Arthur C Clarke's Venus Prime Omnibus

by Paul Preuss

  What I read here on the side of the towering North Pole was a flowing and simple account of the Amalthean Odyssey, embellished with the sort of details that might appeal to later generations of Amaltheans. The words and phrases sounding in my head were like nothing I had heard or read before, but I knew I had often seen and studied it—or rather a small part of it…

  It was Thowintha consciousness that infused itself among us then, and brought us to this least promising place. How far it was from a Manifestation! Yet life is various and abundant. How much more abundantly life embraces itself in the manifestation of an unexpected multitude of forms! Perfection is mutable. That is Thowintha consciousness. The designated heralds of future alien life honored us with their responsive feeling and sharing of consciousness. They tasted with us and smelled with us, and with them we tasted the new and the strange. They sang with us; we shared stories of mutual Might. Our vessels flowed outward like a current surging in the sea, and where we went, life arose. Life strange and familiar, life old and new—one arising from the other, the many arising from the few. In Mutation is Manifestation. That is Thowintha consciousness…

  I bent closer. My breath frosted the writing and as quickly cleared away, for the diamond tower was warmer than the air. I became aware of Bill beside me, peering at the writing as closely as I was.

  “What have you found there, Professor?”

  I mumbled something wordless in reply. My mind’s eye laid a template over the shining mass of this writing and found within it a rounded irregular shape—imaginary, for no such shape had been contemplated by the makers of this text—a shape consisting of a thousand or so characters stacked a couple of dozen lines high, nesting near a corner of the shining plaque.

  Bill gasped. “Is that…?”

  “Yes. The Martian plaque.“

  Other designates are our guests, living happily among themselves in their way, a way hardly comprehensible to us, a way which nevertheless persists and gives occasion for optimism and play. Many plants and animals are not of the Manifestation but of the designates’ home, made as they have suggested. We live together on this new home, in intricate cooperation. Thus we have named it: Harmony.

  For the way that can be exhaustively understood is not the mutual way. That is Thowintha consciousness…

  The Martian plaque. Its translation had been the greatest triumph of my career. “Can you read it, Bill?”

  He leaned closer, then shook his head. “I guess I haven’t kept up, Professor. Like you have.”

  “How laughably I misinterpreted what I read!” A fever had taken me; the old fire of academic priority was upon my brow. “Not that my rivals came any closer to the truth; how could any of us have suspected that the plaque’s oft-mentioned ‘designates’ were human beings—a billion years before their time! That one of the designates was myself?”

  As was Bill, I might have added, but didn’t. He chose not to respond to my diatribe, and I read on, eagerly.

  In shared joy at the enlivening of this tiny planet, now truly our home world, we who work from the far-flying, half-living vessels have made these story-songs and story-pictures on the axis of the world. Our comrade, our sibling, our great and living ship of Manifestation, imbued with Thowintha consciousness, goes forth from here to seed the clouds of the greatest of the nearby planets with undying half-life. The ship of Manifestation has done its work. Let Thowintha consciousness lapse into long sleep until we shall call upon it again. Meanwhile we remain here. Our comrade’s awakening will come in the fullness of waiting at the great world. Then the designates shall reappear. Then the final acts shall be undertaken. Then all will be well.

  As I read the plaque’s last words I was transfixed by the most extraordinary clash of emotions. Fierce delight at learning the richness of its complete and correct text. A certain amusement at how far afield my well-meaning attempts to reconstruct its meaning had led me.

  And fear. Were we really living in an alternate universe, as we had rather complacently decided? Or were we after all living in our own past—a past in which some unimaginable blow would shatter the plaque in front of me, leaving only a single scrap of it to survive into our own era?

  Bill peered at me, his nose red with cold, his face innocent of my worries. “I wonder what could possible smash that up?” he said cheerfully.

  I could only shake my head in ignorance.

  Jo called from a few meters away. “Cold’s getting to us. We’re going back to the medusa.”

  Bill pulled his cloak tighter around his shoulders. “I guess I’ll be joining them, sir.”

  Sir? He hadn’t called me that in a while; something in my manner had touched him. We—all of us—knew one another too well for formality. Or perhaps Troy was more right about my role than I had been willing to admit.

  I watched the others trudge through the crusted snow toward the strange ship that waited under the frozen sky, a ship whose graceful swelling membranes and trailing tentacles were forms that had evolved in warm seas—at first glance so weirdly out of place in an arctic landscape, yet grown so familiar to us “Martians” that it seemed no more exotic than a skimobile.

  A last look at the mirror-bright Martian plaque … perhaps this was a different reality, and the plaque would last forever. Or even if it did not escape its fate, perhaps a billion years would pass before the blow fell. Perhaps we happy few humans would never know, would never need to know.

  I turned and made my way toward the medusa. Between it and the far horizon fleets of other medusas drifted against the gray clouds, shifting as if on currents of ocean. Beyond them a gray and white sun was rising…

  The sun was the world-ship, lifting itself upon columns of white fire, I knew then it was on its way to Jupiter, the Great World, carrying with it Thowintha—“Thowintha consciousness,” rather. My brain seethed with questions I knew would never be answered, and some that soon would be. Were Troy and Redfield going with the world-ship, to await the awakening—to be awakened, a billion years from now, by us and themselves? Or were they planning to stay here—join us—grow old and die on Mars? Would they expect to be welcomed among us, who had once been their friends?

  Fleets of medusas bobbled and moved aside as the gleaming world-ship approached, an immense convex mirror almost brushing the snow below and curdling the clouds above. I looked up and saw, reflected in the huge mirror, the spectacle around me—the snow and the tower, and the massed medusas—but all turned upside down, overwhelmed and overwhelming.

  In our own era, some silly would-be linguist once queried, “When you are overwhelmed, where is the whelm you are over, and what exactly does it look like?” He should have stood here, I thought. Overwhelmed, you are under the whelm—the curling wave of wholeness. Have a good look, while you can.

  Hypnotized by these thoughts, and perhaps nearer to being frozen than I knew, I stood immobile, hypnotized by the approach of the world-ship across the polar snows of Mars—

  —when the surface of the planet was suddenly wrenched from beneath my feet.

  18

  Troy had been right to be concerned for us, but the danger did not come from any mismanagement of the black holes. Not directly.

  I record this uncounted hours (perhaps weeks?) later, hoping to recall in rough outline the principal events which drove us from our home, the second Eden. Yet I must ask how many paradises the aliens have tried to build for themselves? And from how many have they been driven?

  The ground shook and I was thrown to the snow in front of the great tower the Amaltheans had erected at the north pole of Mars. I felt as if I was riding an ice flow in a sudden thaw. The frozen surface beneath me tilted and heaved; I dug my bare hands into the snow and clung to it for my life.

  Just then, in a flurry of snow, I was snatched into the air: a tentacle had descended from our medusa, and within seconds it had pulled me into the aerial machine. But I was thrown down again immediately, this time by sudden acceleration—the medusa was rising up and away
from the tower, high into the atmosphere, making swiftly for the oncoming world-ship.

  All of us in the medusa—we humans I mean—had fallen to the floor, but because the whole machine was flexible and transparent our view of the outside was not cut off. I landed on my back; I could see right up through the clear roof of the vessel. Strangely, I was seeing the ground!

  The whole landscape below was reflected in the vast mirror of the world-ship looming above. It was a landscape in upheaval, with waves like ocean swells traveling across the snowy plains to crash against the base of the tower in torrents of white surf. Gouts of steam erupted in rows across the snow like the impacts of machine-gun bullets; they collapsed almost as suddenly into pits like bullet holes, but big as volcanoes. Far off, a long fissure split the plains, exploded with steam, then filled with fountains of lava that glowed dull orange against the bleak waste.

  When enormous, perfectly round voids opened in the landscape (I had to remind myself that it was, after all, only a reflection) I was slow to recognize the world-ship’s locks spiraling open. On every side the great fleets of medusas, assembled about the north pole in the tens of thousands, were streaming toward the open ports.

  “What’s happening?” somebody next to me—Angus, I think—croaked in a ghastly half whisper.

  “We’re under attack,” said a voice I recognized as Redfield’s.

  “Who…?” Angus said.

  “The Doppelgangers.”

  It took me longer than it should have to comprehend Redfield’s remark. Meanwhile our medusa flew swiftly toward the nearest lock and crowded into it, jostling skin to skin with the nearest other medusas.

  Acceleration abruptly ceased. The huge lock was filled with shimmering medusas, close-packed as fish eggs. As the skin of the lock healed itself and the wintry sunlight was cut off, to be replaced by the world-ship’s ubiquitous inner blue glow, water rushed into the lock and we were submerged in the primal sac.

  Where we stood in our pressurized bubble, our tailored microenvironment, the air was cool and fresh—maintained by the osmotic controls of a living machine that was able to sense our needs. What the machine could not do was overcome the strange, intensely queasy sensation induced in us by the proximity of numerous spacetime-warping nodes in the other medusas that crammed the lock. To take a step was to pass through subtly shifting gravitational fields.

  The medusas began to move past us, jostling and sliding over one another, letting themselves be sucked into the interior of the great ship. Poor Marianne became violently ill. She began to groan, then cry out. Jo and Angus crawled to her aid; Bill struggled to reach her. I was late coming out of my nausea, and by then she needed air more than she needed another useless onlooker.

  Just then we felt the universe move again, massively—the world-ship itself was accelerating.

  “Where are we going?” Jo demanded of Redfield; she was the first to ask the urgent question.

  “To pick up Tony. Then away from Mars.”

  “She can’t take it. She’s in contraction.”

  Marianne was writhing in pain. Sweat stood out on her pale forehead.

  “I’ll do what I can,” he said. But he made no immediate move, and never had he sounded more detached.

  Marianne’s crisis was at its peak when the world-ship lurched again. The great lock had emptied of medusas; its dome now spiraled open. Our own medusa shot into the sky…

  In retrospect I suppose our medusa floated free with as much tenderness as it could manage—balancing what was, in human terms, a cold equation: urgency versus pity, the fate of all against the fate of one—or two. For Marianne was giving birth prematurely.

  We were over our little settlement beside the sea. The medusa coursed swiftly back and forth over the buttes and dunes, but Tony was not to be seen. The sailplane was gone.

  Redfield had disappeared into the lower parts of the hull; I could see his vague outline as he swam through the watery spaces below, conversing in streams of thin bubbles with the tentacled creatures who presumably were the crew of our vessel. Shortly he reemerged into our sector, his long hair streaming with water. “We must go back.”

  “Not without Tony,” Angus roared. “I won’t let him die.”

  “We can’t stay. All of us will die.”

  Angus lunged at Redfield, who did something to him, so swiftly I could not see it—and Angus cried out and fell to his knees. I am ashamed to confess that I was paralyzed with indecision. Redfield stepped away from Angus, and in the same moment Jo made the decision for us: “No fighting. Save who you can, Redfield. But please save Marianne and her baby.”

  He went away again, and by the time he came back the medusa was inside the world-ship and the world-ship had begun to move. And by then it was too late for the baby.

  “Oh why?” Jo cried out as the grief washed over her. Beneath her comforting hands, Marianne was unconscious, lying in a pool of blood, and Bill was near shock, cradling a bloody child who was hardly bigger than his own hands.

  “I’m sorry,” Redfield said flatly. I looked for any hint of emotion in him and saw none. He knelt beside Marianne, checking her pulse, looking into her eyes. “It’s not too late for her.” It was a clinical judgment, devoid of feeling.

  “Are we being taken to Jupiter?” I asked. “Are they planning to freeze us in the ice with you?”

  “I don’t know where we’re going.”

  “The plaque,” I said. “It clearly states that the world-ship will wait at the Great World … until the Awakening.”

  “I don’t know where we’re going,” he repeated coldly. “Ellen and I were committed to Mars. We were planning to stay.”

  “What’s happening outside?” Angus whispered. I could hardly hear his hoarse whisper.

  “The world-ship’s double,” Redfield said. “It was spotted minutes ago, inbound from Jupiter. Just as on Venus. It’s tearing up the work they’ve done, trying to remove the singularities they’ve implanted.” Redfield’s glance flickered past me and the others, lingering upon Marianne. He said, “We’ll have to go into the water.”

  Bill looked away from his wife. “What will happen to…?” His voice was hardly a whisper; it was the first thing he’d said since we were snatched from the surface.

  “She’ll be fine once she’s in the water. I’m sorry about … the others.”

  “Are none of us to be allowed our preferences?” I was startled by my own anger.

  Redfield recoiled, surprised and defensive. “Groves made his choice. He promised to stay until we returned—instead he deliberately flew away. He could see what was happening.”

  “He prefers to die a free man,” Angus said.

  “Pardon my presumption, but you want to live, don’t you?”

  “You were our friend, Blake,” Angus said heavily. “We’ve seen too little of you.”

  “Within a year Mars will be a freezing, uninhabitable waste—everything we’ve striven for destroyed. But do what you think best.” Redfield’s face was a dark and expressionless mask. “The Amaltheans will come for you soon. Perhaps there’s still time to drop you off. Tell them your decision.” He turned away, his long black hair swinging behind him; I saw the gill-slits along his ribs flare as he descended into the watery depths of the medusa.

  Moments later the floor membrane heaved and the mucous-protected mantle of one of the Amaltheans emerged into our air-filled space. A chorus of voices seemed to issue from the walls as the alien spoke: You must tell us now. Shall we place you in the water?

  We all looked to Jo, letting her speak for us.

  “Yes.”

  “What then?” Jozsef asks, appalled. The fire has burned low, and the misty night sky seems to glow with phosphorescence outside the tall windows of the dark, empty library.

  “Why then, we drowned,” Forster says quietly. “We went gently into that dark and fluid good night, taking only our fears and sorrows with us. We had no hope of a morning to come.”

  “And Mars?” th
e commander whispers, his voice as dry as the Martian winds.

  “Oh yes, of Mars I dreamed most vividly. Now these visions must have been based on informed imagination—this is what I tell myself—but later the rough truth of it was confirmed…

  “I dreamed I saw the planet bulge, that the immense Tharsis plateau, which had not previously existed on Mars, now heaved up and burst into gouts of flame and smoke along great seams, that through its gigantic volcanoes the planet hemorrhaged and poured out thick magmatic blood, into heaps so vast in extent—a lava flow that could have covered northwestern Africa—that they caused a severe gravitational anomaly which persists into our own era.

  “Somewhere deep within the planet’s surface, submicroscopic black holes were stirring and wandering. Eventually they tore their way out of the planet’s heart, dragged by some competing force that grew stronger by the second.

  “I dreamed that the shining polar tower I had studied so recently suddenly splintered and vanished, partly vaporized, partly scattered as dust and debris high into the still-thick atmosphere. Most of the debris was sucked right out into space. Glittering motes of it settled back into the churning snow, all of them but one—that fragment we call the Martian plaque—to be lost forever. The black holes had escaped, destroying the devices that controlled them; they constituted perhaps the only force in the universe that could have destroyed those indestructible objects.

  “The skies themselves flashed into a roof of rolling flame.

  “I saw the sudden end of our settlement. Our gardens and orchards were no more than a quick puff of ashy smoke on a hurricane wind. Our concrete domes were baked to the color of bronze; our glass windows slickened to greasy blue before they shattered; nets of iron reinforcing bar stood naked when the concrete shells they had supported turned to powder and dropped away, and only a moment passed before they too melted and the iron puddled in the arid dust.