Arthur C Clarke's Venus Prime Omnibus

by Paul Preuss

  She carried a bundle wrapped in silvery cloth. “A wedding present,” she said.

  With a liquid flourish of notes Redfield brought his playing to a close. Troy descended the short steps to the sandstone court and laid her bundle on the altar bench. “For the parents of the first Martian.”

  Marianne held back, regarding Troy warily. As for Redfield, she’d hardly glanced at him; I knew she had disliked him since she’d met him.

  A tense moment: it had been easy at times for all of us to blame Troy for our fate, or at least to resent her and Redfield for not sharing their program with us. When at last Marianne stepped forward to tug at the silvery wrapping of the bundle on the bench, it was without a smile or a nod of acknowledgment to her unexpected guests.

  A set of black chips lay revealed in their nest of soft silver. Marianne studied them a moment, puzzled.

  “They’re books,” Troy said. “Book House Books. For reading to the child. And other books, encyclopedias and so on—a few things not in the Ventris library—for parents and friends.”

  “Where did you get them?” Bill asked, and half a beat later said, “Sorry, I mean, thank you very much. We’re grateful.”

  “Yes, thank you,” Marianne murmured, her eyes fixed on the trove. We all knew what she was thinking: if the book chips were loaded to capacity, they might very well contain more than the entire library of the Ventris. Books, more than anything else in her involuntary exile, were what Marianne had longed for.

  Where did Troy get them? I thought I knew. I had pondered what Jozsef Nagy had told me about his daughter, during our short interview on Ganymede; I knew what she was. She had gotten the library from her own memory.

  For a moment the silence threatened to grow awkward. Jo and I started making murmuring, clucking sounds, the content of which, if any, I don’t recall. Tony began playing his homemade Synthekord again, producing languid, plangent sounds, halfway between an organ and a bass flute, and a chant-like rhythm that could have been made by Red Indians softly thumping big tom-toms, for all I knew. Angus took up the same rhythm with his strange rattles and sussurating bean-shakers, and Redfield joined in on the melancholy Pan pipes.

  Marianne looked up from the books, her green eyes gleaming with tears. Troy watched her with a look pale and knowing, Marianne said, “Thank you, thank you,” in a fervent whisper—

  —but when she took a step toward Troy, intending perhaps to embrace her, Troy was not where she had been, having translated herself farther back into the shadows in a movement so subtle and flowing I had hardly noticed it.

  Redfield, on his feet now, still playing, nodded to the rest of us with glistening eyes and turned, mounting the steps with a springy step worthy of the goat god. A moment later he was gone into the darkness. Perhaps he had deliberately drawn our attention to himself, or perhaps Troy, like a silent desert djinni, was gifted with invisibility, for when we thought to look, she was no longer there.

  Then I felt fingers brush my shoulder and turned to find her beside me, beckoning me silently with her eyes. I glanced at the others: they were rapt, listening to the sad, sweet melody of Redfield’s flute drifting from the dunes. I backed away from them and followed Troy deeper into the night, among the huts. She was a wraith, a spirit who came and went without warning, and I could not be sure whether the apparition boded well or ill.

  “We didn’t know if it would work,” she said without preamble. Her accent was odd in the still air, the accent of one who, like a person grown slowly deaf, remembers the sound of words through the air but has not heard them that way for a long time. “If it had not worked, there would have been a cataclysm to tear this world to pieces.”

  “Has it worked?”

  Close up, she was as gaunt as a dry ocotillo, a blackened stick that has not flowered since the last rains, who might or might not ever flower again. “We are doing more than rebuilding a world. Professor. We have altered time. We have remade reality.”

  “These days the others call me plain Forster. If anyone’s the professor here, it’s your old friend McNeil.”

  “Awfully informal, Forster…”

  “The J, Q, and R don’t stand for anything, you know,” I was surprised to hear myself admit. “Actually, the honorable parents couldn’t agree on a name. Instead they settled on what they hoped would be an imposing string of initials.” I had rarely confessed this failure of the progenitive imagination; certainly in recent months I had lost much of my former reserve.

  For reply Troy put out her thin, strong right hand and rested it on my arm, and I thought I detected the ghost of a smile when she said, “Little did they know.”

  Seeing the truth of that, I laughed. What did an imposing string of initials amount to, under present circumstances? “So,” I said, “you and your alien friends have given us this whole new world, this whole new history. If we’d been given access…”

  She cut me short. “What you have not been able to record, no amount of access would have helped you understand. The devices of the aliens are far beyond our grasp.” Her mood was mercurial, now lighthearted, now irritable, as if darting about in some multidimensional psi space.

  “What do you want to tell me?” I demanded.

  “I believe that the success of what we do here will determine whether Earth evolves—as we comprehend that process.” Her eyes were like glowing sparks. “If we are to share our solar system with the Amaltheans, we must be sure that they are content to remain here on Mars.”

  “You do not trust them?”

  “I do not understand them.”

  “This is a fine paradox,” I said after a moment’s thought. “If Earth evolves as we knew it, presumably we will be born. But if we must make Mars an Amalthean Paradise in order to insure that, then the solar system into which we will be born will be a very different place.”

  “Whether we personally are born into the same cosmos a few billion years from now hardly makes a difference. What makes a difference is whether human beings evolve on Earth.”

  “Why is that in doubt?” I asked, puzzled by her concern.

  “Are we alone here, circling the sun?” she asked, her voice husky with intention. “On Venus, there were Amaltheans who would settle for nothing less than a perfect reproduction of their homeworld. Nemo insinuated himself into their company, as we insinuated ourselves into Thowintha’s.”

  “Perhaps they left Venus, left our solar system, traveled on in search of new worlds…”

  “My last sight of Nemo was of him urging them to cut us off,” Troy replied. “They seemed readily swayed by his passion.”

  “Why have you chosen to tell me these things now?” I asked. “For a Martian year you’ve avoided us.”

  “Survival,” she answered. “For now, at least. Bill and Marianne need to believe that what we and they are building here will last forever. Tony too.”

  “Angus and Jo…”

  “They’re adaptable. Even so. I’ve never known them more content.”

  “And me?”

  “You may not realize how much they all still think of you as their leader,” Troy said.

  My reply to that was a derisive snort, which I attempted to muffle, too late.

  She smiled. “You are a changed man, Forster. One might almost think you had learned humility.”

  “I say…”

  “You are their leader, whatever you think. I leave it to you to decide how much to tell, and when, and to whom. But I warn you—keep your flock together. At any moment the universe may change.”

  Above us, the myriad stars came out again, uncovered by the movement of the hovering medusa. I looked up, and when I looked back to say something more to Troy, she was gone.

  Bemused, I rejoined the others. No one remarked on my absence—with all the wine we’d drunk, a brief trip to the bushes was hardly unusual.

  Angus put down his cymbals and rattles and pressed a new-filled beaker into my hand. “Cheer up, friend. There are no ghosts in those sands.” />
  At that moment, to our astonishment, fireworks began in the heavens. Huge balls of glistening white flame. Streaks of blue and gold. A bright ball of green fire trailing a thin thread of smoke, whiffling audibly overhead, as it went.

  “Comets again.” Angus peered at me gravely.

  I was agape. “I thought that was mostly done with.”

  “They’ve steered a few bits into collision courses to give us a show”—Tony greeted the spectacle of the exploding heavens with crescendos of synthesized sound—“All in aid of our celebration.”

  The display continued, long after we’d gotten tired of watching it. With all the excitement, it seemed to take Bill and Marianne forever to decide they wanted privacy. At last they slipped off with shy smiles in our direction—to the same domed hut they’d been sharing for years.

  As I record this, lying on my own bunk (a little drunk, I confess) and peering into the darkness occasionally lit by the silent flares of wrecked comets in the night sky, I brood upon the future. I resented Troy for not confiding in me. Now I resent her because she did.

  01.01.19.17

  Marianne and Bill are doing their part. Am I doing mine?

  I long regretted that I never learned where the Martian plaque was found. Now I have another reason to regret my ignorance: we cannot put the extensive records we are compiling there to be found with it.

  Of course there is no Martian plaque as yet. likely we humans will have been long buried in the sands of Mars when (and if, in this reality) the plaque is crafted. Nor do I have any hope that I personally will return to Venus—to put in place the Venusian tablets I discovered there, recording the languages of Bronze Age Earth. That task will evidently be left to some other man or woman. Or more likely to some nonhuman creature.

  01.01.21.04

  The display in the sky goes on without stopping. Perhaps we were too ready to think it put there for us. The far horizon is clouded by storms, and lightning plays constantly across the desert; the sea level is rising…

  17

  The date I recorded this is uncertain…

  Troy came to us this evening to invite us to a grand occasion. The first stage of the transformation of Mars was complete, she said: the Amaltheans had seeded an entire world with microorganisms and plants and animals, creatures of the land and sea and air, of the interstices of the rock, and of the crevices deep beneath the surface of the ice. Having seen that the ecology was stable, they had determined to mark it with permanence.

  This was a world as congenial to humans as to Amaltheans—although, according to Troy, we neighborly Galactic races were likely to see even less of each other from this time on. Given a choice, the Amaltheans preferred the ocean depths; we, possibly having inherited a tendency to climb the tallest handy tree and peer around (and as our adventure with the paper airplane had confirmed), preferred the heights.

  But a new world! A new Crux! A new Earth! A novel plenum organum! The Amaltheans, not wholly unlike humans (though in fact they are very unlike humans), planned to observe the occasion by dedicating a memorial. They graciously invited us to attend the ceremony.

  Before Troy left, she took me aside again. It would be prudent, she said, if everyone came along together. It would be prudent, in fact, if we stayed together from now on into the foreseeable future. She managed to imply without saying so that it was up to me to shepherd our little flock.

  So it was that, when the time came, I had persuaded all but one of my colleagues into joining the expedition. Bill opposed me (as usual) by urging Marianne to stay, but she insisted she would not miss what promised to be an extraordinary sight. And since it was plain that Bill wanted to go, he gave in rather easily; I didn’t need to interfere. Only Tony, whose suspicion of the aliens had grown into an obsession with the passage of time, insisted upon staying behind. The best I could do was extract a promise that he would not leave the neighborhood until we returned.

  Redfield called for us in a splendidly fringed and tentacled medusa. By now Redfield was only a little less alien to us than the Amaltheans themselves; we treated one another cordially enough, but the chance of renewing our old comradeship was long gone. He accompanied the five of us from our equatorial home to the frigid pole.

  In a few hours the medusa covered, by a shorter route, the distance the paper sailplane had taken five days to traverse. From its transparent bubble we saw, piercing the sky above the frozen horizon, the needle-thin bright structure Jo and Tony had described, and soon we were hovering near its snow-drifted base. It was a diamond tower, the gleaming axis of the world, rising a kilometer or more out of the frozen mists and pointing straight up into a whirlpool of clouds overhead.

  A dark inverted funnel opened in the milky vortex of the snow-burdened sky above, a tunnel into space, at the top of which a star-strewn patch of dark sky could be seen. The whole formation was apparently motionless—which meant the deep cloud structure was rotating at the same speed as the planet.

  Redfield said the clouds were expected to dissipate within a day or two. “It’s a cyclone induced by the black hole,” he told us, “an artifact of gravitation. They synchronized the hole’s spin to the planet’s, to eliminate effects on planetary rotation. When it was drawn down out of space, it spun up the atmosphere.”

  “What is this tower, then?” Angus asked. “Some sort of black hole generator?”

  “No, just a sort of fancy drill rig,” Redfield replied. “The top of a shaft that goes to the center of the planet.”

  “And I suppose there’s an identical drill head at the south pole,” Bill said. “For symmetry.”

  “Of course.”

  “What keeps the shafts from collapsing?” Angus asked.

  “They’re cased with synthetic crystalline matter-stronger than the crystal structure of the condensed interior. It’s the same stuff the world-ship is made of—harder than diamond and transparent to heat.”

  “So what’s the origin of these black holes? How do the Amaltheans steer them where they want them to go?”

  “I wish I knew the answer to that. The holes were made locally, but as to how the aliens handle them…” Redfield shrugged. He simply did not understand, he said, how the Amaltheans could alternately wrinkle and smooth the local fabric of spacetime.

  We could have asked endless questions about these apparent miracles, but Redfield gently put us off, claiming that in all the years he had had to study Amalthean technology, he had grasped only a few minor practical matters. “Mostly, what not to touch when,” he said. His grin briefly reminded me of our old days together. He seemed quite sincere.

  The hovering medusa slowly circled the great tower. Fleets of other medusas were arrayed on every side in loose formations, thousands upon thousands of the half-living vessels that had done the work of transforming a world. We came to rest, barely brushing the ground.

  Redfield invited us to dismount and inspect the tower more closely. Only Marianne declined; she was far along, and thought it better not to brave the cold. He produced capes of fluffy white material, which we wrapped around our shoulders and clipped to our wrists and ankles. The medusa’s tentacles set us down in wind-glazed snow.

  Trudging away from beneath the craft, I looked up and gazed directly into the strange cyclone over us, the windless eye of a static hurricane. The air was cold enough to take my breath away.

  We walked quickly toward the tower, watching our distorted selves in its mirrored surface, and soon we knew what it was that Redfield had wanted us to see.

  There were inscriptions and low-relief sculptures covering the base of the diamond tower, most of them reaching a little higher than human eye level and some of them already drifted with snow—pictures of animals and plants and landforms and machines. And maps, and what appeared to be treatises on geology and biology and mechanics, and philosophical essays, and gossip and graffiti. Much of it was incomprehensible, even at first glance.

  We had arrived in front of an oval area, like a kind of appliqué
, reminiscent of the ceramicized photographs sometimes found on tombstones on Earth in our era. This one was made of the strange bright metal, however, and applied next to what was certainly a map of our solar system. It was a long text, very finely engraved—

  —and it attracted me instantly. It was as if I could read it even before I was close enough to clearly make it out.

  …After we left our home we came first to a system in the Black Smoker, whose planets we had believed to be habitable but which proved barren by virtue of the primary’s excessive ultraviolet emissions. We journeyed onward, sleeping long, awaking to investigate each star listed in the Catalogue of Possible Manifestations. None were suitable, until at last we reached the star designated Plain Yellow 9436-7815.

  It was a Manifestation such as might have been created from our very dreams—a young sun like the primary of our home with a planet whose size and mass and orbit were like our home world itself blessed with a saline ocean, a quiet geology, and an atmosphere thick in oxygen and carbon compounds. It was a good-tasting world, a fine-smelling world. We called it New Home. To our joy, New Home was without a trace of life, beyond the precursor molecules common to us all throughout the universe. Thus, our great work began and long persisted. But we had not detected the existence of a companion to the primary, a dead and deadly companion…

  What I once thought of as the language of Culture X, I now thought of as classical Amalthean—a flexible and musical speech quite unlike the stilted translations I had once constructed on Earth (for those were derived inescapably from the human Bronze Age languages recorded on the so-called Venusian tablets, which for Culture X was the equivalent of the Rosetta stone).