by Paul Preuss
“Of course, if you’d rather I didn’t . . .” Kingman is clearly nettled.
“No, please,” Bill says hastily, seeing an opportunity where before he had seen only an embarrassment. Let Kingman tell his tale once again. Let them all again contemplate his debacle. “Martita has already rewritten the agenda, I think. So at your suggestion, my dear”–Bill graces her with a smile as poisonous as he can make it–“let us all exert ourselves to learn from the past.” He turns to Kingman. “So please do go on. Tell us, just what connection is there between a gray squirrel and the fate of the most sacred of the texts?”
Kingman is greatly mollified. He settles deep into his leather armchair and, after refreshing himself with a sip from his jigger of Scotch, begins thoughtfully to speak. “I’m not sure I have all the names, but the times and places are vivid enough in memory. The story begins on Mars Station . . .”
The minutes pass swiftly, and now it is almost eight o’clock. The servants have appeared in the shadowed doorways, quietly but anxiously seeking to remind the assembled party that dinner is about to be served.
But Kingman has paced himself well, and he is just now finishing his recitation. “. . . and so we were forced to retreat. We had no choice. It was the best and only course remaining to us.”
There is a protracted moment of silence before Bill speaks. “Quite an interesting story, Rupert,” he says, “and I see now how it ties up with that squirrel. There you were, with all that firepower, with one of the most powerful ships in the solar system under your command, and one unarmed woman on the surface of a puny little rock . . .”
“Bill, really . . .”
Sometimes when the red anger takes Bill he can’t stop, and I . . . he, I mean . . . adds unnecessary insult to deserved injury. “Would you have done as well in her place? Do you think you would have been able to evade . . . not only evade, but drive off . . . the best machinery and people the Free Spirit could muster? How would you have done if you were the squirrel and she were the hunter?”
Kingman’s lordly features sag; he turns pale. “She is not human, Bill.” He gets stiffly to his feet. “We have you to thank for that.”
Which neatly puts me in my place. Or so I . . . Bill, that is . . . concedes.
Our host–I mean, Bill’s host, Bill’s and the others’–marches out of the room, doing an old man’s best to keep his shoulders squared in proper regimental fashion.
The others in the library look at me with varying degrees of disapproval. Only Jurgen is vulgar enough to laugh.
The next morning reveals one of those crisp October days when, despite the lazy sun, the haze in the air renders the landscape in the flat perspectives of an Oriental ink painting. I am enjoying the view from the terrace when Kingman comes out of the house. He seems unhappy to see me.
“Rupert,” I say, “I really didn’t intend to . . .”
“If you’ll excuse me,” he says, cutting off my apology. “I believe I’ll have another go at that tree-rat. Maybe I’ll get him this time.”
I watch a long time as he strides across the dewy lawn and into the ruddy bracken. Finally he disappears into the autumn woods on the far side of the shallow valley.
A few minutes later, I hear the shot. Not the roar of Kingman’s shotgun, but the sharp crack of a pistol.
I stand at the stone railing, watching the bright speck of a yellow leaf fluttering to the ground at the edge of the distant woods. The others come out of the house one by one.
“Poor Kingman,” says Jurgen, suppressing a giggle.
“He would have done better to run. When he knew it was . . . her,” says Martita.
“The file he had on her was not complete,” I say. “But that was no excuse. If he’d acted more quickly, he could have defeated her.”
“Meaning, I suppose, that we would not have lost the Doradus? That half of its crew would not now be dead and the other half fugitives?”
Damn Martita. I refuse to reply.
“It’s clear enough that she remembers what she was taught,” Jack observes. “The Knowledge has not been erased in her.”
“No matter. We are impervious now,” I say, as firmly as I can. “The New Man is indestructible.”
Jurgen snorts at me; he sounds like some bulky ungulate. “You’ve said that before. And been as wrong as Kingman.” When he is in a very good mood his giggle uncannily resembles the whinny of a jackass. “Really, Bill, if Kingman must die for such a trivial mistake, why should we let you live?”
“Let me live?” I turn away from the fields and the forest to face them. “I think you can answer that for yourselves.”
Until now they hadn’t known how I was planning to deal with Kingman, or whom I’d chosen to do the work. But I’ve just seen the man coming out of the woods–which is why I choose this moment to turn toward them. Against the colorful autumn leaves the man’s curly red hair, his camel’s hair coat, his pigskin gloves, make an unmistakable orange splotch on the landscape.
I’ve turned because I want to see the looks on their faces. They cringe quite satisfactorily–all of them except Jack Noble, who is my man now, now that he’s been forced to go underground like me. The orange man is my man too, and they all know it.
Holly is the first to recover her aplomb. “So, Bill, on to Jupiter.” She has the audacity to smirk at me. “But how do we know Linda won’t be there ahead of us, as she was on Phobos?”
I can think of several answers to that. The least obscene finds voice before the others.
“Actually, my dear, I’m depending on it.”
Afterword
by PAUL PREUSS
W hat’s in a title? When the phrase “people who die in glass houses” came to me I thought it was a nifty tag, and although I used it for the second section of this book, I’ve always thought somebody (probably not me) should use it for a whole novel. People Who Die in Glass Houses would be an Agatha Christie-style mystery, of course, not science fiction.
Arthur’s “Hide and Seek,” on the other hand, is a title uncannily suited to its science-fictional subject, the orbital-mechanical adventure story that inspired this volume of Sparta’s interplanetary quest. In it Arthur also found the perfect metaphor for the problem a spaceship captain might face while chasing a mobile human around a smallish moon, that of the squirrel (or “tree rat”) that easily stays on the opposite side of the tree trunk, as squirrels do. It’s the kind of problem spaceship captains face more often than you might expect–for example, while trying to sidle a space shuttle up to a hatch on a broken satellite that’s spinning.
While the tree-rat part of Arthur’s story would have worked as well on any incidental asteroid or small moon in the solar system–like Phobos, most little moons were probably asteroids to begin with–Arthur chose Phobos, and thereby invoked all the continuing hope and disappointment and continuing mystery of the planet Mars.
What an irony that Arthur should have concluded his original commentary on this volume with a lament for a lost Soviet Mars probe, Phobos I. The Soviet Union is history now, and in the year 2000 what’s gone missing most recently is a big chunk of NASA’s Mars program, two spacecraft in a row, with nothing but the ghost of a signal, vanishingly faint and possibly imaginary, reported from the Polar Lander. Mars seems determined to frustrate our curiosity.
Which only serves to excite us. Far from discouraging speculation, every bit of hard-won truth about Mars fuels more of it. If there are none of Percival Lowell’s irrigation canals criss-crossing the planet, if there are none of Carl Sagan’s “polar bears” wandering the Martian icecaps, there is good evidence for ancient seas (of a sort, incidentally, that nicely underpin the events of the final volume in the Venus Prime series). If there is no chance of lush Barsoomian romance, writers like Greg Bear and Bill Hartmann and Stan Robinson have come up with plenty of all-too-human stories set against red rock and dry ice. This is one of those.
I still treasure my childhood copy of Willy Ley’s Conquest of Space, with
Chesley Bonestell’s painting of a straight blue waterway and its verdant irrigated fields stretching across the tangerine sands, yet Viking’s arid images came as no disappointment.* I grew up in the American Southwest before it became crowded with spas and pastelpine furniture stores, so red rock is no stranger to me; a cold dry Mars is romantic enough.
*Rocket pioneer Willy Ley, who fled the Nazis for the U.S. in 1935, never lost his thick German accent. When someone once asked him if his first name should be pronounced with a W or a V, he replied “Veelly or Veelly, it’s all the same to me.”
All double entendres about the Red Planet changed into non sequiturs overnight when the Soviet Union imploded, not long after this book was written. But little of what we know about the physical Mars has changed since then; some new knowledge has come from the Pathfinder lander, but most has come from the systematic study of images taken from orbit. Used as a textbook, science fiction is full of treachery, but the reader will not be completely misled by the description of the red planet (lower case) in these pages.
To add human dimension to the evidence, I drew upon memories of teenage wanderings in the mountains and deserts of New Mexico and Colorado, of later trips deep into the slickrock and sand dunes of Utah and California, the Navajo and Hopi country of Arizona, and such corners of Nevada as the spectacular sandstone formations of the Valley of Fire. Labyrinth City borrows from Paolo Soleri’s Arcosanti, the forever-unfinished concrete dream that hangs from the basalt rim of a mesa north of Phoenix; when I visited the visionary architect and his inspired followers in the 1970s, they spoke as colonizers of an alien planet might.
Some of these Southwestern memories have been much exaggerated by time, but no matter; imagining Mars, I had to exaggerate more. From Telescope Peak in the Panamints to the deepest part of Death Valley is a sheer 11,000-foot drop, but nothing like the Valles Marineris. The air in northern New Mexico is thin, and the wind is cold, but nothing like Mars. “Compared to Mars, Antarctica is Tahiti.”
The horizontal scale can be approximated, however. Helping a friend drive his fifteen-year-old Chevy from Wichita to Anchorage one summer with an overloaded trailer in tow–the yoke snapped 150 miles short of our destination–and, having gotten him there, hitchhiking all the way back, acquainted me with the taste of lonely distances.
The taste is dust. The endless dust of the Alaskan Highway–all gravel north of Dawson Creek in those days–was inspiration enough for a truck trip across the cold Martian desert.
Except for our own moon, extrapolation is the best we’ve got to describe alien worlds. It inevitably misleads us, but it also prepares us. The astronauts who stepped onto the moon did not sink into bottomless dustpits, but they were properly cautious at first of the lunar surface, whose mountains had been so evidently sanded smooth by an infinite rain of micrometeorites, just as gadfly astrophysicist Tommy Gold had suggested, even if his dire prediction of lunar quicksand was wrong.
Never mind the political arrangements of a future Mars–fantasies that, inevitably, will soon be unstrung by Earth’s own history–any credible extrapolation of the physical conditions of Mars will be fueled more by the surmises of unorthodox scientists like Gold than by science fiction writers, no matter how hard we try. It’s a dirty secret known to all of us in the science fiction community that science itself is far more intriguing (if less accessible) than anything any writer among us can make up.
Intimate acquaintance with Mars, and the surprises it will bring, will require more robotic expeditions and finally personal visits. It will require not only on-the-scene science, it will require the willingness to live in the place. Paraphrasing Roald Amundsen, who made it to the South Pole and back without loss of life, Freeman Dyson said of discovery that “tragedy is not our business.” Amundsen’s rival, R. F. Scott, died tragically in the losing race to the pole along with his colleagues, which is to say they died nobly if unnecessarily.
That’s where extrapolation can help. Fiction writers are better extrapolaters than most, certainly better than professional futurists. Engineers can plan; beyond planning, any optimist can imagine the joy of discovery, but fiction writers, adequately informed, imagine the grief, the misery, and the struggle, without losing sight of the joy. We do it the easy way, of course: we sit at our desks and daydream. But if we do that well, we prepare the ground of the future for those who will inhabit it for real.
Wells, Burroughs, Bradbury, Dick and dozens of writers before and after them imagined a Mars that might now seem silly, taken at face value. But it’s because they imagined Mars so provocatively that we are willing to spend the money to go there, I think. NASA and the Soviet space agency never set out to prove any of them wrong; every flight to Mars has been undertaken in the secret hope, rarely spoken aloud or leaked to the press, that what those writers had imagined would in some small part prove true.
The more Mars tries to hide from us, the more determined we are to seek it out. In many stories, Arthur C. Clarke has imagined Mars with more clarity than his predecessors and peers, and he’s never lost his fascination with the real place. The long journeys across the sands and through the skies of an imagined Mars–a realistic Mars, to the best of our knowledge–narrated in this volume of Venus Prime are my attempt to live up to Arthur’s standards of imagined truth.
Paul Preuss
Sausalito, California
January, 2000
Infopak
Technical Blueprints
On the following pages are computer-generated diagrams representing some of the structures and engineering found in Venus Prime:
Marstruck Open terrain heavy transport tractor–overview; cut-away perspective; cab/tractor overview; wireframe overview cutaway; undercarriage components; turbines.
Town Hall, Labyrinth City Architecture–glass weld integrity scan; wireframe overview; plan view; components–cast glass, carbon filament, ceramics.
Marsplane Climate-driven geo-flex controlled long-range sailplane–canopy false color atmospheric display; cockpit module; perspective of cockpit; rato schematic, ratomount, geo-flex control; rocket assisted take-off; canopy display, cockpit overview, tail section.
Mars Topographical section–surface approximation.
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