Arthur C Clarke's Venus Prime Omnibus

by Paul Preuss

  I refused to enter the suicide pact with the others. They heartily cursed me, but at least I did them the service of scattering their ashes in space.

  For me, three things remained. I would gaze upon the face of the Pancreator. I would bring death to the terrible woman I had helped create. Then I would die myself. To this end I resurrected the useful personality of Sir Randolph Mays and did all that you know about and can infer.

  I have seen the Pancreator. What you call the Ambassador is the being for whom seven thousand years of my tradition had prepared me. I was not even prepared for the inevitable disappointment. He, or she, or whatever it is, is not an ugly thing, but neither is it a god.

  At last Mays fell silent. If he was done, he had timed his speech well, for the three drifting men were passing as close to the world-ship as they were likely to come. They were no more than half a kilometer from the still-gaping opening of that equatorial hold into which the Ventris had settled, but helpless to stop or turn in their onward rush.

  Mays could not resist adding a final, unnecessary comment. “My hopes for revenge have also been disappointed. At least I will not be cheated of my own death.”

  “Think again, Nemo.” Sparta shattered any dignity which might have clung, mold-like, to Mays’s self-pity. “The Ambassador has a name. Thowintha is many things—the pilot of this ship, among them—but not what you choose to call the Pancreator.” She laughed, low in her throat. “And you aren’t dead yet.”

  A second later the three men understood her. From the cavity of the world-ship’s enormous hold, three almost invisibly fine silvery tentacles had emerged and were rapidly feeling their way through space. They moved unerringly, with the quickness of rattlesnakes, as if with their own perception and intelligence.

  “Ahh … easy there!” McNeil cried out, as one of the tentacles hooked his leg and jerked him upside down.

  “Whoops!” Groves exclaimed at almost the same moment—a boy’s gleeful shout; a tentacle had him by the arm.

  Mays merely grunted in surprise as the third tentacle wrapped itself around his middle.

  Immediately the silvery fibers were taut, although they were still playing out of the hold faster than a fishing line spinning off a reel. The total difference in velocity between the ship and the men was that of a well-thrown skipping stone on Earth, and the ship’s smart tentacles did not mean to dismember their prey by taking up the slack all at once. But within three hundred meters the men were momentarily motionless with respect to the ship; the ship instantly started reeling them in.

  Sparta’s calm voice came into their suitcomms: “You are going to be put into the airlock of the Ventris—it’s open for you. You will have very little time to prepare for acceleration, a few seconds at most. Don’t stop to take off your suits, just head for the wardroom and lie flat on the floor. I can’t say how many gees we’re going to pull. Regard any delay as potentially fatal.”

  The tentacles seemed to have a very precise knowledge of how much acceleration and deceleration a human’s body could be expected to withstand without serious injury. They pulled hard and fast, stiffened within a couple of dozen meters of the hold, and dragged the men in through it as the dome was already knitting itself back together. Side by side, the men cleared the dome just as it snapped shut, only a little more than the height of their helmets above them.

  The Ventris appeared ridiculously tiny where it lay inside the kilometer-wide lock. Within seconds the whiplike tentacles had shoved the men through the Ventris’s open equipment bay—one, two, three, they were deposited and released—and the tentacles snatched away out of their sight. Even Randolph Mays, who had so recently recited his own funeral oration, scurried through the double hatches and sought a flat place to lie down.

  The world began to move even before they had gotten down on their knees. But Sparta—who surely had known what she was doing, intending to hurry them along—had exaggerated the awesome capabilities of Culture X. Even the alien vessel did not have the capacity to translate itself—an ellipsoid thirty kilometers long and filled with water—with an instant acceleration of one Earth gravity.

  No, the incredible column of fire that burst from its “north” pole, pointed directly at Jupiter, moved the world-ship slowly at first, just enough to make the floor of the Ventris’s wardroom feel more like a floor than a wall. Indeed, after a few seconds, Angus McNeil got up to make himself more comfortable, unlatching his helmet and throwing it aside, struggling out of his suit.

  He moved prematurely. By the time he’d gotten his top half off, the world-ship was accelerating at one gee; by the time he’d gotten the bottom half halfway down his legs it was moving at five, and he could no longer support his own rapidly increasing weight. He crashed to the padded floor and lay there, his bulk crushing the fabric.

  Sparta’s voice came into the helmets of Tony Groves and the man who had called himself Randolph Mays. “I’m given to understand that acceleration will continue to increase for five more minutes and then cease. By then we will be well on our way to our destination.”

  Groves, the navigator, forced a question out of his collapsing chest. “Where might that be, Inspector?”

  “I don’t know. However, I take it we are going to meet Sir Randolph’s Pancreator after all.”

  On the bridge of the world-ship—what the explorers had mistaken for an art gallery—little Sparta and big Thowintha studied the living, shining murals and charted their course thereby. They floated close to each other, turning and gliding through the waters of the control space, communicating with the schools of myriad helpers, as if they had known each other for a billion years and were waterdancing to celebrate their long-delayed reunion.

  But even as she danced with the alien, an unimaginable event which she had imagined countless times in her dreams, she thought of Blake, her true mate…

  He brooded in the hold of the Ventris. He thought he must be getting old, very old. And it was true, he’d changed: the older he got the more like a responsible adult he became. In this whole trip he hadn’t found an excuse to blow anything up.

  EPILOGUE

  At Ganymede Base they had been tracking these events throughout. A Space Board vessel—a creaking old tug—had been launched in a token attempt at rescue of the Forster expedition, which, having ceased to communicate (by now everybody knew it), was surely in distress.

  But the blazing forth of the silvery egg took all the watchers by surprise. On Ganymede, on Earth, on all the inhabited worlds, they saw the titanic engines ignite. They saw the kernel of a moon move against the grasp of mighty Jupiter. They followed its course, fully expecting it to aim itself out of the solar system, toward the most distant stars.

  It was with suspicion—then with disbelief—then with wonder that they finally believed the evidence of their own computers.

  On Ganymede, the commander watched it with a grim, unyielding expression. Too late he’d tracked down the last of the prophetae, the last mole within the Space Board’s delicate presence on the shore of the Shoreless Ocean. Whatever these pitiful conspiratorial pensionaires of the Free Spirit had to tell him was worthless in the face of an unfolding future.

  On Earth, Ari and Jozsef watched the spectacle. Tears streamed from Ari’s eyes, tears of joy and anger, that it was happening, that her daughter had helped it happen—and that she had been excluded from its happening.

  For what was left of Amalthea—its gleaming core, the world-ship, the diamond moon—was not headed for a destination somewhere in the constellation Crux. It was coming to a rendezvous with Earth.

  THE DIAMOND MOON

  AN AFTERWORD BY

  ARTHUR C. CLARKE

  I have already described, in the Introduction to Venus Prime 4, the story of my life-long fascination with the greatest of all planets. Only since 1979, however, has it been discovered—to the delighted amazement of astronomers—that Jupiter’s wonders are matched by those of its many satellites.

  In 1610, Galileo Galilei tu
rned his newly invented “optic tube” upon the planet Jupiter. He was not surprised to see that—unlike the stars—its showed a perceptible disc, but during the course of the next few weeks he made a discovery that demolished the medieval image of the universe. In that world-picture, everything—including Sun and Moon—revolved around a central Earth. But Jupiter had four faint sparks of light revolving around it. Earth was not the only planet with a moon. To make matters even worse—Jupiter had not one, but four companions. No wonder that some of Galileo’s more intransigent colleagues refused to look through his diabolical invention. Anyway, they argued, if Jupiter’s satellites were that small, they didn’t really matter, and the heck with them…

  Until the 19th century, the four “Galilean” moons—Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto—remained as no more than featureless pinpoints even through the most powerful telescopes. Their regular movements (in periods ranging from a mere 42 hours for Io, up to 17 days for distant Callisto) around their giant master made them a source of continual delight to generations of astronomers, amateur and professional. A good pair of modern binoculars—rigidly supported—will show them easily, as they swing back and forth along Jupiter’s equatorial plane. Usually three or four will be visible, but on rare occasions Jupiter will appear as moonless as Galileo’s opponents would have wished, because all four of the satellites will be eclipsed by the planet, or inconspicuously transiting its face.

  There was no reason to suppose, before the Space Age opened, that the four Galilean satellites would be very different from our own Moon—that is, airless, cratered deserts where nothing ever moved except the shadows cast by the distant sun. In fact, this proved to be true for the outermost satellite, Callisto: it is so saturated with craters of all sizes that there is simply no room for any more.

  This was about the only unsurprising result of the 1979 Voyager missions, undoubtedly the most successful in the history of space exploration. For the three inner moons proved to be wildly different from Callisto, and from each other.

  Io is pockmarked with volcanoes—the first active ones ever discovered beyond the Earth—blasting sulphurous vapors a hundred kilometers into space. Europa is a frozen ice-pack from pole to pole, covered with the intricate traceries of fractured floes. And Ganymede—larger than Mercury, and not much smaller than Mars—is most bizarre of all. Much of its surface looks as if scraped by gigantic combs, leaving multiple groves meandering for thousands of kilometers. And there are curious pits from which emerge tracks that might have been made by snails the size of an Olympic stadium.

  If you want to know more about these weird places, I refer you to the numerous splendidly illustrated volumes that were inspired by the Voyager missions. Stanley Kurbick and I never dreamed, back in the mid-Sixties, that within a dozen years we would be seeing closeups of the places we were planning to send our astronauts: we thought such knowledge would not be available until at least 2001. Without the Voyagers, I could never have written Odyssey Two. Thank you, NASA and JPL.

  In addition to its quartet of almost planet-sized moons, the Voyager spaceprobes discovered that Jupiter also has Saturn-like rings—though they are much less spectacular—and at least a dozen smaller satellites. As befits such a giant, it is a mini-solar system in its own right, whose exploration may take many centuries—and many lives.

  The short story “Jupiter V,” the genesis of this novel, takes place on a satellite which was discovered by a sharp-eyed astronomer, E. E. Barnard, back in 1982. Now officially christened Amalthea, Jupiter V was long believed to be the moon closest to Jupiter, but even smaller and closer satellites were detected by the Voyagers. There may be scores, or hundreds, or thousands more; some day we’ll have to answer the question: “How small can a lump of rock be and still qualify as a moon?"

  Written in 1951, and later published in the collection Reach for Tomorrow (1956), “Jupiter V” is one of the few stories whose origins I can pinpoint exactly. Its first inspiration (explicitly mentioned in the original version) was Chesley Bonestell’s wonderful series of astronomical paintings, featured in a 1944 issue of Life magazine.* Later reprinted in the volume edited by Willy Ley, The Conquest of Space (1949), they must have made thousands of people realize for the first time that the other planets and satellites of the Solar System were real places, which one day we might visit.

  Chesley’s paintings—when published in The Conquest of Space—inspired legions of young space cadets, and this somewhat older one. Little did I know, to coin a phrase, that one day I would collaborate with Chesley on a book about the exploration of the outer planets (Beyond Jupiter [1972]: see the Introduction to Venus Prime 4). How glad I am that Chesley—who died, still painting furiously, at the age of 99—lived to see the reality behind his imagination.

  The second input to “Jupiter V” was somewhat more sophisticated. In 1949, during my final year at King’s College, London, my applied mathematics instructor Dr. G. C. McVittie gave a lecture which made an indelible impression on me. It was on the apparently unpromising subject of perturbation theory—i.e., what happens to an orbiting body when some external force alters its velocity. At that date, nothing could have seemed of less practical importance; today, it is the basis of the multi-billion dollar communications satellite industry, and all space rendezvous missions.

  The conclusions that “Mac” illustrated on the blackboard were surprising, and often counterintuitive; who would have thought that one way to make a satellite go faster was to slow it down? Over the next few decades, I used perturbation theory in a number of tales besides “Jupiter V” and it plays a vital role, though in very different ways, in the finales of both 2010 and 2061.

  In March 1989 the Royal Astronomical Society, of which Dr. McVittie had long been a leading Fellow, gave a special symposium in his memory, and I took pains to tell the organizers about his contribution to my own career.

  But back to Jupiter V—Amalthea. In 1951 I felt perfectly safe in making it anything I wished, for it was inconceivable that we would get a good look at it during the twentieth century. Yet that was just one of the feats accomplished in the Voyager missions.

  Well, perhaps not a good look, but Voyager’s slightly blurred image, though from several thousand kilometers away, completely demolished my description: “There were faint crisscrossing lines on the surface of the satellite, and suddenly my eye grasped their full pattern. For it was a pattern; those lines covered Five with the same geometrical accuracy as the lines of latitude and longitude divide up a globe of the Earth…"

  I’m not worried: the real Amalthea looks even weirder. It’s a delicate shade of pink—probably as a result of spraying by sulphur dust spewed out from nearby Io. And it has a matched pair of prominent white spots, looking very much like protruding eyes.

  Maybe that’s just what they are—we should know when Galileo arrives there in 1995…

  Arthur C. Clarke

  23 October 1989

  * Just a few years earlier, he had done the matte work for what is widely regarded as the greatest movie ever made, Orson Welles’s masterpiece Citizen Kane. His widow told me in October 1989 how much he would have enjoyed the second San Francisco earthquake, knowing he had a great time in the first…

  INFOPAK

  TECHNICAL

  BLUEPRINTS

  On the following pages are computer-generated diagrams representing some of the structures and engineering found in Venus Prime:

  Pages 2-6:

  Manta European Sub—wire-frame overview indicating exterior elements; front, side, and top views; wire-frame and exterior views of sensory systems; exterior view; active wing pattern.

  Pages 7-11:

  Michael Ventris Space Tug—cutaway views feature bridge/main airlock, main engines/ tanks, and strap-on cargo holds; wire-frame perspective; close-up of bridge and fore-dock; front, side, and top views; main engine/tank assembly.

  Pages 12-16:

  Ice Mole Drilling Machine—full-figure view; two cutaway perspectives outli
ning cockpit and evacuator structures; front, top and right views; wire-frame close-up of drill assembly and ice evacuator; exterior features.

  ARTHUR C. CLARKE’S VENUS PRIME, VOLUME 6: THE SHINING ONES is an original publication of Avon Books. This work has never before appeared in book ten. This work is a novel. Any similarity to actual persons or events is purely coincidental.

  Special thanks to John Douglas, Russell Galen, Alan Lynch, Megan Miller, and David Keller.

  AVON BOOKS

  A division of

  The Hearst Corporation

  1350 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, New York 10019

  Text and artwork copyright © 1991 by Byron Preiss Visual Publications, Inc.

  Arthur C. Clarke’s Venus Prime is a trademark of Byron Preiss Visual Publications, Inc.

  Published by arrangement with Byron Preiss Visual Publications, Inc.

  Cover design, book design, and logo by Alex Jay/Studio J

  Front cover painting by Jim Burns

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 91-91786

  ISBN: 0-380-75350-2

  All rights reserved, which includes the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever except as provided by the U.S. Copyright Law. For information address Byron Preiss Visual Publications, Inc., 24 West 25th Street, New York, New York 10010.

  First Avon Books Printing: August 1991

  AVON TRADEMARK REG. U.S. PAT. OFF. AND IN OTHER COUNTRIES, MARCA REGISTRADA, HECHO EN U.S.A.

  Printed in the U.S.A.

  RA 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  For the Phaeacians have no steersmen, nor steering-oars such as other craft possess. Our ships know by instinct what their crews are thinking and propose to do.