Arthur C Clarke's Venus Prime Omnibus

by Paul Preuss

  “Every time I look a chimpanzee in the face, I’m reminded that this is my closest evolutionary relative,” said Singh. “I think it is safe to say that none of us understand in a fundamental, cellular, molecular way, why chimps don’t look and behave just as we do. After more than a century of sophisticated research we still don’t fully understand why we and they have different shapes—although we recognize the utility of the differences—and we still don’t understand why we and they can become infected by the same viruses but not get sick in the same ways. We don’t understand how humans can read and write and talk in complex sentences, and they, in their natural state, can’t. In genetic terms we are so nearly identical that probably only we humans ourselves could tell the difference.” Singh turned slightly toward Sparta, again favoring her with that thin smile. “I doubt that an alien, some visitor from another star, would be able to make the distinction at all—not on biochemical grounds, or at least not without very sophisticated instruments. Which suggests that vast evolutionary differences may be achieved by the subtlest physical adjustments.”

  “If they are the right adjustments,” Sparta said, so quietly she might have whispered it.

  Singh’s eyes widened a fraction of a millimeter before she turned her attention back to the reluctant chimpanzee. “Steg! Come say hello to Holly.”

  Steg crept slowly toward them. He was a fully grown male chimpanzee in the peak years of maturity, with muscles that bulged and rippled beneath his glossy black coat. He outweighed Sparta herself by ten kilos or more. Yet his eyes were dull, his gaze unfocused.

  Halfway across, Steg staggered and caught himself on the narrow beam. He froze in place, then seemed almost visibly to steel his nerve, willing himself to continue; his eyes never left Holly Singh’s face as he resumed his slow progress toward her.

  Finally he caught the wire mesh of the cage in both his leathery hands.

  “Say hello to Holly.” Singh’s voice was clear but intimate.

  Steg’s lips parted in a pained grimace, and a rasping sound came out of his throat. “Bbbbbb … bah, bah…”

  “That’s good, Steg. That’s very good.” Singh reached through the mesh and gave his head a quick scratch. His dark scalp hair was divided by a wide, mottled scar of bare white flesh. She slipped her hand into her jacket pocket and withdrew a chunk of something brown and crumbly.

  Steg released his grip on the wire mesh with apparent effort, pulling the fingers of his left hand away one by one, then reached for the food preparation. He shoved it greedily into his mouth and began to chew. Once his mouth was full and his heavy jaw muscles were grinding away, he risked a wide, sidelong gaze at Sparta, his dark pupils rimmed with yellow, his curiosity pathetically mingled with fear.

  “He can’t speak,” said Sparta.

  “Not anymore. Nor understand, except a few simple commands, the earliest he learned. And as you saw, his motor functions are impaired. Neuro-chips can’t help destruction of brain tissue that massive.” Singh sighed. “Mentally, Steg is roughly equivalent to a one-year-old infant. But not as playful. Not as confident.”

  Sparta looked up at the rigging that suggested the interior of the vanished Queen Elizabeth IV. “Doesn’t this setting have painful associations for him?”

  “On the contrary. He and the others spent the happiest days of their lives in such a setting.” Singh lightly stroked the knuckles of Steg’s right hand, which still clung to the cage. “Goodbye, Steg. Holly will come again.”

  Steg said nothing. He watched them as they walked away.

  The light had gone from the sky. Their footsteps crunched the gravel along a barely visible path outlined by low, dimly glowing light fixtures.

  “Howard Falcon knew about my work with enhanced chimpanzees from the start,” Singh said. “It came up naturally in the course of all those social affairs he precipitated with his ballooning. Indeed, it was his rather casual suggestion that put ICEP on the track to success, although I doubt if he would remember that today. He was always too busy with other matters to take a really personal interest.”

  “Why was he interested in ICEP at all?” Sparta asked.

  “He knew the basics. Normal chimps are superior to humans in almost every physical way. With one or two important exceptions, of course. An adult chimp is quicker and stronger than the quickest and strongest human gymnast, although we are better made for running and throwing—and we have a quantum advantage, not only over chimps but over just about every other living thing, in the construction of our hands. Nevertheless, there was no reason to believe that suitably engineered chimpanzees couldn’t join human beings as fully conscious partners, in enterprises of mutual benefit to both.”

  “Such as the operation of airships?”

  “The Queen Elizabeth IV was already under construction when Howard casually mentioned the idea to me. I think I surprised him when I took it seriously. Thanks to him, his sponsors readily saw the advantage in supplementing the human crew with intelligent chimpanzees who could handle much of the rigging work inside that vast, open craft. Howard once compared it to a flying cathedral.”

  “Handle the rigging? Handle the dangerous work, in other words,” Sparta said.

  “Dangerous to us, not to them.” Singh’s dark eyes shone in the shadowed night. “Ethical considerations were always important, Inspector, whatever doubts you may entertain on that score. We were not creating a race of slaves. Runs of experiments in the mock-up indicated that chimpanzees were not only comfortable in the Queen’s environment but were actually quite happy up there among the spars and rigging. There was not a single near-injury to any chimp during the preliminary tests—some of which were quite strenuous. And those were ordinary lab animals.”

  The women came out of the trees, into the open grassy field.

  Sparta halted and looked up, considering the night.

  Overhead the stars were like fluorescent plankton, four or five thousand of them visible to the ordinary eye in this clear atmosphere, a hundred times that number visible to Sparta’s more sensitive eye. To the northwest the glacier-draped mountains—the raw young edges of continental collision—were avatars of the grinding upheavals that had continually reshaped the surface of the spinning Earth.

  After a moment she turned to Holly Singh. “Does Falcon ever come to visit Steg?”

  “Falcon is not one of us any longer,” Singh replied.

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Since the crash of the Queen he’s chosen not to live in India. And he no longer seeks company outside the immediate circle of his colleagues on the Kon-Tiki project. It’s because of what they had to do to save him, I suppose.”

  14

  Sparta awoke in a high-ceilinged room, gleaming white from centuries of accumulated enamel. Its tall windows were hung with lace and fitted with panes of imperfect glass whose pinhole bubbles refocused the sun into golden liquid galaxies. She didn’t know where she was…

  She was eighteen years old, a prisoner in a sanatorium, half drunk on the random return of her memory, on the assault of her exaggerated senses. Her heart was pounding and her throat ached with the need to scream, for she could hear the beating wings of the approaching Snark, bringing the assassin.

  Sparta rolled out of the bed and slid across the polished wooden floor on her belly, tucking herself naked against the wall below the window sill. She listened…

  Far down in the deep valleys the night birds called and a million tiny frogs sang to the moon. The light of the full moon was flooding the room through the lace curtains.

  It wasn’t morning and she wasn’t in the sanatorium in Colorado, she was in Holly Singh’s house in India, and the air was cold enough that she could see her breath in the moonlight. The sound she heard wasn’t a Snark, it was Singh’s little two-seat Dragonfly, its tiny fusion-electric engine so silent that all she could hear was the whiffle of the blades—and it wasn’t approaching, it was taking off.

  Sparta raised her head to the corner of t
he window and peered out over the sloping lawn. Her right eye fixed on the Dragonfly, already half a kilometer away, as it climbed against a backdrop of moon-shadowed peaks, and she zeroed in until the image of the cockpit filled her field of vision. The angle was bad; she was looking from behind, and could see only the pilot’s left shoulder and arm, but the infrared image processed by Sparta’s visual cortex was bright as day. The pilot was a woman—Singh, or someone who closely resembled her.

  Something in Sparta was not reassured. Was it really Singh in the helicopter? And where was she going in the middle of the night?

  Sparta expelled her breath in a short sigh, an angry spasm almost like a snarl, and abruptly she sprang to her feet. For a moment she was exposed to anyone who might be watching her window, but she was defiant. She crossed to the closet where she’d hung her few clothes and slipped on a closefitting black polycanvas jump suit, then pulled soft black hightops onto her small feet. She returned to the window, this time silently, invisibly.

  She disarmed the telltale she’d set on the glass. In the night air the wooden sash had contracted; it came up easily, scraping softly against the frame.

  She slipped outside and closed the window behind her. She scampered across the gently sloping roof. At the corner of the veranda she tested the strength of the gutter, then hooked her hands into it, rolled forward and hung from the roof, her feet a meter from the ground. She dropped silently into a bed of decorative Irish moss.

  The moonlight through the trees created a blue and black mosaic, but to Sparta’s infrared-sensitive eye the ground itself glowed in shades of dull red, the grass and bushes and bare earth giving back the sun’s heat in varying degree. She walked quickly along the paths that led to the sanatorium.

  She paused once, at the sight of a ghostly white shape moving in the dark cedar branches, but it was only an egret that had sought safety for the night aboveground.

  She came to the sanatorium. Four low brick buildings with wide metal roofs formed a compound; in the center of the courtyard stood a gnarled old chestnut. Two of the buildings, facing each other, were dormitories, their individual rooms opening onto verandas. A third building housed the laundry, kitchen, and dining hall.

  She listened to the deep, drugged breathing of men and women in the dormitories, but passed them by. The fourth structure, the clinic, was her objective.

  Except for dim yellow lights illuminating the verandas, none of the buildings showed lights. Sparta circled the clinic slowly, keeping to the shadows. Her close-focused eye traveled along the roofline, around each window and door frame, seeking monitoring cameras and telltales.

  It seemed that the building’s security was simple, almost primitive. No cameras watched the compound. The windows and doors were wired with conducting strips. She picked a window half hidden by a rhododendron bush and pushed back its shutters. From the thigh pocket of her jumpsuit she removed a slender steel tool; with precisely measured strength she incised a circle in the glass near the latch, tapped it, and let the glass disk fall outward into her hand. She reached through the hole and was about to affix a slack loop of wire to the alarm’s conducting strip when she sensed, through her PIN spines, that no current was running in the alarm.

  She thought about that for a millisecond, then set the loop anyway, tacking down both ends with aluminized putty. Current could start flowing without warning. Then she twisted the latch. Unlike the bedroom window, it took muscle to lift this sash; crumbs of dirt and old paint fell onto her face and into her hair.

  She lifted herself easily onto the sill, tucked her legs, and curled sideways through the narrow opening. Her feet touched the floorboards and she stood up. She was in a small room equipped with a hospital bed and a variety of out-of-date diagnostic equipment. Not what one would expect of an expensive private sanatorium. Leaving the window ajar, she started to explore.

  The clinic’s offices and examination rooms were arranged on two sides of a long central hall. Moonlight fell through the slatted shutters and doors, most of which stood open, onto a threadbare strip of carpet.

  Sparta’s heat-seeking eye darted here and there in each of the rooms as she walked along, but she wasted little time, for she expected to find the clinic’s records in the administrator’s office. With micro-super technology, a century’s worth could be stored on a rupee-sized wafer.

  At the center of the building, near the front door, she came to a door that was closed. An engraved brass plaque screwed to the flimsy louvered door’s crossbrace said “Dr. Singh.”

  She sniffed the simple magnetic lock. From the pattern of Singh’s touch she deduced its sequence. A second later she stepped into Singh’s office.

  She experienced a peculiar shiver of pride. This had been so easy she’d hardly had a chance to stretch herself. She liked the way she could fool photogram monitors by a dancer’s simple tricks of movement; she liked the way she could see in the dark and fool movement sensors by the timing of her steps. She liked the way she could smell who’d been in a room last, and when. She liked the way she could virtually walk through walls.

  And she liked the way she could read a computer system by letting the PIN spines under her fingernails slide into its I/O ports, bleeding it of information—as she did now, to the tiny water-cooled computer box she found on Singh’s office wall.

  For a moment she was in trance, her senses overwhelmed by the aromatic tang of large primes flowing through her calculating organ, her soul’s eye. For her, mathematical manipulation verged on the erotic. The code key she was pursuing had the taste and smell of tangerines … the feel of a light-fingered backscratch … the sound of a bamboo flute. Deftly she swam past the databank’s safeguards, and seconds later found what she was looking for.

  She laughed aloud, not at what she’d found—hardly funny—but with pleasure at her mastery. They’d given her powers she’d never asked for or consented to, powers greater than they knew.

  At first it had been frightening to realize that she could listen and hear what other people couldn’t, that she could taste and smell flavors and aromas that other people couldn’t, and not just perceive them but analyze them in precise chemical detail. It had been frightening—though convenient—to discover that she could open electronic locks and communicate directly with even the most complex computer systems. Equally convenient were her boundless memory and her ability to calculate, at some deep level, far faster than her consciousness could follow.

  Not long ago she had even had the ability to sense the aether, to cast her very will via microwave beam—action at a distance. More than mere convenience, that sensation was one of pure power.

  But that had been ripped out of her on Mars. The life-mimicking organic polymers that had once capacitated her belly with burning electric power had been ruptured by a would-be assassin’s pulse bomb. Unknowing surgeons had finished the job.

  She had not been raised to depend on these prostheses. Her parents had taught her to trust in herself, taught her to believe that simply being human was not only enough, but—if she could be fully human—more than would ever be needed. To be human was to be potentially triumphant.

  What she now read in Singh’s coded files confirmed the conviction that had been building in her since she’d left Mars. A great many human subjects had passed through Holly Singh’s ungentle hands. An astonishing proportion of them had died. They were the anonymous, the homeless poor, the orphaned … those who would never be missed.

  Among them, one stood out.

  Female subject, 18 years, height 154 centimeters, weight 43 kilograms, hair brown, eyes brown, race: white (English ancestry)/

  diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia by transferring agency confirmed/

  patient complains of constant and severe visual and aural hallucinations/

  prescribed treatment, GAF neuro-amplification injection/

  complications of autonomic nervous system/

  apnea/

  elevated body temperature/

  con
vulsions/

  patient declared dead at 11:31 P.M./

  disposition of body according to conclave directive/

  shipment to North America contact without incident/

  records edited, successfully transmitted on…

  On that day, that month, that year. And the dead girl, a nameless runaway washed up in an asylum in Kashmir, appropriated by Singh for her own purposes, could from her appearance have been Sparta’s twin. Her appearance was all they had needed from her—the appearance of her dead body. Singh’s treatment of the girl who was unlucky enough to look like Linda N. was swift and deliberate murder.

  Eight years ago Sparta had been a patient in a sanatorium, a building of the same vintage as these and like them, high in the mountains—the Rocky Mountains of North America. She’d been trapped there, mired in her own past, immobilized by her inability to retain new information for more than a few minutes. Her short-term memory had been so effectively eradicated that she could not even remember her doctor’s face.

  But the doctor she’d had such difficulty remembering had known how to restore her working memory; he’d done so at the cost of his own life, giving her precious seconds she’d used to escape—in the Snark that had brought her intended assassin.

  Hardly a coincidence that, at the time, Doctor Holly Singh should be running a mountain sanatorium, halfway around the globe. Hardly a coincidence that Singh should have developed the neurochip techniques that the doctor had used to save Sparta—the same techniques, in part, that had made Sparta a freak.

  One further next-to-impossible coincidence. When the Queen Elizabeth IV, with its crew complement of neurologically enhanced chimpanzees, had crashed over the Grand Canyon, and Captain Howard Falcon, Holly Singh’s old friend, had been put back together again, what they could save of his nervous system had depended on the same neurochip technology. Of course, they’d done more to Falcon, much more.