanted to know about combat and disguise and sabotage and a few other black arts, and that if he wanted to hire me he could hire me as a consultant anytime, but that I had no interest whatever in going through basic training—again—and putting on a funny blue suit and being paid dirt wages just to get in on his fun.”

  “That must have impressed him,” she said dryly.

  “It made my point.” He said it without bravado. “That I’m no soldier, that I’m not interested in dying or killing.”

  “My hero,” she said, pulling him closer to her side with a tug of her hand, meshing her fingers in his. “What are you interested in?”

  “You know. Old books.”

  “Besides old books?”

  He grinned. “A little noise and smoke can be fun.”

  “Besides making things go bang?”

  “I’m interested in keeping us alive,” he said.

  She glanced toward the thick copse of elms and oaks that intruded into the lawn. “Come in here with me,” she whispered, smiling. “I have an urge to live a little…”

  The library’s tall windows overlooked the morning lawn. “What will we do about him?” Jozsef turned away; he’d been watching the two young people by the wall.

  “Give him one more chance. After this morning, let him go,” the commander said. He stood at the fieldstone fireplace, warming himself at the crackling oakwood fire.

  “You said you could recruit him…”

  “I’ve tried. Mr. Redfield is his own man.” His smile was thin. “He was taught well.”

  “Is it safe to let him go?”

  “Her welfare is important to him. Of the greatest importance.”

  “He is in love with her, you mean.” Jozsef’s expression was invisible against the glare of the high window. “Does he have any idea of how she can be hurt?”

  “Do any of us?” It wasn’t cold in the high-ceilinged room, but the commander kept chafing his hands at the fire.

  “Yes, well…” Jozsef pulled at the flesh under his chin and cleared his throat. “If we let him go, he must be isolated.”

  “I’ll arrange it.” The commander’s voice was a bare whisper past the gravel in his throat.

  “Can you guarantee it?”

  “Not absolutely.” The commander turned hard blue eyes on his companion. “We’ve got limited choices, old friend. We can explain things to him, ask him to come along…”

  “We can’t tell him more than he knows already. Not even she must know.”

  “She will take the case, I think. He may not want her to.”

  “If he refuses, you know what we must…”

  “I hate these drugs of ours,” the commander said vehemently. “Hate using them. They go against the principles you taught me yourself.”

  “Kip, we are in a struggle that…”

  “A man’s own memory … a woman’s … lying. It’s worse than no memories at all.”

  For several seconds Jozsef watched the weather-beaten man who stood by a blazing fire but could not seem to warm himself. What winter was he reliving in memory?

  “Okay,” the commander said. “If he won’t join us on this … this Falcon business, I’ll isolate him.”

  Jozsef nodded and turned back to the window. The couple who’d been standing at the wall had disappeared into the trees.

  They tumbled in the autumn leaves, gasping and giggling like children. The smell of mold was as rich as a winery cave, the very smell of it intoxicating, filling her with the joy of life. Their breath steamed in the sharp air. The moment arrived, like the edge of the first rapid, when the emotion they were riding tipped into the current of their blood, and they felt not at all like children. Her dancer’s finely muscled body was pale white against the black of her coat, spread open on the leaves.

  There were microscopic cameras and microphones in the little copse, as there were everywhere on the grounds. Sparta knew they were there, although she thought Blake did not. Her eye sought one out where it glistened like a carbon crystal against the gray trunk of a tree. She stared at it over his shoulder.

  She exposed herself to those who watched and listened partly to defy them, but mostly because she loved Blake and would have him this way if they would not let her have him any other.

  Later he lay touching her, close against her, flank to flank. His skin tingled and his face was flush with a happiness he had often imagined but now knew for the first time. Her head was on his arm; his other arm hovered over her skin, close enough to feel its radiant warmth. He trailed his middle finger down the faint pink line of the scar that ran from her sternum to her navel.

  “It’s almost gone,” he said. “In another week…”

  “I’ll pass for a human being again,” she said. Her voice was flat. Her eyes stared past him, up at the colorful leaves overhead, and through them to the dark sky-vault beyond. “And then we’ll leave this place.”

  “Ellen … do you understand what’s happening?” With practice it got easier to call her Ellen, although he would always think of her as Linda, the name she was born with.

  Only Sparta thought of herself as Sparta. No one else knew her secret name, any more than a human knows the secret name of an animal. “I think the commander’s keeping his word. This is the R & R he’s been promising me for so long.”

  “R & R.” He smiled. “Very restful.” He leaned over her and kissed the corner of her swollen, perpetually parted lips. “Very recuperative. But why won’t he tell us where we are?”

  “We both know where we are—the Hendrik Hudson nature preserve. We could pinpoint the coordinates on any map.”

  “Yes, but why won’t he name the place? And why not let us come and go? The night we arrived here, after you were asleep, he told me I could leave whenever I wanted, but if I did I couldn’t come back. Why the mystery? We’re on his side.”

  “You’re sure of that,” she said—not quite a question.

  But he took it as a question, and it surprised him. “It was you…”

  “I’m sure of one thing”—she pulled him down to cover her, to feel his warm weight hiding her from the sky—“that I love you.”

  2

  “The man who proposed Kon-Tiki is Howard Falcon,” said the commander. “He will personally pilot the Jupiter probe.”

  It was the same bright morning, but no one could have known it from the surroundings—a dim, quiet basement briefing room, its walls and ceiling carpeted with the same brown wool as its floor, its only illumination leaking from brass-shaded lamps on low tables beside the leather armchairs where Sparta, Blake, and the commander nestled.

  “How did one man get that kind of power?” Blake asked.

  “Falcon is … an unusual specimen. This will explain.” The commander’s raw voice was without resonance in the slowly vanishing room … in the darkest center of which an image had begun to form, filling space with the moving landscape of Arizona’s high sagebrush plains, seen from a great altitude. “What we’ve pieced together here happened eight years ago.”

  The Queen Elizabeth was over five kilometers above the Grand Canyon, dawdling along at a comfortable 300 kilometers per hour, when from the liner’s bridge Howard Falcon spotted the camera platform closing in from the right. He had been expecting it—nothing else was cleared to fly at this altitude—but he was not too happy to have company. Although he welcomed any signs of public interest, he also wanted as much empty sky as he could get. After all, he was the first man in history to navigate a ship half a kilometer long.

  So far this first test flight had gone perfectly. Ironically enough, the only problem had been the fifty-year-old aircraft carrier Chairman
Mao, borrowed from the San Diego Naval Museum for support operations. Only one of Mao’s four nuclear reactors was still operable, and the old battlewagon’s top speed was barely thirty knots. Luckily, wind speed at sea level had been less than half this, so it had not been too difficult to maintain still air on the flight deck. Though there had been a few anxious moments during gusts, when the mooring lines had been dropped the great dirigible had risen smoothly, straight up into the sky as if on an invisible elevator. If all went well, Queen Elizabeth IV would not meet Chairman Mao again for another week.

  Everything was under control; all test instruments gave normal readings. Commander Falcon decided to go upstairs and watch the rendezvous. He handed over to his second officer and walked out into the transparent tubeway that led through the heart of the ship. There, as always, he was overwhelmed by the spectacle of the largest space yet enclosed by humans on Earth.

  The ten spherical gas cells, each more than thirty meters across, were ranged one behind the other like a line of gigantic soap bubbles. The tough plastic was so clear that he could see through the whole length of the array and make out details of the elevator mechanism at the other end, half a kilometer from his vantage point. All around him, like a three-dimensional maze, was the structural framework of the ship—the great longitudinal girders running from nose to tail, the fifteen hoops that were the circular ribs of this sky-borne colossus, whose varying sizes defined its graceful, streamlined profile.

  At this comparatively low speed there was little sound—merely the soft rush of wind over the envelope and an occasional creak from the joints of the ribs and stringers of titanium and carbon-carbon compound, flexing as the pattern of stresses changed. The shadowless light from the rows of lamps far overhead gave the whole scene a curiously submarine quality—

  —and to Falcon this was enhanced by the spectacle of the translucent gas bags. Once while diving he had encountered a squadron of large but harmless jellyfish, pulsing their mindless way above a shallow tropical reef, and the plastic bubbles that gave Queen Elizabeth its lift often reminded him of these—especially when changing pressures made them crinkle and scatter new patterns of reflected light.