Arthur C Clarke's Venus Prime Omnibus

by Paul Preuss

  Lowering his gaze a few centimeters from the calendar, Luke could stare into the sweating face and evasive eyes of an overfed blond man who sat in a swivel armchair rearranging yellow slips of paper on his desk. For half a minute the two men sat wordlessly, almost as if they were a pair of music lovers trying to concentrate on the clash and wail of the Chinese opera that filtered through the thin wall between them and the barber shop next door. Then the faxlink on the credenza beeped and spit out another hardcopy.

  The fat man grunted and leaned perilously over the star-board rail of his armchair to snag the paper from the tray. He glanced at it and grunted again, leaning to port across the littered desktop to hand it to Luke, who folded it and stuck it in the breast pocket of his work shirt.

  “Pleasure doing business with you, Von Frisch.” Luke got up to leave.

  “For once I can say the same,” the fat man grumbled. “Which suggests you are spending somebody else’s money.”

  “Better if you keep your guesses to yourself.”

  “Gladly, my friend. But who else in our small village will believe that Lim and Sons needs a submarine just to fulfill a municipal reservoir maintenance contract?”

  “Nobody needs to believe anything, if they never hear about it.” Luke paused at the door in the opaque wall and as if on impulse groped in the back pocket of his canvas pants. He brought out a worn leather chip case and extracted a credit sliver. “I know we took care of your bonus, but I almost forgot your bonus bonus.”

  He reached over and grabbed the fingerprint-smeared black plastic infolink unit on the desk and stabbed the sliver into the slot. “Let’s say two percent of net, payable one month from delivery”—Luke withdrew the sliver and put it back in his wallet—“if I haven’t heard whispers in the corridors about the sale of a Europan sub by then.”

  “Your generosity overwhelms me,” said the fat man, although he did a creditable job of hiding his surprise. “Rest assured that anything you hear won’t have come from my people.”

  Luke jerked his head toward the surveillance chip in the corner of the ceiling. “Just the same, I’d fry that peeper.”

  The fat man grunted. “Doesn’t work anyway.”

  “Yeah?” Luke grinned his mocking grin. “Your money.” He turned and pushed through the door.

  Von Frisch instantly calculated the amount of Luke’s attempted bribe; he thought he knew where he could sell the information for more. At least it was worth a try, and with luck and a bit of discretion, Luke would never hear of it.

  The fat man waited until Luke had had a chance to leave the brokerage and disappear into the crowd outside. He touched a button to de-opaque the partition; in the outer office his staff of two, harried-looking middle-aged male clerks who were suddenly aware that they were once more under the eye of the boss, crouched in painful concentration over their flatscreens.

  He keyed the office interlink and offloaded the contents of the surveillance chip onto a sliver, then erased the previous twenty-four hours’ surveillance. Fingering the black sliver in one pudgy hand, he punched keys on the phonelink with the other; like those of most businesses, his phone was equipped with one-way scrambling to prevent, or at least impede, tracing.

  “This is the Ganymede Interplanetary Hotel,” said a robot operator. “How may we assist you?”

  “Sir Randolph Mays’s room.”

  “I’ll see if he’s registered, sir.”

  “He’s registered. Or he will be soon.”

  “Ringing, sir.”

  Fresh from two days of quarantine, Marianne Mitchell and Bill Hawkins found themselves crushed together in a corner by an over-full load of passengers, riding an elevator car down into the heart of Shoreless Ocean city. The last thirty meters of the slow descent were in a free-standing glass tube through the axis of the underground city’s central dome. The view opened out suddenly, and Marianne gaped at the startling mass of people on the floor far below.

  The crowd spilled in and out through four great gates, outlined in gold, set in the square walls upon which the dome appeared to rest—although the masonry shell was really a false ceiling suspended in a hollow carved from the ice. As the elevator car moved lower, she could see upward to the vast, intricate, richly painted Tibetan-style mandala that covered the inner surface of the dome.

  “You can’t see the floor for the crowd,” Hawkins said, “but if you could, you’d see an enormous Shri-Yantra laid out in tile.”

  “What’s that?”

  “A geometric device, an aid to meditation. Outer square, inner lotus, interlocking triangles in the center. A symbol of evolution and enlightenment, a symbol of the world, a symbol of Shiva, a symbol of the progenitive goddess, the yoni…”

  “Stop, my head’s spinning.”

  “At any rate, a symbol Buddhists and Hindus are both happy with. By the way, this elevator shaft is supposed to represent the lingam in the yoni.”

  “Lingam?”

  “Another object of meditation.” He coughed.

  “Somehow these people don’t seem like they’re meditating. Shopping, maybe.”

  The heavenly car came to rest and the doors slid open.

  “If we’re separated, head for the east gate—that one over there.” Hawkins barely got the words out before the two of them were expelled into the mob.

  Marianne kept a vice grip on his arm. She was glad he knew where he was going; she was sure she could never have found the restaurant Blake Redfield had named without Hawkins to guide her.

  Finding the right current in the human stream, they plunged through the east gate into a narrow passage, which soon bifurcated, then divided again. They were in what seemed a rabbit warren or ant’s nest of curving tunnels and passages, jammed with people, spiraling up and down and crossing each other at unexpected and seemingly random intervals. For Marianne the yellow and brown faces around her evoked no comparisons with rabbits or ants, however—she was too much a child of the widely (if shallowly) tolerant 21st century for the easy slurs of 19th-century racism to hold any metaphoric force for her—she was merely overwhelmed by dense humanity.

  After twenty minutes of effort and many questions, which Hawkins insisted upon bawling out in a sort of pidgin, they found the restaurant, a Singaporean establishment aptly named the Straits Cafe.

  Inside, it was as busy as the jam-packed little alley-wide corridor it fronted. The air was rich with a compound aroma—sharp spices, hot meats, steamed rice, and undercurrents of other, unidentifiable odors. Hawkins hesitated in the doorway. A teenage girl wearing a viddie-inspired version of the latest interplanetary fashions—orange and green baggies were in this year—started toward them, tattered menus in hand, but Hawkins waved her off, having caught sight of Blake Redfield at a table for four next to a wall-sized aquarium.

  Marianne hadn’t been expecting much from the son of her mother’s friend, so Blake was an interesting surprise: handsome, freckle-faced, auburn-haired, an American with continental airs and too much money—it showed in his clothes, his hairstyle, his expensive men’s cologne.

  And when he spoke, it sounded in his English-flavored accent. “You’re Marianne, nice to meet you,” he said, getting to his feet, a bit distracted.

  There was another man at the table, an emaciated Chinese in work clothes who barely glanced at Hawkins but positively leered at Marianne. “This is Luke Lim,” Blake said. “Marianne, uh. Mitchell. Bill Hawkins. Thanks for taking over for me, Bill. Sit down, everybody sit down.”

  Hawkins and Marianne exchanged glances and sat down side by side, facing the aquarium wall, their faces lit by the greenish light that filtered through its none-too-clean water.

  Menus arrived. Hawkins barely glanced at his. The expression on Marianne’s face conveyed her bewilderment—

  —not lost on Luke Lim. “The rock cod is fresh,” he said to her. “Also nervous.” He tapped the glass and grinned, an appalling display of yellow teeth and goatee hairs.

  She returned a feeble smile and
found herself staring past him at the ugliest fish she’d ever seen, all flaps and wrinkles and stringy parts the color of mucilage, floating at Lim’s eye level where he leaned his head against the aquarium glass.

  Man and fish studied her in return.

  “Uh, I think…”

  “On the other hand, you might prefer the deep-fried shredded taro,” said Lim. “Very … crunchy.”

  She couldn’t believe he was licking his lips at her like that. She stared at him, fascinated.

  “Until you start chewing it,” Bill Hawkins warned. “Then it turns into one-finger poi, right in your mouth.”

  “What’s poi?” Marianne asked softly, almost whispering.

  “A Polynesian word for library paste,” Hawkins said grumpily. “Blue gray in color. One-finger is the gooiest sort.”

  Luke Lim had turned his wild leer full upon Hawkins. “Apparently Mr. Hawkins doesn’t appreciate our Singaporean cuisine.”

  “When were you last in Singapore?” Hawkins asked—mildly enough, yet enough to cause tension; he and Lim had taken an instant mutual dislike.

  “Oh dear,” Marianne murmured, turning back to the menu. Surely she would find there a few familiar words, like beef, potatoes, spinach…

  “Forster’s off with the others tonight,” Blake said to Hawkins, diverting his attention. “He wants to see you tomorrow morning. You’ve got a room waiting in the Inter-planetary. You can sit in it, or in the bar, or wander ’round the town, but don’t expect to find anybody in our so-called office.” Blake hadn’t even glanced at Marianne since she and Hawkins had sat down. “Luke and I—we’ll be in touch, don’t worry—we’ve recently concluded arrangements for the delivery of, uh, the first item.”

  “The what?”

  “Item A,” Lim said meticulously. “He paid me to call it that. At least in public.”

  “We’re working on the second,” said Blake.

  “Item B,” Luke said helpfully.

  “Why all the damned secrecy?” Hawkins asked.

  “Forster’s orders,” Blake said. “We’re under observation.”

  “I should bloody well think so. By about three-quarters of the population of the inhabited worlds.”

  “Dressed like this, in fact,” Blake said, “I’m a bloody neon sign, but I think it would be even odder if I were to greet Ms. Mitchell in my customary get-up these days.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “Did you notice Randolph Mays with you on Helios? No? I’m not surprised.”

  “Mays?” asked Marianne, perking up.

  “Would you like to know how Randolph Mays managed to get himself comfortably ensconced in the Interplanetary Hotel for two days during which all the rest of you have been detained in quarantine?”

  “Sir Randolph Mays is in our hotel?” Marianne asked.

  Blake was still ignoring her, fixing a stern eye on Hawkins and barely restraining himself from tapping a forefinger on the tabletop. “Mays has contacts, informants, friends in places high and low. He knows customs types and hotel managers and maitre d’s and all that sort, knows what they like, which is clean money—which he’s also got. The man’s not just a fatuous old Oxbridge don, Bill, to whom the BBC mistakenly offered a pulpit from which to spout bull. He’s a damned good investigative reporter, stalking history on the hoof. And we have the misfortune to be his quarry of the moment.” Blake reached for the sliver of paper covered with handwriting that indicated his and Lim’s bill. “Luke and I have already had lunch. If you wouldn’t mind carrying on with Marianne here, Bill… I mean…”

  “Quite, delighted to,” Hawkins said quickly, before Blake could make it worse. “Assuming that’s all right with you, Marianne.”

  Two bright red patches had appeared high on Marianne’s cheeks. “Why waste another minute on me? I’m capable of looking after myself.”

  “Marianne,” Hawkins said fervently, “I can think of nothing I would rather do—much less need do—than spend the next few hours in your company.”

  “Catch you at the hotel in the morning, then.” Blake had already stood up. He looked at Marianne, his eyes unfocused. “Sorry, really I am. This way it works out for everybody.”

  Lim followed Blake to the counter. “Did I hear you say you were paying, my friend?” He was talking to Blake, but he couldn’t resist a final, over-the-shoulder leer at Marianne.

  Hawkins watched them go. “Extraordinary!” He seemed genuinely astonished. “Before today I couldn’t have imagined Redfield behaving in other than the most exemplary fashion. Perhaps things aren’t going well for him—Forster seems to have put the fear of God into him.”

  “He was certainly being obscure,” said Marianne.

  “Yes, as in some cheap spy novel. When really, there’s no mystery. The professor plans a thorough exploration of Amalthea. I know he counted on acquiring an ice mole—a mining machine—here on Ganymede. That must be Item A.”

  “Item A, Item B. Worse than this menu.”

  Hawkins took the hint. “May I order for both of us?”

  “Why not? If we were in Manhattan, I’d do the same for you.”

  But Hawkins paid no attention to the menu. Instead he absently studied the fish swimming in the huge aquarium. “I suppose Item B would be a submarine.”

  “What would Professor Forster want with a submarine?”

  “Only guessing.” He waved for the waitress. “Those geysers, you know … could be that under the ice, there’s liquid water. Well, let’s see what this place has to offer.”

  Marianne glanced toward the doorway through which Blake and his friend Lim had disappeared into the throng. Depending on one’s mood, all this could be viewed as intensely mundane or intensely exciting. Why not hope for the best? Marianne moved perceptibly closer to Hawkins.

  If anyone had said to Marianne that she might someday blossom into an intellectual, she would have been shocked; she thought her own record of academic failure proved nothing but the opposite. But in fact she had a powerful hunger for information, a powerful attraction to schemes of organization, and a sometimes too-powerful critical sense that kept her hopping from one such flawed scheme to another. And they were all flawed.

  Sometimes her lust for knowledge got mixed up with her liking for people and her own physical wants. At the beginning of any relationship, people see what they want and hear what they want and take as clues what may be nothing more than accidental gibberish or cant. She knew that. On the other hand, it did help that Bill Hawkins was big and strong and nice looking. She allowed her warm thigh to brush his as he made a great show of studying the menu. Marianne was no intellectual yet, but she was a young woman of ambition, at a stage of her life when men who knew something she didn’t know were the sexiest men of all.

  7

  All afternoon, after their awkward luncheon with Blake Red-field and his odd local friend, Hawkins and Marianne wandered through the corridors of the exotic city, unburdened by an itinerary. They visited the more famous tourist sights—a stroll through the crowded ice gardens, a ride on a sampan through steaming-cold canals lined with tourist shops—and they talked about what Hawkins knew of the worlds: about his earliest desire to be a full-fledged xeno-archaeologist, his vacation trips to Venus and Mars, his studies under Professor Forster. The history of Culture X was virtually a blank, he told her, although it was known that beings who spoke—or at least wrote—their language had visited Earth in the Bronze Age, while other references made it seem they had been around at least a billion years before that.

  And the language of Culture X presented far more difficulties than the layperson would believe, in this day of computer translation. For the computer translated according to rules that had been programmed into it, no matter how well it might understand what it was saying (and some computers were bright enough to understand a lot); different rules based on different assumptions yielded different meanings, and thus each translation was like the invention of a new language. What relationship Forster’s p
rogram for the speech of Culture X bore to the lost language, and especially to its sounds, was a matter of continuing discussion.

  “Forster discusses it?” Marianne asked shrewdly.

  “Other people’s discussions,” Hawkins said, smiling. “He, of course, considers the matter closed.”

  Evening came. Miraculously, they were both staying at the same luxurious hotel, and Marianne had not let Hawkins run out of things to talk about by dinner time, or even afterward.

  “Come upstairs with me,” she said, when they’d put down their empty coffee cups.

  “Well, of course I’ll ride up with you. Aren’t we both staying on the…?”

  “Oh shut up, Bill. Think about it a minute, if you want to—that’s all right, that’s the kind of person you are. Then say yes or no.” She smiled wickedly. “I prefer yes.”

  “Well, of course.” He blushed. “I mean, yes.”

  The Interplanetary’s rooms were small but lavish, with piles of soft cotton carpets covering woven-reed floors and screens of pierced sandalwood in the corners; warm yellow light, turned low, came through the myriad openings in the fretwork like patterned stars. In a gossamer net of light, wearing nothing, her limbs long and smooth and muscular, with glistening darkness flowing in her hair and shining in her eyes and touching the mysterious places of her body, Marianne was so beautiful Bill Hawkins could think of absolutely nothing more to say.

  But much later, she started murmuring questions again. They passed the night in bouts of mutual interrogation.

  “You are Mrs. Wong?” Randolph Mays asked the woman in the high-collared green silk dress.