Arthur C Clarke's Venus Prime Omnibus

by Paul Preuss

  “Whoaaa…” Blake couldn’t hide his surprise.

  Water poured from the dome; the churning waves receded below them; they were moving through thick clouds, clingy as wet gray cotton. Even submerged in the vessel’s interior waters they could sense the acceleration. Sparta stared up into the clouds and pondered what might be at issue here.

  Not all the local contingent had seemed pleased by the arrival of the world-ship, she thought, or by the appearance of Blake and herself. Yet none of the aliens had seemed to show the least surprise. At the great convocation, when she had made her brief speech (Honored hosts, we are your future…), it was as if she were playing a part that had been written for her long, long ago.

  She knew then, beyond doubt, that she and Blake had been expected. Designates, were they?

  But maybe a Designate was the equivalent of a plumbing inspector. Blake had had the same thought. “Get the feeling they think we’re here to check up on this Mandate of theirs?”

  “They referred to ‘a model of the place of origin.’ As if that were the standard.”

  “Their home world, I’ll bet—and they’re trying to reproduce it here.”

  “What we’re trying to do to Mars. In our time.”

  “But what we’re trying—will be trying, three billion years from now—strikes me as a little looser, a little more … adaptable,” said Blake. “Or am I being chauvinistic again?”

  “It’s early to judge. We haven’t seen much.”

  “We already know they like to do things by the book.”

  “By consensus, anyway.”

  We are eager to answer your questions, said their guides, filling the water around them with insistent nervousness—reminding them that it was not, after all, very polite to speak a foreign language in front of one’s hosts.

  We have many questions to ask, Blake said, taking the initiative. We wish you to explain the construction of your vessel…

  Again Forster pauses in his recitation, leaving his listeners in anticipation while he sips from his lukewarm glass. For a moment his thoughts seem far away from the bare library in the house on the Hudson; in the fitful shadows cast by the fading firelight, his expression is obscure.

  Resuming his tale, he said, “Redfield got a fuller response than he’d anticipated. Everything he and Troy asked was answered; it would form the basis for what knowledge I have been able to gather and preserve concerning the beings we had chosen to call Amaltheans…”

  8

  The world-ship stood above the waves, higher than the highest mountain on Venus, rising a fourth of the way into the planet’s thick clouds. On Earth, it would have reached above the stratosphere. Well up the side of the towering, cloud-hidden mass, the great pressure lock that housed the Michael Ventris stood open to the driving rain.

  On our flight deck, McNeil was busy with an artificial-reality helmet and gloves, looking for damage to the number-two engine’s fuel and coolant plumbing. The AR system let him crawl through the pipes and valves like an ant, immersing him in convincing visual, aural, aromatic and tactile sensations as he pushed his way through pistons and past pump rotors, squeezed through injector nozzles, and scrambled over the pitted surface of the combustion chamber without ever leaving the engineer’s couch. Yet if his senses told him he was no bigger than an ant, he was required to be much more discriminating; the concentration required for the job was exhausting. After two hours going over the ground at millimeter scale he’d found no serious damage—still, he’d explored less than half the area affected by the malfunction, and he had a long way to go.

  I watched him work while I filled file after file of my journal, occasionally wishing I had the requisite skills to take some of McNeil’s burden.

  Walsh climbed onto the deck as McNeil was pulling off the helmet and gloves. “Want me to take over?” she offered.

  “Need to rest my eyes, that’s all.” He bent forward to peer out of the flight deck’s wide windows, blinking at the kilometer-wide circle of sky outside. The direction of the planet’s gravity put the big dome at a sideways angle to our tug; our floor, however, was still a level floor.

  The hatches of the Ventris stood open. The atmosphere of this Venus, three billion years younger than the one we had known so well, was actually breathable—a little rich in oxygen, perhaps, but that nicely compensated for our present high altitude—and the thick warm wind was rank with the odor of organics, the smell of the jungles and seas far below us and of the microbial life that inhabited the clouds themselves.

  “Thoughtful of the alien to open the door for us,” McNeil mused, watching the blowing clouds. “I wonder why.”

  “It’s nice to know we’re not forgotten,” said Walsh. “How’s the diagnostic coming along?”

  “I’ve a ways to go yet, but the hardware seems all right—seems we shut down in time to keep from burnin’ anything up. And Tony tells me he’s got the software all cleaned up.” McNeil passed his hand wearily over his head, then leaned back in his couch. He looked up at Walsh. “The Ventris is functional again, or will be soon. We’ve a sturdy little Jupiter tug at our disposal.”

  She read his unspoken thought as easily as I did. What good does it do us? Where do we go from here?

  Even as we pondered these questions, the events that would determine our future were happening without our participation, or even our knowledge…

  Sparta and Blake were carried swiftly aloft by the huge medusa. After many minutes of streaming grayness the sunlit cloud-tops of Venus flashed into view, a shining plain below them, and the last wisps of vapor vanished from the window. Above them spread the deep velvet of starry space.

  The aliens paused, only their wordless music continuing, taking on a melancholy air. When the voice of the choir again filled the vessel’s waters it was feebler, with many of the creatures abstaining. This is what frustrates our efforts, the remaining ones sang, and there was no mistaking what they meant.

  Unfiltered through electronics, unmagnified by optics, unrepresented by pixels on a viewscreen, living or otherwise, Blake and Sparta were confronted with the spectacle of a night sky full of misty comets. Still the alien ship continued to rise, until it was hanging high above the cloud tops.

  You have been struck by objects like these? Blake asked, blowing the phrases into the close-packed waters. He peered out through writhing bodies at the comets that crowded the night sky, which seemed magnified by the bubble dome.

  Repeatedly, within the past million circuits of the sun, the aliens replied. Innumerable objects smaller than those which are nearest to us now. And many larger.

  As they spoke, the medusa appeared to reach the apex of its trajectory and began to fall smoothly back toward the clouds.

  But apparently these impacts have not destroyed your work, said Sparta, nor killed the life you have sown and nurtured.

  For a moment there was no answer. Blake and Sparta listened with interest while high-frequency bursts of sound passed back and forth from one side of the water-filled chamber to the other, in some kind of dialogue.

  Outside, the clouds rushed up toward them, faster and faster. Blake took a last look at the thousands of pale cometary banners set among the stars. “Seems likely two or three of those billiard balls are going to make direct hits,” he said to Sparta. “Assuming they’re incoming at typical delta vees—thirty or forty kps—the first of them could be here in a day or two.”

  “What then?” Few people had a more encyclopedic knowledge of explosions—how to make them, their effects—than Blake; blowing things up was his hobby, perhaps his addiction.

  “Depends on the mass. If they’re typical … say ten to twenty kilometers in diameter, with the density of water”—he briefly pondered—“a bang on the order of a thousand million megatons.”

  Her eyes widened.

  “Big, all right.” He nodded enthusiastic agreement with her unspoken comment. “A crater maybe two hundred kilometers in diameter. A thousand million tons of molten rock and
steam shot into the atmosphere. Tidal waves right around the planet, again and again, until the perturbation finally damps out.”

  “Life?” Her drowned words were almost inaudible.

  He shrugged—it had the effect of flaring his gills. “Hard to know. This isn’t Earth. It’s a lot hotter here, the cloud layer’s a lot thicker. Firestorms? What they used to call nuclear winter? I doubt it. It’s awfully wet out there.”

  Sparta said, “The world-ship could roll over like an egg.”

  “Well, but it’s no ordinary ship.”

  The high squeaks and whistles of the furious conversation around them ceased; when the aliens resumed speaking in the lower, slower phrases that humans could understand, it was apparent that only about half the creatures in the room were joining in the chorus.

  In the past there has been destruction, but the great web of life remains whole, they sang. The threat is not from impacts.

  Accompanying this song was a sustained dissonant bass note.

  The threat is from what, then? Blake asked.

  From water.

  Water!

  Just then the medusa was swallowed by clouds. Sunlight failed and the watery observation room seemed to contract and darken; crowds of raindrops inched across the outside of the window.

  The great thickness of clouds that now shroud this planet did not exist when we arrived. Instead we found a salt world like that which had been mandated. A world with clear skies and sparkling salt seas.

  The voices of those who apparently had come out second best in the recent difference of opinion now piped in, in strident antiphony. For many millions of cycles we had traveled in search of such a place. Our work went forward joyfully.

  Until the first comets appeared in the skies, the other choir chimed in. More and more of them accumulated.

  Out of the Whirlpool, said their opponents. We had not known of its existence until we sought the source of the comets.

  In their curiously harmonious version of disagreement, the groups took turns playing chorus. They were soon appearing in the skies at a frightening rate—

  —When we heated the Whirlpool and determined its orbit, we knew that collisions were inevitable and would continue for a million revolutions of the planet or more. Each comet brings a thousand million tons of water vapor to the atmosphere of this planet—

  —Already the water-vapor concentration near the surface exceeds twenty parts in a hundred. Condensation is warming the atmosphere rapidly—

  —Water now rises so high that when it evaporates it dissociates into oxygen and hydrogen, and the hydrogen escapes into space.

  Blake blew words at Sparta. “How do you say ‘moist greenhouse effect’ in the language of Culture X?”

  We calculate that within another one hundred million circuits of the sun, all water will disappear, the aliens continued. The oceans will be dry and all that we have done will vanish, baked to dust.

  Why not steer the comets away? Blake asked.

  How is that possible?

  Go out there and push them into new orbits, Blake replied. You have the technology to move far greater masses than a comet, at far greater velocities.

  More high-pitched shrieks and whistles ensued.

  “It must be hard to keep a secret in a totally communal society,” Blake said to Sparta.

  “Not from us—until we can understand them better.”

  When things calmed down the prevailing group sang again, in tones that struck Sparta and Blake as tinged with astringency. What you suggest has been advocated. Is this then what the Designates have been sent to tell us?

  Well, it seems obvious. If it has already been suggested, why do you delay? Blake asked cheerfully.

  Vessels of this kind are unable to travel far from the planet, came the quick reply. Only the vessel in which you were brought here is capable of distant journeys.

  In that case, couldn’t you…? Blake began.

  But Sparta softly forestalled him. What is the fundamental objection?

  This time it was the minority faction who answered her, their voices booming as one. Such action is contrary to the Mandate. So it is claimed.

  The din that followed (as Blake Redfield later described it to me) “was like a bunch of kindergarteners with kazoos pretending to be a twentieth-century rock band.”

  Meanwhile, all of us aboard the Michael Ventris were assembled in the wardroom to hear the captain’s address. “The effects of Nemo’s sabotage have been repaired. Our simulations indicate the ship is in A-OK condition. It’s time we gave some thought to our next move.”

  They tell me my eyebrows quiver when I’m being temperamental. “I hope we are not expected to arrive at a final decision about that within the hour,”

  “Just openin’ the dialogue, Professor.” McNeil had the grace to grant me a weary smile.

  “Estimate of the situation and all that,” Groves put in.

  My nod was rather impatient. They were condescending to me. All but Marianne Mitchell. Her green eyes looked dull, and sweat stood out on her pale face. Hawkins hovered over her, full of solicitation.

  Like me, Walsh had noticed the sudden sickly pallor that had come over the girl. “Are you all right, Marianne?” she asked.

  Marianne looked wildly about at the faces now studying her. Though she knew us all well, she might have been staring at strangers. “I just want to go home,” she cried, and burst into wrenching sobs.

  Hawkins tried to put his arm around her then, and for a moment it seemed that she might allow it. But she stood up abruptly, thrusting out her hands as if to fight her way through an enclosing web. As she made for the corridor she stumbled in the unaccustomed near-Earth-normal gravity; Groves leaped up to steady her, but she pushed at him resentfully and hurried down the ladder to the deck below.

  “Bill!” Walsh said sharply, as Hawkins jumped up in pursuit. “Leave her alone. Give her a few minutes to herself. It’s best.”

  Hawkins turned angrily on the captain, on all of us. “The poor thing is desperate! That monstrous man dragged her into this hell without giving her half the chance we had.” He meant Mays, but his next salvo was aimed at me. “Not that any of us were given any reasonable foreknowledge—any truly informed consent.” I said nothing. Young Hawkins was not himself just now. Walsh tried again to calm him, but he wouldn’t be interrupted. “What sort of people has she found herself stuck with—possibly for the rest of her life! Us! Look at us! No wonder she longs to be home!”

  “Don’t we all,” muttered McNeil, who called no place home.

  It seemed to me that Hawkins was borrowing Marianne’s grief to reinforce his personal pique. “There’s no theoretical reason why we shouldn’t be able to go home again,” he burst out. “If this huge thing we’re riding in could drag us three billion years into the past—if that’s what it really has done, and what evidence do we have of that?—why then, it ought to be able to go the other way just as easily. We ought to be able to make it do that.”

  One could allow something for Hawkins’s youth and passion, but really… “We know very little about the capacities of the Amalthean ship,” I said tartly. “We have no influence whatever over those who control it.”

  “Troy and Redfield seem cozy enough with the powers that be,” Hawkins retorted. His big hands went to his sides, perhaps unconsciously stroking his rib cage where we had seen the red gashes of her gills. “She changed herself to be like one of them. And Redfield must have allowed himself to be changed to be like her. They care very little about us, if at all.”

  “Look, Bill, nobody blames you for the way you feel,” said Groves. “Right from the start, Blake didn’t make himself accessible in the way…”

  Hawkins laughed in that unpleasant way, which was becoming habitual. “They chose to be down there. They made it plain they’d rather be living in the water. Apparently they don’t even care to be humans anymore.”

  “Do us all a favor, Hawkins, and stop interrupting everyone who speaks
to you,” McNeil said sharply, shifting his muscular bulk. “As it happens, I’m deeply in debt to Inspector Troy. It’s no secret—I’ll tell you the story, if you insist—that if not for her. I’d likely be in prison at this moment. Happened right here at Venus. But speaking for myself, I certainly do not feel abandoned by her.”

  My agreement came out as a growl. “Troy saved my life, as you all know. In my mind there is no question whatever about her humanity, or Redfield's. There are, however…”

  “Spare me, please.” Hawkins stood up melodramatically, rebelling like an adolescent at our attempt to impose discipline upon him. “I’m going to see Marianne.”

  McNeil was on his feet in a wink, blocking the corridor hatch. “Cease pestering the poor girl for two minutes.”

  “I certainly…”

  “Sit down.”

  Hawkins’s jaw worked silently a moment before he sat down, and McNeil studied him impassively before resuming his own seat. He nodded to me. “You were saying, Professor?”

  “Mmmhhmmmaaa.” My eyebrows must have done calisthenics, but at last I recovered my composure. “Well then. First, let it be clear that I make no further claim to leadership; certainly our mission has fulfilled whatever goals I set for it, long ago. But I will say this. Despite all our work, we know very little about … about these Amaltheans. Yet we still have some means to continue our exploration. There is, for example, the submarine.”

  “The Manta?” McNeil asked. “What good is that to us?”

  I drew myself up until I was as erect as I could be. “For most of the past six months, assuming what we’ve heard is true, we’ve been living in a sort of suspended animation. And by necessity, during our few days of consciousness we’ve been in an essentially reactive frame of mind. We reacted to the events at Jupiter, we reacted to the opportunity to leave the world-ship, we reacted to the failure of that effort, and we’ve reacted most recently by repairing our fragile and possibly useless planetary craft. What we haven’t done is plan or take the initiative. We haven’t even taken time to think.”