Arthur C Clarke's Venus Prime Omnibus

by Paul Preuss

  He had been watching her face through her faceplate, lit only by the reflected glow of their torches, and at that moment he was convinced that his first of impression of her had been the right one: notwithstanding any of the unfortunate events on Ganymede or since, she was still the most beautiful woman he had ever met.

  And the most loveable. In the moment when she turned her green eyes upon him, he felt that familiar pain, which only seemed to get worse, where his heart ought to be—

  “The Ambassador,” she said. “We’ll call it the Ambassador.”

  —and really, quite possibly the most intelligent…

  Hawkins, reminding himself of where he was, abruptly looked at the statue again and found that Marianne’s reaction to the … the Ambassador was virtually identical to his own.

  “Bill, don’t you think we ought to take it back with us?” she whispered. “To give the people of Earth and the other worlds some idea of what we’ve really found here?”

  “The professor’s not against removing a few artifacts to the right museums, eventually”—too bad Marianne didn’t understand, but she was not, after all, schooled in the archaeological disciplines—“but not until all the data’s been gathered.”

  “How long will that take?”

  “Well, it means the total context of each find, which in the case of Amalthea, is just not going to be recorded in the brief time we’ve got remaining to us. It will take hundreds of people, maybe thousands, a good many years to do what needs doing here.”

  “If it were the only piece removed, surely it wouldn’t ruin the record-keeping,” she said.

  Hawkins thought about that. She might be right, in fact, or close to. The removal of a single statue, after it had been photogrammed and hologrammed, probably wouldn’t make much difference to the archaeological understanding of Amalthea. But he didn’t want to encourage that line of thinking. “It must mass a tonne. It will just have to wait.”

  She was genuinely puzzled. “It doesn’t weigh anything,” she protested. “No more than we do.”

  “Weight is one thing, inertia’s another…” he began.

  She bridled. “I’m certainly aware of that.”

  “Okay. And I’m no physicist. All I know is, Walsh says we can’t afford the fuel—especially since we’re taking you and Mays back to Ganymede with us. Not to mention your Moon Cruiser.” He looked at her nervously. “Better take it up with the professor.”

  She gave him a small smile. “Don’t worry, Bill, I’m not going to press it.”

  And that, for the time being, was the end of it. The way out of the maze was simpler than the way in, and they found Tony Groves waiting for them in the Manta only a few meters away, not even having had time to worry about them.

  They made their way out without incident—that is, except for Bill Hawkins’s second glimpse of something pale in the watery distance, flickering quickly in and out of visibility—something definitely not Marianne, for she was swimming ahead of him, well armored in her bulky suit…

  “Randolph! I think you could persuade Forster to take it back… It’s the most moving thing I could have imagined.”

  Marianne and Mays found themselves alone in the corridor outside the equipment bay as she was coming off shift, peeling off her wet spacesuit, and he was just coaxing himself to full consciousness with a hot bulb of coffee McNeil had thoughtfully brought to him.

  “Your young friend Hawkins is right, Marianne. If it’s as massive as it sounds, there’s no way to bring it back. At least without jettisoning our little Moon Cruiser.”

  “The Moon Cruiser! Why is Forster so insistent on taking that awful thing back.”

  “Vendetta against me,” Mays whispered. “As much as he’s needed our help, I think he still would like to make us appear at fault at the inquiry.”

  “But how can he do that?” She was genuinely indignant.

  Mays shrugged. He was thinking of something else. “This Ambassador of yours—it is the crux of the biggest story of the age … and I’ll lay odds Forster intends to keep it a secret.”

  “A secret?”

  “Forster’s not a legitimate archaeologist, Marianne. I won’t repeat myself; you and I have discussed that enough times. Even the name of his vessel is a clue, this Michael Ventris he admires so much, the fellow who deciphered Linear B. But Evans, the fellow who discovered the Minoans, refused to publish his hoard of Linear B tablets for thirty years! Until other discoveries forced his hand. We’ve got to force Forster’s hand, Marianne. We’ve got to make our own holograms of the Ambassador and send them over a tightlink now, to make sure nothing stands in the way of their publication.”

  As Mays already knew, Marianne could not have agreed more. “How can we do that?” she asked.

  Mays breathed a sigh of relief that she had gotten into the practical questions before her subconscious could nag her with his illogic. Luckily, Forster admires Ventris, but it wasn’t Ventris who suppressed the tablets was a thought that never formed in her mind. “Come into the sleeping compartments with me,” he whispered urgently. “Everybody’s out, we can talk a moment. It’s a bold thing, but I believe it can be done…”

  He must always remember that Marianne was smarter in mind than in experience. He started to rough out a plan, relieved that his early-morning brain had not succeeded in tripping itself up.

  PART

  5

  JUPITER FIVE

  MINUS ONE

  22

  On Ganymede, one week earlier…

  The commander’s height, only occasionally notable in Manhattan, made him impossible to miss in the corridors and alleys of Shoreless Ocean, where his close-cropped gray head rose above a sea of shiny black hair as he pushed his way through the crowds. He made no concession to security except to wear a plain tan business suit instead of his blue uniform. Security was the least of his worries.

  He found the Straits Cafe and Luke Lim inside it, sitting at his customary table beside the aquarium wall. The commander’s attention was momentarily split between Lim, the most sinister-looking young Chinese he had ever encountered—but then, having followed him for days, he’d already gotten used to that—and what was certainly the ugliest fish he had ever seen, peering over the fellow’s shoulder. The commander almost smiled, thinking that maybe Lim was attracted to this table because the fish was even uglier than he was.

  The commander made straight for his table. “Luke Lim,” he said in his gravelly voice. “I’m the one who called you.”

  “Hey, you recognize me, I’m impressed. Don’t we all look alike to you?” Lim grinned evilly, displaying enormous yellow teeth.

  “No. This is not a secure location, Mr. Lim. We know that the owner, Mrs. Wong, has reported details of your meetings with Blake Redfield to Randolph Mays.”

  “O my goodness, that naughty Mrs. Wong.” Lim launched an eyebrow into orbit. “Any harm done?”

  “Maybe you’ll help me assess that. But we should talk elsewhere.”

  Lim shrugged. “Long as you’re buying.”

  As they left the restaurant Lim suggested they stop by his living quarters, nearby; he wanted to pick up his guitar. The commander eyed the inside of Lim’s rooms suspiciously, expecting the worst; the walls were solid with shelves of books and magazines in a mix of European and Chinese languages, everything from Eastern and Western classics to Eastern and Western pornography. Hand-welded furniture took up too much of the scarce space, and high-tech toys lay in various stages of assembly in the corners and on the expanses of tabletop that seemed to serve Lim as desks, workbenches, chopping blocks, and dining tables, indiscriminately intermixed. Bright red and gold posters on the wall called for Ganymede’s independence from the Council of Worlds; on them, Space Board officers were depicted as round-eyed, jackbooted thugs.

  Lim and the commander bought skewers of soy-barbecued pork from a corridor vendor and walked to the ice gardens, making their way down slippery wet steps to the bottom of an artificial canyon, where
a stream trickled at the feet of giant sculptures carved from the old, hard ice of Ganymede. Here were fierce Kirttimukha, rotund Ganesha, bloodthirsty Kali, smiling Kwan-yin, and a host of other supernaturals towering fifteen meters over the wandering sightseers below, under a black and icy “sky” six stories up, deeply carved with an enormous looping, writhing rain dragon.

  The two men sat on a bench beside the smoking stream. Lim cradled his twelve-string guitar and picked out a passable solo version of the Concierto de Aranjuez while the commander spoke in a low voice that sounded like stones in the surf: “…through Von Frisch, Mays made a contact at Rising Moon Enterprises. Two days ago Mays and the Mitchell woman took the standard cruise. Twelve hours ago their capsule departed from the programmed path. Looks like they crashed on Amalthea.”

  “Looks like?” Lim strummed energetically on the ancient and honorably beaten-up classical instrument, his expression an exaggerated mask of disbelief.

  “Whether anyone survived, we don’t know.” The commander focused his sapphire stare on Lim. “Not to be repeated: we’ve lost communication with Forster’s expedition.” Which was true, although there had been one last, puzzling communication from Forster after the crash—but it had had nothing to do with Mays or Mitchell, and the commander didn’t intend to mention it to Luke Lim or anyone else who didn’t have a need to know.

  “What are you doing about them?”

  “Nothing. The Space Board have put out a cover story, claiming we’ve been in touch with them, that Mays and Mitchell are safe and recovering from minor injuries. Eat it later if we have to.”

  Lim hit the guitar strings hard and glared at him, wide-eyed and disbelieving. “Aieee, all this bureaucratic garbage! Why lie, man?” Thrummy-thrumm.

  The commander’s jaw tightened. “First, we haven’t got a cutter on hand. Little slip-up or, as you put it, bureaucratic garbage. Take us two days to get to Amalthea on one of the local tugs, and…”—he held up a hand to forestall Lim’s contempt—“second, the Space Board don’t get along all that well with the Indo-Asians. Can’t go to them for help and understanding. Seems they think we’re nothing but a bunch of racist blue-eyed guys looking out mainly for North Continental interests.”

  Lim stared straight into the commander’s blue eyes as he picked out an intricate, Moorish-flavored arpeggio on the mellow old instrument. “Yeah, some of our wilder radical types have occasionally whispered words to that effect in my ear.”

  “Won’t claim it’s wholly unfounded. Thing is”—the commander was usually very good at concealing discomfort, but it now revealed itself in the slight flaring of his nostrils—“I stuck my neck out, personally made sure there would be no cutter on hand to go to Forster’s rescue. Didn’t want to tempt anyone to force the issue.”

  Lim was beginning to see what that issue was. Thrummy-thrummy-thrummy-thrumm. “So Sir Randolph-Pride-of-England-Mays has gone and shipwrecked himself in the last place you guys want him, and a sexy American white girl with him. But he’s not playing our game.” Thrummy-thrumm. “If we were trying to force the issue, we’d have crashed this year’s raven-tressed, purple-nippled Miss Shoreless Ocean.” Lim considered matters a moment, while the commander patiently waited. Pickety-pickety-pick. “And me with her,” Lim said at last, nodding curtly. Thunka-thrumm.

  The commander tried to hide his disappointment—Lim was refusing to get serious. “You were Forster’s agent here,” he said, changing the subject. “You arranged the sale of the Europan sub. We don’t think Von Frisch ever said anything to Mays about it. Yet we know they were thick as thieves over the Rising Moon business—Von Frisch probably sold him the Moon Cruiser codes. So why didn’t Von Frisch sell him the information about the sub?”

  Lim grunted. Strummm… Strummm… “Maybe because of my money—Forster’s actually. I offered Von Frisch a two percent bonus if he kept his mouth shut.”

  “Why didn’t you tell Forster that?” The words grated in the commander’s throat.

  “Didn’t think he’d have to pay.” Lim looked mournful, as if he’d sadly misjudged one of his fellows; his fingers plucked out the mournfully introspective melodies. “Von Frisch never blabbed? Not at all like the guy.”

  The commander said nothing.

  Finally Lim sighed and seemed to relax. Abruptly, he stopped playing and put his guitar aside with a hollow, discordant boom. “Why me, Commander? Why are you trusting me with all this information I could use—if I were a political animal—to get the damned Space Board off our backs?”

  “Well, this is a deniable conversation.”

  “How do you know I haven’t got a chip-corder in my earring?”

  But they both knew Lim wasn’t wired. The expression that played at the corner of the commander’s lips was not quite a smile. “Blake trusted you. I trust him.”

  Lim nodded and said, “I think you want me to confirm what you already know. Von Frisch probably did spill his guts to Mays. If Mays didn’t broad cast it, it’s because he’s not a reporter, maybe not even a full-time history prof. So whatever mighty secret about Amalthea you—you personally, Commander, not the Space Board—are trying to keep, he’s on to it.”

  “Yeah? What secret might that be?”

  “I don’t know and I don’t care. But if I were you, man, I’d worry about those people of yours. I get vibes off of Mays.”

  “Vibes?”

  “The man’s a tiger. A hungry one.”

  On Amalthea, in real time…

  “Ellen. Professor. Time to go. The place is coming to pieces over our heads.”

  Blake was piloting the Manta, shepherding the lone white figure of the spacesuited professor as he made a final bubble-trailing dash through the Temple of Art, recording in passing what he had no time to study.

  “Right now, sir, or we’ll get ourselves in trouble.”

  “All right,” came the grudging reply. “I’m coming aboard. Where’s Inspector Troy?”

  “Here I am.” Sparta’s voice was attenuated in the depths of the waters. “I’m not going back with you.”

  “Say again?”

  “Blake, you must explain to the others,” she replied. “Reassure them.”

  “What are you saying, Troy?” Forster demanded.

  “I’ll be staying here through the transition,” she said.

  “What transition?” Forster asked.

  “The ship will soon shed its waters. I’ll be aboard it through that transition.”

  “But how will you…?”

  “Professor, come aboard right now,” Blake said sternly. “I’ll explain later.”

  “All right then.”

  Blake clapped on an air mask and hit the valves. Water rushed into the Manta’s interior, filling it—except for a few reluctant bubbles that weren’t sure which way was up. Blake hit the switch and the sub’s aft hatch swung open.

  Forster maneuvered himself to the hatch and pulled himself into the sub. Blake closed it behind him and hit more switches: the pumps throbbed again and high-pressure air began forcing the water out. He let his mask fall slack as Forster unlatched his helmet. The Manta flapped its wings and headed for the world-ship’s south polar waterlock.

  Blake tried to raise the Ventris on the sonarlink. “We’re headed in,” he said. “Come in, Ventris, do you read us? We’re headed back.” But he got no answer. He turned to the professor. “They must have lost the cable, or pulled it up. We’d better hurry.”

  “What is Troy doing? You said you’d explain.”

  “She’s not doing anything, sir. Things are happening. Her place is down here. Ours is up there.”

  The dome of the south polar lock was not as big as the equatorial dome to which the school of squid-like animals had originally led Sparta and the professor, but it was still big enough to admit a terrestrial aircraft carrier. As its molecular layers peeled off, or retracted, or at any rate became magically transparent—in that process which the human explorers had not begun to understand, but which they had rapi
dly come to depend upon—Blake and Forster saw through to the seething sea outside, filled with the ruddy opalescence of Jupiter-light which shone through the fast-subliming ice.

  “They’re coming inside!” Forster exclaimed. Against his fatigue, he could still respond to new wonders.

  The Manta was swimming upward against an inflowing tide of luminous sea creatures, luminous squid and shrimp and jellyfish and plankton by the millions, pouring into the core ship in orderly formations that streamed in the water like columns of smoke in the wind.

  “They certainly act as if they know what they’re doing, don’t they?” Blake remarked.

  The professor said, “It’s as if the ship were drawing them in … into its protection.”

  “Or into the stock pens,” Blake said dryly.

  “Hm.” Forster found that notion distasteful. “Clearly they are responding to some programmed signal.”

  “Could simply be equilibrium conditions. Inside and outside pressure and temperature are just about in equilibrium at the core surface.”

  “Very rational,” said the professor. “And still a miracle.”

  Blake smiled privately. Professor J. Q. R. Forster was not given to speaking of miracles. But then, any sufficiently advanced technology… Blake suspected that they were on the verge of encountering one or two more miracles.

  The sleek black Manta was outside the lock now and beating its wings in a swift climb toward the surface. The lock remained open below them as the sea creatures swam swiftly down into the huge ship; above them, the last hard layer of Amalthea’s ice rind was fracturing into ever smaller plates.

  Blake still could rouse no one on the Ventris. He found the hole in the ice without trouble; the passage through the shaft was fraught with risk, but the sub flew cleanly through it and shot through the boiling interface between water and vacuum.