Arthur C Clarke's Venus Prime Omnibus

by Paul Preuss

  “You probably know more details than I do. It was alchemy that intrigued me—all those undecipherable alchemical texts going all the way back to Roman times, senseless either as theory or as practice… But finally I realized it was as if they were refracting real traditions, horrible traditions, through a distorting lens.” She began to recite then, her voice taking on a raspy, menacing monotone:

  “Hail beautiful lamp of heaven, shining light of the world. Here thou art united with the moon, here ariseth the bond of Mars, and the conjunction with Mercury… When these three shall have dissolved not into rain water but into mercurial water, into this our blessed gum which dissolves of itself and is named the Sperm of the Philosophers. Now he makes haste to bind and betroth himself to the virgin bride…

  and so on.”

  “You’ve figured out what that means?” Blake asked.

  “The worst of it, anyway. The cult has been building temple planetariums since Neolithic times—in the alchemical writings the temples are disguised as the alembic, the sealed reaction vessel—and to dedicate the foundations, the adepts of the Knowledge would kill and eat a pair of male and female infants, fraternal twins … children of cult members, if they could get them. The twins were surrogates for the spiritual leader.”

  “They would have eaten him instead?”

  “Or her,” Sparta replied. “In the end, there was supposed to be only one such person, who would unite in his or her body the male and female principles; it was the task of the highest circle to bring this sacred and magical creature into being. In every age the Free Spirit has tried, using the most advanced crafts of their own times, to create the perfect human being.”

  “The Emperor of the Last Days,” said Blake.

  “Yes, and you were the first to tell me about the Emperor of the Last Days—that when the Pancreator returned from the farthest reaches of heaven, from the home star in Crux, the Emperor was expected to sacrifice himself—or herself, if she was the Empress—for the sake of the prophetae.”

  “Yeah, the Pancreator is some benefactor,” Blake said. “Like the god of the Bible. A Jealous God, who demands death as a down payment.”

  Sparta said, “The ancient symbol of the Emperor, this sacred and perfected personality, was the snake devouring itself—with the legend ‘If you have not All, All is Nothing.’”

  “All will be well,” Blake murmured.

  “They distorted what had once been a reassurance into something sinister. I think the practice of twin sacrifice didn’t stop until the 18th century—when modern science finally started to make an impression on the cult—and it is still echoed in the ritual meals of the knights and elders. The self-sacrifice of the Emperor or Empress, however, is not supposed to be symbolic…”

  “But we haven’t heard a peep from the Free Spirit since we squashed the Kon-Tiki mutiny,” Blake said. “We cut the head off that particular snake.”

  “They failed because they misinterpreted the Knowledge. When they tried to make me into the Empress, they made plenty of mistakes. I’ve corrected them.”

  He studied her, suddenly unnerved. “What you showed me…?”

  “I have no intention of sacrificing myself. But Blake, to my own surprise—reviewing everything I’ve been taught and what I’ve learned since—I find that I’ve recovered my belief in the Pancreator. The Pancreator is real. And I think we will soon meet … her, or him, or it.”

  “That’s superstition,” he said quietly, growing increasingly uneasy. “We all think we’re going to find remnants of Culture X—it’s an open secret by now. The Pancreator is a myth.”

  “I have no truck with the Free Spirit. Don’t worry. But I am still the Empress.” Her smile had an edge, and her eyes gleamed like sapphires. “And you are my twin.”

  Forster assembled the others in the wardroom.

  “Angus, will you please tell us what you found inside the capsule?”

  The engineer’s face was as stern as a cop’s at an inquest. “Both the communication and ranging systems were deliberately put out of commission. Someone with a good knowledge of celestial navigation reprogrammed the capsule’s guidance computer to depart from the planned trajectory during close approach to Io…”

  “What are you saying, McNeil?” Hawkins interrupted. “That they tried to kill themselves?”

  “…specifically in order to rendezvous with Amalthea,” McNeil continued, acknowledging Hawkins’s interruption with a single slow shake of his head. “With the intention of making a soft landing. That part of the rewrite seems to have been a bit miscalculated. On the basis of Doppler input, the main engine did in fact retrofire—unfortunately, a few seconds late to do them any good. They’d already hit the ice.”

  Jo Walsh grunted, a sound of reluctant satisfaction. “You were right, Tony.”

  “Wish I could take comfort in that, but I can’t,” Groves said. “It was a hard, hard landing.”

  “If they were dead now, you’d be calling it more than a hard landing,” Hawkins said angrily.

  “No more interruptions,” Forster said sternly, fixing Hawkins with a hot and bristling stare. “Everyone will have a chance to speak. For my part, it’s my opinion that Tony’s initial analysis of the situation was accurate. Mays planned the thing carefully. And even without main-engine retrofire, he and his”—Forster’s glance flickered back to the distraught Hawkins—“no doubt innocent companion survived.”

  Hawkins’s face was a study in conflict.

  Forster went on hastily. “Josepha, make sure we have complete records, safely stored, of everything that has occurred. Especially everything that Angus found. Check the monitoring functions regularly.”

  “Sir.” Walsh was too cool to show surprise. Everything that had happened was recorded; Board of Space Control regulations required it, and the ship’s automated systems virtually prevented anyone from disobeying. Forster evidently expected sabotage.

  “It’s my opinion that if Mays’s plan had succeeded, he would have reprogrammed his computer—or perhaps destroyed it, if necessary—and claimed that the crash had been caused by malfunction. He is here for one reason, and that is to spy upon us.” For a moment the professor withdrew into his own thoughts. Then he said, “All right. Let me have your comments.”

  “They’re going to wake up within the hour, Professor,” said Groves. “They’ll be hungry and curious and eager to get rid of those tubes and wires and straps. How do you want us to handle the moment when it arrives?”

  “We have an impossible job to do, and only a few days in which to do it,” Forster said. “I can think of no way that Sir Randolph Mays, once he is awake and mobile, can be prevented from learning what we learn, almost as fast as we learn it.”

  “I suppose we can’t keep them tied up?” McNeil said hopefully.

  “Out of the question. I want this clearly understood: no one among us is to behave other than according to the highest dictates of ethics and space law.” He cleared his throat. “We’ll just have to find a way to keep him and his young friend busy.”

  PART

  4

  INTO THE HEART

  OF THE DEEP

  19

  Amalthea was contracting faster now, shedding proportionally more mass as its surface area decreased. The smaller it got, the faster it got smaller.

  The oceans of the little moon would have simply boiled away beneath the Michael Ventris if Forster had been willing to wait. But there were too many questions that could never be answered if that extraordinary biosphere were allowed to evaporate into space unobserved. Besides, the professor was an impatient man.

  Sparta was at the controls of the diving Manta when they reentered the teeming sea.

  “There they are already,” Forster said, surprised. “The animals we met before.”

  “They’ve been waiting for you,” Sparta said. “I’ll bet they weren’t happy when you and Blake turned back.”

  A school of luminescent “squid” was arrayed in glittering sp
lendor below them, a whole sheet of creatures rippling all together as one, almost as if with pleasure.

  Forster raised a bushy eyebrow in her direction. “You seem rather certain of that.”

  “She’s right, sir,” Blake said, hunched over in the cramped space behind them. “Listen on the hydrophone.”

  Taking Blake’s cue, Sparta adjusted the volume of the external phones until the eerie cries of underwater life engulfed them.

  “I’m listening. I’m not a biologist. Could be any school of fish…” Forster’s eager brows twitched. “A strong pattern, though, stronger than before. Not regular, actually, but with important elements repeated. A signal, you think?”

  “Encoded in squeaks and whistles,” Sparta said.

  “And possibly saying the same thing,” Blake said. “The same as Jupiter’s medusas, I mean.”

  “Yes, sir,” said Sparta. “Saying the same thing.”

  “‘They have arrived.’” Forster mulled that over for a moment. “I won’t ask you how you know this, Troy…”

  “Your analysis will confirm it. When you have time to get to the recordings we’ve made.”

  “Things are happening too fast for that to happen—not until we’ve left here.” He looked at her. “You didn’t tell me everything. You’ve known all along what we’re here to find, haven’t you?”

  She nodded.

  “And today we will find it,” he said, triumphant.

  She said nothing, paying attention only to her driving. With powerful beats of its wings the Manta followed the glowing squadrons toward the bright heart of Amalthea. As before, the sub was forced to stop to adjust for depth, but because Amalthea was smaller now, the distance from the surface to the core was well within its absolute pressure limit.

  Soon they approached the core.

  The core was everywhere bright but not everywhere hot. As they swam closer they saw that the multiple streams of bubbles that radiated in every direction were being generated by complex structures, glowing white towers a kilometer or more high, studding a perfectly mirrored ellipsoid. The light from the near-molten towers—for even through dozens of kilometers of water they blazed brighter than the filaments of an incandescent bulb—was reflected in the curving mirror surface; it was these reflections, as well as their sources, that from a great distance had given the impression of a single glowing object.

  “You know what we’ve found, don’t you, Troy?”

  “I do.”

  “I don’t,” said Blake.

  “A spacecraft,” Forster said. “A billion-year-old space-craft. It brought Culture X from their star to ours. They parked it here, in the radiation belts of Jupiter, the most dangerous part of the solar system outside the envelope of the sun itself. And they encased it in a rind of ice thick enough to shield it for as long as it took. They seeded the clouds of Jupiter with life; generations upon generations kept passive watch, for us—never evolving, the cloud ecosystem was too simple for that, but neither was it ever subject to the catastrophic changes of a geologically active planet—until Kon-Tiki revealed that we had evolved ourselves, to a planet-faring species. That we had arrived.” He paused, and upon his young-old face there came an almost mystic rapture. “And now the world-ship awakes, and sheds its icy shell.”

  Sparta, privately amused at his rhetoric but careful of his mood, said quietly, “What do you suppose will happen next?”

  Forster gave her a bright shrewd eye. “There are many options, aren’t there? Perhaps they will come forth to greet us. Perhaps they will simply say good-bye, having done whatever they came to do. Perhaps they are all dead.”

  “Or perhaps they will bring paradise on Earth,” Blake said ironically.

  “That’s what that cult of yours teaches, I suppose?”

  “It was never my cult,” he said. “Nor hers.”

  They fell silent, as the searing core loomed beneath them, growing larger until it filled the field of view. Small by comparison to the bulk that had once surrounded it, the core of Amalthea was still enormous, bigger by far than most asteroids—three times as big as Phobos, the inner moon of Mars. Since their first soundings they had known they were not dealing with a natural object, but the sight of an artifact thirty kilometers in diameter was enough to make even Sparta, who was inured to wonders, grow contemplative.

  With her infrared vision Sparta easily read the hot and cold convection currents that flowed over the shining expanse of the ellipsoid, a vista of strong currents and roiling turbulence. Heated to boiling, the columns of water that ascended from the glowing manifolds were marked by whole galaxies of microscopic bubbles, to her vision as bright as quasars. Colder, clearer water descended like purple night around them, feeding the intakes at the bases of the towers.

  She steered the Manta away from the heat, letting the relatively cooler water carry the sub downward. Even without her temperature-sensitive vision to guide her, she could have chosen the safe path merely by following the diving school of squid.

  There were many such schools near the core, swooping and wheeling about the bases of the great towers, seeming to dart in and out of the mouths of the fiery boilers without harm to themselves.

  “I’d like to know what the heat source is,” said Forster. He had to shout over the boom and roar of the boilers, which made the little submarine quiver. “Looks nuclear.”

  “Not these structures,” Blake said. “The instruments show no neutrons. No gamma rays. Whatever the heat source locally, it’s not fission or fusion.”

  “We’ll have time for that later. Right now I want to find a way in.”

  They were still following the squid. “Perhaps our friends will help us,” Sparta said.

  The sub came down to within a few meters of the gleaming surface. It showed no sign of plates or rivets, no hint of a seam or even an irregularity. It was perfect. They flew over it with stately wing-flaps as if over a landscape plated with a film of diamond. The horizon was curved as gently as a moon’s, and the black-water sky was spangled with living, darting stars.

  “What if we can’t get in?” said Blake.

  Forster’s reply was uncharacteristically tentative. “Difficult to imagine anything more … tantalizing than to be locked out of the greatest archaeological find in all history.”

  Sparta was silent, almost contemplative, as if nothing that happened could upset or surprise her.

  The objective of the school of glittering squid seemed to be a broad, low dome at least a kilometer in circumference. Soon they were over it; far off on the diamond plains stood the great bright towers, evenly spaced in rows around then, catching them in a reticule of shimmering reflection.

  Now the school of squid spiraled above them like bright-colored autumn leaves caught up in a whirlwind, soaring into the sky and falling, only to be swept aloft again in the swirling dance. The Manta flapped its way to the middle of the spiral of ascending transparent animals. There below them in the center of the otherwise flawless dome the three submariners saw the first interruption in Amalthea’s perfect surface, a circular hole some two meters across.

  “Too small to get in,” said Forster, crestfallen.

  Sparta let the Manta settle toward the dark opening, probing it with the sub’s lights. Inside were other bright structures, a tunnel-like opening whose walls were fretted and filigreed in bright metal.

  “This doesn’t look artificial,” Forster said, with increasing pessimism.

  “Could be a meteor strike,” Blake said brightly, leaning forward to peer between their heads at the opening below.

  “Mighty lucky hit,” said Sparta. “Awfully round hole, wouldn’t you say?”

  “Big meteors always produce circular holes, unless they strike very glancing blows.” It was as if Blake wanted to convince them of the worst.

  “I doubt that a meteor would make a round hole in this material,” Sparta said, “This is the same stuff as the Martian plaque.”

  “But look at the edges,” Blake persisted.
“You can see there’s been an explosion of some kind.”

  “I don’t think so. That etching looks too intricate to have been done by an explosion.”

  Forster cleared his throat with a growl. “What do you think it is, Troy?”

  “I think they left the door open for us.”

  “They? This is a machine,” Forster exclaimed hoarsely. “A billion-year-old machine.”

  She nodded. “A very smart one.”

  “You think it’s programmed to let us in?” He was transparent; he wanted her to tell him what he wanted to believe.

  She nodded again, obliging him at least partly. If he wanted her to say that they were still inside, however, she would have to disappoint him.

  Sparta studied the interior of the round hole and its scalloped and serrated surfaces; she fixed it in memory and then, for an imperceptible moment—

  —she fell into a trance, into a mathematical space of unpicturable dimensions where no real-world sensations penetrated—only the chittering squeaks of the squid, still echoing inside her head. Her soul’s eye performed the analysis and the computation and suddenly she saw how the thing worked. Her eyes flickered—

  —and she was back in the strangely lit underwater world—partly bright, partly dark, partly cold, partly hot. The Manta bobbed sensuously in the dark water. Without bothering to explain herself to Blake or the professor, Sparta manipulated the Manta’s waldos, brushing its sensitive titanium fingers along the complex inner surface of the cylindrical hole, brushing and stroking the textures that could as easily have been melted slag or fine jewelry by their appearance but were really something as straightforward and purposeful as a mathematical constant, like the written-out expansion of pi.

  “Something’s happening,” said the professor.

  “I don’t see anything,” Blake said. “Or hear anything.”

  “I feel it—I mean, somehow I sense it.” Forster’s eyes widened. “Look there, what’s that?”

  The low dome over which they hovered seemed somehow less adamantine, less perfect in its reflection of boiling incandescent towers.