Arthur C Clarke's Venus Prime Omnibus

by Paul Preuss

  “Then you’re still on the team.”

  “No, I don’t think so,” she said thoughtfully. “I don’t think this is a team sport.”

  Blake spent the afternoon trying to talk her out of her curiosity about Falcon, which to him seemed founded upon the flimsiest of circumstantial evidence. Oh, he admitted that he’d been a great conspiracy theorist in his day, but for his own part, he had come to the conclusion that the Free Spirit—the prophetae, the Athanasians, whatever you wanted to call them—while admittedly a bunch of dangerous nuts, had made so many mistakes they were on the verge of putting themselves out of business. Now that the Board of Space Control obviously knew all about them, why should Ellen continue to risk her life?

  She humored him, agreed with him, did everything except promise to do what he asked—resign from the Board of Space Control. On the other hand, she didn’t say she wouldn’t. Her love and affection for him seemed steady. But for all his passion and argument, some cold part in the center of her was untouchable to his reasoning.

  That night they stopped outside her bedroom door and Blake moved impetuously to kiss her. She responded, pressing her taut dancer’s body to his hard frame, but broke off when he tried to go farther and push past her into the room.

  “I’ve told you, there are cameras and microphones in there,” she said. “In your room, too.”

  “I almost don’t care.”

  “I do.” She said, “Until tomorrow, darling,” then closed the door firmly and locked it behind her.

  In the cold dark room she stripped and went naked to bed. In this century and culture, modesty hardly noticed nakedness—and certainly her body had often been rendered transparent, inside and out, to anyone who might be peering at her now. It was not because of Blake that she cared about the watchers; it was because of what they watched while she slept.

  She did not want him to share her visions—her nightmares—as she knew they did.

  With the aid of a private mantra, what some might call a prayer, she forced herself to fall asleep.

  Blake shoved the narrow casement open just enough to let night air enter. He hung his clothes carefully in the walk-in closet; he was a bit of a dandy, some said, and it was true that he liked to look his best, whatever part he was playing. And with the cameras watching, he liked to keep every-thing neat.

  He hopped naked into the bed and stretched out under the cool sheets. He lay there bursting with hope and fear and love—she loves me!—and stiff with renewed, frustrated lust.

  A long time ago they had been children together in the same school, a special school for ordinary kids who were being taught to be something more than ordinary. The SPARTA project, it was called—SPARTA stood for Specified Aptitude Resource Training and Assessment—and it had been created by Linda’s parents… Ellen’s parents, that is … to demonstrate that every human is possessed of multiple intelligences, and that each of these intelligences may be developed to a high degree by stimulation and guidance. SPARTA vigorously contested the prejudice that intelligence was one thing, some mysterious ectoplasm called “I. Q.,” or that I. Q. was fixed, immutable, or in any meaningful sense real.

  Not all the children in SPARTA were equally capable in every area—people are rather less like each other than are pea plants—but every child blossomed. All became competent athletes, musicians, mathematicians, logicians, writers, artists, social and political beings. In one or more of these fields, each excelled.

  But for Linda and Blake, growing up, this extraordinary education was just school, the school they went to whether they wanted to or not, and to each other they were nothing more than schoolmates. Later, when it came to sex, the experience should have made them treat each other as casually as siblings.

  Not in their case. She’d been slower to realize it—or more reluctant to admit it—but they were in love with each other. And, evidently, very much in the physical way.

  It occurred to him that there is something about making love to the person you love that cannot be mimicked by any other experience in life; no amount of intelligence, no amount of sexual inventiveness, no amount of friendly feeling, not all the goodwill in the world, will lift you to that plane where all seems good and all good things seem possible, without love.

  So he lay there between his fresh cotton sheets, grinning inanely at the stars visible through the narrow slit in the stone wall that was his window, dreaming of Linda … of Ellen. And renewing his determination to take her away from all this. He never noticed the moment when his daydreams turned to night dreams.

  An hour later, when the house was dark and her body was immobile and her mind was sunk deep in its own undreaming depths, the locked door to Sparta’s room silently opened.

  The commander entered the room and shone the beam of a tiny bright flashlight into the corners, then gestured to the door. A technician came into the room and, while the commander held the spot of light steady on the side of Sparta’s neck, pressed an injector pistol against her skin. There was no sound of protest, no evidence of sensation as the drug entered her bloodstream.

  Her nightmares resumed not long after.

  4

  The moon was a fat caïque riding on cold, billowing seas of October cloud. Something was chasing the moon. He heard it coming long before he saw it, a black winged thing whose wings beat the night…

  This was no dream. Blake opened an eye and saw a black silhouette slipping silently down the sky, past his window.

  He tore aside the covers and rolled out of the bed, sprawling flat on the floor. He didn’t know how long he’d been asleep—the pattern of moonlight on the carpet suggested that it was already after midnight—but he knew what the thing outside was—

  —a Snark, an assault helicopter, its blades and turbines tuned to whisper mode, settling gently onto the wide lawn below his window.

  One of ours or one of theirs? But who were they? Who were we?

  Whose side was Blake on anyway? He kept low and rolled across the moon-dappled carpet into the cover of his closet. Inside, he dressed as quickly as he could, slipping into dark polycanvas pants and a black wool pullover, snugging black sneakers onto his feet and pulling a roomy, many-pocketed black canvas windbreaker around his shoulders.

  After the escape from Mars, when Blake had been shown to his room here, he’d found all his things already neatly cleaned, pressed, and hung up or put away in drawers. Thoughtful of the troops. Only his toys had been missing, his wire-working tools, his oddments of integrated circuitry, his scrounged bits of plastique.

  He didn’t blame them; that stuff was dangerous. And anyway, in the days since he’d arrived he’d managed to replace most of it. Remarkable, the amount of deadly and destructive chemicals required to maintain even the average studio apartment—not to mention the average estate. That thick green lawn upon which the Snark had just come to rest, for example: that kind of lush plant growth doesn’t come without generous applications of nitrogen and phosphorus. Out in the gardener’s shed, high explosives were there for the taking. Fusing and timing circuitry were here and there for the taking, too, hidden in odd corners of the estate, in rarely used alarm and surveillance mechanisms.

  Blake knew where the cameras were. He knew where they were placed in his room, and in Ellen’s, even where they were scattered among the trees in the woods. Ellen wanted to pretend she didn’t know about some of those; fine with him. Meanwhile, he cannibalized whatever he thought the cameras couldn’t see him cannibalizing; he stole what his hosts wouldn’t miss and put it where he hoped they couldn’t find it.

  From behind loose strips of molding, from the undersides of shelves, he retrieved the fruits of his explorations and borrowings. He spent a long minute assembling disparate parts before shoving them into his pockets. Finally he took a roll of adhesive tape from the tie-rack where it hung beneath a handful of knit ties; he circled both his palms with tape, ripping it off the roll.

  He stood at the closet door and listened. He could barely he
ar the twin rotors of the Snark whispering on the lawn below. He opened the closet door and walked straight to the window, knowing that the cameras would be on him by now, even if earlier he’d managed to elude them. He peered around the stone jamb.

  Three floors below, meshing rotors were whistling in close harmony at the edge of audibility, not free-wheeling; the Snark’s engines weren’t shut down, which meant it was prepared to take off instantly.

  A metallic scrape and click at the door of his room…

  Blake jumped onto the sill. He squeezed through sideways and hung by his fingers until the toes of his rubberized shoes found a deep seam in the rustic masonry. With his right hand he reached into his pocket and brought out a small package, which he left beneath the casement frame, before he transferred his grip sideways and began to move in a deliberate traverse along the face of the mansion.

  The moonlight was mottled and constantly shifting, a drifting cuckaloris pattern on the irregular wall that could not have been better designed to hide him from ordinary visual surveillance.

  Ellen’s room was a long way off, but he’d studied the route for days. It had occurred to him even before they arrived at this place that he and she might be wanting to leave it on short notice, and not through the front gate.

  He made it around the corner bastion of the house before the inevitable white flash and bang split the night. Somebody had shoved at his casement window to look out.

  Phosphorous makes a bright light. Simultaneously he heard the man’s scream. There hadn’t been enough charge to maim, but the stuff did burn fiercely, and Blake wouldn’t be surprised if whoever had tripped the booby trap was in for a bit of skin grafting. He felt only a twinge of guilt. They should have known better than to walk into his room in the middle of the night without knocking.

  Lights went on all over the perimeter; the moonlight was washed away in a glare a hundred times brighter. The house was crossed by searchlight beams like the night sky over London in the blitz. Blake braced himself for the ack-ack.

  But it seemed he still had a few spare seconds. He moved his taped hands and sneakered feet one at a time, as rapidly as he could, until he found the bay window of Ellen’s room. It was locked.

  No time for subtlety. He had his left hand and both sets of toes firmly lodged in the crevices of the masonry; with his right hand he punched the pane of glass through its leading, taking a nasty scrape across the back of his fist, above the tape.

  As he cranked open the slat, it occurred to him for the first time that something fishy was going on. Extra fishy.

  No alarms. No sirens or bells. All the outside lights were on, but the klaxons hadn’t sounded. Even the window wire hadn’t tripped.

  “Ellen—it’s me,” he said, loud enough to rouse her from sleep. “Don’t do anything drastic.” He pulled himself through the window, a little wider than the one in his room, and landed in a crouch on the floor.

  No bells, no sirens, and the helicopter hadn’t lifted from the lawn. A Snark was smart enough all by itself to find a guy climbing on a wall and shoot him off it. They weren’t out to kill him, then. Maybe they were hoping Ellen wouldn’t wake up.

  Too late for that. By the stark white light that poured in through the windows, it was plain that her bed was empty.

  Warm, with the sheets in a nest where she’d been sleeping until minutes ago, but empty.

  Her door was ajar. Had they gotten her first, or had she heard them—he knew she could hear things no one else could—and made her escape? Gone to rescue him?

  He crouched and stuck his head out the door.

  A loose pattern of rubber bullets from a silenced weapon whacked the floor and doorjamb, hard enough to dent the wood. He rolled back into Ellen’s room, scrabbled in his pocket—

  “Come out of there, Mr. Redfield, we aren’t going to hurt you.”

  —he tossed another little package into the hall.

  This time the flash and bang were instantaneous, and he was through the door almost as quick as the flash. No way they were going to trap him inside the room.

  He rolled across the burning rug and leaned up and over the stair rail in a low vault, ignoring the residual flaming matter that stuck to the back of his jacket. He dropped half a floor to the landing below, rolling again as he hit, rolling right on down the stairs in a tight tuck, shedding the burning stuff as he rolled.

  He hit the corridor and bounded to his feet, a little dizzy but unhurt.

  No pursuit. Teach them to take that superior tone. Mister Redfield, his ass.

  He had an inspiration. Maybe the Snark was still out there on the lawn; maybe it hadn’t moved since it had landed. Maybe there was nobody in it. Maybe they were all inside chasing him and Ellen, because maybe they’d thought this was going to be easy.

  Maybe he’d show them how wrong they were.

  He sprinted down the hall and kicked his way through a door into a corner room, a sort of pantry to one of the mansion’s big reception halls. He knew that everywhere he went the cameras could follow him, so he wasted no time hiding. He punched his already-skinned fist through the face of a knight in shining armor—shining from the light of exterior floodlights—and punched again and again, using his forearm to tear away the leading, until he’d made a big hole in the stained-glass window, big enough to climb through.

  He was close enough to the ground to risk jumping. He flexed his knees and ankles to absorb the shock. He let himself fall from the stone sill.

  He hit the lawn and rolled and bounced to his feet, none the worse for the five-meter drop. The Snark was just sitting there, twenty meters away, its rotors still whispering. When he had that formidable machine in his control, he’d be able to stand off an army. Then he’d find Ellen quick enough, and they’d be out of here…

  He ran, not bothering to conceal himself. They weren’t going to shoot him; they’d had their chance, and they’d used rubber bullets. If somebody came into the chopper’s open door right this minute, Blake would decide what he had to do. Rush? Run? Raise his hands in surrender?

  He ducked under the drooping blades.

  A white face appeared, framed in the darkness of the open door. Ellen. She beckoned sharply.

  His heart leaped. “You did it!” She’d already captured the machine! As he ran forward she extended her hand to him. Her hand, slender and strong and white … her face, a pale white oval framed in short blond hair … the rest of her was armored in black canvas, nearly invisible in the darkness; all he saw of her was a disembodied hand and face.

  He took the hand as he stepped on the chopper’s skid, feeling her firm, familiar grip through the tape. She pulled him into the open doorway—

  —but as she did so she twisted and he staggered, off-balance, and almost before he knew it he was lying on his back on the metal floor. A man leaned out of the darkness behind her. Blake tried to sit up, but in Ellen’s other hand, hidden until now, she held a hypodermic pistol. She’d already shot its paralyzing charge into the base of his skull.

  “Ellen…” His mouth lost its ability to form words. His vision seemed to narrow on her face, her moving lips.

  Her face held no sympathy, no love, only a stark white smile in which her teeth gleamed like fangs and her tongue was as wet and red as fresh liver. “You’re starting to get in the way, Blake. We won’t be seeing you for a while.”

  She straightened. The man behind her came forward and tugged Blake upright, hefting him into a canvas sling seat against the bulkhead, strapping him firmly into place. Blake could feel nothing except the cold in his fingers and toes. He could do nothing to prevent the man’s expert fingers from searching all his pockets, his other hiding places, finding everything he’d had time to conceal.

  Ellen hadn’t even stayed to watch. His last glimpse of her was of her shadowy form jumping lithely out the door.

  5

  In places where the day approximated twenty-four hours, Sparta habitually rose a quarter hour before the sun; in other places
she had trouble sleeping at all.

  Blake, on the other hand, sometimes managed to sleep until midmorning, a trick Sparta envied but could not comprehend. But she had been around him long enough by now to get used to it, so she didn’t think it odd when he failed to appear at the breakfast table.

  She thought it distinctly odd when he didn’t show up for lunch. His appetite had never, in her experience, allowed him to skip two meals in a row.

  No one else showed up for lunch, either. The young blond steward had no idea where Mr. Redfield was—done with that salad, Inspector? The young blond stewardess couldn’t say why, but she was certain the commander would be returning soon—sure you won’t try the wine, miss?

  The rules here were unspoken, but clear enough: this was a place where guests minded their own business. And everybody else minded Sparta’s.

  When, at the end of another shamefully opulent meal, the perfectly brewed dark-roast arabica coffee arrived, she sipped it without enthusiasm.

  After lunch she went upstairs to Blake’s room. Outside his door, she listened.

  In the walls of Blake’s room she could hear the gurgle of ancient pipes, the clatter of pots and pans in the ground-floor kitchen and the voices of the kitchen workers; they were talking about nothing of consequence.

  The narrow leaded windows of his room had been pushed open; she could hear the curtains stirring in the fitful draft. She could hear birds outside in the autumn trees, only a few sparrows that were late for the southward migration. Overhead she could hear the rattle of a crumb of slate roof-tile—weathered for centuries, warmed by the sun, and expanding until, just at this moment, its last attached grains were stressed beyond crystalline integrity—splitting from its parent and rolling down the steep roof into the copper gutter above Blake’s open window, where it landed with a tiny “ping.”