Arthur C Clarke's Venus Prime Omnibus

by Paul Preuss

  No matter how far one traveled across the solar system, the stars never changed; these same constellations now shone on Earth, millions of kilometers away. The only novelties here were the small, pale crescents of Callisto and Ganymede. There were a round dozen other moons somewhere up there in the sky, but they were all much too tiny and too distant for the unaided eye to pick them out.

  “All’s nominal here,” he reported to the controllers far above him on Garuda, drifting in safety in Amalthea’s shadow. “Closing down shop for two hours.”

  “That’s a roger, Howard,” the flight director replied. The bit of jargon from the early days of the American space program might have sounded strange once, pronounced as it was in Thai-accented English, but certain phrases of American and Russian had long since become as familiar in interplanetary space as ancient nautical terminology on the seven seas of Earth.

  Falcon switched on the sleep inducer and fell swiftly into that aimless musing that is prelude to unconsciousness. His brain, which stored information willy-nilly and produced it by free association at moments like this, now reminded him of the etymology of the name Amalthea: it meant “tender,” as in gentle and caring. Amalthea the goat-nymph had been nursemaid to the infant Zeus—whom the Romans fondly equated with Jupiter—in his hiding-cave on Crete.

  For a long time after Jupiter’s inner moon was discovered it was known simply as Jupiter V, the first to be found after the four satellites made famous by Galileo—their names also borrowed from mythological associates of Zeus. If it served no other caring purpose, Amalthea was a cosmic bulldozer perpetually sweeping up the charged particles which made it unhealthy to linger close to Jupiter. Amalthea’s wake was almost free of radiation and chunks of flying matter, and there Garuda could park in perfect safety while death sleeted invisibly all around it.

  Falcon idly pondered these matters as the electric pulses surged gently through his brain. While Kon-Tiki fell toward Jupiter, gaining speed second by second in that enormous gravitational field, he slept—at first—without dreams. The dreams always came when he began to awake. He had brought his nightmares with him from Earth.

  He never dreamed of the crash itself, though he often found himself face to face again with that terrified super-chimp, seen in those moments when they were both descending through the collapsing gasbags. The simps hadn’t survived, except one, he didn’t really know which; most of those who were not killed outright were so badly injured that they’d been painlessly euthed. He didn’t know if that holdout survivor was the same one he’d confronted in the wreck, but Falcon—in his dreams—always had that one’s face in front of him. He sometimes wondered why he dreamed only of this doomed creature and not of the friends and colleagues he had lost aboard the dying Queen.

  The dreams he feared most always began with his first return to consciousness. There had been little physical pain; in fact there had been little sensation of any kind. He was in darkness and silence, and he did not even seem to be breathing—

  —strangest of all, he could not locate his limbs. He felt them there; he had all their sensations. They seemed to move, but he did not know where they were…

  The silence was the first to yield. After hours, or days, he had become aware of a faint throbbing, and eventually, after long thought, he deduced that this was the beating of his own heart. That was the first of his many mistakes.

  Next there had been faint pinpricks, sparkles of light, ghosts of pressure upon those still ghostly limbs. One by one his senses had returned, and pain had come with them. He had had to learn everything anew.

  He was a baby, helpless, and about as cute as sour milk and dirty diapers; probably there would have been lots of desperate smiling at Mom, if he could have figured out how to smile, and who was Mom. But soon he was a toddling infant: lots of cheers from everybody as he lurched half the length of the room before he folded abruptly. Folded up time after time. Physical therapy, they called it.

  Though his memory was unaffected—it didn’t seem to have been affected, for he could certainly understand the words that were spoken to him—it was months before he could answer his interrogators (why did they always lean over him with those damned lights overhead, those bright lights in a circle?) with more than a flicker of an eyelid.

  Vivid now were the moments of triumph when he had uttered the first word … first pressed the pad of a book chip … and then, finally, moved. Moved through space (the space of a hospital room), and not in his imagination but under his own power. That was a victory indeed, and it had taken him almost two years to prepare for it.

  A hundred times he’d envied the dead superchimps. They had tried and died. He hadn’t died, so he had to keep trying—he was given no choice in the matter. The doctors, his close friends, had made their deliberate decisions, deliberately.

  And now, years later, he was where no human being had ever traveled, falling planetward faster than any human in history.

  Sparta was falling with him, toward the bright planet, if only in her blazing imagination. Her eyes burned and her heart throbbed painfully in her chest. She hadn’t slept for twenty hours, yet all her senses, the ordinary and the extraordinary, were tuned to a bright pitch.

  The pain of that brightness, the crashing pain of perception and imagination, cried out for relief. Her weak fingers fumbled for the precious vial. She snapped off the cap and tried to extract a wafer, nestled close to the others in their tube, but they were obstinate in the microgravity. She extended her PIN spines and prized one out.

  Slowly the wafer melted under her tongue. The brightness softened; imagination dissolved into memory—dreamed memory, or perhaps remembered dream…

  Dilys pauses to listen.

  Except for the night watchman and his assistant, out prowling the grounds, the staff of the great house are deep in exhausted sleep. Upstairs the last of the guests are finally asleep too.

  The shooting parties had set out and had not returned for several hours. Kingman and the man called Bill had taken the east side of the estate; the west side was left to the big, loud German fellow—whose partner was Holly Singh.

  Singh had not bothered to disguise her looks or her name; Dilys had wondered if the others’ identities were as real as hers. When a late guest arrived she knew they were: he was Jack Noble from Mars, who had vanished after the failed attempt to steal the Martian plaque.

  The hunters had returned when the woods were in shade and October shadows were long on the meadow.

  Cook had had dinner for six to contend with, but a butler, maid, and manservant were sufficient to do the service. Dilys, inexperienced in the ways of the household, had been free to sit in her tiny room in the servant’s wing and watch the viddie, until exhaustion overcame her.

  She’d tried to listen, but after dinner Kingman and his guests had seemed to vanish into some utterly soundproof recess of the ancient manor. Through the crashing din of the nearby kitchen she’d filtered the sound of footsteps descending stone stairs—even the whisper of long robes—then a loud screech of iron hinges and the boom of heavy wooden doors. Then nothing.

  Nothing to do but sit quietly in her little room, while the rest of the staff bustled about her, and think. Seems there was a place beneath the house that did not appear in the oldest plan, those fragments of parchment dating from the late 14th century, when what was to become Kingman’s house had begun as an abbey on the pilgrim road. If the hidden place deep in the earth had been built at that time, its architects and builders had conspired to keep it secret. If it had been dug later, the contractors and workmen were equally discreet.

  How was such perfect discretion obtained? By the ancient expedients, no doubt still in use. How many building inspectors and historians and would-be archaeologists had come into sudden wealth or met with untimely death after professing an interest in this significant pile of old stones?

  Dilys, truly exhausted after fourteen hours of washing and ironing, had been unable to resist exhaustion. She’d fallen
asleep then, and wakened to this deathly quiet moment.

  Now she leaves her narrow cell, walks through the big kitchen smelling of grease and soap—moonlight spills through the high leaded windows, reflects from the round bottoms of hanging steel pans and bowls, gleams from racks of knives—moves through the pantry into the service hall beside the main dining room.

  Here a door opens upon a narrow stair, those she had heard them descend. Nothing guards the door. She opens it and moves swiftly down the spiraling stone steps into utter darkness.

  Infrared radiation seeps from the warm stone walls, enough for her to see by. Empty racks and abandoned casks are shoved back against the walls, but someone has recently been in to dust off the cobwebs. The stone pavement underfoot has been washed and waxed. At the far side of the old wine cellar is another door, again unlocked and unguarded. Here, at the heart of the conspiracy, confidence has overruled caution.

  Through the door. More stone steps—cooler now, a cave that keeps a steady temperature all year around. She sees forms in the dim glow of the Earth’s faint radioactive warmth.

  At the bottom of the steps. The air redolent of perfumes and perspirations; by their various scents she knows Kingman and each of his guests. There—their ghosts hang in midair, six white robes still glowing with the body heat of those who have recently worn them.

  In front of her, another door, this one of metal. She touches her tongue to it: bronze, cool and sour. On its surface, only a few handprints, still barely warm and thus visible. Otherwise the door is a slab of black in the dim red darkness.

  She sniffs the air, stares at the cooling prints, listens.

  She eases the door open. Cold air flows gently out of the cavern. From the barely perceptible echoes of her quiet footfalls on the stone she senses the amount of empty space in the chamber.

  To see more, even she will need light. She cups her palm over the bright electric torch, making a lantern of her hand’s bones and flesh. By the blood-filtered light she sees a severely simple octagonal chamber of pale sandstone, like a church without aisles or transept, higher than it is wide. The floor is of black marble, highly polished, unadorned.

  On eight sides slender stone piers soar upward, springing into thin ribs which criss-cross the vault in a star pattern. Between the ribs, a ceiling painted so dark a blue that it is black in the red light. Bright gold eight-pointed stars randomly adorn it, in sizes from nail heads to shield bosses. The biggest star, a kind of gold target, is fixed at the high center.

  The architecture is Late Gothic, a style originating in Eastern Europe in the 14th Century, in England called Perpendicular. The work is original, no copy, but this vault is no church. The stars overhead are not randomly sprinkled.

  This is a planetarium. It depicts the southern sky, and at its center is the constellation Crux. She recognizes the nature of the room from what Blake has told her. The starry vault is an analogue, centuries older, of the last chamber in the underground villa in Paris where Blake’s initiation into the prophetae had culminated.

  She moves slowly about the windowless, utterly sterile room, noting how the golden stars above are reflected in the polished black marble at her feet, as if from the bottom of a deep well.

  There, in the center of the black marble floor, is the single decorative feature, directly beneath the bright golden star in Crux. A raised round stone, with a device carved upon it. She uncaps her torch and shines its intense white beam straight down.

  A Gorgon’s head. Medusa.

  Not the classical fancy of a lovely woman with garden snakes for hair, but an Archaic-period horror mask of deeply carved and brightly painted limestone—red and blue and yellow—fused upon the marble: staring eyes, wide-stretched maw, curved tusks, a scalp writhing with vipers.

  The Goddess as Death.

  The hall in Paris that Blake had told of had been built in the Age of Reason, and the starry chamber which he had attained after many trials was dominated by an enormous statue of Athena, inside of which was housed (O pinnacle of Apollonian calm and exuberance!) a pipe organ. But on the aegis of that same Athena, goddess of wisdom, was an archaic mask of Medusa.

  The prophetae worship the Knowledge, Agia Sophia, Athena and Medusa, Wisdom and Death. To look upon the face of Medusa is to be turned to stone. To resist the Knowledge is to die.

  She could be the greatest of us

  To resist us is to resist the Knowledge

  The gaunt girl who now looks upon the face of the goddess thinks otherwise. Beneath the carved stone mask at her feet rests something of great value, something of deepest significance to the people who put the mask here.

  To confront wisdom is to die. The gate of wisdom is death.

  The slab is heavy, but it lifts easily away. The crypt below, lined with white limestone, is no wider or deeper than the marble plate above. Something in it is hidden under a linen shroud. She plucks the shroud away and penetrates the dark chamber with a spear of light. She sees…

  An iron chalice bearing the figure of the striding storm god. Hittite, older than the carved Medusa, at least 3,500 years old.

  A pair of papyrus scrolls. Egyptian, almost as old.

  The tiny skeletons of two human infants, yellowed to ivory. Origin unknown. Age indeterminate.

  A slim black datasliver, shiny and new.

  “Kon-Tiki Mission Control at mission elapsed time three hours, ten minutes, on the mark,” said flight director Meechai Buranaphorn into the data recorder. “And here’s the mark… Guidance, give us your verbal assessment please.”

  “Tracking still nominal for scheduled atmospheric descent.”

  “Medical?”

  The med controller spoke into his comm unit. “All nominal. EEG indicates our man is in transition out of stage-two sleep.”

  Already there was a lag in signal reception from Kon-Tiki, amounting to perhaps a twentieth of a second and steadily increasing. Mission Control was forced to maintain communication with Kon-Tiki via comm satellites in temporary orbits, for between Garuda and the planet the shield of Amalthea was always upraised, blocking line-of-sight communication.

  The half dozen controllers hung comfortably in loose harnesses above their sparkling flatscreens. Through surrounding windows of thick glass a spectacular landscape of pocked and irregular ice and rock reflected feeble sunlight back into the circular room: it was one end of the oblong moon, which stretched away for dozens of kilometers like a striated, convex plaster impression of Death Valley. From the edge of the dirty white horizon an orange-red glow refracted daytime on Jupiter. The planet itself would never be seen through the windows of this room, but Kon-Tiki’s triumphant return would be.

  For all the relative luxury of its custom-made facilities, Garuda was a crowded ship, with five crewmembers and a total of twenty-one mission controllers, scientists, and supporting technicians. When Howard Falcon was aboard, that made twenty-seven people. There was one other passenger on Garuda’s official roster, but so far as the professionals were concerned he was worse than useless baggage.

  Mister Useless Baggage spoke up now, from a privileged seat peering over the flight director’s shoulder—the controllers knew him mainly as someone from a watchdog citizens’ group authorized by the Board of Space Control to observe the mission, a place a couple of hundred media types would willingly have shed blood over.

  “Consumables, Redfield here, if you can spare a moment. My calculations do not quite jibe with your estimate of oxygen-consumption rates aboard Kon-Tiki. Will you kindly reconfirm?” His voice and manners were those of an unfriendly tax collector.

  The controller in question objected to nothing, offered nothing, merely suffered the indignity and tapped a few keys. The Baggage Man had subjected all of them to such indignity in the weeks since Garuda had left Ganymede.

  Mr. Baggage, Redfield, as he called himself, grunted at the numbers freshly displayed on his screen and said nothing. He was not really paying attention, not even really caring.

  A
rmed with the plans Blake had worked out for them, Dexter and Arista had launched their public-relations blitz… “Quis custodet custodies?” Arista had demanded, as confident of her dimly remembered Latin as only priests and lawyers can be. Dexter had put the matter a little more earthily: Who sets a dog to watch the eggs?

  Faced with Vox Populi’s persistence and this last bit of untranslatable logic, the Board of Space Control had given in. After much jockeying and negotiating—the Plowmans never hesitating to go public when things bogged down—it was agreed that one or more impartial observers from an organization such as Vox Populi should be allowed free access to every facet of the Kon-Tiki program, throughout its operations.

  Blake sometimes suppressed a grin when he thought how readily the Space Board had capitulated. The mess was not all that funny, really, when he considered that perhaps a dozen people on this ship knew all about it and were merely awaiting a chance to kill him. And even the innocents wished he would go away.

  Yet he stayed and asked harassing questions and watched them, sometimes for two or more shifts at a time without sleeping. What he was looking for, they didn’t know. They weren’t friendly, and neither was he.

  Blake’s bitter reverie was broken by the comm controller. “Flight, we have Howard on line.”

  19

  Kon-Tiki was just emerging from shadow, and the Jovian dawn was bridging the sky ahead in a titanic bow of light, when the persistent buzz of the alarm dragged Falcon up from sleep. The inevitable nightmares (he had been trying to summon a nurse, but did not even have the strength to push a button) had swiftly faded from consciousness. The greatest—and perhaps last—adventure of his life was before him.

  He called Mission Control, now almost 100,000 kilometers away and falling swiftly below the curve of Jupiter, to report that everything was in order. His velocity had just passed fifty kilometers per second (given that he was within the outer fringes of a planetary atmosphere, that was one for Guinness), and in half an hour Kon-Tiki would begin to feel the resistance that made this the most difficult atmospheric entry in the entire solar system.