Arthur C Clarke's Venus Prime Omnibus

by Paul Preuss

  A scatter of tiny black chips and two micro-supercomputers, their housings cracked where he’d pulled them out of the system … he hoped he hadn’t fried them in their own heat. For micro-supers—not unlike men encased in impermeable plastic suits—generated copious amounts of heat; if they weren’t vigorously cooled by water or some other fluid, they could burn in seconds.

  It took Blake a quarter of an hour to get the first of the two little machines operating; for input he used his father’s keyboard, and the output was displayed on the desktop via his father’s holo unit. But after another hour’s concentrated tapping Blake gave up trying to extract anything from that machine. Nothing he tried got more than a scramble of standard code symbols on the holo projection, and he suspected that the thing was indeed fried.

  He had more luck with the other machine, but only just: after forty minutes of increasingly frustrating play—it kept telling him he was an unauthorized user—he got up and went to stand in front of the window, staring with unseeing eyes into the haze, looking across the lower Hudson to the smoky Jersey shore. He tried to empty his mind of everything except the experiences of the night. It was a species of self-hypnosis, in which he tried to see and hear again everything he had seen and heard inside the lodge.

  He went back to the desk and typed a word. A few millimeters above the green leather surface of Edward Redfield’s desk, the air glowed.

  No message appeared, however, neither a welcome nor a warning. Instead, an animal writhed there in three dimensions. It was a lizardlike creature with a thick tail and a wide triangular head, with tiny gleaming round brown eyes. Its awkward thin legs had splayed toes ending in thick pads. The thing’s moist skin was coppery brown, with a bright yellow underbelly.

  The string Blake had entered into the machine was SALAMANDER, the term Leo had used to accuse him—and the creature he had seen carved on the unconscious girl’s garnet ring.

  Nothing encourages persistence like a minimal reward. Blake persisted for another two hours, trying all the chips he’d stolen, one after the other. He got nothing more. Nothing but that writhing salamander.

  Bone weary from the night’s exertions and the morning’s concentrated effort, hunched over an unyielding machine, Blake fell asleep.

  He was awakened by the beat of wings.

  No, not wings, rotor blades.

  He sat bolt upright, and as soon as he remembered where he was and what he had been doing, he threw himself flat on the floor. But the steady whuff whuff whuff of the helicopter outside the window neither increased nor diminished. He crept across the floor and raised his eye to the level of the sill.

  A black silhouette, a hole in the sky, diffuse and without detail against the bright haze in the west; the thing just hung there in space, eighty-nine stories above the streets of Manhattan, twenty meters away and exactly opposite the window of his father’s office. A Snark. A Snark as Boojum.

  As Blake watched, the machine slowly rotated on its axis, until its strut-mounted rocket launchers and twin Gatling guns were pointed straight at him through the window.

  Blake didn’t move. There was nowhere to run or hide. The Snark carried enough firepower to wipe the penthouse right off the skyscraper on which it sat. The metropolitan police should have been here by now, within seconds of the Snark’s arrival. That they were nowhere in evidence spoke volumes. Blake could reach for the controls to the apartment’s private defenses—they were inside his father’s desk—but even if he reached them alive, he doubted the rooftop rockets could put a dent in a Snark.

  Blake stood up, exposing himself to the full view of the machine’s pilot. If you are here to kill me, do it cleanly, he said without words.

  The Snark bobbed its nose. Yes, we understand each other. Yes, we could do that. Yes, we know it was you, and now you know we can kill you and the people you love, any time we want to.

  Then the machine lazily arched into the air and slid away, peeling off toward the river. Within seconds Blake had lost sight of it in the dazzling bounce of light from the plain of wet algae. It left an unspoken message in its wake: The next move is yours.

  Blake walked back to the desk. He carefully unplugged the functioning computer and put it and the machine he’d probably scragged into an express envelope, along with all the stolen black chips. He took a thick pen from his father’s drawer and wrote in bold block letters across the face of the envelope, “ATTENTION SALAMANDER, C/O NORTH AMERICAN PARK SERVICE, GRANITE LODGE, HENDRIK HUDSON PRESERVE, NEW YORK ADMINISTRATIVE DISTRICT.” The address wasn’t complete but it was more than sufficient. If they controlled the police, no doubt they had some clout with the postal service.

  He swung a windbreaker over his arm, covering the envelope, then left the penthouse and took the elevator to the bottom of the tower. If anything went wrong, he wanted it to go wrong at some distance from his parents’ building. This package he would mail from some anonymous neighborhood box.

  As he walked the windy streets toward uptown, Blake faced the fact that he was not a happy man. The woman he’d thought he loved wanted nothing to do with him. All the physical possessions he’d valued had been destroyed.

  So the Salamanders were former Initiates, were they? Heretics. Rivals to the prophetae, and like them, deep into the workings of the system. Blake had thought he could make himself so visible he couldn’t be hit without scandal. A forlorn hope. Even if the Plowmans offered him that job at Vox Populi, he owed it to them not to accept.

  He’d dragged his own parents into danger, a degree of danger he had foolishly underestimated. Whatever else he did or didn’t do, he had to move out of his parents’ penthouse. Fast.

  10

  Sparta found a job at J. Swift’s, a large travel agency in the City of London whose computers were rather better connected—for someone of Sparta’s leanings—than the firm’s managers suspected. They readily hired the girl with the sparkling green eyes and the Irish lilt who called herself Bridget Reilly, and who produced an impressive resume of service in the travel industry.

  For the next weeks and months her life was too tedious to contemplate: long hours in front of a flatscreen, speaking into a commlink with clients and other agents, booking and endlessly rebooking flights and rooms and ground transportation for people who couldn’t seem to make up their minds or abide by their agreements, and cheerfully accepting responsibility for atrocities over which she had no control—many of them stemming from the middle-class, middle-aged English tourist’s desire to experience foreign culture as if through a tea-room window, most of the rest resulting from the young English tourist’s conviction (like that of youth everywhere) of personal blamelessness and immortality.

  Bridget Reilly was the soul of friendliness at work, but her coworkers, male and female, soon learned that she had not the least interest in getting to know them better than her job required. When the workday was over, Ms. Reilly rode the underground to a tiny, ugly apartment in a dirty, ugly neighborhood, where prudence suggested she keep indoors, away from her neighbors and other strangers. She thawed dinner each night in an autochef; after she ate she went straight to her narrow bed. Six hours later the room’s tiny videoplate would brighten the predawn darkness with the BBC’s morning news, waking her to another day.

  Her inward life was richer and stranger by far.

  By night, there were dreams. Night after night she descended into the vortex of lurid clouds. She knew they were the clouds of Jupiter; more than that she did not know. The wind sang to her in a language she could not name, and although she seemed to understand it perfectly she could never remember a word of what had been said when she woke up. All she could remember were the tumbled emotions of ecstasy and fear, of ego-dissolving hope, of poisonous self-hatred.

  By day, her intellect was the very edge of Occam’s razor. While she booked group tours to Port Hesperus and Labyrinth City with one hand on the keyboard, her other hand rested with PIN spines extended, penetrating her computer’s ports, running other program
s in the interstices of processing. She needed no screen except the one in her head.

  Not even the commander knew where she was or who she pretended to be. She maintained tenuous contact with him through untraceable circuits to his office at the Board of Space Control—somehow he was never in his office—but on the rare occasions they actually conversed, she made little pretense of heeding his suggestions; she was not running his programs. Indeed, although she said nothing of this to the commander, she had deferred her researches into Howard Falcon’s affairs while he investigated a deeper mystery, the contents of her own mind…

  Seated at her travel agency computer, she absorbed whole encyclopedias of neuroanatomy, neurochemistry, drug lore. Using the infolinks, she arranged prescriptions for women who did not resemble each other and did not resemble Bridget Reilly in the least; late at night, in neighborhoods filled with people of wealth or people of color, these women collected their medicines. Sparta’s pill and patch collection grew into a pharmacopeia.

  At the safe house they’d used drugs on her in an attempt to penetrate her dreams. But she’d refused to work with the commander on his terms; perhaps because of that, perhaps for some deeper reason, the commander had refused to share everything they’d learned from that part of herself she could not reach. Now she used drugs on herself, trying to crack her own subconscious.

  Amphetamines and barbiturates and psychedelics acted on her just as a century’s documentation said they would; they were useless. Metal salts changed her behavior and threatened to poison her internal organs and left her mind reeling. Alcohol increased the rate of dreaming but reduced the cogency of the dreams and left her nauseated in the morning, with burning eyes. The known neurotransmitters—dopamine and the rest—seemed to add vivid flourishes to familiar dream scenes, but did nothing for her insight or her memory.

  Her researches took her farther afield. One taste of a chemical on her tongue and she knew what she was ingesting, for its precise formula spread itself across the screen of her mind. Of the estimated 30,000 significant proteins and peptides in the brain, a comparative handful had been characterized. Still, it was a long list. Methodically she worked her way through it. She recorded the effects of her self-experimentation with clinical accuracy.

  But she became ever more isolated. Her coworkers thought she disdained them, and they developed a cordial, low-temperature hatred for her in return. Still, her sacrifices were not in vain. After weeks of horrific nights, she stumbled upon a result.

  A short-chain peptide, some nine amino-acid residues long, known to play a role in the formation of the striped columns of the visual cortex, seemed to release an image from her dreams, allowing it to be held in memory.

  With the image a word was associated, perhaps two words, whose meaning she did not recognize: “moonjelly.”

  She took more of the peptide, a cheap and simple preparation that in the previous decade had been a favorite of some aggressively inclined psychotherapists, the type who liked roughing up their clients in the name of love and were inclined to become impatient with the slow unfolding of the talking cure. Cutely, they’d called the stuff Bliss. Bliss had started in the designer drug labs on L-5 as an analogue of controlled substances, not itself illegal. But it quickly made its way to Earth, where it soon developed that Bliss had unfortunate “side effects.” A few suicides were enough to get it banned for all but controlled experiments. A single pharmaceutical company manufactured it for the use of researchers, under the brand name Striaphan.

  Each successive night that Sparta took Striaphan, the dream word and the dream image became more closely associated, the vision more focused. The “moonjelly” took on a precise form: as if a miniature of the containing dream, the thing she envisioned was itself a fleshy vortex, which pulsed rhythmically in the center of the vortex of clouds. It could have been a terrible sight, but to her it seemed exquisitely beautiful.

  She no longer awoke in terror. The conviction grew in her that there was some thing in the eye of the Jovian vortex that sang to her, called to her, welcomed her … home.

  She forgot what she knew of Striaphan’s history and contraindications. In the midst of her thrilling discovery, Sparta’s extraordinary capacity for self-analysis, for self-awareness, failed her, having dissolved away without her notice. She never noticed the moment when she became dependent upon the stuff.

  PART

  3

  THE

  CARNIVAL

  OF THE

  ANIMALS

  11

  The ramjet from London began its final approach to Varanasi; steady deceleration pushed the passengers forward against their seat harnesses. Sparta looked much like the Indian women who crowded the jitney: delicate, dark-skinned, black-haired, and swathed in colorful cotton. From her seat window she could see a distant rise of snow-covered peaks, defining the curve of Earth. Then the plane was into the smog.

  Her ears popped. She shook a white wafer from a thin plastic tube containing a stack of them. She sucked it silently, urgently; the taste of it was like honey and lemon on her tongue.

  A slender woman wrapped in a gauzy cotton sari threaded with gold rose from her chair and smiled as Sparta entered the room. “Welcome, Inspector Troy. Doctor Singh will be free shortly. Please make yourself comfortable.”

  “Thanks. I’m comfortable standing.” Sparta stood at something resembling parade rest. She was wearing dress blues now, with ribbons for marksmanship, good conduct, and extraordinary heroism—the only ribbons she possessed—in a thin colored line above her left breast pocket. The Space Board uniform made for high visibility; voluntarily, she had made herself a walking target.

  “Would you like tea? Other refreshments? These are rather good.” The woman touched one of her long polished fingernails to a silver tray that held bowls of colorful sweets, marble-sized balls of ground nuts and coconut milk and pistachios wrapped in silver foil, the foil being part of the treat. The tray rested on the corner of an elaborately carved teak table, as low as a coffee table, which carried nothing else except a discrete imitation-ivory flatscreen and commlink.

  “Nothing, thanks.” Sparta saw the red dot in the center of the woman’s brown forehead and thought of her own “soul’s eye,” the dense swelling of brain tissue behind the bone of her forehead. She walked to the window and stood with legs braced and hands clasped behind her. “You have quite a view here.”

  The reception room was on the fortieth floor of the Space Board’s Biological Medicine Center, a sprawling glass polygon that rose on the edge of Ramnagar, on the right bank of the broad Ganges; the modernist building had started as a conceptual cube, so savagely sliced and carved by its architect that it might have been chipped from a block of glacial ice that had wandered too far south from the Himalayas. Through the tall windows Sparta could see northwest to the holy city of Varanasi, to its spiked temples rising from the smog and its riverbank steps crowded with bathers descending to share the brown water with drifting flotsam.

  The Indian woman resumed her chair, but she seemed to have nothing very much to do. “Is this your first trip to our facility, Inspector?”

  “My first trip to India, in fact.”

  “Forgive me, I hope I am not prying, but you are rather famous”—the woman’s voice was clear and musical; perhaps her principal job was to entertain visitors waiting on Dr. Singh—“for you have already been to the moon, to Mars, even down onto the surface of Venus.”

  Sparta half turned from the window and smiled. “I’ve seen very little of our own exotic planet.”

  “What one can see today is mostly haze, I fear.”

  “Does the city still use fossil fuel?”

  “No, our fusion plant works well. That is wood smoke from the funeral pyres on the ghats.”

  “Woodsmoke?” Sparta focused her attention on a stepped terrace beside the river. Her right eye enlarged the scene telescopically, and she could see the flames rising from the stacked logs, see the blackened shape lying atop t
hem.

  “Much of the wood is imported from Siberia, these past several decades,” said the woman. “The Himalayan forests have been slow to recover.”

  Sparta’s telescopic view darted to another ghat, and another. On one, the partially burned remains of a body were being wrapped in bright cloth; it made a bundle like those floating in the river.

  “Perhaps you are thinking, what a strange place for a biological research facility,” the secretary said cheerfully. “The holiest city in India.”

  Sparta turned her back to the window. “And you? Do you regard it as strange?”

  “Many of our visitors do.” The woman deftly evaded the question. “Particularly when they learn that some of our distinguished researchers, very thoroughly grounded in microbial biology, I assure you, are also good Hindus who believe that drinking from the sacred waters of the Ganges purifies the body and unburdens the soul.” The commlink chimed and the secretary, without answering it, curved her wide red lips in a smile. “Doctor Singh will see you now.”

  The woman who came out from behind the desk might have been her secretary’s sister. She had a graceful red mouth, huge brown eyes, and straight black shining hair pulled tightly back behind her neck. “I’m Holly Singh, Inspector Troy. I’m pleased to meet you.” The accent was pure Oxbridge, however, without a trace of Indian lilt, and the costume was polo: silk blouse, jodhpurs, and polished riding boots.

  “It was good of you to make time for me on short notice.” Sparta shook hands firmly and, in the momentary exchange, studied Singh in ways the woman might not have enjoyed knowing about, had she sensed them—the sort of scrutiny one was likely to receive from inquisitive machines upon seeking entry to a military base, or the upper floors of the Board of Space Control’s Earth Central headquarters in Manhattan. She focused her right eye on the lens and retina of Singh’s left, until its round brown circles filled her field of view. From the retinal pattern, Sparta saw that Singh was the person the files in Earth Central said she was. Sparta analyzed the aroma of Singh’s perfume and soap and perspiration, and found in it hints of flowers and musk and tea and a complex of chemicals typical of a healthy body in repose. Sparta listened to the tone of Singh’s voice, and heard in it what she should have expected to find, a mixture of confidence, curiosity, and control.