Arthur C Clarke's Venus Prime Omnibus

by Paul Preuss

  00.23.07.12

  “We’re almost over the pole. Cold as a banker’s heart—good thing these old pressure suits still work, or we could have been forced down just to keep from freezing. There’s lots of medusa activity going on here. Something our friend Troy hasn’t bothered to tell us about. A couple of curious medusas came over to give us a look—we saw those friendly fishy faces peering out at us, but they went away without saying hello.”

  00.23.08.12

  “There’s definitely something strange going on over the pole. They’re building an enormous silver tower right on the pole itself. And the weather in the upper atmosphere isn’t natural; somehow they’re controlling it.”

  00.23.10.12

  “We crossed forty degrees north latitude this morning, headed south again; the inertial puts us at about two-forty west, over a stretch of sand Tony tells me is called Aetheria on the map. At this rate, on this heading, we may make it back to within a few hundred kilometers of base. We may even … but never mind, I’m too superstitious to say it out loud.”

  00.23.11.20

  They’re safely back.

  After flying a ragged arc a third the circumference of the planet, Jo and Tony managed to come down less than a hundred kilometers to the west of us; Jo probably could have brought the plane all the way in, but as she explained, the last stretch was fifty kilometers over open water with little hope of thermals, and she didn’t think it was worth the risk.

  Angus, with my eager if useless attempt to help, made a quick, fuel-intensive hop in the Ventris to bring them and their paper airplane back home.

  Having been gone a week, Tony and Jo were delighted to get out of their pressure suits (their waste-disposal systems having been overtaxed, as I probably do not need to mention even for these, my own records). But as soon as they’d freshened up and put down some solid fare, they told us as much as they could of what they’d seen of the activity at the pole.

  Jo said, “We decided not to transmit everything we saw. They didn’t tell us what they’re doing; maybe they’re hoping we didn’t find out.”

  We were sitting under the olive trees on our patio, the table still littered with the remains of supper. The low, red sun cast restless intricate shadows of olive leaves on the rough rounded sides of the nearest domes.

  “We encountered a gravitational anomaly up there,” Tony said. “Noticeable to big. At first I didn’t want to trust the readings—the gravimeter’s just a scrounge from a deep-space rig, after all, not what you’d call a precision instrument.” Having teased us, Tony sipped at a beaker of juice, waiting for someone to ask for details.

  “What exactly did you find out?” My impatience was all too obvious.

  He smiled at me rather languidly; he is our mapper and the nearest thing we have to a geophysicist (although Angus has committed more geological knowledge to memory), and he was clearly enjoying our attention. “It was a negative anomaly. At the time we crossed the region, therefore, gravity was distinctly less than average over the pole.”

  “How can that be?” Bill asked.

  “The lithosphere must be significantly less dense over the pole,” McNeil put in.

  “Not in our era,” said Bill. “It almost sounds like something was pulling up.”

  Tony didn’t contradict him. In fact, for the rest of the evening Tony said very little, while the rest of us heatedly argued theories we made up—out of thin air, so to speak—to explain the strange observations of our aerial explorers.

  01.01.01.20

  New Year! By consensus we celebrated at sundown. A fine party—I note that there’s no shortage of fermented stuff, even a year after the last of the expedition’s supplies were exhausted. No surprise, given a biological kit as well supplied as ours.

  But before it was dark, before we’d fairly gotten started. Bill stood up with an odd expression on his face, swiped at his schoolboy hair, and nervously cleared his throat. “Marianne and I have something to say.”

  “Go ahead,” said Jo. “No ceremony here.”

  Bill blushed and glanced fondly at Marianne. Her face was newly scrubbed and sleek with youth, a beautiful face—now creased around the mouth and brows. She smiled, but she seemed wistful. Bill said, “I … we, I mean … we’ve decided we want to get married.” His square-fingered hand groped for her small, slender one, encouraging her. “Right, Marianne?” he said anxiously. She surrendered her hand but still found no words.

  Jo said lightly, “So the guy’s in love with you. Not exactly news to the rest of us. You gonna let him talk for you too?”

  That seemed to rouse her; we’d always known her as an independent young woman. “Yes.” Her green eyes flashed. “It’s what we want.”

  “No problem,” said Jo. “I can still claim to be the captain of that hulk of a ship over there. Two hours of counselling first—Space Board regs,” she growled, mock seriously. “I should be real good at that.”

  “I take it that congratulations are in order,” Angus said, “in which case. I’ve waited long enough for a drink.”

  Were our young lovers happy or bereft? Or perhaps a bit of both? After much convivial back-pounding and hugging and tears, we managed to put the question behind us, substituting for it a serious appraisal of Angus’s latest barrel of homebrew. But I find myself thinking—and hoping—that it is a happy and a sensible thing for Marianne and Bill to have done. Why do I say that? Because Marianne has at last accepted—not her fate—but the reality of her situation and ours. And her own needs and desires. Because she no longer holds against Bill that for which he had too long foolishly blamed himself, our mutual predicament.

  And because Bill and Marianne are young. Perhaps only the old know that there is no joy in coupling without belief in the future. Jo put it well to me (and I urged her to put it the same way to them): that Marianne could let go of her unhappiness and many the man she loves (even a little) gives us all confidence.

  Also it was a sensible thing to do because it partly solves a complex equation. I suppose Angus and Tony will now be competing with each other (and with me?) for the attentions of our captain.

  Sometime during the night I giddily proposed that we name the first month of the year “Marianne.”

  01.03.13.20

  “I’ve been watching the gravimeter every day. The readings have shifted considerably.” Tony paused halfway through the grilled catfish that was the centerpiece of our luncheon. “Anyone here feel … heavier than usual?”

  “Heavier?” Marianne said, amused. “Definitely. Every day.” She patted her abdomen. Although her internal changes were as yet invisible to us, she was accutely aware of them.

  The rest of us considered one another, trying to recall complaints of fatigue in recent days. Tireder, maybe—nothing unusual about that, we’re all getting older, and with Marianne out of the schedule, there’s been more than the usual amount of work to do.

  “Actually, I too feel heavier every day,” Angus allowed. “My imagination, no doubt.”

  “Not entirely,” said Tony. “If my crude instruments are not completely worthless, this whole planet is more massive than it was two weeks ago.”

  “Weren’t you telling us the planet was less massive—at least at the pole?” Bill succinctly expressed our confusion.

  “That was temporary. We—Jo and I—think the additional mass approached from space along the polar axis, then was somehow inserted through the north pole within the last few days,” Tony said, satisfied with himself.

  “And we suspect something symmetrical has happened at the south pole,” Jo said.

  Tony nodded. “The reason being that you can’t add mass to a spinning top—or a planet—without throwing the whole thing into a crazy spiral, anywhere except at the poles.”

  “What sort of mass?” I wanted to now.

  “Most probably … black holes,” replied Tony. “Small, with event horizons no bigger than molecules, I’d guess, but with the mass of whole mountain ranges, maybe whole s
ubcontinents. We know the Amaltheans have some control over the vacuum, and they appear to be using it to plant black holes in the core of Mars. When the two meet, they’ll coalesce into a single hole.”

  “Good Lord!” Bill’s dudgeon came complete with pink nose, ears, and scalp; very English. “Why would they do such a thing?”

  “Elementary,” Angus grumbled, “in the long view.” He glanced at Tony, asking permission to steal his thunder, I think, and Tony nodded the go-ahead. “All the marvelous progress that’s been made in the years we’ve been here is ephemeral, unless there are fundamental changes in the geology of the planet,” said Angus. “Mars has a thick atmosphere now, but it needs enough mass to keep the air from eventually escaping. And it needs internal heat to maintain the carbon cycle. A black hole in the center of Mars solves both problems: it increases the planetary mass, and it heats up the core.”

  “How does it do that?” I wondered. “Heating the core?”

  “Radiation.” Tony again. “Paradoxically, the smaller the radius of the hole, the greater the tidal forces at the Schwarzchild radius—the edge, that is. The greater the tidal force, the greater the amount of radiation coming from the hole.”

  “Where does the radiation come from?” Marianne asked. “I thought there was nothing inside a black hole.”

  “Nothing’s where the radiation comes from,” Tony replied. “From the vacuum. The vacuum is seething with particles that come and go too quickly to detect. Pairs of virtual particles—protons and antiprotons, electrons and positrons, all kinds—are constantly flashing into existence and vanishing again, instantly—everywhere, all around us, all the time. If that should happen right on the edge of a black hole, one of the pair can be caught; the other escapes as, well, real radiation.”

  “Why won’t this hole just eat the planet up from the center?” Marianne asked.

  “Maybe it will,” Jo put in. “But it will take a long time to feed all of Mars into a hole the size of a molecule.”

  “Well, but the more mass it absorbs, the faster it grows, right?” Marianne’s native intelligence had clearly been engaged by this fascinating new question.

  “Right. Given a handy source of matter—the core of Mars—the hole will tend to grow from the infall,” said Tony. “But the radiation we’ve been talking about offsets that tendency. Indeed, a hole as tiny as the one indicated by the gravimeter radiates a tremendous amount of energy—so much so that, in a vacuum, it would evaporate in a short time.”

  “I take it you’re saying that at some point the two tendencies cancel, and the system achieves a sort of equilibrium?” Bill sounded dubious.

  Tony nodded. “I can have a go at the calculations if you want a precise answer—not a simple task—but in essence the matter inside Mars will be converted to energy with extreme efficiency—enough to warm the planet without a noticeable reduction in mass for at least a couple of billion years.”

  Warmth lingered in the air and light lingered on the horizon, although the sun was down and the wind had stopped stirring the olives. Marianne stood up to light the lamps, moving herself carefully. The worried call of a quail came from somewhere off in the shadowed dunes, now overgrown with stiff grass.

  I traded glances with Angus. His dire prediction that Mars would freeze had indeed been anticipated by the Amaltheans, in a fashion that none of us could have predicted.

  “A fascinating supposition,” I said to Tony. “But I wonder why Troy didn’t bother to alert us? Why, having invited us to record all the magnificent achievements of the Amaltheans until now, did she try to suppress this greatest of their feats?”

  16

  01.01.15.03

  Midsummer on Mars—the fourteenth of Marianne—and Bill and Marianne have done the sensible thing. At dusk, that hour when the wind fails and the warmth of the day lingers in the still air, the ceremony began with music.

  Tony did most of the work, providing a humming melody and a perhaps rather moody bass line on his rigged-up version of a Synthekord, with Jo accompanying him on pottery drums stretched with polymer skin, Angus banged out a very respectable rhythm on what looked like oversized iron castanets. Torches fueled with oil from a shrub Angus calls creosote bush fluttered at the edges of our little central plaza. We’d all pitched in to do the decorating, principally garlands of leaves strung among the huts and the saplings.

  Bill came forward shyly to stand in the center of the little courtyard, in a space heavy with the scent of autumn-flowering vines and warm with light from flickering yellow flames, wearing his best, the scrubbed remnants of a pair of twill trousers and a white cotton shirt that he had brought with him to Ganymede uncountable years ago. His bright English hair was slicked down against his long skull, his bright English face was pink with embarrassed happiness in the torchlight. Here was a man who had got what he wanted at last, and he was uncritically thankful to his friends for it.

  Marianne and I were waiting in the domed hut I used for a workplace; I held the door ajar and peeked out, awaiting our cue. There were no lights on, but I imagined her happiness was enough to shed a soft glow through the place. She wore layers of silk-fine tapa and wore white-flowered vines, both as a coronet and in layers of fragrant necklaces.

  The sound of the little orchestra, augmented by synthesized strings and brass, now swelled boldly in the desert night, echoing from the sandstone walls of the buttes. After a while Jo left off the high-pitched patter of the ceramic drums—by then Tony had sampled her playing and kept her rhythms alive on his Synthekord as she went to take her position at the pottery bench that had been cleared to serve as an altar.

  It was time to present the bride. The music fell silent as I escorted Marianne the few steps across the flagstones to stand in front of the “altar”; Tony took up the best man’s position beside Bill, and Angus stood by, approximating the maid of honor’s place with a solemnity that would have been comic had we not all been touched by the moment. Jo addressed us, standing easily with her hands clasped behind her back, talking no more formally than at any crew meeting. But there was enough expectancy in the air to lend a touch of solemnity.

  “We’re here to celebrate with Bill and Marianne—celebrate not just the fact of their marriage but the boost it gives us all. Seems they’ve decided that life is worth living.”

  “Here, here,” Angus muttered with feeling.

  “And since we’re not standing on ceremony,” Jo went on, “I think it’s okay to mention that they obviously think life is worth giving.”

  Which drew a serene smile from Marianne and an intense blush from Bill—expressions we honored with rowdy applause.

  “We’ve had to face what no one could have foreseen.” Jo became serious. “We’ve disagreed, gotten mad at each other, stepped on each other’s toes. Sometimes we’ve pulled in different directions. But we’ve made a home and a life together. And our first major event as a … society, I think we’ve got to call it … isn’t a funeral, as it might have been. Nobody’s gotten sick, nobody’s had an accident. Nobody’s killed anybody else or themselves. Instead, we’ve got a marriage to celebrate and a child on the way. Maybe we’re the only humans in this place and time, but we’ve made a start. So thank you, Marianne, and thank you. Bill, for making it official.” She nodded at Tony. “Speaking of official, if you guys can find those rings, I’ll read the words.”

  Tony and Angus produced rings of forged iron, Jo’s work. Bill trembled as he tried to force the braided black band over Marianne’s finger. She had to help. Her hand was steadier than his, and she got his ring over his callussed knuckle with less difficulty.

  Jo said, “Marianne, do you take Bill as your lawfully wedded husband, to work out your life together however you two see fit?”

  “I do.” Her voice was filled with conviction.

  “And Bill, do you take Marianne as your lawfully wedded wife, with the intention of being her partner in all things needing partnership and otherwise minding your own business?”

&n
bsp; “I do,” Bill said fervently.

  “Then, by the authority vested in me as captain of the Michael Ventris—of which for purposes of making this legal I consider you two part of my crew—I pronounce you married. You can kiss each other.”

  They did, tentatively and very gently.

  Simple, but oddly touching. I may even have shed a discreet tear. I find these things easier to admit as I grow older.

  At this precise moment the thin, sweet sound of a flute echoed from the wall of the nearby buttes. We looked at one another in surprise; no one had planned this.

  The melody of the distant flute repeated the melody Tony and the others had played earlier, an irreverent but pretty rendition of the march from Mendelssohn’s Midsummer Night’s Dream. The single strand of music seemed to float like cottonwood silk on the still desert air. As it approached we peered into the night, but the torchlight interfered with night vision; besides, our little village was sunk below the ground level, and even in daylight we could have seen only narrow patches of the surrounding dunes.

  We felt rather than saw the shadow that passed over the stars. One of the Amalthean’s huge, semi-transparent medusa ships was edging across the spangled Milky Way to hang over us, its interior dimly alight with a faint purple glow.

  The flute music was close now. Troy and then Redfield emerged from the darkness at the edge of the firelit circle. Redfield was the one playing the flute; he perched himself on a convenient slab of sandstone looking the perfect figure of Pan, bare-limbed and sun-blackened, wearing only a scrap of cloth about his loins. His glossy auburn hair fell over his shoulder and across his chest almost to his thin waist, but despite his rakishness he no longer looked, I thought, quite like a young man. Rather he seemed thin and tough, dried out, almost salt-cured, his eyes burning darkly under black brows. Purple scars striped the sides of his chest, and for a moment I did not recognize them for what they were, his organs of breath under the water.

  Nor did Troy look young. She was wearing as little clothing as Redfield and was as dark as he was; her blond hair had been bleached to the color of driftwood by sun and salt, had grown long and fell in a slant across her sinewed, small-breasted chest. In the sides of her chest the gill slits, once hardly noticeable, were pronounced, no doubt developed by constant use; they stood out as parallel purple scars that striped her rib cage, like Redfield’s. Overall, her appearance was wild, alien—slightly incongruous with her cheerful smile.