Arthur C Clarke's Venus Prime Omnibus

by Paul Preuss

  A youth came forward and set a chest down in front of Redfield. From it Redfield withdrew a fishnet, the kind made for throwing. Even at first glance, it was an exquisite thing; its threads were of some fiber as hard and shiny as silk, and its mesh was so fine he could not have put his little finger through it. The sinkers spaced along its hem were of carved white stones, which I recognized as Minoan sealstones from an earlier time, adapted to the purpose.

  Redfield held his gift up, as I had done; at first the silence that greeted his gesture was a little ominous. This clearly was a treasured object, extraordinarily expensive in hours of labor and in the ancient treasures that had gone to decorate it; no doubt it had been an offering dedicated to the village Shrine.

  Again the murmurs and glances of the people identified the net’s maker, a shrunken old man. (I say old, but who from our era of saving medicines could tell if these wizened elders were ninety or fifty?) I had noticed him performing a few tottering ritual steps in the dance after the young women had retreated, although he had not given himself to the general giddiness.

  Diktynna saw that we recognized who had made the gift, and that was no doubt as she had intended. In this I sensed her reply to the easy tricks with which Redfield had earlier challenged her authority. Does cheap magic make a god? We are all humans here, she seemed to say. If you cannot properly honor simple humanity, what right have you to our respect?

  Redfield was silent a moment, studying the net. I did not envy his dilemma. While no words of his could justify his accepting the offering—thus taking it away from the village—he could not possibly refuse it.

  Then Redfield—to my astonishment, for after sitting so long I was virtually paralyzed, and he had been sitting with his legs tucked under him as long as I had—bounded to his feet. The watchers gasped in surprise. He stood still a moment, the focus of every pair of eyes in the plateia. Then he began to dance.

  For almost a minute there was perfect silence. Redfield danced slowly, to some perfect inner rhythm. His dance mimicked some of the steps he had seen performed for us, but for the most part he danced an eclectic modern Greek sort of dance—a few steps this way, then a kick and a fancy back step, then onward about the circle—until gradually he had danced an orbit around Diktynna and her contingent. All the while he held his arms high; instead of another dancer’s hand or a scrap of handkerchief he held up the gleaming net, first draping it over his shoulders, then sliding it along the length of his arms.

  First the drummers, then the other musicians—all but the boy—began to play. They began softly, but Redfield’s energy encouraged them, and theirs encouraged him, and soon he was leaping and wheeling in the flickering light in a display that delighted me and all his audience. The music entwining us soon whirled Redfield to heights of frenzy. I saw Diktynna’s boy fidget as if itching to take up his flute, or perhaps to join the dance; with a squeeze of his wrist Diktynna brusquely discouraged him.

  As Redfield turned, he let the net slide from his shoulders into his hands: it bloomed about him like a flower, like a coral, golden in the lamplight, as soft as a vision under the sea. His long hair, glossy black and flaring with coppery highlights, became unraveled and flew out loose around his head. His black Asian eyes were half closed in ecstasy. His loose chiton became disarranged. Gradually his deep breathing expanded his lungs—and caused the gill slits under his ribs to open.

  Everyone watching saw it. Diktynna’s expression faltered, as if she were suddenly a little less certain what sort of creature she was dealing with, but she recovered nicely. Her world was populated with nymphs and sprites to whom she must routinely address rites of propitiation and control; she was still confident that none of us were gods and therefore, I think, at some deep level she was truly unconcerned.

  Redfield ended his dance almost as suddenly as he had begun it. He stood quietly a moment, then finished nicely with a deep bow to the old man, the netmaker. Although the sweat ran in rivers and his chest still heaved, he walked back to his place between Troy and me and with easy dignity sat down, having said not a word. The crowd buzzed with sudden awe and approval.

  Diktynna held his eyes a moment; her acknowledgment was as wordless as his tribute had been.

  She turned to Troy—assessing her more cautiously than she had Redfield and me. “Aphrodite, born of the sea-foam, Great Lady: we search within ourselves for the reasons you and your divine friends have chosen to honor us.” This time her words sounded sincere. “We cannot fathom your mystery. Naturally it is wholly fitting that a goddess should contain herself—until whim or strategy leads her to choose another course.”

  Diktynna’s boy stepped forward, bringing the last chest to lay before Troy. His black-outlined eyes were fixed upon her, bold as a man’s. That he was barely more than a child, paradoxically, made him seem dangerous.

  I dredged up from memory the information—only a hypothesis, really—that the boy-god so often depicted with the Cretan goddess was identified with Zeus. Or sometimes with Dionysus.

  The challenge in his mascaraed gaze was indeed dangerous, and explicit. If Troy looked away from him first, she would lose the staring game. Perhaps that particular game did not carry the same charge as in our era, but what we had seen so far suggested it might. On the other hand, if she held his gaze too long, who knew the implications?

  Troy solved the dilemma effortlessly. As she watched him, her chest swelled. His eyes flickered, then dropped.

  Redfield’s gill slits had been revealed when he danced, but since he had not been breathing with his gills, their intakes had remained closed. For a bare second, Troy deliberately opened the gashes that paralleled her collar bones. She extended her flesh.

  The village boy looked straight down into those blood-rich orifices. He stepped back quickly, solemn and pale, and managed a bob of his head before resuming his place beside his priestess. No one else had seen what made him flinch.

  Troy reached into the clay chest and withdrew a mirror, its handle of ivory carved with flowers, its reflecting surface a circle of polished bronze. She studied her reflection a moment—in the flame-light, in the soft unfocused bronze, it must have been a flattering portrait—and she smiled.

  Meanwhile, I studied the back of the round disk, held toward me. It was incised with naked gods and goddesses, lively figures—bluntly sexual, angular, and to my eyes distinctly Picassoesque. Troy held it up high so the people could see. From their cranings and polite murmurings it was apparent that like the other gifts the object was valuable, but unlike them it had been made by no one in the village. It was a mirror, a sophisticated thing requiring not only the technical facilities but the self-conscious sensibility of a palace or city. It was several centuries old.

  “In these beautiful depths I see those who came before us,” said Troy. She held the mirror to her own face, then to Diktynna’s. “Goddess, you are one with us,” she said. “You and your companion and your people are one with us all.”

  She rose up swiftly and before Diktynna could react she took the priestess’s hand. With her other hand she gestured to the musicians, then beckoned Redfield and me to join her—and in a few seconds, it seemed, all of us were dancing, everyone in this tiny village, which clung to its tower of rock, thrusting itself at the stars.

  Now, I had heard rumors that Troy had been a dancer, although I had never believed them. An Inspector of the Board of Space Control a dancer? But I was mistaken. I do not have the words to describe what I saw that night, but I do know that Troy first managed to wrap all of us in a web of communal movement—in which the distinction between gods and humans dissolved almost completely—and then broke away into a performance of athletic grace that, while it took nothing from Redfield’s earlier exertions, was of a different order of art.

  She was beautiful indeed.

  22

  A snake was sliding over my leg.

  For a moment time seemed suspended. The room was filled with indirect morning light, diffusing from gray stone
walls and the beaten red earth floor. Hadn’t Troy and Redfield gone to sleep beside me? They were nowhere in sight. I heard the soft chortle and lament of doves; a pair of the slender gray-brown birds had perched in a narrow window above statuettes of the goddess. From some crevice of memory came the supposition that the arrival of doves meant the presence of the goddess herself.

  Her shrine was a single low room, divided into two spaces by a squat pillar in the center, and in the inner space there was a low bench that held two short, cylindrical clay portraits of her—not good likenesses. Offering stands set on the ground in front of them were decorated with sinuous snakes.

  The live snake moving over my bare leg seemed to me a huge thing, although I suppose it was no more than a meter long—but very round and sleek, its scales glistening with a lovely rose color. I had inadvertently positioned myself between the snake’s hole in the comer of the wall and the birds’ eggs and day-old mullet and dishes of milk set for it before the altar. It was on its way to breakfast, and clearly unconcerned with me; people must sleep here all the time.

  I wish they’d warned me. I shivered as it slithered away.

  The whole village would have stayed up to watch us talk last night, but when Diktynna showed us into the shrine the villagers gradually dispersed and went to their houses. Inside we palavered for hours with the goddess and the boy-god, peering into each others’ faces by the light of rough clay lamps, exchanging stories, while the man with the lyre, the only other person in the room, continued his playing. There was wine from a seemingly bottomless jar, new and harsh, not watered as was the Greek custom. I recorded everything I heard, every trivial anecdote, every marvel. Before long my translator/synthesizer spoke and understood Hephtian—so-called Minoan—like a native of Crete.

  The story that transfixed us was told by the harper himself, whose name was Tzermon. It was a tale of Proteus, the Old Man of the Sea, and in it I recognized, centuries closer to the source, another incident that would someday find its place in the Odyssey. Tzermon placed his tale off the east shore of Crete; Homer put it on the island of Pharos. There was of course a Pharos in the Nile delta—a lighthouse—but “a day’s sail out for a well-found vessel with a roaring wind astern” makes Crete seem the more likely. At any rate, Menelaus and his crews, marooned after leaving the mouth of the Nile, were desperate to escape the windless, waterless place.

  “They were on the point of death from starvation when the goddess Eidothe approached Menelaus and told him he could escape the windless place only by forcing Proteus to do his bidding,” chanted Tzermon, to the low thrumming of his lyre.

  “‘How can I force him? It is not easy for a man to get the better of a god,’ Menelaus complained.

  “Eidothe replied, ‘Each day about noon he comes up from below, shadowing the surface of the sea as if with a light breeze to conceal his coming. If all is safe he walks up onto the beach and enters a shallow cave, whereupon a flock of seals, children of the brine, heave out and follow him and settle themselves to sleep all piled around him. When he has counted them and seen they are all there, he will lie down among them like a shepherd with his sheep. That is your moment…’”

  According to Tzermon (and to Homer), at the appropriate hour Eidothe helped Menelaus and three of his crew to wrap themselves in the skins of seals she had flayed and to lie down in nests in the sand. She also smeared aromatic ambrosia on their nostrils to kill the awful stench. Proteus came out of the water.

  In Tzermon’s version he had the shape of a man, but his skin was white and wrinkled like an octopus’s, and he was covered with seaweed which seemed to grow out of his head and body. He accepted the disguised Menelaus and his companions as members of his flock of seals, and paying them little attention, he went into the cave. After giving the sea-god time to settle down to his siesta, Menelaus and his men threw off their odious cloaks and rushed him.

  Here Homer and Tzermon diverge markedly.

  In Homer, Proteus was caught in a sound sleep, and a terrific wrestling match ensued. Menelaus had been warned that Proteus was a shape-changer, and would try anything to escape. He started by turning into a bearded lion, then a snake, then a panther, then a giant boar. He even changed into running water—wrestle with that!—and a huge, leafy tree. “But we set our teeth and held him like a vise.”

  In Tzermon’s version, however, “They came upon the god in colloquy with priests of Zeus. Upon seeing them, the priests vanished into the interior of the grotto. The Achaians hesitated, terrified that they had profaned a sacred rite. The god turned upon Menelaus and demanded of him, ‘Who are you, to interrupt these solemn proceedings?’ His voice was a horrible whisper, filled with the hiss of the sea.

  “Menelaus explained his belief that Proteus had killed the winds and detained him and his men because he had inadvertently angered some god. He prayed forgiveness. Proteus was astonished. ‘Who told you this? Who conspired with you to waylay me and capture me?’ The truth was that he held them no grudge, nor did he know of any god who did. ‘Then what shall become of us?’ Menelaus cried hopelessly.

  “‘Do not despair, your wish is granted,’ said Proteus. ‘Soon I will send the meltemi. Then you must return to Egypt. Inquire there what god you have offended. Then attend to your purification.’”

  “Menelaus professed thanks but proposed to stay with Proteus until the god should keep his word and raise the northwest wind. At this, Proteus grew angry and bid them begone, but Menelaus and his men drew their swords and refused to leave. Proteus raved at them in many unknown tongues but at last said that if they would withdraw and stand back a few steps—far enough to see but not to hear—he would conclude his offering to Zeus. Then he would come out with Menelaus and his men.

  “Menelaus agreed, but when he and the Achaians had retreated, Proteus hurled himself deeper into the interior, just as the priests had done. Menelaus dashed after him, but was soon lost in a maze of stony passages. In despair he retreated; he and his men returned, dejected, to the beach.

  “To their profound surprise they found Proteus himself already in the surf, trailing green ribbons of seaweed behind him as he swam hard for the open sea. The Achaians dashed after him, and swam hard in their turn. As they drew near him, an immense creature rose out of the sea. It was bulbous, like a giant jellyfish, and purple in color, and the light shone through it; a thousand tentacles dangled from its underside.

  “Yet Menelaus was close enough to grasp for Proteus. But at the very moment that his hand closed upon the god, the god changed. He became an enormous sea creature, slick and gray and wreathed with many arms like an octopus. Menelaus lost his grasp. There was a great boiling of surf. The giant sea creature Proteus had summoned from the waves sank back into the waves and vanished.”

  Tzermon paused then, and I thought he spent a moment studying Redfield—“Poseidon”—before he quickly concluded his tale. “Soon after the escape of Proteus, the strong northwest wind rose. Menelaus doubted whether the god had kept his promise, for in truth the season of the wind had come. Nevertheless, he returned to the heaven-fed waters of the Nile with the meltemi behind his black ships and, after appeasing the deathless gods, made his way to his native land, on a favorable wind sent by the immortals.”

  Troy and Redfield and I found we had nothing to say; the implications of Tzermon’s tale were disturbing. Our conversation faltered shortly thereafter. We bedded down to spend the remainder of the night here in the shrine—the most capacious guest-house in the village.

  A shaft of bright daylight split the soft haze and Redfield came in through the curtained door, followed by Troy.

  “If your god-like bladder or any of your other organs is distended, you’ll find a handy place to relieve yourself down the path to the left. Too bad we forgot to bring deodorant ambrosia with us from cloud-topped Olympus.”

  “Oh, and don’t mind the audience,” Troy remarked as I stepped through the doorway. “They’re remarkably easy to please.”

  Very funn
y. I did what I could to maintain my privacy from the crowd of children who followed me to the place. Still, audience or none, there was a certain wild joy to be found in pissing vigorously into the cool blue morning, a sheer seven hundred meters above the sea…

  Returning to the shrine I spied a small flock of agrimi cavorting on the higher slopes beyond the spire of the Castle—kri-kri, the Cretan ibex, the wild goats worshiped by the Minoans, rarely seen outside zoos in our era. From the male’s massive curving horns, according to some, came the legend of the cornucopia. And the female was the inspiration for the goat-nymph who nursed baby Zeus—the original Amalthea.

  Troy and Redfield and I were relieved to find ourselves alone in the shrine. We compared notes of the previous day. Tzermon’s tale of Menelaus and Proteus told us plainly enough that Nemo was here—or had been here, perhaps as much as a century or two ago, or even longer ago than that. But perhaps more recently. No description could have been more explicit. In this, it was plain, the alien traditionalists were his accomplices.

  How had he survived? What was his intent? Who were these “priests of Zeus” with whom he was communicating? Troy had already guessed the answers to these questions, but my sluggish brain, congenitally reluctant to deal with conspiracy theories, did not readily see the implications.

  “Nemo has been ahead of us again—in this as in so many things,” she said.

  “And he could still nip us in the bud,” said Blake.

  “What do you mean?” I asked, alarmed.

  “Our world-ship—the key version of it, the source of ail that has to happen later—is sleeping in the ice around Jupiter. It’s been there for thirteen million years, since the last approach of Nemesis. Defenseless. Vulnerable.”