Arthur C Clarke's Venus Prime Omnibus

by Paul Preuss

  “Now we’re accelerating away from it,” said Groves.

  The tendrils had curved back upon themselves, coiling themselves like a spring. To some cosmic observer watching this scene from afar, it would seem that the huge shining ellipsoid had budded, emitting an almost invisibly tiny polyp from a cyst on its side.

  McNeil said, “The world-ship … it’s throwing us!”

  With a snap like a slingshot, we were hurled into space.

  “…Three. Two. One.”

  A solid boom, massive and comforting to those of us on the flight deck, thundered through the Ventris as our main rocket engines fired—

  —followed almost instantly by a sharp, crackling cough. To me it felt and sounded as if somebody had just dropped a piano on the roof.

  Stars were suddenly streaking across the real sky outside the windows and jiggling crazily across the image of the sky on the flight deck’s flatscreen; the Ventris was out of control, tumbling in a violent, spiraling spin. I had gotten my harness fastened barely in time.

  “Number two main engine misfire,” McNeil said. Most of his bulk, like mine, was thrown upside down against his harness, and all trace of Scottish accent gone from his expressionless voice.

  Alarm sirens were howling, red lights were flashing on all consoles.

  “Auto-shutdown one and three,” Walsh said quietly and without hurry, as if this sort of thing happened every other day or so. “MS to auto-stabilize.”

  “One and three to auto-shutdown. MS to auto-stabilize,” McNeil confirmed.

  “Computer, status please—first approximation, in order of criticality.”

  “Life support systems nominal. Auxiliary power systems nominal. Maneuvering systems nominal. Fuel stores nominal. Other consumables nominal. Main propulsion system condition red. Number two engine out of commission. Number two engine H-two pumps out of commission. No fire… No danger of fire.”

  “Computer, carry on.”

  “Present position and velocity not computable from available data. Internal accelerational forces misaligned by…”

  “That’s enough, computer.” Walsh shot a crooked glance at Groves. “Any guesses on a heading?”

  “We should be in a lot of trouble,” Groves replied.

  “Well, are we?”

  “I think not, Jo.” He indicated a threadlike pattern of light unraveling on the navigation flatscreen. “Looks like the world-ship is about to…”

  There was a bruising jerk—

  “…grab us back.”

  —the first of several jerks that repeatedly hurled us against our harnesses. I groaned woefully, suddenly concerned with keeping my dinner down. Outside the windows, stars stopped spiraling and started bouncing. Then, abruptly, they settled into a smooth wheeling pattern.

  “Look!” Groves pointed excitedly out the flight-deck window. A hard-edged plain of diamond-bright metal had appeared, cleaving the heavens, to spread itself solidly beneath us. The sun and stars were doubled in its polished depths.

  “What’s happening?” I asked, sounding pitiful.

  The Ventris was so close to it that the world-ship filled our sky; in its perfect diamond-like surface we could see the reflection of our own tiny vessel against the panoply of the wheeling universe.

  “Later,” Forster tells his listeners, “I learned of the words—remarkably few words—that passed between Troy and the alien just then…”

  Do you wish the human beings to survive? Thowintha asked her without preamble. Whether she did or didn’t—whether the other humans lived or died—seemed a matter of indifference to the alien. If they are to survive, they must be made to conform to the living world.

  Water transmits sound much better than air; although Thowintha was far off and invisible, Troy heard the alien’s words as if they came from beside her. How shall they be made to conform? she called into the dark waters.

  They must conform as you do now. As your companion will. They must live within the waters.

  How are we to make water-breathers of them? she demanded. You said the professor could not be modified. And now there is no time.

  We have other means to saw them, besides modification. You must persuade your fellow human beings of the necessity. From what you have told us, this will be a great obstacle.

  Why do you say so?

  Because you are—what do you call yourselves?—‘individuals’.

  That will not be an obstacle, Troy said firmly.

  What the alien did not understand is that individuals have an instinct for survival far more intense than that of beings who regard themselves as merely the organs and limbs of a collective body.

  For when Troy came to us and said, to live you must let us drown you, we quickly replied, let us drown.

  3

  “Like the egg it resembled, the huge spheroid of the alien world-ship was filled with warm fluid,” Forster continues, “a broth of saltwater, thick with life…”

  Water is virtually incompressible. Creatures who live in water, having their tissues and hollow spaces filled with water, are unbothered by accelerations that would crush an air-breathing human. Wholly submerged in dark water, our lungs and other hollow places flooded with water, our tissues and organs infiltrated by microtubules that bathed us in water-borne oxygen and cleansed us of impurities and bubbled all corrupting influences away, our seven naked bodies swayed in a kelp-like forest. We seemed to swell like pods from the pulsing transparent tubes and veined leafy ribbons that bore us.

  We slept for half a year. We might have slept that way for eternity, dreaming…

  As for myself, a professor of xeno-archaeology, late of King’s College, University of London, I dreamed what I believed—that I had brought myself and the others with me to the culmination of my life’s work, pursuing the traces of vanished Culture X. Scenes of my lifelong chase replayed themselves vividly, from my first amazed boyhood encounter with reproductions of the dusty and enigmatic fossils of Venus, to my discovery, on the hellish surface of that very world, of the extraordinary Venusian tablets, twice the cause of my near-death—from which, the first time, Ellen Troy had saved me at great risk to her own life—and finally to what I was sure would be my triumph in orbit around Jupiter. And although the future hid itself, even in dreams, a warm confidence now suffused my expectations. I had gotten what I wanted after all, and surely the end of our journey would be the alien homeworld in Crux, a planet never touched by humanity revealing itself in all its majesty and unimaginable strangeness. I dreamed, and at the edges of my musing consciousness, alien masses flocked like choirs of angels…

  Ari interrupts Forster’s musings. “What of the others?”

  The professor eyes her. “Later—much later, we were to have longer than we could have then imagined to come to know one another, to learn one another’s deepest thoughts. My friends never forget what they dreamed then, or thereafter. This is a little of what they told me…”

  In her sleep, Josepha Walsh told me, she inhabited an underworld more congenial by far than the darkness in which her body was actually submerged, a world of sky-blue waters and glowing reefs and squadrons of fishes as bright and energetic as fireworks—a glorious underworld like that which lay beneath the Caribbean reefs of her girlhood. Shining brown gods came striding across the sandy seafloor, wreathed in smiles and flowers. One of them became her lover, before she lost him. But she was sure, in her dreams, that someday, somewhere, she would find him again…

  Awake, Tony Groves was a lively elf; drowned and dreaming, melancholy overcame him. His pale mother flitted at the outskirts of a dark urban dreamscape; his tradesman father, mostly absent when Tony was growing up and in reality now long dead, was ever-present, taking more of an interest in the boy than he’d ever shown in life, but expressing himself, even here, only by nagging: was young Tony prepared for his maths test? Would he pass the swimming examinations that so terrorized him? And just what ideas had Tony been putting into his younger brother’s head, to make the lad de
cide against seminary? Precisely why was Tony so … perverse … so inadequate…?

  Angus McNeil wasted little of his dreamtime on his childhood, his damp and brown-hued Scottish boyhood. He lived in fiery fantasies of planetfall. Awake, McNeil was a private man, like most of the men and women who spent the bulk of their lives aboard the working ships of the solar system. Only a few professional spacefarers have families in the regular way; the others make do instead with a shifting network of seldom-seen friends and occasional lovers. Ascetic of necessity, accruing hefty credits but with no place to spend them in space, McNeil indulged his considerable appetites between cruises. He was a voracious reader of books, old and new. He wanted knowledge, of whatever kind, whatever its source. But in his dreams he was not a reader. In his dreams tom-toms pattered, ouds moaned, houris whirled, and sweet wine flowed…

  Marianne Mitchell had read much in her peripatetic college career but never since childhood anything in the way of fantasy. Her wildest nightmares before this fell far short of the true situation. Now she dreamed desperately of normalcy. She was back in a college classroom, or she was back in her dormitory room, or in her mother’s Park Avenue apartment in Manhattan, or wandering the corridors of the Metropolitan Museum—which in her dreams, curiously, was hung only with representations of alien life forms—or she was perched high on the rail of a close-hauled ketch, tossing her luxuriant hair in the breezes of Long Island Sound. Young men crowded these halls of memory; it was with irritation that she recognized Bill Hawkins’s sincere English good looks among the anonymous suitors who approached her almost everywhere she turned. But another face confronted her whenever she turned away from Bill, and Nemo’s leer set her to screaming inside…

  On Amalthea, young Bill Hawkins had dreamed of oak-paneled lecture halls gleaming waxy gleams, of scholarly philological triumphs; then he had been caught up in the real-life excitement of our first explorations of the alien vessel. Now he dreamed of dark-haired, green-eyed Marianne, of the wooing and winning and losing of her, in endless variations upon his own recent past. Bill had learned that nothing binds a wanting but indecisive man’s longing like the realization that the woman once within his grasp has lost her patience, has decided to get on without him…

  Who can say what Nemo dreamed? Surely the man so recently known to us as Sir Randolph Mays was more accustomed than we knew to the nature of the drifting consciousness which trapped us all. I think his “dreams” would have startled us, anchored as they were in specific memories and pointing to hard-edged (if then only potential) alternative futures.

  We do know that more than once in the eternal night that threatened to dissolve their very flesh, Nemo’s eyelids rolled back and his pale eyes, hard as pearls, gazed implacably upon our drifting bodies…

  We know it because every day another human came to visit us, although we were oblivious to her. She swam freely and consciously in the rippling half-light among the swaying bodies of the drowned. Her slender body was as hard-muscled and lithe as a dancer’s; her short blond hair swayed gracefully as she swam, as if each strand of it were alive. She was more at home in the water than anyone else of her species could have been. The slits beneath her collar bone gaped to accept the inrush of water, and the petal-like gills between her ribs fluttered as water flowed through her. Her bare limbs undulated rhythmically as she swam.

  At first only she experienced the days that passed—experienced them in the present tense; at first she was alone, free (and condemned) to explore the vast watery realm of the alien ship by herself. Occasionally, at unscheduled moments, at times that seemed without rhythm, she found herself in the company of the only other waking sentient creature who inhabited that endless volume of water—as she did on the very first day.

  “They talked that first day, and Ellen Troy—your daughter, Linda—recounted their conversation to me much later,” Forster explains. “And so it was that I learned her secret name…”

  Seen at a distance, the enormous animal swimming ahead of her might have been a giant squid from the oceans of Earth, although a closer look revealed many differences; the resemblance was accidental but not random, for organisms adapted to speed in the water tend to assume the same torpedo-like shape no matter what their evolutionary history. She pursued the silvery-gray, many-tentacled creature as swiftly as she could, tracking the alien by its odor in the water, taking the water through her mouth and nostrils, analyzing its rich and intricate chemical nature at a level that verged on consciousness and that she could call to consciousness whenever she willed it.

  For years my parents conducted what came to be known as the SPecified Aptitude Resource Training and Assessment project—SPARTA for short. Later the Free Spirit tried to destroy my memory. I forgot my name for a while, but I remembered something of my upbringing. So I called myself Sparta.

  The alien adjusted itself to her speed in the water. What purpose had they, these … your parents? The creature’s question streamed out behind it as if in a string of ringing bubbles as it moved easily through the life-encrusted corridors, hardly rippling its propulsive fins. The waters through which they swam, she following in its wake, teemed with glowing, multicolored life.

  Whatever “Thowintha”—a corrupt and approximate rendering of a name whose sounds consisted of bubbling hisses and resonant thuds—was doing could apparently be done in a leisurely fashion. At least for the moment, the alien (Sparta—as she always thought of herself—had as yet received no hint of the creature’s reproductive systems, or its place or orientation within those systems, and considered him’er neither a he nor a she) had no tasks more important than the one sh’he and Sparta were engaged in now, the exchange of stories.

  Sparta blew bubbles and spat clicks. There is a prejudice in our culture that ranks individuals according to a single measure of intelligence. My parents wished to disprove that prejudice.

  Such an idea is beyond our comprehension.

  There is much about us you do not comprehend. She smiled inwardly at the thought. We have trouble comprehending ourselves.

  They spoke in the language that humans (chiefly myself) had reconstructed from a few ancient artifacts, which I had labeled that of Culture X. Granted, my reconstruction was far from perfect. But Sparta was learning Thowintha’s true language rapidly, limited in her attempts to reproduce it only by her physique: her body was a fourth the volume of the alien’s and her clicks and booms and squeaks were feeble by comparison.

  Nevertheless, the creature seemed to comprehend her watery words. Whether sh’he and Sparta fully understood each other’s meaning was another question, one that might take both their lifetimes to answer.

  To begin with, Sparta suspected that Thowintha did not have a firm grasp of the notion of individuality. For her part, Sparta certainly did not fully understand what Thowintha meant when sh’he said, We are the living world. To Sparta’s eye, Thowintha was a single body, but sh’he referred to his’erself only in the plural and, moreover, seemed to regard his’erself as somehow actually a part of the world-ship. But by “we” Thowintha apparently meant more than the ship itself. Thowintha assumed unity with those who had built it, now absent and long dead—or perhaps asleep somewhere in its depths, as Thowintha had slept for unknown ages. There were no others of his’er kind in evidence in the vast ship, whose volume exceeded thirty-five trillion cubic meters.

  While Thowintha answered Sparta’s questions on these subjects without reservation, the answers often made little sense.

  The alien quivered and emitted an intermittent stream of bubbles. Your … parents. They succeeded in healing this aberrant mode of thought?

  The aberrance persists among all but a few of us, as it has for centuries. An amused stream of bubbles flowed from Sparta’s nose. Perhaps you think us mad.

  Thowintha suddenly darted ahead with strong beats of his’er fins, vanishing into a green-glowing corridor.

  Sparta swam doggedly after, wondering what urgent business had suddenly arisen—or if t
he conversation had made the alien uncomfortable.

  They were swimming inside the enormous structure-within-a-structure that we had called, because of its many murals and sculptural representations of familiar but unknown life forms (actually Mays had called it this, and his name stuck), “The Temple of Art.” One such work of art had turned out not to be a piece of sculpture at all; it had been Thowintha his’erself, who had rested in perfect stasis for who knew how many milleniums. As yet none of the other pieces in the so-called Temple of Art had come to life, but Sparta regarded everything around her with wary respect.

  As for the Temple, it was no temple at all, and its relationship to art was obscure; it was, as nearly as Sparta could determine, the bridge, the area from which Thowintha in some way that was unclear to her participated in the operation of the world-ship.

  The maze of narrow intersecting corridors opened into a cavernous hall whose filigreed walls radiated shades of dark purple and blue. Sparta knew the place; she knew that the innumerable bright glowing patches on the shadow-clotted walls—walls that reached higher than any Earthly cathedral—represented the stars as seen from the ship’s orientation in space, which moved as if projected on a planetarium’s dome. These stars were not projections, however; each glowing patch was alive, a colony of some phosphorescent planktonic organism, and the physical movement of the whole ensemble of living light was somehow coordinated to the precise motion of the ship.

  Thowintha hung suspended in the middle of this bowl of heaven, in water that swarmed with glittering, galaxies of other life, ctenophores and transparent shrimp and swarms of tiny jellyfish that pulsed with neon colors, pink and purple and green. A shimmering sound as of underwater bells issued from the alien’s siphons; the living stars on the walls dimmed and rearranged themselves. When they reappeared, moments later, the relationships among them were similar, but the orientation seemed skewed.