Arthur C Clarke's Venus Prime Omnibus

by Paul Preuss

  Marianne said nothing, but she reached up and pulled the visor over her faceplate.

  Time seemed to stop then. The aether was silent. Forster said nothing; Marianne said nothing but only watched the sky; Blake lay in the Manta saying nothing, apparently studying his fingernails, deliberately sparing Marianne his curious stare.

  She kept her silence. Was she waiting to see how far the professor would go?

  Amalthea’s diffuse horizon was ridiculously close. Marianne made a tiny involuntary gesture that upset her equilibrium; she had seen the exhaust of McNeil’s and Grove’s maneuvering systems drawing thin, straight lines against the orange backcloth of Jupiter. She adjusted quickly, in time to see the three figures rising into space.

  As she watched, they separated. Two of them decelerated and started to fall back. The other went on ascending helplessly toward the ominous bulk of Jupiter.

  “He’ll die,” she whispered. “You’ve thrown him into the radiation belt.”

  Forster said nothing—perhaps he hadn’t heard her—so Blake took it upon himself to allay that particular horror. “We’ll take care of that on the ship. We’ve got the enzymes to clean up the dead cells, repair the damaged ones. You know from your own experience that even twelve hours’ exposure won’t kill you if you get treatment.”

  “Twelve hours…”

  “Yeah,” Blake said, not without a hint of satisfaction, “Mays knew that when he crashed the two of you. He counted on us to save your lives. And we did.” Almost immediately, Blake regretted his words. This was not the time to discourage her sympathy for Mays.

  Forster’s voice came over the link. “I hope I don’t need to impress upon you the urgency of the situation. As I said, the time of fall from our orbit to the upper atmosphere of Jupiter is about ninety-five minutes. But of course, if one waited even half that time … it would be much too late.”

  Marianne floated there in space, arms akimbo, head tilted back, and Blake thought that even in obvious anguish, swathed in a bulky spacesuit, she was an image of dignity and natural grace. Watching her, Blake sighed. He felt sorry for her. And for Bill Hawkins. Love gets people into the worst tangles.

  24

  Deep in the darkest waters of Amalthea’s core, Sparta swam without light, sliding through the cold as strong as a dolphin but with less effort, as slick and quick as a fish.

  To see, she did not need light in the so-called visible spectrum, for she could easily see by the infrared emanations of the great ship’s crystalline tissues; everywhere the pillars and walls transmitted the vibrant heat from its unseen inner heart. Warm light pulsed around her with the deep beating of that heart.

  Even in the visible spectrum the waters were literally alive; around her sparkled galaxies of tiny living lights, Amalthea’s bounty, animals of blue and purple and startling orange.

  Sparta was one with them, unencumbered by canvas and metal, needing no bottled oxygen. As she moved naked through the water, dark swollen slits opened on either side of her chest, from beneath her Adam’s apple to the wings of her collar bones; water pushed into her and pulsed out again through flowering petals of flesh that opened beneath her ribs, the blue white of skin on the outside, frilled inside with throbbing gills that in longer wave-lengths would have revealed their rich and blood-swollen redness.

  Although she had spent far more hours exploring the alien ship than all the other members of Forster’s team together, even she had seen no more than a fraction of it. Millions—millions at least—of intelligent creatures had once inhabited these empty grottoes and corridors; millions upon millions of other animals and plants, trillions upon trillions of single-celled creatures, uncountable as the stars in the galaxies, had filled the innumerable niches of its watery ecology. She had formed a clearer picture of who they were, what they had been about, why they had lived the way they did, where they had gone and what they had done. She was a long way from knowing how they did it.

  Yet every minute that she swam alone in the darkness she learned more, for the colorful plankton and larvaceans and medusas and ctenophores, even the anemones that coated the walls in some parts of the ship, all sang a rhythmic song coded in the pumping of their stomachs and hearts, the beating of their tentacles and wings. The ship as big as a world was also a world as coordinated and purposeful as a ship, a ship made not of titanium and aluminum and steel—or not exclusively—but of calcium and phosphorus and carbon and nitrogen and hydrogen and oxygen as well—and of forty or fifty other elements, in significant percentages—assembled in uncounted varieties of molecules, in proteins and acids and fats, some of them simple as gasses, some of them huge and entwined upon themselves beyond immediate comprehension. There were familiar shapes here, DNA and RNA and ATP and hemoglobin, keratin and calcium carbonate and so on and so forth, the stuff of earthly nucleus and earthly cell, earthly bone and earthly shell. And there were molecules never yet seen, but seeming not so odd here, not so illogical. There was everything a living being needed to extrude a cloak about itself, thick with life, a shining suit of mucous tough enough to withstand the depths or the vacuum. Or to go naked in the warm, shallow waters.

  Sparta inhaled the creatures as she swam—and ate a good many of them—which is how she knew these things. They did not mind; individually, they had no minds. Tasting them and smelling them, almost without her willing it whole arrays of chemical formulas appeared on the screen of her mind. She stored what information she could analyze—far from everything, for her means of analysis depended almost wholly upon stereochemistry, upon the fit of her taste buds and olfactory sensors to the shapes of the molecules presented to them—in the dense tissue of her soul’s eye, there to be sorted and compared against what was known.

  Thus she learned the world-ship, and—if not yet its purpose—its organization.

  Professor Forster’s teams had gone in along two axes, one equatorial and one polar, and had generated maps of the two narrow cone-shaped regions of their exploration, showing that the ship was built in shells, one within the other. Forster had pictured them as nested ellipsoid balloons. Sparta knew that the ship was at once simpler and more sophisticated than that; it was more like a spiral, more like a nautilus’s shell, but not so easy to compute. The volume of each subsequent space outward from the center did not increase in a simple Fibonacci sequence, as the sum of the two preceding values, but according to a curve of fractal dimension. Nevertheless, it had grown according to rules which, if not wholly predictable in their production of detail, were so in result, at the cut-off.

  She had never swum the fifteen kilometers down to the center of the ship. Her body would have been unperturbed by the pressures and temperatures; like the sea lions or the great whales, she had had built into herself the mechanisms of heart and blood vessels that she needed to force oxygen into her brain and organs at depth. She knew that the engine of all that had transpired since the Kon-Tiki expedition had entered the clouds of Jupiter was centered there. The power that had melted Amalthea and the intelligence that had ordered the resurrection of the ship’s life were centered there. The potential of whatever was yet to come was centered there.

  But she had not had the time to make the trip. Something in the Knowledge held her away from the place. The Knowledge, that torn scrapbook of enigmas, had revealed much as it had unfolded itself in her memory, but it left as much unrevealed.

  She returned time and again to the chamber within the Temple of Art where the Ambassador rested in stasis. She was drawn back to the immense statue not only by her natural curiosity and appreciation of it, but because of expectation…

  Thowintha had been alone in the singing darkness for a hundred thousand uncounted circuits of the sun, undreaming.

  It was not the darkness that first dissolved; that came later. What came first, was that the oneness of the world formed an edge—for as the myriad creatures say, the edge of oneness is time.

  There was a beating as of a great heart. Thowintha was far from awake, or even a
live as the myriad creatures are alive, but the oneness of the world had formed a way of knowing something of itself: its great heart was beating and Thowintha, without consciousness, knew that it was beating. The world was marking its time.

  Next there was a beating inside and a beating outside, and they were not the same. Indeed, Thowintha was the world’s way of marking its time, and—while of the world still—Thowintha marked a separate time as well. Thus the darkness began to dissolve.

  Thowintha’s eyes grew transparent to the light that seeped from the walls of the world, beating with the world’s heart. The walls were not black, although the light of them did not travel far through the waters. Brighter than the stars in heaven were the myriad creatures that filled the sweet waters.

  Thowintha did not move or need to move, but only to wait and savor the delicious waters. All things were dissolved in the waters. In the waters were life and the memory of life. In the waters was the state of things.

  The world was waking as it had been meant to: in this there was joy, as the first designation had foretold. The most perilous circuits of the sun, feared with reason by the delegates that came after—for when they saw the state of things on the natural worlds they were plunged into sorrow—had been endured by the myriad creatures. Now their representatives, those who had been designated, had arrived. All was well.

  They had arrived. The smell of them was in the water, an acceptable smell—indeed, a fine smell—but nothing that had been foretold by the first designates. For these creatures were not water-breathers.

  No matter. The nature of these creatures—abstract thinkers, machine-makers and life-tenders, storytellers—had been discovered by the second designates. What seemed wondrous to Thowintha was how few of them there were. There was so little taste of them in the water! They had so little variety! Their numbers were less than a bundle of feelers.

  Where were their great vessels? Why did the myriad creatures of the natural worlds not come in their thousands and millions to occupy the spaces that had been prepared for them? For the world had been set in order for them when it was seen that the great work had failed, that the natural worlds must fail. The second designates, who came after, had said there was hope still, that all would be well even yet, that they would arrive, having developed that capacity for abstract thinking, not only for machine-making but for life-tending, for storytelling, without which it would be unthinkable to carry them onward… But the moment had come. The world was awake and soon would move. If these were all there were to go with it, so it must be.

  In the water nearby Thowintha tasted one of them now, the one who came most often. By the beating of three hearts, by the marking of time, Thowintha knew it was time to exchange stories.

  Swimming long hours alone in life-spangled darkness, she had begun to understand deeply the place the Knowledge had played in the myths and legends of the Bronze Age, from which so many contemporary religions had descended. She knew why so many heroes had spent so much of their time under the sea. She knew why Genesis described heaven and Earth, in the beginning, as “without form and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep,” and why “the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.”

  For the Hebrew word that the scribes of King James had translated as “moved” was merahepeth, “to brood.” In the beginning the Spirit of God brooded, as eagles brood or as salmon brood, whether above or below the waters…

  Sparta flickered whitely through the corridors of the Temple of Art where the walls glowed most warmly and nebulas of shining life swarmed most thickly. She came to the inner chamber. The Ambassador rested there on its pedestal, unchanged, giving no visible hint of life, much less of awakening consciousness. By the taste of the water she knew better. The acids that had bathed its cells in stasis were flowing away, out of its system.

  She hovered before the Ambassador in the water, her short straight hair drained of color, gently swaying in the beating current, her gills opening and closing as gracefully as the waving of kelp in the slow sea surge.

  You are awake. She blew air—borrowed from her gills, stored in her lungs—through her mouth and nose and made clicks deep in her throat, speaking in the language known to those who had reconstructed it as the language of Culture X.

  A single click echoed in the water around her. Yes.

  How are you called?

  We are the living world.

  How do you wish to be addressed?

  The sounds that came back were hollow poundings, like wooden gongs struck under water. In this body, the form of address is Thowintha.

  You are Thowintha? The volume of Sparta’s body was a fourth the Ambassador’s; as much as she tried, she was unable to reproduce the sound of the name precisely.

  You may call us Thowintha. We would not call ourselves this, but we understand that you have a different impression … a different outlook. How are you called?

  We—all of my kind—call ourselves human beings. In this body, most who know me call me Ellen Troy. Others call me Linda Nagy. I call myself Sparta.

  We call you Designate.

  Why do you call me that?

  You are like the other humans who have come here, and those we observed before, but also different. You have learned ways to make yourself more like us. You can only have learned these ways from designates: thus you are designated.

  Please explain these matters. Sparta emitted an impatient sequence of clicks and hisses. I want to know your impression.

  We will tell each other many stories. We will tell you as much as we can of what happened before we last visited you. You will tell us of all that has happened since. With each phrase, water flowed in and out of the Ambassador’s mantle; life was rippling through its body. There will be more time later. But there is little time now. Where are the others?

  They are in our ship in nearby space.

  You wish them to be destroyed, then. The Ambassador’s impassive “face” gave no hint of approval or disapproval as it subtly drifted free of the gleaming pedestal and the nest of writhing microtubules that had fastened it to the ship. You wish to come with us alone.

  No! A reverberating click. They must not be harmed.

  All must come. There is little time. Very soon there will be no time.

  I will tell them, if you will show me how.

  Come and we will show you how.

  The equipment-bay airlock of the Michael Ventris opened slowly. Marianne came inside first, followed by Blake. She pulled her helmet from her head before proceeding on up the corridor to the crowded flight deck.

  She arrived with fire in her heart and fire in her eye, needing only a bloodstained axe to fit her for the part of Clytemnestra. Her first words were not for Forster, however, who floated expectantly before her, but for Bill Hawkins.

  “You could have stopped them,” she said angrily. “Or at least tried. You want him to die.”

  He looked her in that fiery eye. “No, Marianne, I don’t. And he won’t.”

  “Because I gave in,” she said. “Obviously he didn’t. If I hadn’t made him tell me where he hid the statue, he would have gone to his death for his principles. He acted like a ma … a grown-up. But you, Bill…”

  “Plenty of time for recriminations later, Ms. Mitchell.” Forster interrupted before she said the harder words. “We have business to settle.”

  “Here,” she said, and pushed a graphics pad at him. On it was a crude sketch-map of a section of the Temple of Art, with an X to mark the spot. “That’s the best I can do.”

  “That will be fine,” said Forster, glancing at it briefly. He passed it to Blake. “Blake, I believe you indicated you wanted to take care of this.”

  “Sir.” Blake took the pad and immediately left the flight deck.

  “Well, now that that’s over with”—Forster moved to Fulton’s empty couch and bent over, rummaging in a canvas sack beneath the console. He came up with a glass bottle plastered with peeling labels, filled with a dark amber liquid
. One of his treasured Napoleons—“Why don’t we relax and have a drink to forget all this unpleasantness?”

  “A drink?” Marianne’s outrage carried almost palpable force. She pointed at the time display on the console behind Forster. “Have you gone crazy? Randolph must have fallen halfway to Jupiter!”

  Professor Forster regarded her disapprovingly. “Lack of patience is a common failing in the young,” he said, which sounded odd coming from his youthful-appearing self. “I see no cause at all for hasty action.”

  Marianne flushed red but as quickly became pale again; real fear had temporarily pushed aside her anger. “You promised,” she whispered.

  In Bill Hawkins’s expression, menace was replacing anxiousness. “Professor, you told me … well, I don’t see there’s any point in prolonging this.”

  Seeing their emotion, Forster realized he might have gone a tad too far; he’d had his little joke, after all. “I can tell you at once, Ms. Mitchell—Bill knows this already, which is why he is justly angry with me—that Randolph Mays is in no more danger than we are. We can go and collect him whenever we like.”

  “Then you did lie to me,” she said instantly.

  “No, I certainly did not. Mays has lied to you repeatedly, but what I told you was the truth. Granted, you jumped to the wrong conclusions. So did Bill here, until I explained it to him—his outrage on your behalf, and on Mays’s, was quite genuine, and I doubt we could have restrained him had we not convinced him that we were telling the truth.”

  “Which is?” she demanded—and added with a hiss, “If you’re ready to cut the self-serving bull.”

  Despite himself, Forster flinched. “Yes, well … when I said that a body would take ninety-five minutes to fall from here to Jupiter, I omitted—not accidentally, I confess—a rather important phrase. I should have added, ‘a body at rest with respect to Jupiter.’ But we are not at rest with respect to Jupiter. Sir Randolph shares our orbital speed, which is about, mm, twenty-seven kilometers per second.”