Arthur C Clarke's Venus Prime Omnibus

by Paul Preuss

  The image of Sir Randolph himself appeared, inserted neatly into a lower corner of the screen—the huge white geyser seemed to loom behind him, vaguely menacing. Three years earlier, few people would have known the face that stared from the screen—and in real life stared back at itself over a technician’s shoulder. Once handsome, that face had grown pale and thin from half a century of disappointment with human nature, yet it betrayed no cynicism, and behind the staring gray eyes, under the drooping gray brows, a spark of faith seemed to burn hotly in Mays’s brain.

  Many more seeming unrelated events culminate on little Amalthea—events occurring in such far-flung locales as the hellish surface of Venus, the far side of Earth’s moon, the deserts of Mars—and not least, at a lavish estate in England’s Somerset countryside. These and other impossible coincidences will be the subject of tonight’s program, the conclusion of our series.

  Mays and his editor said the familiar words in chorus: “Music up. Roll titles,” and the editor chuckled at their identical reflexes. Music swelled. Standard opening titles and credits flashed on screen, superimposed on scenes from earlier “Overmind” episodes.

  Both men stood. The editor stretched to get the tension out of his arms. “You had it timed to within a tenth of a second, sir,” he said with satisfaction. “I’ll just get this down to Master Control. We’re on the air in seventeen minutes. Want to watch from the control room?”

  “No, I’m afraid I have another appointment,” Mays said. “Thank you for your assistance.”

  With that he strode out of the halls of Broadcasting House and back into the rainy night without another word to anyone—as if really, one did this sort of thing every day.

  PART

  1

  TO THE SHORE OF

  THE SHORELESS

  OCEAN

  1

  Earlier the same day, on another continent…

  “You aren’t sure you are human,” said the young woman. She sat on a spoke-backed chair of varnished pine. In her oval face her brows were wide ink strokes above eyes of liquid brown, and beneath her upturned nose her mouth was full, her lips innocent in their delicate, natural pinkness. Her long brown hair hung in burnished waves to the shoulders of her summery print dress. “I believe that’s where we left off.”

  “Isn’t that where we always leave off?” Sparta’s lips were fuller than the other woman’s, perpetually open, as if testing the breeze; they did not curve easily into a smile.

  “Certainly that is the question you hope to have answered. And until you do—or decide that some other question is more interesting—it seems we shall have to keep returning to it.”

  The room was unfurnished except for the chairs on which the two women sat facing each other from opposite corners. There were no pictures on the cream-painted walls, no rugs on the polished sycamore planks of the floor. The rain had stopped sometime in the night. The morning air was fragrant with the aroma of the greening woods, and where sunlight came through the open casement, it was warm on the skin.

  Sparta’s straight blond hair just reached the high collar of her soft black tunic; together they framed her face, a smooth oval like Linda’s. She turned her head to look out the single window. “They remade me to hear things no natural human can hear, see things no natural human can see, analyze what I taste and smell—not only with precision but consciously, specifying molecular structure—and calculate faster than any human being, and integrate myself with any electronic computer. They even gave me the power to communicate in the microwave. How can I be human?”

  “Are the deaf human? The blind? Where does a quadriplegic’s humanity end—somewhere in her spinal cord, or where her wheels touch the ground? Are such people de-humanized by their prostheses?”

  “I was born perfect.”

  “Congratulations.”

  Sparta’s pale skin brightened. “You already know everything I know and much more. Why is this such a difficult question for you?”

  “Because only you can answer it. Do you know these lines?

  Be still, and wait without hope

  For hope would be hope of the wrong thing; wait without love

  For love would be love of the wrong thing…

  Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought…”

  The lines of poetry roused defiance in Sparta, but she said nothing.

  “You have tried to think your way to an answer,” Linda suggested. “Or feel your way, which in these circumstances is no better. What are feelings but thoughts without words? The answer to your question cannot be deduced or emoted. It will come when it comes. From history. From the world.”

  “If it ever comes.”

  “It’s as good a question as any, but yes, you may lose interest in it.”

  Sparta picked at an imaginary bit of lint on the knee of her soft, close-fitting black trousers. “Let’s change the subject.”

  “So easily?” Linda laughed, a girlish laugh, like the seventeen-year-old she appeared to be.

  “My humanity or lack of it is not in fact the only thing that interests me. Last night I dreamed again.”

  “Yes?” Linda sat quietly alert. “Tell me your dream.”

  “Not of Jupiter’s clouds, or the signs,” Sparta said. “I haven’t had those dreams for a year.”

  “That part of your life is past.”

  “Last night I dreamed I was a dolphin, racing deep under the sea. The light was very blue, and I was cool and warm at the same time, happy without knowing why—except that there were others with me. Other dolphins. It was like flying. It went on and on, deeper and deeper. And then I was flying. I had wings and I was flying in a pink sky over a red desert. It could have been on Mars, except there was air. I realized I was alone. And suddenly I was so sad I made myself wake up.”

  “What was your name?”

  “I didn’t… What makes you think I had a name?”

  “I wonder, that’s all.”

  Sparta paused, as if remembering. “When I was a dolphin, it was like a whistle.”

  “And when you were a bird?”

  “A cry, like…” She hesitated, then said, “Circe.” It came from her lips like a dolphin’s squeal.

  “Fascinating. Do you know what that means?”

  “Circe? I don’t know why I thought of that. In the Odyssey she changed men into animals.”

  “Yes. In the Odyssey she is the Goddess as Death. But the word literally means ‘falcon.’”

  “Falcon!” The previous year’s Kon-Tiki expedition to Jupiter had been commanded by the airship captain Howard Falcon; in her madness, thinking him her rival, Sparta had tried to murder him.

  Linda said, “A name not of death, but of the sun.”

  “I was happier under the sea,” said Sparta.

  “The sea is an ancient symbol of the subconscious. Apparently your subconscious is no longer barred to you. A propitious dream.”

  “But that came first. Then I lost it.”

  “Because a lonely, conscious task still calls you. A sun-like task. In the West, at least, the sun was a lonely god.”

  Sparta’s expression set into stubbornness. “That task was imposed on me by others. Empress of the Last Days.” She spoke the ritual phrase with contempt. “By what right did they elect me ambassador to the stars? I owe them nothing.”

  “True. But sooner or later you’ll have to decide what to tell them. Whether yes or no.”

  Hot tears welled up in Sparta’s eyes. She sat still and let them fall on her lap, to disappear in the soft black cloth. After a few moments she said, “If I were human I could refuse.”

  “Must you be sure of your humanity before you can refuse?”

  Sparta evaded the question. “Then maybe I could be with Blake and do something normal, like live in a real house, have babies.”

  “Why is that impossible?”

  “That was destroyed in me.”

  “You can be remade.”

  Sparta shrugged.

>   Linda tried again. “How does Blake feel?”

  “You know.”

  “Tell me again.”

  “He loves me.” Her voice was flat.

  “And you love him.”

  “But I am not human,” Sparta muttered.

  Linda smiled dryly. “Now you are sure.”

  Trapped, Sparta stood up, her motion smooth as a dancer’s. She moved toward the door, hesitated, then turned. “This is getting nowhere. I designed you as you are…”

  “Yes?”

  “Because when I was you—was Linda—I was human. Normal, almost. Before they turned me into this, I could have had anything I wanted.”

  “Footfalls echo in the memory,” Linda recited, “Down the passage which we did not take…”

  “What?” Sparta said irritably.

  “Sorry, I seem to be iterating Eliot this morning. Do I understand you are disappointed that I am not in fact the girl you used to be?”

  “I thought if I had them make you like this, maybe we could talk about things the way … normal women do.”

  “Alas, you are not normal, and I am certainly not a woman.”

  “As you insist on reminding me.”

  “The part of me you did not design for … user-friendliness … is a sophisticated ontologist, with many ways of testing what the world is, what a person is, how things are. Granted, the related epistemological questions are subtle, but at least my algorithms are explicit. Because you are who you are, however, you can never fully untangle what you know about the world and about yourself from how you know it.”

  “I’m no phenomenologist.”

  “No, and I don’t mean to suggest that just because you have a human brain and not an electronic one there is no truth. Or that the universe is not consistent, or doesn’t exist independently of your perceptions. I simply mean that—unaided by me or another therapist or teacher—it is doubtful that you, or anyone else, could ever free yourself from the web of your untested, culturally acquired assumptions.”

  “You haven’t answered my question.”

  “I think I have. It’s my job to help you see how things are. To become aware of who you are, Linda-Ellen-Sparta.”

  “We’ve been at this a year.”

  “I can hardly blame you for impatience.”

  “They took that stuff out of my belly. Fine—what do I need with a radio in my belly? As for my seeing, I personally killed that with Striaphan. Fine again. Those things were not really me. I feel strong now, I feel well now. Better than ever. But toward … oh, meaning, I suppose—a purpose of my own, decided on by me—what progress have I made?”

  “To have completely recovered from your dependency on Striaphan seems like progress to me.”

  “Yesterday I was walking down by the cliffs, above the river, and I remembered that one of the boys from SPARTA was climbing in the Catskills one summer and the granite gave way beneath him and he fell and was killed. Just like that. And I thought, if that happened to me now, I… I wouldn’t mind. That would be all right with me. Nothing that needs doing would be left undone.”

  “Do you miss Blake?”

  Sparta nodded. Again the tears pooled in her eyes.

  Linda spoke softly. “Perhaps there is something you need to do for your own sake.”

  From across the room, Sparta studied the simulacrum of her younger self sitting so placidly in the spring sunshine. Her reluctant lips formed a wry smile. “We always get to this place, too.”

  “What place?”

  “Aren’t we about to get to the place where you tell me I should talk to my mother?”

  “I doubt that I have ever used the word should.”

  “For five years she let me believe she was dead. She tried to talk my father out of telling me the truth,” Sparta said angrily. “She gave them permission to do this.”

  “Your reluctance to confront her is easy to understand.”

  “But you do think I should. Whether you use the word or not.”

  “No.” Linda shook her head. The highlights in her brown hair gleamed in the sunlight. “It would be a place to start. But only one of many.” The two women watched each other, unmoving, until Linda said, “Are you leaving already? The hour is young.”

  Sparta took a deep breath and sat down. After a silent moment, they continued their conversation.

  2

  Around the planet and throughout the solar system, a hundred million people gathered in front of their flatscreens. Only those in Great Britain would receive the final episode of “Overmind” at the comfortable hour of eight in the evening. Others, of whom there were many more—those who chose not to wait for local redistribution at a more convenient time—were fiddling with their satellite antennas as their clocks blinked to 3:22 A.M., or 11:43 P.M., or as close to the moment of original transmission from London as the speed of light allowed.

  On the eastern seaboard of North America, it was almost three o’clock on an alternately bright and rainy afternoon, with the sun dodging in and out of the clouds. A tall man in a black leather topcoat mounted the porch of a stone house in the woods. He knocked on the door.

  A woman in a wool skirt and leather boots opened the door. “Come inside, Kip, before you catch your death.” Ari Nagy was spare and athletic and wore her graying black hair trimmed sensibly at the jaw line. She was among the few who called this man anything except Commander.

  He did as she told him, shaking the water from his coat and leaving it hanging on a peg in the hallway beside yellow polycanvas slickers and down-filled parkas. He went into the long living room.

  The house was larger than it looked from the outside. Through the windows at the south end of the room, beyond the woods, one could see a stretch of cloud-heavy sky ending in a horizon of low, gray green mountains—a monochrome landscape, punctuated by splashes of yellow forsythia and the pale white promise of dogwood blossoms among wiry wet branches.

  Overhead, carved beams reflected warm light from bare planed surfaces; Native American rugs on the plank floor held in the warmth of an oak fire; which burned busily on the fieldstone hearth. The commander walked straight to it and held out his hands to collect the heat.

  The woman returned from the kitchen, carrying a tea service. “Black tea? You’ve been known to have a cup on days like this.”

  “Thanks.” He took a cup of tea from the tray and set it on the mantel; the porcelain saucer grated against the stone. “How’d you know I was coming?” His voice was so low and gravelly, it almost sounded as if it hurt him to speak. With his suncured skin and pale blue eyes he could have been a north woods lumberjack or fishing guide; he wore faded denims, and the sleeves of his plaid shirt were rolled back over his strong wrists.

  “I called the lodge, looking for Jozsef. I was hoping he’d be with you.”

  “Soon. He wanted to put his report in the files.”

  “It’s three o’clock. Just like him to miss the program—he thinks the world ought to take his schedule into account.”

  “We’ll replay the important parts for him.” He picked up iron tongs and poked fretfully at the burning logs until they crackled with heat.

  Ari settled into a leather couch and arranged a red and green plaid blanket over her lap. “Turn on and record,” she said in the direction of the pine-paneled wall—

  —whereupon a hidden videoplate unfolded into a two-meter-square screen, thin as foil, and immediately brightened. “Good evening,” said the voice from the screen, “this is the All Worlds Service of the BBC, bringing you the final program in the series ‘Overmind,’ presented by Sir Randolph Mays.”

  The commander looked up from the fire to see Jupiter’s clouds filling the screen. Visible in the foreground was a swift, bright spark. “Jupiter’s moon Amalthea,” came the voice of Randolph Mays, in that half-whisper of suppressed urgency. “For more than a year, the most unusual object in our solar system—and the key to its central enigma.”

  Unlike most of the hundred million people wa
tching “Overmind,” who were sure their narrator would track down the truth wherever it led—indeed, most who had seen the earlier episodes were hoping Mays would solve “the central enigma of the solar system” this very night, before their eyes—the two watching in the house in the woods were hoping he wouldn’t get too close to it.

  “Good picture,” Ari remarked.

  “Heard about it on the way in—it was stolen from a Space Board monitor on Ganymede. Mays had reedited the opening of his show within the last hour.”

  “Did someone in the Space Board give it to him?”

  “We’ll find out.”

  They watched in silence then, as Sir Randolph recited his litany of coincidences: “…events occurring in such far-flung locales as the hellish surface of Venus, the far side of Earth’s moon, the deserts of Mars—and not least, at a lavish estate in England’s Somerset countryside. These and other impossible coincidences will be the subject of tonight’s program…”

  “Oh dear,” murmured Ari; under her blanket she hugged herself tighter. “He’s going to bring Linda into it after all, I fear.”

  The commander left off brooding by the fire to take a seat beside her on the couch, facing the screen. “We’ve put up as high a stone wall as we can.”

  “How does he know these things?” the woman demanded. “Is he one of them?”

  “They’re finished—we knew it when we went into Kingman’s place and found the destruction.”

  “But he’s spilling secrets they killed to keep.”

  “Probably the man has his hooks into some poor disillusioned soul who repented and wants to tell all. Whoever it is needs a better confessor.”

  “No one below the rank of the knights and elders could connect Linda to the Knowledge.” Her voice betrayed her fear.

  On screen, the title sequence faded. The final episode began…

  Sir Randolph Mays was a formerly obscure Cambridge historian whose title derived not from his scholarship but from the lavish charity of his youth, when he had given a good part of his inheritance to his college. Popular with his students, he had become an overnight star, a veritable viddie nova, with his first thirteen-part BBC series, “In Search of the Human Race.” Mays had seemed to move through the widespread locations of his show as if stalking elusive prey, gliding on long, corduroy-clad legs past the pillars of Karnak, up the endless stairs of Calakmul, through the jumbled maze of Çatal Hüyük. All the while his great hands sawed the air and, perched atop the neck of his black turtleneck, his square jaw worked to deliver impressively long and vehement sentences. It all made for a wonderful travelogue, thickly slathered over with a sort of intellectual mayonnaise.