The Mountain Cage

by Pamela Sargent

  He did not reply.

  “It’s true, you know it’s true. Stop looking like that.” She jabbed him with her elbow. “Say good-bye, Andrew. I don’t want you hanging around when we leave. I won’t be able to stand it.”

  “Good-bye, Thérèse.”

  “Good-bye.” She touched his arm. He got up and lifted the tent flap. He wanted to look back at her; instead, he let the flap drop behind him.

  He climbed the hill, trying to imagine endless life. Joan and Dao were on the porch, waiting for him. He thought of Silas. You’ll always be afraid, just like them; that was what his friend had said. No, Andrew told himself; not any more. His friend’s face was suddenly before him, vivid; Joan and Dao were only distant, ghostly shapes, trying to face up to forever.

  Afterword to “The Summer’s Dust”:

  Immortality—as a hope, a promise, or a punishment—has to be among the most persistent of human concerns, while the knowledge that we are all eventually going to die seems to be at the heart of everything we do. Death is the goad that drives us to whatever achievements we win. Many people look past this certain end and choose to believe in a life after death; unbeliever that I am, this hope strikes me as an extreme if all too common form of being in denial.

  One consolation for our limited human lives has traditionally been knowing, or at least hoping, that others of our kind, our children and descendants, would live on after we were gone. Some have speculated that in a world where human lives could be indefinitely prolonged, there would likely be fewer children. Instead, people could live out various lives themselves instead of passing on their hopes to their progeny, and if all of those long-lived people kept having children at our rate, the population would explode.

  What would life be like for children in such a society, a world where perhaps only they are growing, maturing, and changing? What might happen if, in spite of all the safeguards people might employ to protect themselves and preserve their long lives, death intruded on the world of these children? “The Summer’s Dust” grew out of these questions.

  DREAM OF VENUS

  Hassan Petrovich Maksutov’s grandfather was the first to point out Venus to him, when Hassan was five years old. His family and much of his clan had moved to the outskirts of Jeddah by then, and his grandfather had taken him outside to view the heavens.

  The night sky was a black canopy of tiny flickering flames; Hassan had imagined suddenly growing as tall as a djinn and reaching out to touch a star. Venus did not flicker like other stars, but shone steadily on the horizon in the hour before dawn. Hassan had not known then that he would eventually travel to that planet, but he had delighted in looking up at the beacon that signified humankind’s greatest endeavor.

  Twenty years after that first sighting, Hassan was gazing down at Venus from one of the ten domed Islands that floated in the upper reaches of the planet’s poisonous atmosphere. These Cytherian Islands, as they were known (after the island of Cythera where the goddess Aphrodite had been worshipped in the ancient world), were vast platforms that had been built on top of massive metal cells filled with helium and then covered with dirt and soil. After each Island had been enclosed by an impermeable dome, the surfaces were gardened, and by the time Hassan was standing on a raised platform at the edge of Island Two and peering into the veiled darkness below, the Islands had for decades been gardens of trees, flowers, grassy expanses, and dwellings that housed the people who had come to Venus to be a part of the Project, Earth’s effort to terraform her sister planet.

  The Venus Project, as Hassan had known ever since childhood, was the greatest feat of engineering humankind had ever attempted, an enterprise that had already taken the labor of millions. Simply constructing the Parasol, the umbrella that shielded Venus from the sun, was an endeavor that had dwarfed the building of the Pyramids (where his father and mother had taken him to view those majestic crumbling monuments) and China’s Great Wall (which he had visited during a break from his studies at the University of Chimkent). The Parasol had grown into a vast metallic flower as wide in diameter as Venus herself, in order to allow that hot and deadly world to cool. Venus would remain cloaked in the Parasol’s shadow for centuries to come.

  Hassan’s grandfather had explained to him, during their sighting of Venus, that what he was seeing was in fact not the planet itself, but the reflected light of the Parasol. To the old man, this made the sight even more impressive, since the great shield was humankind’s accomplishment, but Hassan had felt a twinge of disappointment. Even now, as he stood on Island Two, the planet below was veiled in darkness, hidden from view.

  The Venus of past millennia, with a surface hot enough to melt lead, an atmosphere thick with sulfur dioxide, and an atmospheric pressure that would have crushed a person standing on its barren surface, had already undergone changes. Hydrogen, siphoned off from Saturn, had been carried to Venus in a steady stream of tanks and then released into the atmosphere, where it was combining with the free oxygen produced by the changes in the Venusian environment to form water. The Cytherian clouds had been seeded with a genetically engineered strain of algae that fed on the sulfuric acid and expelled it in the form of copper and iron sulfides. The Venus of the past now existed more in memory than in reality; the Venus of the future, that green and fertile planet that would become a second Earth and a new home for humankind, was still a dream.

  As for the present, Hassan would now become one more person whose life would be enlarged by his own contribution, however small, to the great Venus Project. So Hassan’s father Pyotr Andreievich had hoped while meeting with friends and exerting his considerable influence on behalf of his son. Pyotr Andreievich Maksutov was a Linker, one of the privileged few who had implants linking their cortexes directly to Earth’s cyberminds, a man who was often called upon to advise the Council of Mukhtars that governed all the Nomarchies of Earth and also watched over the Venus Project. Pyotr had convinced several Linkers connected with the Venus Project Council that Hassan, a specialist in geology, was worthy of being given a coveted place among the Cytherian Islanders.

  Hassan, looking down at shadowed Venus through the transparent dome of Island Two, had been able to believe that he might have earned his position here until arriving on this Island. He had been here for two days now, and was beginning to feel as though his father’s influence had always been a benign shadow over his life, one that had shielded him from certain realities. The passengers on the torchship that had carried him from Earth had been friendly, willing to share their enthusiasm for the work that lay ahead of them; the crew had been solicitous of his welfare, and he had taken their warmth and kindness as that of comrades reaching out to one who would soon be a colleague laboring for the Project. On the Island, he had been given a room in a building where most of the other residents were specialists who had lived on Island Two for several years, and had assumed that this was only because newcomers were usually assigned to any quarters that happened to be empty until more permanent quarters were found for them.

  Now he suspected that the friendliness of the people aboard the torchship and his relatively comfortable quarters on Island Two had more to do with his family’s connections than with luck or any merits of his own. The Venus Project needed people of all sorts—workers to maintain and repair homeostats and life support systems, and pilots for the airships that moved between the Islands and for the shuttles that carried passengers to and from Anwara, the space station in high orbit around Venus that was their link to Earth, where the torchship s from the home world landed and docked. Counselors to tend to the psychological health of the Islanders, scientists, and people brave enough to work on the Bats, the two satellites above Venus’s north and south poles, were all needed here, and not all of them were exceptionally gifted or among the most brilliant in their disciplines. Many Islanders, the workers in particular, came from the humblest of backgrounds; the Council of Mukhtars wanted all of Earth’s people to share in the glory of terraforming, although the more cynical
claimed that offering such hope to the masses also functioned as a social safety valve.

  Hassan could tell himself that he measured up to any of the people here, and yet after only a short time on Island Two, he saw that many here had a quality he lacked—a determination, a hardness, a devotion to the Project that some might call irrational. Such obsessiveness was probably necessary for those who would never see the result of their efforts, who had to have faith that others would see what they had started through to the end. The Project needed such driven people, and would need them for centuries to come.

  But Hassan was only a younger son of an ambitious and well-connected father, who was here mostly because Pyotr could not think of anything else to do with him. He was not brilliant enough to be trained for an academic position, not politically adept enough to maneuver his way into becoming an aide to the Council of Mukhtars, and he lacked the extraordinary discipline required of those chosen to be Linkers; his more flighty mind, it was feared, might be overwhelmed by the sea of data a Link would provide. Hassan might, however, be burnished by a decade or two of work on the Project. With that accomplishment on his public record, he could return to Earth and perhaps land a position training hopeful young idealists who dreamed of joining the Project; that sort of post would give him some influence. He might even be brought in to consult with members of the Project Council, or made a member of one of the committees that advised the Council of Mukhtars on the terraforming of Venus. In any event, his father would see an ineffectual son transformed into a man with a reputation much enhanced by his small role in humankind’s most ambitious enterprise.

  Hassan knew that he should consider himself fortunate that his father had the power to help secure his son’s position. He was even luckier to win a chance to be listed among all of those who would make a new Earth of Venus. His life had been filled with good fortune, yet he often wondered why his luck had not made him happier.

  After the call to evening prayer had sounded, and the bright light of the dome high overhead had faded into silver, Hassan usually walked to the gardens near the ziggurat where Island Two’s Administrators lived and ate his supper there. He might have taken the meal in his building’s common room with the other residents, or alone in his room, but eating in solitude did not appeal to him. As for dining with the others, the people who lived in his building still treated him with a kind of amused and faintly contemptuous tolerance even after almost five months.

  Hassan chafed at such treatment. Always before, at school and at university and among the guests his family invited to their compound, he had been sought out, flattered, and admired. His opinions had been solicited, his tentative comments on all sorts of matters accepted as intriguing insights into the matters of the day. His professors, even those who had expected more of him, had praise for his potential if not for his actual accomplishment. But many Islanders seemed to regard him as someone on the level of a common worker, no better or worse than anyone else. Indeed the workers here, most of whom came from either teeming slums or the more impoverished rural areas and isolated regions of Earth’s Nomarchies, were often treated with more deference than he was.

  And why not? Hassan had finally asked himself. Why shouldn’t an illiterate man or woman laboring for the Project be given more respect than a Linker’s son? The workers, however humble their origins, had to be the best at their trades, and extremely determined, in order to win a place here, and the main reward they wanted for their efforts was a chance for their descendants to have more opportunities than they had been given and to be among the first to settle a new world. Hassan’s place was a gift from his father, and he was not thinking of a better world for any children he might have, only of hanging on to what his family already possessed.

  Hassan sat down at his usual table, which was near a small pool of water. Other people, several with the small diamondlike gems of Linkers on their foreheads, sat at other tables around the pool and under slender trees that resembled birches. As a servo rolled toward him to take his order, he glimpsed his friend Muhammad Sheridan hurrying toward him from the stone path that led to the Administrators’ ziggurat.

  “Salaam,” Muhammad called out to him. “Thought I’d be late—the Committee meeting went on longer than we expected.” The brown-skinned young man sat down across from Hassan. Muhammad’s family were merchants and shopkeepers from the Atlantic Federation, wealthy enough to have a large estate near the southern New Jersey dikes and sea walls and well connected enough to have sent Muhammad to the University of Damascus for his degree in mathematics. Hassan felt at ease with Muhammad; the two often ate dinner together. Muhammad had a position as an aide to Administrator Pavel Gvishiani, a post that would have assured him a certain amount of status on Earth. But here, Muhammad often felt himself patronized, as he had admitted to Hassan.

  “Let’s face it,” Muhammad had said only the other evening, “the only way we’re going to make a place for ourselves among these people is to do something truly spectacular for the Project, maybe something, God willing, on the order of what Dawud Hasseen accomplished.” Dawud Hasseen had designed the Parasol almost three centuries earlier, and had been the chief engineer during its construction. “Or else we’ll have to put in our time here without complaining until we’re as driven and obsessed as most of the workers and younger specialists, in which case we might finally become more acceptable.”

  The second course was their only realistic alternative, Hassan thought. Their work here would not allow either of them much scope for grand achievements. Muhammad’s position as an aide to Pavel Gvishiani required him to devote his time to such humble tasks as backing up written and oral records of meetings, retrieving summaries of them when needed, preparing and reviewing routine public statements, and occasionally entertaining Pavel with discussions of any mathematical treatises the Administrator had recently had transmitted to him from Earth. Lorna FredasMarkos, the head of Hassan’s team of geologists, had given Hassan the mundane work of keeping the team’s records in order and occasionally analyzing data on the increases in the levels of iron and copper sulfides on the basalt surface of Venus, work no one else was particularly interested in doing and that almost anyone else could have done.

  “I don’t know which Islanders are the worst,” Muhammad had continued, “the peasants and street urchins who came here from Earth, or the workers who think of themselves as the Project’s aristocrats just because their families have been living here for more than one generation.” This was the kind of frank remark Hassan’s friend would have kept to himself in other company.

  Muhammad set his pocket screen on the tabletop in front of him. Hassan had brought his own pocket screen; although there was no work he had to do this evening, he had taken to toting his screen around, so that he could at least give the appearance of being busy and needed. The two young men ordered a pot of tea and simple meals of vegetables, beans, and rice. Hassan had come to the Islands with enough credit to afford a more lavish repast, even some imported foods from Earth, but he was doing his best to keep within the credit allotted to him by the Project, knowing that this would look better on his record.

  “How goes it with you?” Muhammad asked.

  “The way it usually does,” Hassan replied, “although Lorna hinted that she might give me a new assignment. There’s a new geologist joining our team, so perhaps Lorna wants me to be her mentor.” He had looked up the public record of the geologist, who had arrived from Earth only two days ago. Her name was Miriam Lucea-Noyes; she had grown up on a farm in the Pacific Federation of North America, and had been trained at the University of Vancouver. It was easy for him to piece together most of her story from her record. Miriam Lucea-Noyes had been one of those bright but unschooled children who was occasionally discovered by a regional Counselor and elevated beyond her family’s status; she had been chosen for a preparatory school and then admitted to the university for more specialized training. Her academic record was, Hassan ruefully admitted to himself, sup
erior to his own, and he could safely assume that she had the doggedness and single- mindedness of most of those who had come to the Cytherian Islands. About the only surprising detail in her record was the fact that she had spent two years earning extra credit for her account as a technical assistant to a director of mind-tours and virtual entertainments before completing her studies.

  “Ah, yes, the new geologist.” Muhammad smiled. “Actually, I might be at least partly responsible for your new assignment. Administrator Pavel thinks it’s time that we put together a new mind-tour of the Venus Project. The Project Council could use the extra credit the production would bring, and we haven’t done one for a while.”

  Hassan leaned back. “I would have thought that there were already enough such entertainments.”

  “True, but most of them are a bit quaint. All of them could use some updating. And Pavel thinks that we have the capacity to provide a much more exciting and detailed experience now.”

  The servo returned with a teapot and two cups. Hassan poured himself and his friend some tea. “I wouldn’t have thought,” he said, “that an Administrator would be concerning himself with something as relatively unimportant as a mind-tour.”

  “Pavel Gvishiani is the kind of man who concerns himself with everything.” Muhammad sipped some tea. “Anyway, Pavel was discussing this mind-tour business with the rest of the Administrators, and they all agreed that we could spare a couple of people to map out a tour. This new geologist on your team, Miriam Lucea-Noyes, is an obvious choice, given that she has some experience with mind-tour production. And when Pavel brought up her name, I suggested that you might be someone who could work very well with her on such a project.”