Arthur C Clarke's Venus Prime Omnibus

by Paul Preuss

  I replied that I did not think Mars would remain lifeless for long.

  She scheduled a meeting of the crew for later that night.

  Eventually we reached consensus, although not without a certain amount of emotional bullying on my part. As I had hoped, McNeil and Groves were all for the adventure: McNeil is a thoroughgoing, cheerful Stoic; as for Groves, I’m afraid he would as soon die alone on a primitive planet as face another move in the drowning chamber of the world-ship.

  Hawkins and Mitchell posed a problem, however. I had already suspected the difficulty, for Ms. Mitchell’s cabin was next to my own, and in the confines of a small ship like ours it was impossible to avoid overhearing conversations one would normally prefer to avoid. Thus, while we were still at Venus, I had found myself involuntarily eavesdropping—keeping quiet not so much from prurient interest as from an intense desire not to interrupt.

  “Marry me.” It was Hawkins, his voice heavy with urgency.

  “What if I did?” she replied rather sadly. “What would that change?”

  “Would you marry me if we were back on Earth?”

  “Living on the mud flats with the blue-green algae?” Her laugh was short and sharp, “Playing Adam and Eve?”

  “I mean Earth the way it was.”

  “Get me there and I’ll give you an answer.”

  “Maybe we’re not three billion years in the past.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Maybe this is all a show. The professor claimed he knew what to look for on Amalthea, but he never told the rest of us until we got there. So maybe this situation too isn’t … real.”

  When she spoke, she sounded years older—or at least more mature—than he. “It’s real. Bill. And no way out.”

  “How do you know that?” He spoke in an intense whisper, broaching a conspiracy. “I’m not saying there’s not an incredible technology at work here. Maybe it’s alien technology. Maybe not. Maybe it’s something a lot less mysterious.”

  She was so surprised that her laughter, this time, seemed almost happy. “Welcome to Disney-Cosmos. This way to Alien World.”

  “Why not?” His voice was hoarse, the charge of his emotion almost frightening. “They’re in some big fight, some power struggle—Forster, working for the Space Board, Mays…”

  “Nemo.”

  “He’s not nobody, no matter what we call him.”

  “We should have killed him after what he did.” She was serious. “He deserves to be dead.”

  “Should I have done it?”

  “No. You’re saying that for my sake. What I did with him was my own doing. Bill. You can’t fix it.” There was silence then, and I honestly tried not to listen, but I heard her tell him, “I don’t expect you to take me home. But if you can. I’ll love you the better.”

  At that moment Jo Walsh called me to the flight deck, and this convenient interruption spared me further intimacies between them…

  Hawkins’s conspiracy theories were not confined to chats with Marianne; he’d hinted at his suspicions to others as well. Now that we had met to discuss our future, the time had come to confront his extreme form of denial.

  “Mr. Hawkins, you have suggested that we’re the victims of a charade, mounted by me, perhaps, or mounted by the Amaltheans for unknown reasons.”

  “How … why do you say that?” Is it only the young who manage such exquisite mixtures of anger and guilt?

  “This is a chance to satisfy yourself of the truth. On the surface of this planet, acting without supervision, we’ll be able to conduct any researches of which we’re capable. I guarantee you freedom of movement.”

  He wavered visibly, pushing a hand through his limp blond hair, but came back strongly: “Since we will, after all, require the aliens’ cooperation, how can we pretend that we are independent?”

  And so we went back and forth for a few minutes more; in the end Hawkins brought himself around. He was not wholly bereft of a scientist’s natural curiosity—he was mightily intrigued to see for himself a transformation which, as I proposed, would culminate in the inscription of the Martian plaque, that glimmering shard whose meaning he had learned, if I may say so, at my knee.

  Marianne Mitchell, throughout all this, said nothing at all. Her expression was that of a sphinx.

  The next morning we hailed Thowintha on open circuits and explained ourselves, using the translator. Some hours later, an answer came back—from Inspector Troy: “We have approved whatever action you wish to pursue, Professor. Here is your best landing plan…”

  But though she gave detailed instructions, complete with coordinates, her concern struck some of us as off-handed.

  Shortly the Ventris, its tanks topped off by the lock’s half-sentient machinery, was released in an equatorial orbit and began a slow descent into the thick carbon-dioxide atmosphere of primordial Mars.

  Our destination was the shore of a desert sea whose margins were expanding by the hour. Floods of silt-laden water were still pouring in, carving wide channels through sand and rock on their way from the highlands where the nearest icy fragments had struck.

  The tug settled on a handy butte, in a mess of smoke and fire and sand—landing tail first on two of its three legs, then falling over in a kind of controlled crash to come to rest on a sturdy tripod, a horizontal orientation which left the cargo and equipment holds readily accessible from the surface. It seemed an awkward system, but it had been devised for the wildly varying gravities and surface conditions of Jupiter’s moons, and it worked well enough for Mars.

  I could scarcely bear imprisonment in the tug, seeing only what the flatscreen and the narrow windows could show. McNeil bore the brunt of my impatience to get outside, to see the world-ship come down and watch the Amaltheans set to work.

  The phlegmatic engineer humored my attempts at inspiring him with a prefiguration of great events. “It won’t be hard to patch something together, Professor,” he told me. “I’ve already been at work on it.”

  We didn’t need pressure suits. The atmosphere of ancestral Mars was thick indeed—at our present elevation, a pressure of more than one bar, that of Earth on a planet only one-tenth the mass of Earth—but the dominant gas was carbon dioxide. What we needed was a supply of oxygen.

  McNeil pointed out that while the Martian pressure suits of our era were equipped with breather units to recycle respiratory gases and thin atmospheric carbon dioxide, extracting pure oxygen by means of artificial enzymes, we had no such suits handy; we’d certainly never contemplated visiting Mars. On the other hand, the ship’s kit included a broad selection of biologically useful artificial enzymes; the fresh air recyclers specifically included the catalysts needed to break down CO2. He’d set our biosynthesizers to work making more of the needed mix.

  Meanwhile he’d been at work himself, on a prototype breathing system. He showed me the unit, a compact thing consisting of a filter intake, a mask and hose, and a pair of bottles to be worn on the chest.

  Privately I marveled that this compact and beautifully crafted assembly, with its lathe-turned parts so lovingly polished and joined (from his description I had expected a real Heath Robinson), was the product of McNeil’s large and curiously neat hands. Within that bulky man resides the soul of an artist.

  Soon McNeil had Groves and Walsh and me busy rigging our own breathing systems. (Even Hawkins showed interest, despite himself.) The task was quickly done, and—although none of us produced so beautiful a piece of machinery as McNeil’s—one certainly takes the necessary precautions when one’s own life depends on the quality of the work.

  The moment for testing arrived; Tony Groves insisted on being the first out of the lock. He took a few steps away from the main air lock, holding his breath. We heard his cautious exhalation and the bold indrawn breath that followed. Walsh had volunteered to stand by in the lock in full spacesuit regalia, ready if necessary to rash out and drag Groves back in. But his next breath sounded steadier, the next steadier yet.

&
nbsp; “Works fine,” he reported. “And a lovely view.”

  One by one we tested our gear. When my turn came I found my initial nervousness passing quickly. I looked around to appreciate the view that Tony Groves had recommended.

  It was high noon, under a small hot sun in a transparent purple sky; a cold wind was blowing, but the sunlight was warm on my skin. Above me, a handful of stars winked like distant signal lanterns. More numerous still were the dozens of pale streaming comets that streaked the daytime sky, thin smudges of chalk on a celestial blackboard.

  I allowed myself only a few moments to savor this day on ancient Mars. We had very little time to prepare for the coming of the aliens.

  Walsh and I were out on the rim of the bluff with photogram cameras to record their arrival. They appeared almost twenty minutes earlier than we expected; we had to hurry and grab what we could.

  The world-ship descended obliquely on streamers of fire, an immense diamond moon soaring in over mounded black volcanic peaks and plains of rusty sand, gliding across the wide valley that meandered toward our sparkling equatorial sea. Several kilometers off our shore, which was sharply defined by flat red buttes and mesas, the ship settled into the wind-whipped blue water. Far off we could see clouds of steam rising where the mirrored egg sat in the bright water; the steam quickly dispersed, leaving the ship resting delicately on its bottom. Its arching top stood high above us—over twenty-five kilometers high. A formation of ranked cirrus clouds formed spontaneously above it, drawn to it like a school of curious fish.

  Then they came out. By the thousands.

  High on the shining ellipsoid the equatorial locks spiraled open; like a pregnant guppy swollen to term, the world-ship expelled its offspring in clouds. Their disembarkation was militarily precise, as if rehearsed to perfection. Fleets of transparent medusas—hundreds of squadrons of vessels which must have been synthesized by the living machinery of the world-ship—rapidly deployed to all points of the compass, flying outward in ordered formations to take up their far-flung positions around the planet.

  Their enemies would put up no active resistance to the invasion, I reflected. For their enemies were sterile seas and dead sands. The assault on Mars had not in fact been rehearsed: among members of a species who aspire to consensus and coordinated action from birth, near-perfect communication more than compensates for rehearsal.

  Alas, humans do not mesh with one another so easily.

  13

  This, from my journal:

  00.02.14.15

  Shortly after the first descent of the world-ship—our New Year’s Day, our Year Zero—exotic constructions appeared in many places on the planet. “Cities,” if that is not too misleading a term—clusters of gleaming structures, partly underwater and partly onshore, their visible parts bone white against the pink sands at the margins of the narrow blue seas. Seeing them from a distance now, I catch myself daydreaming of the “chess-bone cities” that the writer Raybury, I think his name was, set down from his imagination before anyone had the slightest notion of the truth of matters on this planet.

  The Amaltheans are going very smartly about the business of customizing Mars to suit themselves. These chess-bone cities—centers of transformation-incorporate immense processors which break down carbon dioxide into oxygen and carbon. Atmospheric pressure remains high, but at the rate these bone-white gleaming refineries remove carbon and spill oxygen into the atmosphere, we will soon be able to breathe the air as easily as scuba divers breathe bottled air a few meters underwater. It’s the sort of atmosphere in which the Amaltheans must feel quite at home.

  Where does the carbon go? A mystery…

  Meanwhile bacteria swarm; orange and gray lichens cover the rocks everywhere; green mosses spread into every sheltered cranny. Columns of algae cover the sandy floors of ubiquitous shallow lagoons. To visit the shores of the sea near our base-camp every few weeks or days is like watching a film of evolution speeded up a million times. Today I noticed that the clear waters were teeming with tiny shrimp, and the salt-encrusted shores were buzzing with swarms of black flies.

  00.08.01.08

  The purple skies are crossed by fleets of gravity-defying medusas, busy with their ecological errands. The transformation of Mars continues. (I can not help thinking of it as the “cruciforming” of Mars, after the Amaltheans’ homeworld in Crux.) What is striking is the degree to which the Amaltheans have evidently abandoned their original goal.

  Primordial Venus, what little we glimpsed of it, may have been a close analogue of the Amalthean homeworld, but Mars could hardly be more different-smaller and colder and drier by far. The narrow seas are alive now, but most of the surface remains an austere desert. Surely the few creatures that live in the dry lands, eking an existence from the watercourses or braving the dunes and lava plains, are novel inventions, not importations from some exotic oceanic world—viz those delicate, lively, ferocious windspiders that roll like miniature fanged tumbleweeds over the sand! This may be paradise, for like the first paradise it is a carefully tended garden in the sand, but if by heaven one means the race’s once and hoped-for future home. Mars cannot be even a pale copy of Amalthean heaven.

  Or of human heaven. I think of these things when I join my colleagues, wearing our breathing masks, to tend the struggling desert shrubs in the decidedly human-scale gardens near our basecamp, our dry miniature paradise.

  00.08.27.22

  Still we live aboard the Ventris. On this night another sad but inescapable occasion for eavesdropping…

  “My whole life I’ve been going from one place to another without knowing why,” I heard Marianne say. “People never took me seriously. They wanted sex, or they were like Blake—he ignored me, he couldn’t wait to get away from me. You didn’t take me seriously either.”

  Hawkins sounded as miserable as usual. “I did, Marianne, I…”

  “You didn’t. You wanted to impress me; you definitely didn’t want to include me.” Her laugh was bitterly self-deprecating. “And I thought Nemo was different.”

  The events they were rehearsing had happened long ago on Ganymede, before our expedition had left for Amalthea; Marianne had been a tourist who had made Hawkins’s acquaintance quite accidentally. But Hawkins had puffed himself up and subsequently made a fool of himself in front of her and the urbane Sir Randolph Mays.

  Nemo had “included” her indeed, made use of her youth and eagerness and spirit in the most cynical way imaginable. In trying to wreck our expedition he had deliberately put her life in extreme danger, and he’d been prepared, should she survive, to let her take the blame for the crimes he himself had committed.

  Soon I heard the soft, familiar sound of Marianne in tears (she spends hours a day weeping, despite the antidepressants Jo Walsh insists that she take). “I don’t know why I’m here,” she said. “I don’t know where I’m going, or what’s happening to me.”

  “You want it to be like it was before.”

  “No.” Her vehemence must have startled Hawkins as much as it did me. “I want what I never thought I would want. I want to be in one place, with people I know. I don’t want to go anywhere strange. I don’t want to think about getting myself killed because there’s no air or gravity or whatever—I want to be safe. I want to be loved. I don’t want to deal with any more strangers. I don’t want to have to deal with those … those … creatures.”

  “I love you, Marianne. I want what you want. If there’s anything I can do to help you get it, I will. I swear.”

  Hawkins’s dilemma is as accute as any we face. How can he keep his promise to this lost girl? How can he restore to her a world she has never really known, but has only created from wishful memories?

  00.11.26.19

  My ethnographic notes on the Amaltheans now fill almost an entire chip. My mineral collection enlarges every day, as do my collections of plants, animals, and microorganisms. The Amalthean lifeforms are disturbingly Earthlike; often, even when I have never seen anything like a par
ticular specimen on Earth, one or more of my colleagues has. At other times, none of us knows the species but the general type is familiar. At still other times, what we behold is truly alien.

  And I do have exquisite specimens; whenever an even more exquisite example of something already on hand is found, I ruthlessly throw out the old and replace it. Anyone who finds these homemade wooden and paper crates and boxes, these crude pottery vials and plastic jars, will marvel at what they contain and think that ancient Mars was a place of perfection unparalleled in the Galaxy.

  Unless, of course, there exist places of real perfection.

  Angus is of extraordinary help in this work. The man is possessed of odd stores of knowledge, informational tastes of astonishing catholicity, among them the apparent memorization of numerous catalogues of the natural world. When he cannot name something—a fish, a flower, an ore-bearing rock—he can often suggest an analogue. Among the six of us who are willy-nilly sharing out the tasks of Adam and Eve, he has taken on the naming. Thus we evolve a peculiar Martian taxonomy, half fantastic and mythological, half prosaic and Linnaean, a novel Systema naturae, viz, Bufo elephantopus (a big frog) and Lebistus McNeilis (a guppy-like fish) on the one hand, Puccinia pandorae (a wheat-like plant, with unfortunate side-effects if badly cooked) and Raphanus novus (a radish) on the other. I might add that, even among those who once studied the subject, none of us seriously pretends to remember his or her Latin. I include myself, for I have much less Latin than Greek.

  00.21.07.08

  The medusas have sown the barren fields of Mars with a cornucopia of seed, which has exploded into life. The plants have grown riotously: I have watched amazed as blue seas like rivers grow borders with grassy meadows, as the slopes of the low pink hills cover themselves with a sort of chaparral or maqui of low bushes, as the ridges of the valleys sprout spiky lines of bent trees. What were sterile seas are now wide swaths of green, as green as the “canals” of the old science-fiction writers.