Venus of Dreams

by Pamela Sargent

  “She’s my bondmate,” Fei-lin burst out.

  Eleanor’s eyes narrowed. “Something’s funny here. I never knew Tonie Wong to be sick. And if it was serious, they would have sent a Counselor here.” She motioned to two men. “Grab him,” she said in a low voice.

  Fingers dug into Chen’s arms painfully; he looked frantically around the bay. He could still cry out for help, tell Eleanor she would never land at the Platform, but then she might threaten this Island.

  Fei-lin stepped toward Eleanor. “Wait, you don’t have to —”

  “Get him aboard,” Eleanor said. The two men, still holding Chen’s arms tightly, hustled him up the ramp. When they were inside, he was dragged to a seat and thrown into it. The other passengers watched him silently from their seats; he saw a few young people among them, including Eleanor’s son. They had to be mad if they had dragged children into this.

  Eleanor was next to him, standing in the aisle. “Don’t expect any help from anyone else in the bay — they’ll just think you decided to come along for the trip. You lied, didn’t you? Didn’t you?” One of the men near her struck Chen in the face, numbing his cheek. “I want to know why. What do you want with Fei-lin?”

  He was struck again; his mouth was bleeding. Fei-lin was protesting to Eleanor. The woman, Chen thought hazily, was a bit more perceptive than he had realized; if she guessed what he had done —

  Chen spat out some blood. “I heard rumors,” he said. “Heard you were planning something, I don’t know what. Thought if I could get Fei-lin alone, he’d tell me what was going on and maybe I could talk him out of it, that’s all. We always tried to look out for each other.”

  Fei-lin averted his eyes guiltily. Chen stared at Eleanor, hoping she would believe him; he had told her enough of the truth to be convincing.

  “Well, isn’t that something,” Eleanor replied. “I suppose you thought he’d listen to you, and then you could both march off to Pavel Gvishiani and be heroes.”

  “Something like that.”

  “You’re stupid, Chen. Can’t leave things alone, can you. You think you’re something, with your schooled bondmate and your pretty carvings — think you’re special. But you’re stupid. A smart man would have tried to have us stopped instead of worrying about his friend. A smart man would have told somebody else about his suspicions instead of coming here.”

  “Maybe he did,” one man muttered.

  “No,” Chen said. His mouth felt cottony; his face was beginning to swell from the blow. “I wasn’t sure. I didn’t want to get Fei-lin in trouble if I was wrong.”

  Fei-lin was shaking his head. “You should have stayed out of it.” He turned toward Eleanor. “Let him go. He won’t —”

  “He’s in this with us now,” Eleanor answered. “I’m afraid we can’t let him go. Wait until he sees what we have planned.” She waved Fei-lin away; the small man stumbled to a seat. Chen was almost disappointed that his friend had not defended him more, but Fei-lin couldn’t fight everyone in the ship, and right now it was more important that the airship leave this Island. He wondered what Eleanor would do when she discovered that she would not be able to land at the Platform.

  “Tie him,” the blond woman said to her comrades. “I don’t want any trouble from him. We’re leaving now.” She walked up the aisle to take a place beside the pilot.

  The airship floated out into the upper Venusian atmosphere. Chen, with bound feet and hands, had been harnessed to his seat. He glanced at the passengers across from him; they had suited up, as had most of the other thirty passengers. Chen swallowed. There would be no suit for him, nothing to protect him if the ship’s systems failed. The Islanders could simply let them drift, unable to land; Chen wondered how long the airship could last without recharging its engines.

  He was a dead man already. He thought of Iris; she would have warned Amir by now. He should have left the bay when he had the chance. The other passengers would probably take out their frustrations on him when they found out that the Platform crews were aware of their plans.

  He had caught glimpses of most of the people in the airship; except for Fei-lin, none was a person he knew well. Most of them were, in fact, people he had usually avoided, people with hard faces and wild or resentful eyes. They seemed just the sort of people one would recruit for a mission like this. Eleanor Surrey seemed somehow to be in command, and she had always been one who carried grudges, but even now, he could not imagine her planning this alone or with any of the people aboard.

  He might be wrong about that. He had thought he understood Fei-lin, and yet the man had thrown in his lot with this group. He thought back on all the years he had known his friend, and began to see Fei-lin’s cheerfulness and garrulous manner as a kind of camouflage that hid darker moods, but perhaps Fei-lin was less complicated than that. He might simply have been drawn into the plot and been unable to extricate himself later; had he been completely committed, he would never have revealed the plan to Tonie.

  Now that Chen knew he was a dead man, it seemed important to try to understand what had happened and why. Fei-lin and the others might have simply become unbalanced; he could see how that might happen. He looked up at the large screen in front of the cabin. They were always closed in here. Domes covered the Islands; Islanders traveled in airships or shuttles, sealed off, with only screens, sensors, and diagrams in place of direct perceptions. On the Islands, however far you walked, you always came to the edge and always saw Venus’s eternal, Parasol-created night. When you thought of anything beyond the Islands, it often seemed vague and formless; Earth, the Habs, Anwara, and space were encompassed by the phrase “out there” or “outside.” The screens might show you one thing, but your eyes often contradicted it; it was as if the screens created another reality somehow. There were always intermediaries; while working, a machine or scanner or cybermind told you something, and you acted on that, and then had your judgment confirmed by another device.

  Chen struggled with these slippery thoughts, trying to make them coherent; too many of them seemed just beyond his reach. For a moment, he understood the people aboard the airship; even the destruction of an Island, when they thought about it, must seem like something that would happen on a screen, something a machine might verify for them, not an event that would actually affect them.

  The Islands were always the same. The climate never altered; most of the Islanders measured their progress by what they were told rather than what they themselves saw. Earth had been more — Chen searched for the concept — more chancy, more indeterminate. He wondered if he could even endure Earth now, after being here for so long. When he had first returned, he had imagined himself disappearing among the crowds, becoming hidden even from himself. The Islanders were not only becoming prepared for Venus, they were also becoming unfit to live anywhere else. Earth, by now, would have overwhelmed most of them.

  He glanced at the passengers nearest to him. Of course they were mad, but Earth had made them that way. They could not live anywhere else any more, so they would die instead. There was a logic to it.

  Everything was a dream. They stared into the Cytherian night and dreamed. The settlements might have given them a chance to awaken, when the future Cytherians looked up through their domes and again saw the light of the sun.

  His thoughts were fading. Chen tried to cling to them, but they were like gossamer threads dissolving inside him. He did not have the tools to think them out properly, or to hold on to them.

  He became conscious of his body again. One side of his face felt paralyzed, his mouth was sore, and his wrists stung whenever he moved his hands. His hands were tied tightly in front of him; his legs, also bound, prickled.

  A woman moved down the aisle, passing out weapons; she pointed one wand playfully at Chen as she passed. Chen gazed at the front of the cabin. The screen above the pilot was black; the pilot was hunched over her panels. Chen caught a few of her words; she was already calling to the Platform. He stiffened in his seat.

&
nbsp; The pilot sat up, whispered to Eleanor, and then slapped another panel.

  The amplified voice of a man filled the cabin. “… can’t land,” he was saying. There was a pause. “I repeat — your airship will not be allowed to land on the Platform. If you attempt to approach us, action will be taken against your ship. You cannot be allowed to land here. Neither can you land elsewhere unless you jettison all cargo and prepare to surrender yourselves.”

  Eleanor released her harness and stood up. Her face was livid as she stumbled down the aisle to Chen. “You warned them,” she shouted. “You told them after all. How did you know?”

  Chen was silent.

  “How did you know?”

  He glanced at Fei-lin, who was on his feet. “I guessed.”

  A man slapped Chen. Fei-lin grabbed the man by the arms. “Leave him alone,” Fei-lin cried.

  “We ought to jettison him,” someone shouted.

  “No!” Fei-lin protested. “Don’t you see? He’s a hostage now.” He gazed apologetically at Chen.

  “As if anyone cares what happens to him,” Eleanor said, but her eyes had narrowed and she seemed to be thinking. “We might still be able to pull something out of this,” she muttered in a low voice.

  Eleanor turned around. “Teofila,” she shouted at the pilot, “can you take this ship down to the surface?”

  The pilot nodded.

  “Then do it. Now. Head for al-Anwar. The bay’ll admit our ship automatically, and once we’re inside, we won’t be stopped.”

  “But why there?” a young man asked.

  “Use your head,” Eleanor replied. “We can still threaten a dome, can’t we? And there are people down there, Habbers among them. They could be useful. We’ll have hostages, you see. Maybe the Habs will act then, and put some pressure on Earth. Are we agreed?”

  A few people standing in the aisle nodded; they had no real alternative. If they gave themselves up, Chen knew, they were lost.

  “Then sit down and strap in. If you don’t have your suit on, put it on now.”

  “We’ll be tracked,” the pilot said. “The Islands’ll see where we’re going and track us. They’ll try to warn —”

  Eleanor held up a hand. “Then we can’t let them know what we’re doing. We have to look like we’re in trouble, that something’s wrong with the ship, confuse them. Can you do that?”

  “I don’t know. I could shut down automatic and take us down manually part of the way. I could lock the pumps, make it seem they’re not working. But it’s risky. I won’t have as much control, and the pumps could stick later on. We could be trapped down there.”

  Eleanor laughed harshly. “What are we risking? Nothing we wouldn’t risk on the Platform. If Earth backs down, we’ll get away from the surface in another ship. If it doesn’t, it won’t matter anyway. You’re a good pilot, aren’t you? You can take us down that way.”

  Teofila pointed her chin. “I can take us down.” She turned toward her panels as Eleanor strode up to the front of the ship.

  The airship was still dropping. Chen wondered how long they would continue to fall. Teofila had taken the ship north, where the high-altitude winds were not as strong, before beginning the descent. He could hear nothing except the uneven breathing of those nearest him.

  In spite of his predicament, he was beginning to feel a little respect for the pilot. It was true that, as Iris had once told him, the Venusian wind patterns had been altered by the planet’s increased rotation, and that made surface landings a bit less difficult, but Teofila was piloting a deliberately crippled ship. He wondered how a pilot had become involved in this business. Perhaps she was involved with one of the plotters; maybe she was simply nursing her own hatreds and resentments and had needed an outlet for them.

  He stared at the screen. The ship’s outer lights still danced over black clouds; they were surrounded by a black fog. The Islanders might see through the pilot’s ruse, but somehow, he doubted it. The Administrators would have guessed what Chen had grasped when he first entered the Island bay — namely, that others must have been involved in the scheme besides those on the airship. With the threat to the Platform deflected, and the airship apparently in trouble and perhaps doomed, the Islanders were probably already trying to discover who might have aided the plotters. Those in the al-Anwar dome might not be warned in time.

  Chen strained at his bonds. His fate was tied to that of the plotters now.

  He squinted. On the screen, through a smoggy haze, he could see the eerie reddish glow of a dome. A sliver of light appeared and then widened as the bay’s roof slid open to receive the ship. The cradles, except for one holding an airship, were empty. The pilot, Chen knew, was probably inside the dome’s shelter with the specialists; pilots usually made themselves useful by fetching meals from the dispenser or picking up things while the specialists worked until it was time to take passengers back to the Islands. No one had been here to notice the approaching ship and override the automatic controls.

  The airship sank into the light toward a cradle. The entrance to the bay was soon sliding shut above them. Eleanor was calling out orders to her companions. People donned helmets and moved toward the exit as they waited during the few moments it would take for air to cycle into the bay.

  Fei-lin lingered in the aisle, then moved closer to Chen. “I am sorry you got involved in this,” he said in Chinese.

  “I’m sorry you did,” Chen replied in the same language.

  “Tonie told you.”

  “Yes,” Chen said. “She didn’t want to betray you, she wanted to speak to me. She thought I could get you away from the others, talk you out of this. She didn’t want to see you punished.”

  “I thought — I was afraid —”

  “She’s all right. You did an evil thing, Fei-lin.”

  “I did not mean to strike her, but then — You’ll see, Chen. The Habbers will make a move now. The Guardian told Eleanor —”

  “Fei-lin! Stop jabbering!” Eleanor shouted in Anglaic. “Get ready to unload some cargo.”

  Fei-lin pulled on his helmet. Eleanor shot a baleful glance at Chen. “What a pity,” she said. “The Linkers might lose both a dome and the man who makes all those pretty carvings for them. You’d better hope that they can convince Earth to be smart.” The blond woman turned toward the pilot. “Leave all channels open. We’ll listen through our suit comms. You know what to say, don’t you? You’ll have to change it a little.”

  The pilot nodded. “It’ll be close to what we were going to announce from the Platform. I can make changes.”

  “And make sure they keep the Habbers down here in mind.” Eleanor put on her helmet, waited for the cabin’s lock to cycle open, and stepped inside.

  Chen was alone with the pilot. On the screen, he could see the dome’s entrance at the far end of the bay; the wall separating the cradles from the rest of the bay had already lifted itself. In a few moments, three carts carrying helmeted people and the boxes holding their deadly cargo were rolling toward the entrance.

  “It won’t work,” Chen said. “They might not get inside.”

  The pilot turned toward him. “Who’s going to stop them?” she said. “No one in there has weapons. They’ll let them in, and if they don’t, we can take care of the dome from out here. Eleanor will make it very clear that they’ll be in less danger if they cooperate.”

  The carts were approaching the entrance; the wide door began to open. Teofila had been right. The carts rolled inside.

  Teofila turned toward her panels. “Time to send a message.” She turned on the comm. “People of the Islands!”

  Chen shuddered at her hard, forceful voice.

  “People of the Islands,” Teofila repeated. “Turn on your screens, open all your channels. I have a message for you.” The pilot was slouching in her seat again, and had removed her band. Chen suspected that she was not transmitting her image; her disembodied voice emerging from a blank screen would be more intimidating.

  “I s
ee that you’re receiving me now. Listen well, Islanders.” The pilot sounded exultant. She seemed to be enjoying this, knowing that thousands of people were waiting to hear her. Maybe that was why she had joined the group; perhaps she had only wanted attention.

  “My name is Teofila Marquez,” the woman continued, “and by now, you will know where I am and who has accompanied me here. You should have realized how determined we were. You should understand that we’re now prepared to die if necessary. Earth wants to save this Project. Earth had better understand that, if it does not give in to our demands, the Project will be lost to them.” This part of Teofila’s speech seemed rehearsed; her voice had a practiced tone.

  “It is time for you to send a message to Earth,” Teofila said. “Tell Earth that if it doesn’t call off its ships, this dome will be destroyed — this dome, and the people inside it. Now let me outline exacty what that means. If even one dome here is destroyed, the Project will be set back. And let me remind you that some of the people inside al-Anwar are Habbers. If they die, the Habbers won’t be likely to aid the Project further, and Earth, as we all know, does not have the resources to complete construction in a reasonable length of time. On the other hand, the Habs may finally act to save the people here — they may force Earth to come to an agreement now. You see what that could mean. The Project may be saved, but Earth will suffer a great humiliation and will lose control of this Project, for the Habbers will expose the weakness of the Mukhtars.”

  Teofila appeared to be improvising here. She was, Chen thought, clearly rising to the occasion and the altered circumstances.

  “And let me make another point.” Teofila sat up. “If Earth does not come to an understanding with us now, there will be others who will take actions similar to ours. We’ll only be the first. Be certain that there are others who will sympathize with us. Earth will be taking a great risk if it ignores our demands.” She took a breath. “Here is what we want. We must have a public agreement from Earth, transmitted on all public channels so that the Mukhtars are bound by the promise. Earth must call off its ships. It must leave control of the Project in the hands of all the Islanders here now. It must allow us to call on the Habs for help, and must come to an agreement with the Habs to allow this. It must pardon all of us, and punish no one now on the Islands, or the Bats. In return, we will honor the Mukhtars and give them their due. Our allegiance will remain with Earth, and we shall issue a statement praising them for their wisdom and forbearance, for strong ones can afford to be merciful.”