Arthur C Clarke's Venus Prime Omnibus

by Paul Preuss

  “The Michael Ventris, with our little Manta submarine still in its belly, was shattered by the explosion of its fuel tanks, and the wreckage was strewn upon the sands, then swallowed forever in a flood of lava that swept down from the highlands and obliterated the last sign that humans had ever walked those buttes and hills.

  “I saw poor Tony’s paper airplane blown across heaving deserts, climbing higher on fountains of superheated air until finally it was ignited by lightning and its tattered scraps swallowed in the black anvil of a thunderhead.

  “The meandering oceans boiled. I heard the dying agonies of countless millions of creatures. Forests exploded. Birds fell flaming from the skies.

  “We fled Mars on a swerving course, pursued by our double. My dreaming brain plotted the path of evasive action. We plowed through flights of oncoming asteroids and comets, shattering some, smashing others into new orbits. Mars acquired moons—broken, blackened, retrograde moons.

  “Not for the first time I wondered what interference in the continuum of matter or fields would constitute the ‘reduction of the wave function’ we dreaded. Our world-ship and the other could simultaneously inhabit spacetime, it seemed, perhaps even communicate, so long as we did not inhabit the same local region of spacetime. But where were the boundaries of sameness of locality? What made our doubles think that they would be the ones to survive an encounter?

  “Perhaps they had no such confidence. Perhaps they did not care whether they lived or died. Who could say what evil genius now influenced their acts? But their purpose was plainly to destroy. The alien inhabitants of our own world-ship, however, remote as they might be from human affairs, were nevertheless passionately committed to life; tact and judgment and hope dictated that we must be the ones to flee.

  “We humans slept in the waters. In my dreams the red-gold planet Mars receded, like a golden apple of paradise now lost to us forever.”

  Forster falls silent. A brief sputter of flame is the only sound of the room; black shadows swell and waver upon the ceiling.

  Ari, uncharacteristically reticent, asks, “My daughter? What of her?”

  Forster smiles. “My acquaintance with her, so recently renewed, was to be elaborated under circumstances more intimate—and more peculiar—than any I had yet imagined.”

  19

  Drowned again, I dreamed a while.

  I heard a whispered voice close beside me. “You wanted to be privy to our plans.” It was Troy, bringing me out of the waters into the air-filled bubble of a medusa.

  “What about the others?”

  “Better to let them sleep. We woke you to witness a crucial event. Whatever happens, win or lose, you are here to record it.”

  The medusa floated out of the world-ship’s open lock. The setting was familiar: a night sky smudged with hazy lines among the stars. I took them for comets…

  “Life on Venus was destroyed by a natural greenhouse, primed by periodic cometary bombardment,” Troy told me. “On Mars, our efforts to start a greenhouse with the help of cometary ice were frustrated by the traditionalists whom we fled on Venus, those who follow the Mandate. Only one terrestrial planet remains. Thowintha’s group—the adaptationists—have left it undisturbed.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it possesses indigenous life forms.”

  “Because you have persuaded them, I think.”

  She did not answer. Troy is, I think, the best liar I have ever known; she does it by telling only the truth. She was concealing something from me, so obviously I think she meant me to guess at it, but she was too subtle; I have never been able to decide what she wanted me to know.

  “Both factions were in doubt,” she pronounced, as if lecturing. “Had the organisms that were known to inhabit the seas of Earth—and known to resemble Amalthean lifeforms in startling ways, particularly the primitive forms like medusas and krill and such—accidentally been sown there by the Amaltheans themselves during their earliest survey of our solar system, or were these creatures already present, their resemblance merely chance, examples of convergent evolution?

  “Whatever the answer, our adaptationist friends felt that evolution on Earth should be allowed to proceed unchecked. There is no inevitable outcome to any evolutionary contingency. Looking back, evolution is history, a very particular history with innumerable branch points, always obeying laws of physics and probability but, in its particulars, ruled only by chance.

  “Earth’s dark companion, the singularity called Nemesis, is an agent of that chance. Every twenty-six million years it sends comets hurtling toward the sun. Often one or more of them strike Earth—radically altering its environment, extinguishing some species, allowing others to move into new niches from which their daughter species evolve even further.

  “We have come to Earth to ward off a black contingency. We have seen the traditionalists—Amaltheans who clung to their Mandate religiously and abhorred and rejected adaptation to any preexisting ecology—deliberately destroy our work on Mars. By their own belief they should have moved onward, seeking another star; in losing Venus they lost their only chance to fulfill the Mandate in this solar system. But perhaps they have shied from the awful prospect of another billion-year odyssey. Certainly they have chosen to regard our friends as heretics—and they have stayed behind to eradicate us all, Amaltheans and humans alike.

  “To destroy humanity it is sufficient to alter evolution on Earth, The simplest way to do that is to alter the pattern of comet impacts caused by Nemesis. The Whirlpool.”

  “Where are we?” I asked her. “When are we?”

  “The final moments of the Cretaceous,” she said.

  The time of the most famous of all cometary impacts…

  Our medusa emerged from night into daylight. Soon we were floating low over the Earth’s globe. Its seas and continents were rather differently arranged then, but I guessed that we were in mid-North America. The rolling plains of what would be Montana looked much as central China or eastern Oregon does in our era.

  I knew that a warm, shallow sea had covered the region a couple of million years earlier and had since retreated south and east. Now, lazy rivers drained the plain. To the west, the Rocky Mountains were nothing but low volcanic hills, airy uplands covered with pines and desert shrubs. The swampy lowlands sprouted ferny forests of bald cyprus and metasequoia—a dark and feathery tree called dawn redwood, which was thought to be extinct in the 20th century until a few specimens were found in a Chinese temple garden. Along the gravel levies of the braided riverbanks the forest was semitropical, a tangle of flowering plants and hardwoods, huge sycamores, persimmons, kadsuras, palms, magnolias…

  Where we could do so—without risk of disturbing anything but the lightest draft of air (for while there must be a limit to the delicacy of perturbations that can alter whole evolutionary pathways, we did not want to approach that limit even distantly)—we came within a few centimeters of the swamp. We observed frogs and turtles splashing in the shallows, hunted by immense, horrific crocodiles. Lizards scurried through the woods, and boa constrictors slid along the tree branches.

  Oh and there were dinosaurs! Herbivorous Triceratops, horned and frilled, built like a battle tank; Tyrannosaurus, that awesome carnivore, fifteen meters of teeth and tail balanced on two legs (and with a brain more adequate than most people think).

  We found what we were most anxious to find: mammals, managing to scratch out a living. Some of them would look quite familiar today, including our own ancestors, tiny shrew-like creatures, and others such as opossums who have changed little in millions of years—while others would seem odd indeed.

  Condylarths in particular. They were square-nosed creatures about the size of fox terriers, with clumpy, five-hooved feet and square teeth capable of grinding up vegetation; we were delighted to see a herd of them, for they were the ancestors of all hooved placental mammals—horses, cows, hippopotamuses, elephants…

  It was across the skies of this teeming Eden that we expecte
d the fatal (and vital) comet to approach, a streak of pale light that could hardly be apprehended until the very end, when—the likeliest scenario, though no human before us had been there to confirm it—it would pierce the ocean at a velocity of some ninety thousand kilometers per hour, releasing a hundred million megatons of energy to raise tidal waves eight kilometers high, to bowl over dinosaurs and blow down forests everywhere, to punch a hole through the atmosphere and spew a quadrillion tons of liquified and vaporized matter—its own stuff mixed with the Earth’s—into the highest regions of air … some even into orbit, where it would hang for months to blacken the sun.

  But upon our return to the world-ship we learned there was no evidence of what we had most hoped to find. The ship’s systems had calculated the vectors of all visible comets in the swarm then converging upon the inner solar system. None were on a collision course with Earth.

  Our conversation paused—Troy was there with me, Redfield was there—while I strived to appreciate our uncertainty…

  If no comet were to hit the Earth at the end of the Cretaceous, it would be a different world indeed. What was to prevent some smart descendant of the dinosaurs from assuming the position we smart descendants of apes held so proudly?

  But how was one to interpret the absence of the dinosaur-killing comet—as a sign of interference on the part of Amalthean traditionalists? Had they been here before us? Or was the true natural history of the solar system here revealed? If this were the true course of history, with no interference from outsiders, what was to be done?

  Troy waited until I had a grasp on our fine ethical dilemma, then made hash of my indecision.

  “I have conferred with Thowintha. We picked the likeliest candidate. It had the right size—nine kilometers on the semimajor axis—and its orbit is highly unstable. Clearly it has recently been perturbed, whether deliberately or by chance.”

  “You think Nemo has persuaded them to perturb it?” It was, I believe, the excuse she wanted me to grasp.

  “It will take only the barest nudge from our world-ship to send it straight into Earth.”

  That was the only moment during our discussion when I indulged myself in irony. “You seem to have made great efforts to insure that history would live up to its prior billing,” I said.

  She went ahead and did what she had intended to do all along.

  Later, she told me what happened. “The comet nucleus struck the Caribbean plate—as knowledge from our era confirmed. That sort of accuracy was utterly beyond our control. We would have been happy had it hit anywhere in the North Atlantic.” She smiled at me, a smile I had learned to be leery of. “The mathematics of macroscopic quantum theory is intriguing, but in the final analysis there is only one reality, Forster my friend. Since it presently includes us, history will surely have provided for our evolution—whatever course we or the Amaltheans take.”

  “Certainly it has done so,” I replied, “at least until now.”

  Troy inclined her head microscopically. “Just so.” She held her smile, although it had grown thin and faint, and I thought she showed her age at that moment, even as I was beginning to. “With or without quantum theory, there is no way of predicting the future,” she said. “Even in principle. The future will have changed by the time we get there.”

  PART

  4

  THE MIRROR

  OF APHRODITE

  20

  This time, when I woke up, the medusa was flying a few feet from the planet’s surface. Had they drowned me again? My skin was white and wrinkled, but I was warm and dry and breathing surpassingly sweet air; I could actually identify the aroma of thyme and oregano. Hot sunlight poured through the medusa’s clear canopy. I wiggled my fingers and toes and stretched my limbs. Delicious!

  Gravity seemed Barth normal, or close to it; I was shaky, but I didn’t seem wasted or weak, as I had upon being revived from the previous drowning session. I had been under only a short while, or else something had been at work to restore me to good physical condition. Still, I was in no hurry to sit up. I studied what I could see of the view, reflected in the glassy curve of the canopy over my head.

  The craft was skimming foam-edged blue wave-tops at what was, for a medusa, a moderate pace, gliding toward the towering clouds and sunlit gray peaks of the sea-girt peninsula or island. I saw living shapes in the reflected water, and with delight I recognized them for what they were—we were so near the waves that sleek dolphins paced us, leaping and curving through the transparent water, sparkling wetly in the sun.

  In my confused state it took me a long time to notice that a man and woman were standing beside me. I sat up at last. I noted first their physical appearance, and especially their very long hair—hers a tarnished gold, his a kind of blackened bronze—intricately braided and bound up on their heads. They wore robes of some loose and snowy white material, draped with negligent elegance over their bare limbs.

  Troy and Redfield, standing tense and watchful as the medusa approached the shore, resembled nothing so much as archaic statues of the kind once thought to represent Persephone and Apollo. They were perfect Greek kore and kouros.

  I found that I was wearing the same sort of garment. I felt my head and discovered that I had been provided with a hat, a wide-brimmed floppy thing made of felt, almost like a sombrero. Under it, I found that my own hair, of a rather lusterless pale color (some have called it “gingery”) had apparently grown very long after my last stay in the drowning chamber, and someone had gone to the trouble of carefully braiding it into a fashionable Bronze Age arrangement.

  “Hello, Forster.” Troy had seen that I was awake.

  “Where are the others?” I asked. The question had become a habit with me.

  “Still asleep. This time we need your knowledge of languages.”

  “Where are we?”

  “Ahead of us are the mountains of eastern Crete. If we’ve timed things correctly, the time should be about three centuries after the decline of the Mycenaeans.”

  I counted centuries. “Then it’s the Dark Ages. The Dorians will have overrun the place. Is my…?” I groped for my translator and immediately discovered that I had no pockets. But I did have a pouch—it seemed to be made of leather—and inside it was my precious translator and vocal synthesizer. Not that the machine could understand an unknown tongue, of course, but properly programmed, it was an essential aid to communication. “Why in the world do we want to talk to Dorians?” I asked—exhibiting a bit of snobbery, I’m ashamed to confess.

  “We’re not particularly interested in Greeks, of whatever tribe. It’s just that we needed a period when we had some hope of understanding some language. Or at least of you understanding a language,” she said. “On this trip we’re looking for Eteocretans.”

  “Natives of Crete!”

  “They still inhabit strongholds in these mountains. Presumably they still speak the lost language.”

  It was my turn to raise a brow. “And we are here…?”

  “To record it and decipher it.” She smiled. “Here’s your chance to do what your hero, Michael Ventris, never had the chance to do. He solved Linear B; you can solve Linear A.”

  I thought about that stunning possibility a moment—a daunting prospect. But my first words on the subject were not precisely humble: “Well, of course I am better qualified than the only other candidate,” I said, getting slowly to my feet and peering dubiously at my chiton, which came only to mid-thigh. “I don’t believe Bill Hawkins went in much for Minoan studies.”

  “Don’t be modest, Forster,” said Redfield. “You’re our expert on the Bronze Age.”

  I left off mourning my bony knees and faced the man and woman before me. They were golden creatures, if a bit weathered. “Delighted as I am to be here. I’m inclined to ask why this trip is necessary. What urgent connection do these philological studies have with our program?”

  Her smile was distant. “You will see the connection soon enough.”

  The med
usa had entered a wide blue gulf edged with a curving strip of tawny sand, broken by eroded headlands. We were flying south, just high enough to see across the narrow isthmus ahead, a neck of land that connected two parts of the great island that extended to our right and left. To the west a mass of mountains rose from hills carved with cultivated terraces; another block presented itself in sheer cliffs to the east.

  The medusa gained a few meters of altitude and veered to the left, eastward, entering a smaller, satellite bay, where a trickle of creek bisected a wide beach. We passed low over the masts of half a dozen fishing boats and one graceful fifty-oared ship just putting ashore. The surprised men aboard stared up at us in undisguised alarm.

  We crossed the beach and proceeded inland above thorny wild scrub and isolated groves of silvery olive trees. Flocks of goats were startled into flight as our shadow crossed over them. At the foot of the mountains we slowed and began to climb.

  Before us rose sheer mountains of gray limestone riven by breathtaking vertical gorges, their lower slopes terraced in grapevines and corn (what the North Americans call wheat). Straight ahead of us stood a spire of rock perhaps seven hundred meters high, upon which one could discern threads of smoke and the flat roofs of houses built into the stone, like the Hopi villages on the mesas of the American Southwest. Immediately beneath us was a village on a high hill, fallen into ruin.

  “I know this place,” I said. “This is Vronda.” Thunder Hill. It was the modern Greek name for the abandoned village, halfway up the mountainside; in our era the spire of rock that towers above it is known as the Kastro, the Castle. “Why don’t we land up there, where the people are?”

  “We don’t want to startle them into attacking us.” She touched my arm. “We brought you here without asking. This first stage could be tricky. You don’t have to go with us right away.”

  I saw her hot eyes, set in a seamed and sunburned face. What could I say? I was a xeno-archaeologist, but first of all an archaeologist—and a philologist. This was the sort of experience I had consigned to unrealizable fantasy; what in fact I had lived for, if only in imagination. I had named our exploratory ship Michael Ventris after the man who had deciphered Minoan Linear B, who had proved that the script was indeed Greek; all my work—before an accident of history had removed me from my own space and time—had drawn its inspiration from Ventris. What would he have given for this chance?