Arthur C Clarke's Venus Prime Omnibus

by Paul Preuss

  Brother and sister locked gazes. Dexter blinked first.

  “Go ahead, Redfield,” Arista said.

  “When I infiltrated the Free Spirit I learned that their beliefs are based on historical texts which they think are records of alien visits to Earth. This so-called Knowledge indicates the approximate location of the alien home star. It also indicates when and where they think the alien Pancreator will return.”

  “Which would be…?” Dexter grumbled.

  “Jupiter. Two years from now.”

  The little group came to a halt. The beach ahead was crowded with small purplish shapes like abandoned baggies. “What are those?” Dexter demanded, horrified. “Leftovers from somebody’s lunch?”

  “Jellyfish, sir. Don’t step on them. They could sting.”

  “As you say.” Dexter shoved his hands deeper into his overcoat pockets. Standing still, the wind seemed stronger. “Redfield, why should Vox Populi or anyone else be concerned with the beliefs of these moonies?”

  “Loonies,” muttered Arista.

  “For a couple of reasons, sir. They’ve taken over the machinery of government—spending the people’s money on their religion, if you want to look at it that way. Within the last century there have been three hundred and twenty-six probes into the clouds of Jupiter. Two years from now the Kon-Tiki expedition is scheduled to send the first human explorer to Jupiter.”

  “Yes, yes, it’s a big waste, but that’s what science is, isn’t it? Cons and crazy people fleecing the public.”

  Blake let the proxmirism pass. “What if some alien thing is waiting in the clouds of Jupiter. The Prime Directive prohibits approaching it.”

  Dexter shook his head. “This is nuts!”

  “The Free Spirit are nuts,” Blake said. “That doesn’t mean they’re not right. What I’ve seen of the Knowledge looks pretty convincing.”

  “Right or wrong, they need to be stopped,” Arista put in.

  “How do you propose to do it, Redfield?”

  “I’m glad you asked, sir…”

  They turned and walked back down the beach. The frigid smoke-filled wind which had been at their backs now stung their cheeks and burned their eyes and numbed their ears, and Blake had to shout over it to outline his plan.

  By the time they reached the parking lot, where a few shivering reporters still waited to hear Dexter’s next antiestablishment salvo, he was more than a convert; he was already preparing to take credit for Blake’s scheme.

  “As I’ve always said, Redfield,” he expounded, “you can’t break eggs without a loose cannon.”

  “That’s me, sir,” Blake cheerfully agreed, while Arista’s eyes rolled skyward.

  PART

  4

  THE WORLD

  OF THE

  GODS

  17

  Two years later…

  The fueling tender blew its hoses a little rougher than it should have, spilling a quick blizzard of freezing oxygen into space. On Captain Chowdhury’s board, the numbers bounced. No alarms went off, no vital pieces were broken off, but Garuda would have to spend more fuel than it should, keeping station.

  The captain swallowed a curse. “Garuda to Sofala, that was an execrable separation. Please learn your job before you come back.”

  “It is our opinion that it is your loadmaster who needs to learn his job,” the Sofala’s captain replied sharply. “Do you insist upon arbitration?”

  Chowdhury hesitated—his mass-to-fuel ratio was only minutely on the down side—before he replied, as coolly as he could, “Leave the mouse-pushers out of it. Just go easy, will you?”

  Sofala did not deign to answer. The fuel tender slid smoothly away, climbing toward Ganymede.

  Chowdhury keyed off. He’d have to have a word with his loadmaster. Meanwhile, no harm done, and there were plenty of more important things to worry about.

  But he wondered which demon he had failed to propitiate before lifting this grandly named bus from Ganymede a month ago. What should have been a routine job, despite the hoopla about the fancy cargo—after all, all he had to do was keep his converted tug on station behind Jupiter’s little moon Amalthea—had plagued him from the start with all the accumulated glitches and gremlins and bugs he’d somehow managed to avoid in an error-free, twenty-year career, jockeying ships among the big planet’s satellites.

  The gremlin in the works was Sparta. She had shoved her PIN spines into one of the fuel-control microprocessors and messed up its timing; a second later she had readjusted it. Chowdhury’s system check would reveal nothing amiss.

  Sparta hovered in the shadows of the loading manifold, listening to the quick exchange between the two captains—filtering their distant voices out of all the multiple vibrations of the ship—before scurrying further back into the dark.

  She used the narrowest of access passages to climb toward her lair in one of the ship’s auxiliary power bays. From her grease-blackened face her sunken eyes shone starkly. She squeezed through the cramped shadows, finding her way by acute hearing and smell, seeing the dull red glow of Garuda’s metal guts in the infrared. She made it to her nest while the tug was still wobbling from the bad disconnect.

  In a space station or a satellite colony, whose populations often exceeded 100,000, she could easily have disappeared in the crowd—as she’d done on Ganymede Base—but in a ship with twenty-eight people aboard, her only choice was to hide. She disguised her slight but anomalous extra mass by arranging numerous little “accidents” in refueling and resupply.

  For a month, ever since Garuda had launched from Ganymede, she’d been living the life of a homeless refugee, secreting herself in the tiny space behind the AP unit service hatch. In that time she’d grown gaunt and filthy, with few opportunities to sponge her body or dry-wash her hair and none to clean her clothes. Twice she’d risked stealing bits of laundry from the recycler, substituting her own grimy underwear and coveralls. She’d filched food from stores when she could and rescued scraps from recycling; her meager diet had a high proportion of nutrients in forms others didn’t want: powdered grape drink, salted yeast extract, freeze-dried tofu chips—

  —but she carried her own supply of Striaphan, in a tube filled with hundreds of little white disks that melted like fine sugar under the tongue.

  Garuda was Kon-Tiki’s mother ship. A ten-year veteran of service in near-Jupiter space, until eighteen months ago Garuda was an unprepossessing heavy-lift tug with spartan facilities for the usual crew of three. Now its builders wouldn’t have recognized it. Garuda’s cargo holds had been replaced with a complex of crew facilities, tiny but luxurious—private cabins, dining room, game rooms, clinics, commissary—and its life support systems had been enlarged, its onboard power units made multiply redundant, its chemical fuel tanks tripled in capacity. Amidships, Garuda bristled like a sea urchin with antennas and communications masts.

  The most obvious and striking change was Kon-Tiki Mission Control itself, the big circular room that sliced right through Garuda’s middle, belting the ship’s equator with dark glass windows below the smaller dome of the bridge. Once Kon-Tiki had been launched, a flight director and five controllers would man the Mission Control consoles, in three shifts around the clock.

  And now that Sofala had topped off Garuda’s propellant tanks, that launch was only hours away.

  Sparta lay curled like a fetus, weightless in the dark, listening to the final countdown…

  With the main airlocks of the two craft mated, the Kon-Tiki module had been carried into Jupiter orbit on Garuda’s bow. Now Sparta heard the sealing of the locks and the clang of the hatches, felt the shudder of shackles springing back in precise sequence and the final bump of separation. She heard the hiss of Garuda’s attitude-control jets compensating almost imperceptibly for the gentle push Kon-Tiki’s own jets had given the mother ship as it separated.

  Sparta imagined the Kon-Tiki module, its intricacies hidden beneath gleaming cowlings and heat shields, carefully increasing i
ts distance from Garuda.

  Now both craft hung virtually motionless a thousand kilometers above the desolate rocks and ice of Amalthea, in the radiation shadow of that modest satellite. For Kon-Tiki, Jupiter would soon rise above the rim of the little moon, but the great planet would remain hidden from Garuda throughout the mission. When orbital separation was complete and all systems had been checked, Kon-Tiki would fire its retrorockets and begin its long fall.

  Howard Falcon’s quest was about to reach its culmination.

  Sparta’s quest over the past two years had been more private and more tortured. She lay listening as his moment of triumph approached, while her consciousness phased in and out of dark dreams and distorted memories…

  “Are you all right, dear?”

  The solicitous questioner is a wide woman with the broad hands and bright cheeks of a former milkmaid, whose round Rs betray her Somersetshire origins. Her arms are filled with bundled sheets.

  The girl blinks her blue eyes and smiles apologetically. “Was I at it again, Clara?”

  “Dilys, I warn you that you’ll never work your way out of the laundry if you keep falling asleep standing up.” Clara pushes the armful of dirty sheets into the maw of the industrial-sized washing machine. “Be a good girl and pull those others out of the hamper, will you?”

  Dilys bends to drag the sheets up from the depths of the cart. Above her head opens the maw of the laundry chute, which reaches three stories up to the top floor of the country house.

  Clara lifts an eyebrow. “If I didn’t know you for an innocent, I’d suspect you of listening in. That chute’s a fine telephone to the bedrooms, as you’ve no doubt discovered.”

  Dilys turns wide eyes on her. “Oh, I wouldn’t do that.”

  Clara’s ample bosom shakes with a hearty laugh. “Not that it would do you any good at this hour of the morning. Nobody upstairs but Blodwyn and Kate, stuffing these down the hole.” Clara takes the sheets from Dilys, pushes the slept-on-once linen into the machine, and closes the round glass door on it. Her brown eyes glint with mischief. “You’d learn more about our guests from these. See here, Miss Martita’s sheets haven’t been slept in at all. Why not?” She pulls open a used expanse of bedding. “Here’s a clue: that fellow Jurgen is not the ox he appears.”

  “I don’t understand,” Dilys said.

  “I mean the difference between an ox and a bull, dear.”

  “Clara!”

  “But perhaps a miner’s daughter shouldn’t be expected to understand country matters.” Clara crumples the sheet and shoves it into the washer. “No more daydreaming, now. See that the towels and napkins are pressed and folded by the time I get back.”

  Dilys watches Clara’s broad back and broader hips disappear up the stairs. Rather than attend to the ironing, the slim, dark girl immediately falls back into trance. Although she isn’t standing near the laundry chute now, she is doing just what Clara has accused her of doing. She is listening. Listening not to bedroom antics, in which she has no interest, but to the casual conversations of Lord Kingman’s weekend guests. Voices come to her from the hall…

  “The hunting is rather good to the west—let’s leave it to the others, what do you say?” Kingman’s voice, an older man’s, ripe with good breeding.

  “I’m sure you’ll find us something worth shooting, Rupert.” A middle-aged man, whose every utterance so far has betrayed a terrible impatience underlying his charm.

  “I won’t disappoint you … ahh”—Kingman’s voice drops, his inflection sours—“here’s the German now.”

  Downstairs in the laundry room, the dark-haired girl stands rapt. Her peculiarities will be tolerated in the household for the sake of the centuries-old, romantic, mystical reputation of the Welsh—not to mention that old Lord Kingman seems to have a special fondness for a merch deg. But under her brunette wig her hair is blond and her eyes are not as dark blue as they seem, and Kingman would be profoundly shocked to discover the bitterness in this particular pretty girl’s heart.

  Sparta—but for Kingman and his cronies, alone in all the worlds—knows that Kingman was the captain of the Doradus.

  PIRATE SHIP IN SPACE, the newsheads had screamed. There were no pirates in space, of course. Putting aside practical matters of pursuit and conquest, where could they possibly hide? Not near inhabited planets and moons, and the Mainbelt was not the Caribbean: the asteroids were small and airless and unable to support life, without huge and obvious investments of capital.

  The Doradus had not been a pirate vessel, but a secret warship, intended to be held in reserve against some future conflict with the Council of Worlds. In all the solar system, less than a dozen fast Space Board cutters were authorized to carry offensive weapons; the Doradus was a formidable force. How well guarded had been the secret of that ship! How chagrined the Free Spirit must be at its loss!

  As the news media recounted in great detail, the registry of the mystery ship was aboveboard and normal: the ship was owned by a most respectable bank, Sadler’s of Delhi, which had loaned the capital for its construction. The builders had gone bankrupt and forfeited, and Sadler’s had acquired the ship and hired a reputable shipping line to operate it, a firm which had subsequently leased Doradus to an asteroid-mining venture that made regular voyages between Mars and the Mainbelt. For five years the ship had turned an unremarkable but respectable profit.

  Yet every one of the ten recorded officers and crew of Doradus, it soon developed, were fictitious identities. Even though four bodies had been left on Phobos when Doradus had blown its cover, their true identities could not be established.

  Still, not a glimmer of evidence linked the ship’s phony crew with any wrongdoing on the part of the mining company that had apparently hired them in good faith, or the shipping line that had contracted with the mining venture, or the bank that had contracted with the shipping line, or the bankrupt shipbuilders who had lost their investment.

  Sparta knew that such a complex deceit could never have been successful without the complicity of people deep within the Board of Space Control itself. Through her own access to electronic media she had leveraged her way into the Space Board’s investigations branch, learning the results of the search of Doradus almost as soon as Earth Central did.

  Among the armaments found on board were “12 each passive-target missiles of SAD-5 type, no serial numbers; 24 each high-impulse torpedoes with proximity fused HE warheads, no serial numbers, design previously unknown; 4 each Tooze-Olivier space-adapted repeating shotguns; 24 cases, 24 rounds per case, antipersonnel shells for same; 2 each miscellaneous 9-mm copper-point bullets, possibly of antique manufacture…” Along with the heavy stuff, two old pistol bullets—somebody on board the Doradus had been a gun collector.

  As it happened, one of the directors of the Sadler’s Bank who had been active in arranging the bankruptcy and leasing arrangements of the Doradus was an enthusiast of antique weapons, an Englishman of rather distinguished ancestry—name of Kingman.

  It was the sort of obscure fact that Space Board investigators would have gotten around to checking sooner or later, by way of doggedly tracking down every possibility. Whether the investigators would have been able to make anything of it was less certain. Sparta’s approach was more intuitive and direct. Her carefully constructed resume was borrowed freely from a real girl from Cardiff named Dilys, and it withstood the intense scrutiny of King man’s household manager; Sparta had seen to it that a position had opened shortly before.

  Soon after arriving at Kingman’s estate, Sparta had confirmed her guess, learning from here voluble belowstairs colleagues of Kingman’s famous ancestor and of a pistol taken off a German soldier in the battle of El Alamein, a pistol that accepted the round Kingman, in his haste, left aboard his abandoned warship.

  Now “Dilys” stands listening until the voices she hears through the walls fade away, one by one. Kingman and his weekend guests are leaving the house for their afternoon of shooting. She turns back to the m
ountain of linen that needs ironing. By tonight, she knows with a certainty she would not be able to explain, she will learn the final secrets of the prophetae…

  Aboard Garuda, Sparta stirred fitfully and roused herself from sleep. A steadily increasing intake of Striaphan—for almost two years now—had shrunk her emotional life to a black knot of rage, but it had not diminished her powers of perception and calculation … so long as she was awake enough and strong enough to focus them. But her head throbbed and her mouth was dry. It took long seconds for her to recall where she was, why it was so cold and dark and foul-smelling in this cramped little space.

  Then the glow of remembered anger once more began warming her from inside. Kon-Tiki had awakened her.

  Kon-Tiki was on its way down.

  18

  The fall from Amalthea’s orbit to the outer atmosphere of Jupiter takes only three and a half hours—plus a few minutes to gain an extra modicum of orbital inclination, thus avoiding the wide stretch of the planet’s diaphanous, rubble-filled rings. Even with the detour, it’s a short trip.

  Few men could have slept on so swift and awesome a journey. Sleep was a weakness that Howard Falcon hated, and the little he still required brought dreams that time had not yet been able to exorcise. But he could expect no rest in the three days that lay ahead, and he must seize what he could during the long fall down into that ocean of clouds, some 96,000 kilometers below.

  Thus, as soon as Kon-Tiki had entered her transfer orbit and all the computer checks were satisfactory, he tried to prepare himself for sleep. Viewed coldly, it was the last sleep he might ever know—so it seemed appropriate that at almost the same moment Jupiter eclipsed the bright and tiny sun, as his ship swept into the monstrous shadow of the planet. For a few minutes a strange golden twilight enveloped the ship; then a quarter of the sky became an utterly black hole in space, while the rest was a blaze of stars.