Arthur C Clarke's Venus Prime Omnibus

by Paul Preuss

  “It’s brighter here,” he said excitedly.

  “Really?” Sparta’s voice was teasing.

  “The ground—I mean the hull, or whatever it is—it’s glowing.”

  “The instruments don’t show any increase in temperature,” said Blake.

  “I didn’t say … look at that!” Forster scooted himself forward and practically shoved his nose against the Manta’s polyglas window. “I can see right through it!”

  For indeed the low dome had begun to glow, like an immense light fixture on a very slow rheostat; the whole surface of the bulge in the diamond moon was a rosy pink, as of a soft neon sign. But it swiftly grew brighter, and suddenly what had appeared to be a solid—an opaque, polished metal surface—had become as transparent as lead crystal.

  For the first time in several minutes, Jo Walsh’s voice came to them over the sonarlink. “We’re seeing a change in the seismic profile of the core, Professor.”

  “What change?” Forster asked.

  “Computer can’t make sense of it. But the core’s no longer opaque to sound. It’s uncertain we have the appropriate programs to interpret what we’re seeing…”

  “Just record. We’ll analyze later.”

  “As you say, sir.”

  Forster and Blake and Sparta were staring in wonder, straight through the perfectly clear kilometer-wide dome into a glowing open space, far bigger than Earth’s biggest cathedral.

  “It’s an airlock,” said Forster. “Big enough for whole spaceships.”

  “Not an airlock, I think,” said Sparta.

  “What? Oh, of course … what’s inside isn’t air.”

  “How do you suppose they open the hatch?” Blake asked.

  As if on cue, the crystal dome beneath them began to melt visibly away. First the lock mechanism immediately below them—which had retained its shape although it had grown as fragile-looking as a spun-sugar sculpture—visibly quivered and dissolved. From the place where it had been, a gossamer gyre peeled off, Fibonacci-like; it was as if the material of the hull had grown thinner, losing layer after layer, faster and faster, down to the final layer of molecules—and then even these had been stripped away.

  There was a great inpouring of water. Caught in the turbulence, the Manta tumbled inside, into the liquid arena.

  A moment later it was all over: the gossamer window reformed overhead, layers of invisibly tiny molecular tiles relaid themselves in reverse order, and—even faster than it had become transparent—the great dome was once more opaque. The last sight that the three in the Manta saw through it, as the submarine tumbled inside in the eddies, was a bright school of squid flashing away in every direction, like a shower of meteors.

  Sparta took a moment to stabilize the rolling submarine, orienting the weightless craft with its belly toward the center of Amalthea, the “floor,” and its roof toward the center of the dome, the “ceiling.”

  Eerie silence closed on them. The clattering rush and roar of the boiler towers outside had vanished, along with the subsonic phasing that had sounded so like a giant heartbeat. All the sub’s hydrophones picked up was the rhythmic watery fizz of its own respiration.

  “Jo, do you read us?” Sparta said into the sonarlink.

  She was neither surprised nor concerned when there was no answer. She glanced at Forster, whose shiny face registered excitement but no fear.

  “Whatever’s damping the seismic signature of this thing is back in place,” Blake said.

  “As long as we’re in here we won’t have any communication with the surface,” said Sparta.

  “I expected as much,” said Forster. “Walsh and the rest will know what’s happened. We’ll keep to our prearranged schedule.”

  Sparta didn’t think the crew would realize what had happened, but she knew they were disciplined enough not to depart from the mission plan. She glanced at the console. “Outside pressure is dropping rapidly.”

  “Good trick,” said Blake.

  Forster was surprised. “Must be some rather large pumps at work. But it’s perfectly silent.”

  “Rather small pumps, I think,” Sparta said. “Molecular pumps, like a biological cell’s, all over the surface of the lock.”

  They were a tiny speck adrift in the center of a huge bowl, smaller than a guppy in a fish tank. A pale blue light, like that a dozen meters below the surface of the tropical seas of Earth, came from the softly glowing walls and floor of the chamber itself. On the roof of the dome, a random scatter of blue-white pinpricks shone more brightly.

  While the spectrum did not extend either to the infrared or the ultraviolet, the ubiquitous glow was bright enough to allow Sparta to make out the graceful architecture of the vault. The space was sparsely filled, the shell lavishly decorated with Gaudi-like, apparently melting pilasters and sagging arches, all fretted about with a network of fractal piping, as intricate as the branching alveoli of a mammalian lung.

  Blake could see it almost as well as she, and—“Something about this place”—he noticed what she did, although he could not pin down his impression—“looks very … familiar.”

  To Sparta—allowing only for severe foreshortening—it was a familiar pattern indeed. “You saw the holos of the Free Spirit temple under Kingman’s place?”

  “Yes.”

  “Put that in a graphics program and flatten the Z axis about four hundred percent.”

  The crypt beneath Kingman’s English manor was built in the high-flying Perpendicular style of the 14th century, while this space bulged outward more extravagantly than the central domes of the Blue Mosque. Yet the architectural elements—the graceful arches, the eight-fold symmetry, the interlocking ribs, the radiating foliate patterns from the central boss overhead—made for a sort of squashed High Gothic.

  Forster craned his head to look up through the Manta’s bubble. “And those white lights overhead? Almost like stars.”

  “Crux,” she said. “Perhaps they were sentimental. The center of the hatch, where we came in, marks the position of their home star.”

  “And directly beneath it, the inner sanctum,” said Blake.

  “Yes.” She nodded at Forster. “Directly beneath, sir, is the way in.”

  She steered the Manta down into the blue water. The floor beneath was as intricate as a coral reef, encrusted with multi-armed and multi-tentacled creatures. Directly below lay a forest of frozen metallic tentacles, baroquely curled and bent, like the arms of a basket starfish. In the center of the array, where the sea star’s mouth would be, there was a dark opening. Sparta plunged the tiny Manta toward it.

  Moments later they were in black water.

  Sparta played the searchlights on the roof above; the ovals of light danced away into the distance until they were too diffuse to be visible. The Manta hovered in the midst of a space so vast and dark its light beams reached nothing below it.

  “I feel like a spider suspended beneath the dome of St. Peter’s,” said Forster, peering around him in the gloom.

  “I didn’t know you were a religious man, Professor.” Sparta’s cool tone did not betray her amusement.

  “Oh, well … it’s a very large construction, that’s all I meant.”

  “Surely this is exactly what you expected to find? The ship that brought Culture X to our solar system.”

  “Yes, certainly. I’ve even argued it in papers that no one seems to have read—or if they did, they thought they were doing me a favor by pretending I hadn’t committed the indiscretion.”

  “I recall one in Nature in ’74,” Blake said. “It got some attention.”

  “You were hardly old enough to read in ’74,” said Forster.

  “I came across it in files later,” Blake said.

  Forster admitted he was flattered. “It was rather a good statement of the thesis, wasn’t it? Suppose a civilization wanted to cross interstellar space—how would it attack the problem? I argued that it would build a mobile planetoid—a world-ship I called it—taking perhaps centuries
over the task.”

  “At least centuries, I should think.” Sparta’s tone of voice subtly encouraged him to keep talking as she nosed the Manta lower into the water below them—crystal clear and utterly devoid of light.

  “Since the ship would have to be a self-contained world which could support its inhabitants for generations it would need to be as large as … as this. I wonder how many suns they visited before they found ours and knew that their search was ended?”

  “So you guessed all this before we started,” Blake said.

  “Oh, not all of it.”

  “No?” Sparta glanced at him curiously.

  “I never thought they would be sea creatures,” said Forster, his soft voice full of wonder. “Even with all we’ve encountered, the ice and the temporary sea outside—full of life—it never occurred to me that they would live in water. When we came into the inner lock, my first thought was that the vessel had sprung a leak, that all of them were dead and that the melting ice had filled their world-ship with water.”

  “What changed your mind?”

  “You knew it right away,” he said sharply. “The pressure and temperature in here are like the shallowest seas of Earth.”

  “Yes. And like the seas that once covered Mars and Venus,” said Sparta.

  “The salt-worlds, that’s what the Martian plaque calls them. We knew that must mean ocean worlds, but we didn’t know how important oceans were to them. Oceans with just the right mix of nutrients to sustain their own kind.”

  Something loomed out of the darkness below them, a vast and lacy strutwork of crystalline vaulting. Farther down, according to the Manta’s sonar, there was another smooth shell.

  “If I had to guess, I’d say we were inside a hangar,” Blake said. “They must have had smaller ships that could take them down to the planets.

  “I wonder if we’ll ever find one of those,” Forster said. “Or did they return here a billion years ago?”

  “If this is a hangar, it’s empty except for us,” said Sparta.

  “Yes. Too bad.”

  “Why too bad, sir?” Blake asked.

  “Their wonderful machinery performed on cue. Their myriad animals woke from frozen sleep and did what in their genes they’d been programmed to do. But apparently a few too many million years have passed. On the outside, everything is alive and working. Here in the interior, all is dark and empty.”

  Sparta and Blake said nothing, and Forster fell silent, not caring to say more. The Manta glided lazily through the dark water, its blue-white beams picking out structural elements as delicate as fronds of kelp or branches of coral. On every side dark passageways beckoned them to enter labyrinthine corridors; there were too many entrances to make any choice obvious or easy.

  “We should start back before we worry the others,” Sparta said.

  Forster nodded, still brooding.

  She was moved to comfort him. “Just think what you’ll find.”

  “Yes, but really, it’s almost too big,” he said wearily. “Not to mention filled with water.”

  “Don’t worry, we’ll put everyone to work,” she said.

  “How?” He stirred. “I’m not sure I understand.”

  “We’ll use them as divers—put them in space suits and ferry them down here, two at a time. The Manta can be flooded, and once we get them here inside the core, the pressure is low enough. A rigid suit can easily stand up to it.” She smiled. “It’s still the greatest archaeological find in history, Professor. Even though it is full of water.”

  20

  “I don’t want to take up space here with yet another description of all the wonders of Amalthea. There have already been enough docu-chips and photograms and maps and learned disquisitions upon the subject—my own bookchip, by the way, will soon be published by Sidgwick, Routledge & Unwin—but what I would like to give you instead is some impression of what it was like to be one of the first humans ever to enter that strange watery world…”

  Bill Hawkins turned in his sleep, making himself more comfortable in his loose sleep restraint, and resumed his murmurous dream soliloquy. “Yet I’m sorry to say—I know this sounds hard to believe—that I simply can’t remember what I was feeling when the Europan submarine ejected me into blackness. I suppose I could say that I was so excited and so overwhelmed by the wonder of it all that I’ve forgotten everything else…”

  In his dreams, Hawkins was a marvelous speechifier, throughout it all remaining fluent, suave—but humble, of course—although his audience constantly shifted, from packed lecture hall to intimate video studio to a circle of evening-jacketed, bearded men in a map-lined drawing room of a vaguely imagined Explorers Club…

  “Certainly I do recall the impression of sheer size, something which mere holos can never give. The builders of this world, coming from a world of waters, were giants, at least four times the size of humans—or so we guessed from the dimensions of their entranceways and corridors, which were easily big enough to admit the submarine. We were tadpoles wriggling among their works.

  “We never got below the outer levels, so we met with few of the scientific marvels which later expeditions discovered. That was just as well; we had enough to keep us busy. We assumed we were exploring residential areas and control rooms and the like, but the architecture was so strange and haunting we were never perfectly sure what we were looking at—we might have been swimming in an octopus’s garden. Oh, there were inscriptions aplenty, millions of characters of them, and I spent most of my time trying to decipher just enough to get their gist. Most were unimaginably dull, mere lists of supplies, or labeled diagrams for incomprehensible devices.

  “But there were no representations of the creatures who had written them, no sign of the creatures who lived in these intricate halls. We knew from the Martian plaque that they were not without vanity, but nowhere did they keep pictures of themselves, or even surfaces smooth and flat enough to serve—as the Martian plaque and the Venus tablets might have served, had they not been covered with symbols—as mirrors…”

  Hawkins muttered and grumbled. In his dream he was looking into a mirror inscribed with a thousand alien characters, and behind them a face stared back at him, not his own…

  The face resembled that of the woman psychiatrist he’d been required to interview before he was accepted for the expedition.

  “I could say that I was excited and overwhelmed by the wonder of it all … but that would be inaccurate.” His dream statements became fussy, his words precise. The dream psychiatrist regarded him skeptically. “Actually, the first time Inspector Troy heaved me out of the tight little Manta into the warm fluid interior of Amalthea’s core—pushed me out rather roughly, in fact, with surprising strength for a woman of her size—my mind was so filled with thoughts of Marianne that I wasn’t paying attention to the job I’d traveled so many hundreds of thousands of…”

  A new face confronted him in his dreams. He moaned aloud. His eyes sprang open in the darkness.

  His heart was thudding in great slow beats and his forehead was beaded with sweat. He groped in the pouch on the wall beside him and found a tissue, which he used to wipe the sweat carefully away. Hawkins would never be able to eradicate the memory of Marianne’s horribly blackened and bloody face as she lay blind and barely conscious inside the wreck of the Moon Cruiser.

  But less than twenty-four hours later—he’d kept watch until the professor had ordered him to go to sleep—all the burst cells and infused blood of her ruined face had been carried away and digested, and her skin was again as fresh and new as a ten-year-old’s. Her beauty hurt his heart.

  Hawkins shared the tiny sleeping compartment with the professor—he’d moved into the professor’s cabin when Sparta moved in with Blake—but the work of exploring the great world-ship had required the crew of the Ventris to work in shifts, and for the moment Hawkins had the place to himself. He knew he would not be going back to sleep soon. His dream had been too vivid.

  He had not giv
en any thought—consciously, anyway—to what he would make of his experiences once he got back to civilization. There were the various confidentiality agreements and contracts he’d signed before coming aboard, but these merely limited him to clearing public statements with the professor until the scientific results of the expedition had been published. Forster had promised that he had no intention of delaying publication and no inclination to muzzle his crew.

  It occurred to Hawkins that there was going to be a big demand for the memoirs of those who were actually on the scene, including his own. Certainly having Randolph Mays close to hand did nothing to discourage fantasies of fame.

  Maybe his dream was trying to tell him something. As long as he wasn’t going to sleep anyway, it wouldn’t hurt to start making some private notes. He reached for his chip recorder, switched it on, and in the creaking darkness of the sleeping compartment, began to whisper into it. He started where his dream left off.

  “Barely more than another hour had passed before both of them, Marianne and that odious Mays, were awake and talking—Mays doing almost all of it. As there was no room in the clinic, I watched all this on the monitor—a good thing, as I doubt I could have kept my hands from Mays’s throat. His television persona is pretty well known, but it’s misleading. In the flesh he is a tall, rather cadaverous man with thinning hair and an attitude of bonhomie which one knows to be only skin-deep, the protective coloration of someone who has to be friendly with too many people. Underneath he is a carnivore, as I had already learned.

  “‘I expect this is as big a surprise to you as it is to me,’ he said to us with a wholly inappropriate attempt at heartiness, as if he’d just shown up for a dinner invitation a day early. ‘I see you’ve already made the acquaintance of my…’

  “There was just the slightest pause before Mays’s next word, but it was more than long enough to make me see red—‘assistant,’ he said, ‘Marianne Mitchell.’