Arthur C Clarke's Venus Prime Omnibus

by Paul Preuss

  A few years earlier or later in Jupiter’s orbital progression, Whirlpool—Nemesis—would have lain in a different direction from the world-ship’s starting point; crushing accelerations would have been needed instantaneously, to free the ship from the grip of the solar system. Instead the sun’s pull was an asset, and thus the humans were given a few short days in which to prepare themselves. Only the accidental particulars of time and place had saved their lives.

  Thus spoke Thowintha, and they believed everything sh’he said.

  “A singularity in the heart of the ship, a singularity in space … controlling us like a rock on a string,” Blake said later, when they were alone. “In a universe like this, I’m not sure I know what it means to have a choice.”

  One moment the world-ship was falling toward an invisible place in the sky. The next moment the sky was ablaze with rainbows.

  And a moment after that, a sun burst in the heavens…

  What sun is that? Sparta asked, watching in awe. The living constellations on the ceiling of the Temple bridge had almost instantaneously rearranged themselves, representing the new view of the heavens; the glowing patch of organisms that represented the new sun made a disk so sharp-edged, so yellow-hot, that it seemed to Sparta almost as if she were seeing it in reality.

  We call it Enwiyess, which in the classical language means, approximately. Plain Yellow. And we give it a number to distinguish it from the many millions of others of its kind. Thowintha emitted the watery burble that might have been a laugh. You call it the sun.

  The sun?

  Our sun? Blake gushed bubbles of amazement.

  Yes.

  We left our sun at least two light-years behind us, Blake protested. Those constellations aren’t the same as our sky.

  Whirlpool warps space and time. We have emerged in a region of space-time three billion years earlier than we left. The star patterns were different then.

  Three billion years … earlier? Sparta waved her arms in a graceful if unconscious imitation of Thowintha’s tentacles, a gesture which to all of them indicated puzzlement.

  You haw a clock which tells you this? Blake asked.

  Thowintha waved feelers at the vault of the Temple. There is our clock. We know—we remember—where and when we are. The huge creature turned toward them; its tentacles rising like a ballerina’s skirt. You may waken the humans from their sleep.

  PART

  2

  VENUS,

  VENUS

  PRIME

  5

  Jo Walsh blinked water from her eyelashes and sneezed again.

  “Are you cold?” Troy asked.

  Dough, I’b olig, Walsh said nasally. Ed’s fuddawadda.

  I watched this exchange, half conscious, from my own corner of the Ventris’s smelly wardroom. It wasn’t just warm in here, it was downright hot; the water beaded on our bare skins, and we felt as if we were in a steam bath.

  Walsh snagged a restraint on the padded wall, pushed her hair out of her eyes, and vigorously shook her head, banging the palm of her free hand against her ear. Hade wadda id by ees, she said. Bakes be dizzy. She pulled her palm away from her ear with an audible pop. “That’s better.” She looked around, saw me, and gave me a sickly smile. “Where are the others?”

  “Getting into their clothes,” Troy said. “Claim they need the pockets.”

  On the far side of the room, Tony Groves was coming awake. He was pale as a fish, and looked half dead; six months’ growth of beard curled on his chest. “Guess I’ll be off to find some pockets for myself,” he said, intending it lightly, but he seemed desperate to escape our attention. Troy’s touch on his shoulder seemed to restore his calm. “I’m okay now, thank you very much,” he said as Troy tried to help him steer toward the corridor.

  To go about naked is not an occasion for offense in this century, of course, although to furless, tool-obsessed humans, clothes are more than a convention, they are a necessary convenience. No doubt the longer Troy lived in the water, the less she missed them. She crouched in front of Walsh again, comfortable in her skin.

  “Nemo?” Walsh asked.

  “He’s safe where he is.”

  “How long were we underwater? It seems like about ten minutes since you put us to sleep.”

  “Nine days of acceleration at forty gees. Six months coasting. Nine days of deceleration, at forty gees again.”

  Walsh stopped sponging. “Mary, Mother of God.”

  Troy raised an amused eyebrow. Jo Walsh, religious?

  “Where did the power come from?” Walsh asked. “Where did the reaction mass come from?”

  “The motive force is invisible.”

  “How does it work? What does the alien say?”

  “Sh’he can’t explain. Sh’he claims sh’he’s not what sh’he calls a tool-grower. Sh’he’s a, uh, a map-reader.”

  By then I was far enough out of my muzzy confusion to exclaim, “Let’s have a look.” Troy looked at me warily, but I plunged on. “We could take the Manta down. Even if we can’t see this phenomenon, we might very well pick up some clues. We hardly scratched the surface of this world-ship, in the time we had. We never got really deep inside it. Does Thowintha object to our having a closer look?”

  Troy held up a hand, halting my rushing speech. “Blake and I have already looked, Professor. There was nothing.”

  “You already…?” I stopped myself, realizing I was still too weak for anger.

  “Nothing there except a bright light.”

  “Nothing!”

  The captain took up my cause. “What is the protocol here?” she demanded of Troy. “I mean, I can’t figure out if we’re guests or prisoners. Or just barnacles on the back of a whale.”

  “We are Designates,” Troy said.

  Walsh didn’t hesitate. “You are a Designate, maybe. You can live down there, go anywhere you want. Which doesn’t answer my question.”

  “Sorry, Jo, I can’t do better at the moment.”

  “Six months! We must have hit ninety-nine percent of lightspeed. Which implies…” She thought a few seconds. “Four years from Earth, at least. Including redshift.”

  “The Lorentz equations seem to be on the tip of your tongue.”

  “I’m a pilot.”

  “It’s a bit more than four years,” Troy said. “You see, we’ve passed through a black hole.”

  Walsh and I exchanged incredulous looks. “I suppose I should have asked before,” she began—

  —but I was quicker. “Where are we?”

  Troy’s breath caught and the word came out almost as a sigh. “We’re at Venus.”

  Within the hour the expedition had gathered in the tug’s wardroom to hear what Troy had to tell us. Heat and sonic massage had resurrected us from the pasty wrinkles into which we’d slumped. We men had shaved our cheeks and chins of our Rip Van Winkle beards; the women had spent some minutes brightening their eyes and lips. Troy, her skin stretched taut over long muscles, so white it was almost translucent, seemed content as she was.

  “Where’s what’s-his-name?” Hawkins muttered, to no one in particular.

  “Blake’s in the world-ship, if that’s who you mean.”

  “Not him…”

  “So’s Nemo. But not free to move around. I didn’t wake him up,” said Troy. “You people have to decide what’s to be done. He sabotaged the ship’s launch sequence—very skillfully, very quickly, in just the few minutes he was left without direct supervision.”

  “Quite a feat,” said Groves.

  “I left his handiwork in place in the computer, if anyone wants a look,” Troy said.

  “I don’t need convincing,” said Marianne Mitchell. “If I’ve got a vote, we should leave him down there for good.” From the silence, it was plain no one disagreed with her.

  “Damage reparable?” asked Angus McNeil quietly. The engineer was more concerned about the integrity of his ship than about the fate of their unwanted guest.

  “Again—you’l
l have to judge,” said Troy. “I can erase the worm. It’s up to you people to put the ship back into commission. The world-ship’s machines may be able to help, if you can communicate your needs.”

  “Tony and I’ll have a look.”

  I spoke up then. “This assumes the Ventris is still of some use to us. But is that a reasonable assumption, Inspector Troy?”

  “Just now I can’t see very far into the future, Professor,” she said, giving me a look that implied more than her words. “Since we last talked, the world-ship has traveled two light years from the sun in the direction of the constellation Gemini. It reached almost ninety-nine percent of light speed before it entered a spinning black hole, apparently the remains of a binary companion to our sun. We came out of it—Thowintha calls it the Whirlpool—practically right back where we started, a couple of light months from our own sun. A few more hours and we’ll be in a parking orbit around Venus.”

  “Then perhaps there’s no need to repair the Ventris. Surely the world-ship can simply transfer us to Port Hesperus.”

  Troy took a deep breath of the air that must have seemed very thin to her; her gills flared involuntarily. “The catch is that the time—or date, or however you wish to express it—is a few billion years earlier than when we left.”

  Marianne gasped; Hawkins said “Lord, now what do we do?”

  “Thowintha hasn’t told us what to expect,” Troy said firmly. “Maybe sh’he doesn’t know. But from some hints sh’he’s dropped, I don’t think we’re alone here.”

  “Could it be… Culture X?” For I had suddenly seen the possibilities, and leapt so far to a conclusion that I startled even myself. “Surely it’s possible! We may have been brought into the past to see Culture X at work. Perhaps we are to be permitted to observe the, uh, terraforming of Venus. If terraforming is the word for it.”

  “If Culture X is the word for them,” said Hawkins, speaking with unusual unpleasantness. He gave me a withering look, as if to suggest that I was the one who’d gotten us all into this fix—which I suppose I had.

  His unpleasantness was echoed by Ms. Mitchell’s heat. “I don’t think permitted is the word I’d use for any of this.”

  I took their criticism, forcing myself to bear it in silence. I was no longer in charge of their fates.

  “What do they call themselves?” McNeil asked mildly.

  “They call themselves we,” said Troy. “Just we.”

  “We can’t go on calling them Culture X,” Hawkins retorted, thinking to needle me for having proposed the term many years earlier, “We’re not dealing with artifacts, we’re dealing with live creatures. One live creature, anyway.”

  At that, Groves spoke up brightly. “Ever since the Ambassador came to life, I’ve thought of him as an Amalthean.”

  “That’s the way I think of her, too,” said Walsh.

  “It, I mean,” said Groves.

  “Very good,” I said. “Amaltheans they are.”

  We talked a while longer, until everyone had asked their questions—What was the alien like? What was inside the world-ship? How did we know we were three billion years in the past?—but only confirmed that the most pressing questions were unanswerable.

  It seemed to me that, remarkably fresh as they were after their ordeal, my friends had lost the edgy, prideful carriage natural to them at Jupiter. The ego quirks, the small competitions that had arisen on the expedition to Amalthea were rapidly giving way to private concerns. For one thing, the alien clearly had no need of our professional skills. Thowintha was keeping us alive for purposes of its own. Or simply from indifference.

  No goal or objective, no matter how difficult or far in the future, would by its achievement put an end to our adventure. Only death would do that. We had already taken on the stolid look of wagon-train pioneers heading into unexplored country, hoping we would find a place for ourselves, but knowing we would recognize it only when we came to it, if we ever did.

  Finally, after one interminable pause, McNeil had the last word: “Now that that’s out of the way, what’s for dinner?”

  We laughed, more from relief than amusement. And dinner wasn’t long in coming. Shrimp and squid and seaweed tasted fine to a crew that had been fed intravenously for months.

  I only regretted that we were still inside our cramped spacecraft, with no way to see what lay beyond the gleaming hull that enclosed us.

  6

  “Long afterward, I learned what was outside the ship,” Forster tells his listeners. “I had described to me what none of us could see…”

  The diamond moon, our mirrored world-ship, was falling smoothly toward the sun’s own mirror, bright Venus. But as it fell, it left behind it other lights in the sky, startlingly near, glowing streamers that hung in the star-mottled night like battle flags aimed at the sun.

  The night was full of comets.

  The mighty exhaust flared briefly, and the world-ship lost orbital speed, steeply descending toward the planet’s cloud tops. Those of us aboard Ventris would have been startled at the sight of these clouds. Although they were as high and dense as the clouds of our later epoch, these clouds were not the sulfur-yellow color of industrial smoke, but the bright, steel-edged blue of water vapor.

  The thirty-kilometer-long world-ship sank into them, diminishing slowly in relative size and brightness against the disk of the planet, until at last it was swallowed in the mist.

  Green, a thousand shades of green—the green of hard shiny leaves and of feathery fern fronds bejewelled with moisture, and textured green that dully glistened, hanging like bolts of green brocade down the faces of red-black cliffs…

  A millions years and more of hard, steady winds and unceasing rains had carved these basaltic crags into knife-edged scallops of rock, standing a thousand meters out of the implacable surf of a seething gray-green sea.

  The misty sky was black with swirling bird-things, like a sprinkle of ink drops on thick white paper; the cliff tops were smeared chalky white where the creatures nested. Reefs encircled the shore, and in coves at the base of the cliffs, edging beaches of red-gold sand, pliant trees like coconut palms bent smoothly under the burden of the hot wind. The cliffs stretched away to the east and west for hundreds of kilometers. White waterfalls fell from them into the shallow green sea, falling with the rain into water that was ceaselessly bubbling, whipped with foam. The oceans of Venus, almost a hundred degrees Centigrade at the surface, were on the very edge of boiling.

  Although there were the things like birds to look upon what happened then, there were no sentient creatures to see through the kilometers of steaming, rain-swept air. The million eyes of the circling birdlike creatures, unthinking scraps of life, only registered a shape, coming out of the cloud-roof—

  —a huge diamond shield, a perfect convex mirror reflecting a green world of wavetops and clifftops, of wet vegetation and curving reefs—and of tens of thousands of inky marks darting about the white sky, screaming, circling the cliffs and skimming the steaming waves…

  The immense apparition thundered out of the cloud-bellies and settled seething into the sea on columns of bright flame. Matching columns of roaring steam rose to hide it, before they were dissipated in the wind. Frothing green surf crashed against the mirror wall; a sucking maelstrom swirled around its flanks as it slumped to a grinding halt. It had sunk as far as it would go.

  Thirty kilometers long on its major axis, not much less even when lying on its side as it was now, the world-ship had settled into one of the deepest chasms in the oceans of Venus, which were nowhere more than two kilometers deep. The bright skin of the great ship soared outward, cantilever-like, curving upward into the clouds of the lower atmosphere, far exceeding the height of the nearest cliffs. Rain ran down its sides and fell in veils to the shadowed waters beneath. Hot primeval seas rolled in unchecked ranks of spume around it, flowing toward the breaking shore.

  Forster pauses in his recitation. “Meanwhile, deep in the interior of the world-ship,” he prese
ntly resumes, “other momentous events were unfolding, hidden from us…”

  “Something seems to be happening up there,” said Blake, his words ringing through the waters of the Temple vault.

  Sparta, swimming into the deserted bridge behind him, followed his gaze. On the intricate surface of the vault, the star map had vanished. Clusters of light were coalescing; unlike the livid celestial displays she’d seen before, these clusters were multicolored, the colors almost hot, throbbing in neon hues like the living creatures that inhabited the internal waters.

  As if stimulated by her thought, the Water within the bridge suddenly trembled and swirled with colors in three dimensions. Creatures that for six months had drifted casually through all the watery spaces of the ship, even allowing themselves to be caught and eaten, were now galvanized into frantic but coordinated activity; squadrons of squids and schools of fish flashed blue and orange and whirled away in tight formations, dispersing like single organisms to the right and left, up and down. Clouds of glowing plankton and blushing jellyfish pulsed in intricate watery abstractions.

  Suddenly Thowintha appeared in the cathedral-like heights and swam downward toward where Blake and Sparta hovered. Sparta had never seen the alien move so fast—Thowintha was an underwater rocket, and his’er mantle, which had not changed its shade of pearly gray since we humans had first encountered him’er, now radiated a kind of mottled blood-orange.

  As the huge creature darted past them, sh’he emitted a burst of sound: We are coming to question ourselves as to the right course.

  Seconds later sh’he exited through one of the narrow passages at the base of the vault, leaving them rocking in his’er turbulent wake.

  Blake looked goggle-eyed at Sparta. “We?”

  “In this case, maybe ‘we’ means ‘they’,” she replied. Overhead, on the surface of the vault, the multicolored clusters had brightened to aggressive hues, forming an unbroken circle below the ring that represented the exterior water line. “We’d better find out what’s happening.”