But it was a space dominated by an immense, dazzling sphere, for Carole Lerner was in orbit around planet Venus.
Before Carole had come here – the first human to visit Venus, Earth's twin planet – nobody even knew Venus had a moon. Her mother had spent a life studying Venus, and never knew about the moon, probably never even dreamed of being here, like this.
With no sensation of motion, floating in space, she and her ship swept around the planet, moving into its shadow so that it narrowed to a fine-drawn crescent. Close to the terminator, the blurred sweep that divided day from night, she saw shadowy forms: alternating bands of faint light and dark, hazy arcs. And near the equator there seemed to be yellowish spots, a little darker than the background. But these details were nothing to do with any ground features. All of these wisps and ghosts were artifacts of the strange, complex structure of Venus's great cloud decks – or perhaps they were manufactured by her imagination, as she sought to peer through that thick blanket of air.
Now, at the apex of her looping trajectory, she moved deep into the shadow of the planet, and the crescent narrowed further, becoming a brilliant line drawn against the darkness. As the Sun touched the cloud decks there was a brief, startling moment of sunset, and layers in the clouds showed as overlaid, smoothly curving sheets, fading from white down to yellow-orange. And then a faint, ghostly ring lit up all around the planet: sunlight refracted through the dense air.
As her eyes adjusted to the darkness she saw the stars coming out one by one, framing that ringed circle of black. But one star, as if a rogue, moved balefully across the equator of that black disc, glowing orange-yellow. It was a Gaijin flower-ship, one of the small fleet that had followed her all the way here from the Moon.
"The cloud tops of Venus," Nemoto whispered, her voice turned to a dry autumn-leaf rustle by the low-quality radio link. "I envy you, Carole."
Carole grunted. "Another triumph for man in space." She waited the long minutes as her words, encoded into laser light, crossed the inner Solar System to Earth's Moon.
"You are facetious," Nemoto eventually replied. "It is not appropriate. You know, I grew up close to a railway line, a great transport artery. I lay in my parents' small apartment and I could hear the horns of the night freight trains. My parents were city dwellers; their lives had been static, unchanging. But the night trains reminded me every night that there were vehicles that could take me far away, to mountains, forest, or sea.
"The Gaijin frighten me. But when I see their great ships sailing across the night, I am stirred by a ghost of the wanderlust I enjoyed, or suffered, as a girl. I envy you your adventure, child..."
Incredible, Carole thought. I've traveled a hundred million kilometers with barely a word from that wizened old relic, and now she wants to open up her soul.
She twisted in space and looked back at her ship.
It was a complex collection of parts – a cylinder, bulging tanks, a cone, a giant umbrella shape, a rocky shield – all fixed to an open, loose framework of struts made from lunar aluminum. The shield was made of blown lunar rock: gray, imposing, now heavily scorched and ablated. The shield had protected her on arrival at Venus, when her craft had dived straight into the upper atmosphere, giving up its interplanetary velocity to air friction. The big central cylinder was her hab module, the cramped box within which she had endured the long flight out here. The hab trailed a rocket engine unit – gleaming pipes and tanks surrounding a gaping, charred nozzle – and big soft-walled tanks of hydrogen and oxygen, the fuel that would bring her out of Venusian orbit and back home to Earth's Moon. A wide, filmy umbrella was positioned on long struts before the complex of components. The umbrella, glistening with jewel-like photovoltaic cells, served as sunshade, solar energy collector, and long-range antenna.
Stuck to the side of the hab module was her lander: a small, squat, silvery cone with a fat, heavy heat shield. The lander was the size and shape of an old Apollo command module. This tiny, complex craft would carry her down through Venus's clouds to the hidden surface, keep her alive for a few days, and then – after extracting much of its fuel from Venus's atmosphere – bring her back to orbit once more.
The craft looked clunky, crude, and compared to the grace of Gaijin technology very obviously human. But after such a long journey in its womblike interior, Carole felt an illogical fondness for the ship. After all, the trip hadn't been easy for it either. The thick meteorite-shield blankets swathed over its surface were yellowed and pocked by tiny impact scars. The paintwork had been yellowed by sunlight and blistered by the burns of reaction-control thrusters. The big umbrella had failed to open properly – one strut had snapped in unfurling – causing the ship to undergo ingenious maneuvers to keep in its limited shade.
Fondness, yes. Before she left the Moon, Carole had failed to name her ship. She'd thought it sentimental, a habit from a past to which she didn't belong. She regretted it now.
"...No wonder we missed the moon," Nemoto was saying. "It's small, very light, and following an orbit that's even wider and more elliptical than yours, Carole. Retrograde, too. And it's loosely bound; energetically it's close to escaping from Venus altogether –"
She turned to face the moonlet. It swam in darkness. It was a rough sphere, just a hundred meters across, its dark and dusty surface pocked by a smattering of craters.
Carole knew she wasn't in control of this mission, even nominally. But she was the one who was here, looping extravagantly around Venus. "Are you sure this is necessary, Nemoto? I came here for Venus, not for this."
But Nemoto, of course, had not yet heard her question. "...A captured asteroid, perhaps? That would explain the orbit. But its shape appears too regular. And the cratering is limited. How old? Less than a billion years, more than five hundred million. And there is an anomaly with the density. Therefore... Ah. But what is necessity? You have a fat reserve of fuel, Carole, even now – more than enough to bring you home. And we are here not for pure science, but to investigate anomalies. Look at this thing, Carole. This object is too small, too symmetrical to be natural. And its density is so low it must be hollow.
"Carole, this is an artifact. And it has been here, orbiting Venus, for hundreds of millions of years. That is its significance."
She held her hands out before the approaching moonlet.
There was no discernible gravity. It was not like jumping down to the surface of a world, but more like drifting toward a dark, dusty wall.
When her gloves impacted, a thin layer of dust compressed under her fingertips. The gentle pressure was sufficient to slow her, and then she found a layer of hard rock beneath. Grains billowed up around her hands, sparkling. Some of them clung to her gloves, immediately streaking their silvery cleanliness, and some drifted away, unrestrained by this odd moonlet's tenuous gravity.
It was an oddly moving moment. I've come a hundred million kilometers, she thought. All that emptiness. And now I've arrived. I'm touching this lump of debris. Perhaps all travelers feel like this, she mused.
Time to get to work, Carole.
She took a piton from her belt. She had hastily improvised it from framing bolts on the ship. With a geology hammer intended for Venus, she pounded at the spike. Then she clipped a tether line to the piton.
"It looks like moondust," she reported to distant Nemoto. She scooped up a dust sample and passed it through a portable lab unit for a quick analysis. Then she held the lab over the bare, exposed rock and let its glinting laser beam vaporize a small patch, to see if the colors of the resulting rock mist might betray its nature.
Then, spike by spike, she began to lay a line from her anchor point, working across the folds and ridges of this battered, tightly curved miniature landscape, toward the pole of the moonlet. There, Nemoto said she had detected what appeared to be a dimple, a crater too deep for its width: it was an anomaly, here on this anomalous moon.
Nemoto, reacting to her first observations and images, began to whisper in her ear, a remote insect. "L
unar regolith, yes. And that rock is very much like lunar highlands material: basically plagioclase feldspar, a calcium-aluminum silicate. Carole, this appears to be a bubble of lunar-type rock – a piece of a larger body, a true Venusian moon, perhaps? – presumably dug out, melted, shaped, thrown into orbit... But why? And why such a wide, looping trajectory?..."
She kept talking, speculating, theorizing. Carole tuned her out. After all, in a few more minutes, she would know.
She had reached the dimple. It was a crater perhaps two meters across – but whereas most of the craters here, gouged out by impacts, were neat, shallow saucers, this one was much deeper than its width – four, five meters perhaps.
Almost cylindrical.
She found her heart hammering as she clambered into this pit of ancient darkness; a superstitious fear engulfed her.
With brisk motions, she fixed a small radio relay box to the lip of the dimple. Then she stretched a thin layer of gas-trapping translucent plastic over the dimple. Of course by doing this she was walling herself up inside this hole in the ground. It was illogical, but she made sure she could punch out through that plastic sheet before she finished fixing it in place.
She saw something move in the sky above. She gasped and stumbled, throwing up a spray of dust.
A flower-ship cruised by, its electromagnetic petals folded, jewel-like Gaijin patrolling its ropy flanks.
She scowled up. "I want company," she said. "But you don't count."
She turned away and let herself drift down to the bottom of the pit.
She landed feetfirst. The floor of the pit felt solid, a layer of rock. But the dust was thicker here, presumably trapped by the pit. When she looked up she saw a circle of stars framed by black, occluded by a little spectral distortion from the plastic.
Nothing happened. If she'd expected this "door" to open on contact, she was disappointed.
But Nemoto wasn't surprised. "This artifact – if that's what it is – may predate the first mammals, Carole. You wouldn't expect complex equipment to keep functioning so long, would you? But there must be a backup mechanism. And I'll wager that is still working."
So Carole got to her hands and knees, trying to keep from pushing herself away from the ground, and she scrabbled in the dirt, her gloved hands soon filthy.
She found a dent.
It was maybe half a meter across. There was a bar across the middle of it. The bar was held away from the lower surface, and was fixed by a kind of hinge mechanism at one end.
Once more her heart hammered, and she felt a pulse in her forehead. Up to now, there had been nothing that could have proven, unambiguously, Nemoto's assertion that the moonlet was an artifact. But there was surely no imaginable natural process by which a moon could grow a lever, complete with hinge.
She wrapped both hands around the lever and pulled.
Nothing happened. The lever felt immovable, as if it was welded tight to the rocky moon – as, of course, it might be, after all this time.
She braced herself with a piton hammered into the "door," and pushed. Nothing. She twisted the lever clockwise, without success.
Then she twisted it counterclockwise.
The lever turned smoothly. She felt the click of buried, heavy machinery – bolts withdrawing, perhaps. The floor fell away beneath her.
Quickly she let go of the lever. She was left floating, surrounded by dust, suspended over a pit of darkness. Some kind of vapor sparkled out around her.
Making sure her pitons were secure, she slid past walls of rock and through the open door.
Nemoto's recruitment pitch had been simple. "The flight will make you rich," she'd promised.
Carole had been skeptical. After all, she was only going as far as Venus, a walk around the block compared to the light-years-long journeys undergone by the handful of interstellar travellers who had followed Reid Malenfant through the great Saddle Point gateways – even if, twenty years after the departure of Madeleine Meacher, the first, none of them had yet returned.
But still, Nemoto turned out to be right. Nemoto's subtle defiance of the Gaijin's unstated embargo on Venus had evidently struck a chord, and Carole's shallow fame had indeed led to lucrative opportunities she hadn't been ashamed to exploit.
But it wasn't the money that had persuaded Carole to commit three years of her life to this unlikely jaunt.
"Think of your mother," Nemoto had whispered, her masklike face twisted in a smile. "You know that I met her once, at a seminar in Washington. Reid Malenfant himself introduced us. She was fascinated by Venus. She would have loved to go there, to a new world."
Guilt, the great motivator.
But Nemoto was right. Her mother had grown to love Venus, this complex, flawed sister world of Earth. She used to tell her daughter fantastic bedtime tales of how it would be to sink to the base of those towering acid clouds, to stand on Venus itself, immersed in an ocean of air.
But her mother's studies had been based on scratchy data returned by a handful of automated probes, sent by human governments in the lost pre-Gaijin days of the last century. When the Gaijin had showed up, all of that had stopped, of course.
Now humans rode Gaijin flower-ships to Mars, Mercury, even the moons of Jupiter. Where the Gaijin granted access, an explosion of data resulted, and human understanding advanced quickly. But the Gaijin were very obviously in control, and that caused a lot of frustration among the scientific community. The scientists wanted to see it all, not just what the Gaijin chose to present.
And there were major gaps in the Gaijin's gift. Notably, Venus. There hadn't been a single Gaijin-hosted human visit to Venus – although it was obvious, from telescopic sightings of flower-ship activity, that this was a major observation site for the Gaijin.
Not too many people cared about such things. To spend one's entire life laboring in some obscure corner of science when it was obvious that the Gaijin already had so much more knowledge was dispiriting. Carole herself hadn't followed in her mother's footsteps. She had gone instead into theology, one of the many broadly philosophical boom areas of academic discipline. And her mother had gone to her grave unfulfilled, leaving Carole with a burden of obscure guilt.
The truth was, to Carole, these issues – the decline of science, the obscure activities and ambitions of the Gaijin – were dusty, the concerns of another century, of vanished generations. This was 2081: sixty years after Nemoto's discovery of the Gaijin. To Carole, as she had grown up, the Gaijin were here; they had always been here, they always would be here. And so she had put aside her guilt, as much as any child can about her mother.
Until Nemoto had come along.
Nemoto: herself a weird historic relic, riven by barely comprehensible obsessions, huddled on the Moon, nursing her fragile body with a suite of ever-more-exotic antiaging technologies. Nemoto continually railed against the complacency of governments and other bodies regarding the Gaijin and their activities. "We have no sense of history," she would say. "We have outlived our shock at the discovery of the Gaijin. We do not see trends. Perhaps the Gaijin rely on our mayfly life span to wear away our skepticism. But those of us who remember a time before the Gaijin know that this is not right..."
And Nemoto was worried about Venus.
One thing that was well known about the Gaijin was that their favored theater of operations was out in the dark, among the asteroids or the stately orbits of the giant planets, or in the deeper cold of the comet clouds even farther out. They didn't appear to relish the Solar System inward of Earth's orbit, crammed with dust and looping rogue asteroids, drenched by the heat and light of a too-close Sun, a place where the gravity well was so deep that a ship had to expend huge amounts of energy on even the simplest maneuver.
So why were the Gaijin so drawn to Venus?
Nemoto had begun to acquire funding, from a range of shadowy sources, to initiate a variety of projects: all more or less anti-Gaijin – including this one.
And that was why the first human astronaut to
Venus was under Nemoto's control: not attached to a Gaijin flower-ship, but riding in a clunky and crude human-built spacecraft, little advanced from Apollo 13 as far as Carole could tell: a ship that had been fired into space from a great electromagnetic cargo launcher on the Moon.
The Gaijin could have stopped her, Carole supposed. But, though they had shadowed her all the way here, they had shown no inclination to oppose her directly. Perhaps that would come later.
Or perhaps, to the Gaijin, Carole and her fragile ship simply didn't matter.
She was surrounded by blackness, the only lights the telltales in her helmet and on her chest panel. The aperture above her was a star field framed by the open doorway.
Nemoto, time-delayed, began to speculate about the vapors that had been trapped by the translucent sheet. "A good deal of sulphuric acid," she said. "Other compounds... some clay particles... a little free oxygen! How strange..."
On her belt Carole carried a couple of miniaturized floods. She lit them now. Elliptical patches of light splashed on the walls of the chamber, which curved around her. She glimpsed an uneven, smoothly textured inner surface, some kind of structure spanning the interior.
She reported to Nemoto. "The moonlet is hollowed out. The chamber is roughly spherical, though the walls are not smooth. This single chamber must take up most of the volume of the moonlet. The walls can't be much more than a few meters thick anywhere..." She aimed her beams at the center of the cavern. There was a dark mass there, about the size of a small car. It was fixed in place by a series of poles that jutted out radially, like the spokes of a wheel, to the wall of the chamber, fixing themselves to the moonlet's equator. The spokes looked as if they were made from rock. Perhaps they had just been left in place when the chamber had been carved out.
She described all this without speculating about the purpose of the structures. Then she blipped her thruster pack and drifted to the wall.
Manifold: Space Page 16
