Arthur C Clarke's Venus Prime Omnibus

by Paul Preuss

  “Let’s think, then.” Groves again—but his eagerness and good cheer sounded oddly forlorn. “Let’s do more than that. Let’s explore. Who knows, we may even figure out how to run this world-ship for ourselves.”

  “Or at least learn how to persuade those who do run it to take us back where we came from,” said McNeil with a rueful smile.

  “What if Troy and Redfield try to stop us?” That was Hawkins, of course.

  “Why would they want to stop us?” said McNeil, astonished.

  Before Hawkins could launch himself into a new diatribe, I spoke up. “I vote with Mr. Groves. We should inaugurate a new exploration of the world-ship. And a look outside, should that prove practical. And an investigation into the nature of the Amaltheans themselves.”

  9

  Forster pauses to watch the commander tend the fire; he does so obsessively, poking at the coals, staring into them as if seeking in them the answers to questions too elusive to express, too portentous to suppress. There is a brief flare of orange light, which momentarily overwhelms the faint vision of multiple misty comets seen through the tall library windows.

  The commander catches Forster’s eye, suddenly aware of his attention. “Go on,” he says, his voice rasping, his shadowed face more menacing, perhaps, than he intends.

  “Certainly.” Forster nods agreeably and turns back to Ari and Jozsef. “In our earlier explorations of Amalthea, Redfield had been the chief pilot of the Manta. He had absented himself, and since the status of the Ventris seemed to be one of indefinite standby, Captain Walsh undertook to prepare the submarine for our new explorations.” He clears his throat, more loudly than necessary. “In the course of doing so, she departed from her mandate—and thereby made a disturbing discovery…”

  Walsh had done the checklist in the equipment bay and everything checked out fine, so she’d lowered the sub through the inner lock, into the world-ship’s waters. She lay there looking at the control console, waiting for a warning she didn’t really expect to hear. With the interior lights on, the hemisphere of the Manta’s bubble was a distorting mirror that showed her an inverted image of herself.

  Looking into that diminished self-portrait, she reflected that this whole trip was an example of the way things were not supposed to turn out. This was more like what they warned you about when you showed up at the Academy; this was why all the squats went through a couple of days of stone-black solitary at the start—to see who would freak right away, to see who would never survive a wide-awake to the moon, much less a wide-awake to Mars or the Mainbelt.

  Some learned right then they’d never make it in space. Couldn’t stand the screaming boredom. Some found it out a few weeks or a few years later. Most who’d gotten as far as the Academy’s gates made it, though—because they’d figured out how to beat the system. Their secret was that they couldn’t be bored. Their imaginations were too lively, their anticipation too keen. They were the sort who would put up with two or three months of machine tending (most Space Board ships were about as glamorous as the Ventris, or even less so; the Space Board had only a dozen of the sleek white fusion-torch cutters), if in exchange they got a week of action on some far-flung outpost of the solar system.

  It didn’t matter that the action was never as adventurous, the venue never as exotic, as in their dreams. As long as they lasted as Board pilots—until age thirty-five, say, or forty at most—their fantasy lives kept them fooled. When reality finally caught up, there were pilots in line behind them and desk jobs begging for their experience. Seems the Board had known about their kind all along; the test protocols were specially made to find candidates with those secret dreams.

  From the start, Jo Walsh had much more than a pilot’s dream.

  In a service dominated by North Continentals, therefore by pale skins, even her looks were special. She was one of the Board’s rare women of color; her forebears were black African and Arab, with a dusting of Portuguese by way of the Caribbean sugar planters who’d owned her slave ancestors three hundred years before. Walsh herself had the bold geometric features and rich deep color of a Benin bronze.

  She had the reflexes of a shark fisher, a skill she’d acquired summertimes while still a little girl, to the delight of her widower fisherman father and the horror of her teachers. And she had extraordinary mathematical aptitude—of the sort that cascades randomly through the human gene pool to concentrate, seemingly by magic, in the offspring of Hindu clerks and Greek peasants and Hungarian Jewish refugees and Eskimo pipeline workers and other such folk—in other words, striking anywhere, anytime. Thus she had the makings of a fusion-torch captain.

  Even that was far from the sum of her. She was certainly the daughter of her parents, a child of her green island and the clear seas surrounding it, and of the sunny superstitious people who inhabited it. In the late 21st century the concept of “nation,” as a geopolitical reality, had been obsolete for half a century. But every minority-language group on Earth that had been trapped inside boundaries not of its ancestors’ making still craved nationhood. Cultural imperatives may become diluted; they do not dissolve, but persist for countless generations. People are not immune to ancestral magic.

  Josepha Walsh was not a prisoner of magic, but neither was she proof against the interference of the gods. In retrospect, then, none of us should have been surprised to learn that she’d been recruited by the Free Spirit before she became a cadet. Throughout the worlds they trolled for promising children, and they’d spotted her when she was fifteen, when she’d already been frightening the nuns for two years with her precocity and talent.

  Having been forced to choose Jesus over Ogun or Chango by the sisters, it now seemed that a third and higher way was opened to her, that the Pancreator was Jesus and Ogun and Chango rolled into one—the Pancreator, who had made all things and was the fount of Knowledge and would be bringer of Paradise on Earth. Looking back, it was clear that agents of the Free Spirit—one, anyway, in the persona of a certain Jesuit padre—had steered her into mathematics and physics at parochial school, and then into the Space Academy itself. They’d been eager to plant another of their own inside the most active arm of the Board.

  After the first year, the Academy let cadets have weekends free; the campus, such as it was, was in New Jersey (a Space Academy on Earth needed nothing more than classrooms and access to a shuttleport), and it was an easy trip from there to Manhattan, where she attended the secret meetings of the prophetae. But with closer inspection of that collection of half-remembered mix of history and myth they called the Knowledge, her belief began to waver.

  By the time she graduated from the Academy, she’d come to believe in nothing beyond practical matters except quantum theory and curved space-time. The Knowledge was incomplete, she was persuaded, and its preachers were con artists; if there were aliens about—and this much she did believe—they were not here to bring salvation to the prophetae of the Free Spirit. She had also pieced together enough of the program of the Free Spirit to know that as long as she remained a member she was a traitor to the Board and the Council of Worlds. But it was too late for her; anyone who tried to leave the Free Spirit was marked for death.

  Then, on her first assignment, she encountered a gravel-voiced, sun-blackened Investigations Branch commander. He’d been watching her, he said; he knew her for one of the prophetae. But to her surprise, he didn’t arrest her. Instead he recruited her into his own secret service…

  He and his colleagues called themselves Salamander. Like her, they’d been members of the Free Spirit; like her, they believed in the essential truth of the Knowledge but knew it was being used to distorted ends. They’d survived their apostasy, most of them, by arming themselves and disguising themselves or going into hiding. A few, like the commander, operated openly from positions of power, daring the Free Spirit to strike. And a few pretended to be Free Spirit yet. This was the role the commander asked Josepha Walsh to play.

  She continued her Space Board career and rose ra
pidly in the ranks. A cutter captain sits in the left seat by the age of twenty-six or seven or not at all; Josepha Walsh made it at twenty-four. Simultaneously she continued her “secret” membership in the Free Spirit.

  She was never more than a soldier for the prophetae, who left her in the dark and gave unexplained orders—orders she was expected to carry out without question. Sometimes she did so; at other times, risking her life, she only pretended. Thus she “killed” her first, ritual victim, a member of Salamander who upon her warning changed identities and vanished, leaving only a convincing death report.

  Although Walsh was not privy to the councils of the knights and elders of the prophetae, she discerned their broad objectives and observed their maneuvers. She managed to convey what she knew to the commander. Sometimes the commander was able to arrange her missions to bring her into contact with Inspector Ellen Troy, even before Troy herself had appreciated her place in the scheme of these events. It was Josepha Walsh who carried Blake Redfield to the moon, with his news that the alien home star was in Crux; it was Josepha Walsh who planted the suggestion that the mystery of the Martian plaque could be solved on Phobos.

  It was natural that Josepha Walsh would volunteer for detached duty with the Forster expedition to Amalthea, an assignment that suited both Salamander and the Free Spirit. But before it could begin, the Free Spirit had been suddenly beheaded, deprived of half its ruling council, by Ellen Troy operating as a free agent—out of control and out of her mind.

  Walsh did not recognize Sir Randolph Mays when he (quite literally) crashed the Amalthea expedition, bringing Marianne Mitchell with him. For Mays’s part, although he must have recognized her, he evidently thought it more efficient to kill her along with the rest rather than try to make use of her. No one except the commander knew that Josepha Walsh was Salamander, not even Redfield, who was Salamander himself.

  And no one at all knew—when Mays was finally forced to admit who he was, when Walsh realized what he’d done and tried to do—that she had made a private resolution. For at that moment the chief and principal among the prophetae of the Free Spirit, the eldest elder, the most honored knight, the one who had fouled the Knowledge, twisted Walsh’s aspirations, dishonored her, and tried to murder her and her crew—that one had come within her grasp. Even now he drifted below her in the warm waters of the world-ship, unconscious and vulnerable. It would take only this supple Europan submarine to search him out and put an end to him.

  Which is why Josepha Walsh, in the midst of the grandest adventure of her life, an adventure such as she had dreamed about since she was in her teens, was nevertheless mad with impatience and the boredom of enforced inactivity, and why she did what she did. No revenge is sweeter than revenge extracted for ruined dreams.

  The submarine we had nicknamed the Manta had originated as a research vessel on Jupiter’s moon Europa; below that moon’s thick rind of ice was an ocean, devoid of life but rich in dissolved minerals. The Manta was intended to be wholly independent of the surface: its “gills” were suffused with artificial enzymes with which it absorbed the oxygen in the water; other artificial proteins carried the oxygen to all the sub’s internal systems that needed it, including its human passengers. Underwater, the submarine propelled itself by the rhythmic beat of its ray-like wings, which were powered by the molecular complexification and decomplexification of engineered molecules. Since the Manta’s internal peristaltic pumps could equalize pressure equivalent to depths far greater than any that occured naturally in the deepest trenches of Earth’s oceans, the shallower oceans of Venus posed it no challenge.

  Without saying a word to the rest of us, Josepha Walsh now steered it downward, into the depths of the world-ship.

  Her search was swift and precise. We’d gleaned enough from Troy to know where we’d spent those months of suspended animation, and it was a chamber not far from the lock where the Ventris was parked. The Manta’s wings carried it downward like an angel of death.

  In a few minutes she was there. Nemo, however, wasn’t.

  Forster cast a shrewd eye about him: once more he had his small, select audience hanging upon his words. He paused a moment to watch reflected firelight flaring from the bare paneled walls of the library before quietly resuming his narrative. “What happened in the minutes before Walsh came upon the deserted drowning chamber? We will never know for sure. From Troy I have a version of events, but she did not witness them. Perhaps Thowintha is the source…”

  Deep in the dark waters of the world-ship, a drowned man’s eyes open to pearly slits; his sluglike, wrinkled fingers clutch at the tubes that feed him and bathe his organs in oxygen.

  Nemo has slept when it suited him to sleep and dreamed when it suited him to dream. It has ceased to suit him, so he has come awake. Over the decades he has learned more about seizing and shaping his own consciousness than even yogis know. Now he would seize the rest of himself.

  The life-sustaining nutrient tubes and oxygen-exchange membranes in which he is entangled are not connected to primitive pumps or ponderous tanks of air; these are miniaturized enzymic systems, far more sophisticated if similar in principle to those humans use in submarines or to breathe the thin carbon dioxide atmosphere of Mars. It hardly matters that these gossamer systems have not been intended for mobility.

  Nemo leaves the kelp-like strands and tubes undisturbed in their symbiotic attachment to himself but uproots them from their anchors in the encrusted wall of the chamber in which he has been a floating captive. Wreathed in polymer seaweed, he swims slowly into the watery labyrinth, aspiring to the fate of the Wasteland’s drowned Phoenician sailor:

  …As he rose and fell

  He passed the stages of his age and youth

  Entering the whirlpool.

  Now Thowintha floats alone in the waters of the Temple bridge, studying the parabolic paths that are depicted in glowing streamers on the vault of living lights. The alien’s tentacles barely waver in response to the tasted sign, borne to him’er on the eddies, that a human has entered the Temple.

  I find you done, Nemo says. Like me.

  We are never alone.

  Nemo’s pale, bony figure hangs in the luminous water, garlanded with trailing polymer membranes. Awkwardly, he paddles closer. That is your manner of speaking, honored one. It does not express fact.

  Nemo’s manner of speaking is peculiar indeed—barely comprehensible—since the human has to make the sounds of Thowintha’s language without benefit of lungs or the resonating gas bladder the alien possesses. Instead, Nemo speaks feebly with his tongue and lips and presses hand-claps and finger-snaps into service when necessary.

  Nevertheless, he is understood. You have isolated yourself, Nemo says. You have set yourself against the others of your kind. You have brought Troy and the rest of us humans here for purposes of your own—for the sake of a scheme you hatched in your own mind, who knows how many hundreds of thousands of years ago in your personal history. When I first kid eyes upon you, I mistook you for a mere animal. Now I know. You are the Pancreator.

  These sounds are without meaning to us, the alien replies.

  You do not fool me.

  A shimmering sourceless sound fills the Temple, then fades away. Nemo waits.

  But Thowintha forms no words.

  What will you do if I demand to leave? Nemo asks.

  That does not concern us.

  Even if I explain to the others of your kind why you are really here?

  Nothing is hidden.

  So you say. You can kill me easily, says Nemo.

  Thowintha’s mantle brightens and, without warning, sh’he swims swiftly away.

  I imagine Nemo allowing himself a cold smile, full of teeth that are ghastly in the pale blue light. His big hands and feet flail the water and he sinks slowly toward the depths of the world-ship, trailing life-sustaining weeds behind him as he seeks the way out.

  “The alien let him escape?” Jozsef is amazed.

  Ari gives her husband an i
mpatient glance. “The creature was hardly human. It could not be expected to understand.”

  “If you will excuse me, Doctor, I suspect it understood very well indeed,” says Forster. “And that all that happened subsequently was considered in the alien’s calculations.”

  “Do you mean to say, that is why I will never see my daughter again?” Ari angrily demands of him.

  But Forster’s reply is mild. “She contributed equally to her fate. She and Redfield…”

  10

  The commander places another billet of split oak on the fire and pushes it firmly into place, ignoring the flames and sparks that shoot up around his wrists. Outside the bare library’s windows the last skylight has faded; the descending celestial lights are bright enough to intrude even into the warm interior.

  “I’ve asked them to bring us a hamper of sandwiches,” says Jozsef, “whenever anyone is hungry.”

  “Not yet,” says the commander. “A few things…”

  “Yes, Kip?”

  “Professor Forster has done an impressive job of reconstructing events which he did not witness—he has even included some that no one witnessed…”

  “Kip, please,” says Jozsef, disturbed by the commander’s ill-disguised irritation.

  “I have no intention of deceiving you,” Forster interjects, his gingery eyebrows rising in indignation. “My intention is to be explicit about my sources.”

  “You have been. I want to know what you think all this means.”

  “There is a very interesting conversation which Inspector Troy reported to me some years later…”

  “No, I want to know what you think,” says the commander. In the firelight he is as fearsome as Baal; the fierce glow renders his gaunt face in black shadows, in rough-hewn slabs of dark flesh.

  The others exchange glances. With visible effort, Forster lets the unpleasantness pass. “Very well then. It’s clear Venus was doomed. Our voyage into the past was partly a rescue mission. Thowintha went back to get his’er compatriots out of a tight spot—before the rest of the Amaltheans could ‘amputate’ them. Which is what they do to those who don’t fit in.”