“Seen enough?” Noella asked.
“I guess so.” Ragnar moved his broad shoulders. “It’s stupid, having it take so long.”
“Having what take so long?”
“Changing everything.”
“Terraforming takes a long time,” Noella said. “You can’t just make it happen all at once.”
“We’d better go,” Mahala said. “Thanks for showing us around, Noella.”
“Glad to do it. Oh, when you see Nikolai, do tell him that we’re expecting him after supper. We’re going to borrow a cart, so we can move my things over in one trip.”
“I’ll tell him.” Mahala followed Ragnar from the room. The short hallway was silent, the workers hidden behind doors.
“She’s really moving into your house?” Ragnar asked as they stepped outside.
“Yes,” Mahala replied. Noella had lived with Risa when both of them were young women, before leaving to set up her own household with her bondmate Theron Hyland. She had taken up residence with her children and grandchildren after the death of her bondmate. Theron, who had died during the Revolt trying to protect his students in the west dome’s school, was another of the uprising’s heroes. “Noella’s moving back to our house now because of Kolya.” The engineer, in front of others, persisted in addressing Kolya as “Nikolai” even when the two lovers were joining the rest of Risa’s household at breakfast after a night in Kolya’s room. Everyone else had been surprised at the sudden romance between the two old friends, but Mahala had suspected that something was up as soon as Noella had started using Kolya’s formal first name; the woman would roll the name around in her mouth, as if tasting it. “I’ll bet they make a pledge sooner or later.”
Her grandparents’ house, Mahala thought, was definitely getting more crowded. She had come back from her first visit with Dyami in Turing three years ago to find that Risa had acquired two new housemates, a young woman named Ching Hoa and a man, Jamil Owens. Since the two new settlers intended to become bondmates, everyone had assumed that they would eventually form their own household. Instead, Hoa and Jamil had gotten along so well with Risa’s housemates that the couple had decided to stay on after making their pledge. By then, Barika and Kristof had been expecting their first child.
Now Kyril, their son, born in 640, was nearly a year old according to the Earth calendar the Cytherians continued to use, and Hoa had recently announced that she and Jamil were trying for a daughter. That meant that Hoa would almost certainly be pregnant soon, given that she and her bondmate were healthy and young. Paul, after examining them both and doing their gene scan, had practically guaranteed an immediate pregnancy.
The External Operations Center lay near the main road, and a passenger cart was rolling over the bridge that spanned the small creek, but Solveig had said that she would meet Mahala and Ragnar at a bridge farther upstream. The creek was one of the many small streams created from the cleansed and purified water collected from the acidic rains outside, streams that fed the lake in the center of the west dome’s settlement. Mahala often thought of the rain and what it meant and found it beautiful.
“When’s your Habber uncle supposed to get here?” Ragnar asked, interrupting her vision of the rain.
“Benzi? He said tomorrow.”
Ragnar was fascinated by her uncle and her great-uncle, although he would not admit it outright. He had learned to get along with her over the past couple of years partly because of that and because Solveig had become her friend. Whenever either Benzi or Dyami was visiting, Ragnar found an excuse to come over, usually tagging along with Solveig. It was odd that, given his interest in her relatives, he was so quiet and distant when in their presence. Dyami’s old friend and housemate Arnina Astarte, who had come with him during his last visit, had tried to draw Ragnar out, but even she had not penetrated his barriers. Ragnar could watch Dyami do a carving for hours, but had not, despite his sister’s urging, shown any of his own sketches and carvings to him. He was usually silent around Benzi and had offered no opinion to Mahala about the Habber.
“He doesn’t visit very much,” Ragnar said.
“My grandmother says that might be because when Benzi went to the Habbers, he probably thought he’d never see the people he left behind again. Now here he is, and for him to come and see Risa, and know she’s his younger sister when he doesn’t look any older than Dyami—”
“It’s weird,” Ragnar said.
“For him,” Mahala said, “two visits in the past three years must seem like a lot. After all, he has a Link, so he can visit with people whenever he wants to without going anywhere.”
“As long as they have Links, too.” Ragnar thrust his hands into his pants pockets. “That stuff about all of the Habbers having Links—maybe that’s just what they tell us. We don’t really know if it’s true—maybe it’s just the Habbers who come here who have them. We can’t go to their Habitats to find out for sure, we only have their word.”
The Linkers of Earth and Venus had a small glassy jewel in their foreheads, the outward sign of their implanted Links, but Habbers did not wear such ornaments. That could account for some of Ragnar’s doubts about them, along with the fact that the Linkers of both Earth and Venus still kept their own Links closed to those of Habbers, while the channels to the minds of the Habitats were closed to Cytherians and Earthfolk. No communications would pass between them or their nets of cyberminds. Even after all that had happened, distrust of the Habbers had not entirely died.
“Benzi wouldn’t have lied about something like that,” Mahala said.
“How do you know? Just because he’s your uncle? Seems to me nobody really knows that much about Habbers. The new settlers are put in suspension if they make the run here from Earth with Habbers, so they never get to see very much of the Habber ships—makes you wonder if the Habbers are trying to hide something by making sure they’re asleep and stored away and not able to poke around. The Habbers got the Mukhtars to back down during the Revolt, but how do we know if they could really have shut down Anwara or not if they didn’t get their way?”
Anwara, the satellite and space station that circled Venus in high orbit, where shuttles from the Islands docked and freighters and torchships from Earth arrived, was also the port of any Habber vessels carrying passengers to Venus. Had Anwara been disabled, Earth would have been cut off from Venus completely, and the Islands and the settlements would have suffered the effects of a prolonged siege, might not even have survived.
“Oh, Ragnar.” Mahala shook her head. “You know what the Habbers helped us do, how much help they still give to Earth. They’re keeping one of their ships in orbit to study the changes here. I don’t think they’d have a ship nearby unless they knew they could protect it.”
“And there’s another thing.” The blond boy slowed his pace as they moved down a grassy slope toward the creek. “They send Habbers here, and their pilots spend time on Earth before they come back with more settlers, but nobody from here or Earth ever gets to go to one of their Habs.”
“What are you talking about? Those Islanders who escaped to one of the Habs came back. Benzi went there, and my grandmother’s first bondmate is still living in a Hab. The Habbers always said they’d welcome anybody. We’re the ones who don’t want to go, and it’s the Mukhtars who won’t let people from Earth go there.”
“I haven’t seen any Habbers going out of their way to invite us,” Ragnar said, “and your uncle and your other grandfather don’t count. They’re Habbers now, not Cytherians. And those Islanders—can you really trust anybody who ran away when things got hard and then came back when things here were settled? Nobody goes to a Hab and comes back without being different. Maybe they don’t let some people ever come back.”
The boy had probably been hearing such talk from his father. Einar Gunnarsson had suffered at the hands of traitors and might have paid for his resistance to Ishtar with imprisonment or worse if the Habbers had not intervened ten years ago, during the Revolt Einar should
have been grateful to the Habitat-dwellers, yet he was still suspicious of them.
Mahala thought of her grandfather Malik Haddad, who had fled to the Habitats with the group of Islander specialists. Why hadn’t he returned with the others? What had happened to him in the over twelve years since then? Risa had asked Benzi, who had said only that Malik was reasonably content with his life and spent much of his time in study. Mahala had never asked Benzi for more details about her biological grandfather; maybe it was time she did.
Four new prefabricated houses with white sides, small windows, and flat roofs had gone up near the stream they were approaching. Small greenhouses next to them had been built since the last quake a couple of months ago, a quake that had been strong enough to level a few houses. No one had been seriously injured, largely because of the lightweight materials used in the construction of their residences. They did not need to construct durable houses of sturdy materials here. The climate of the settlements was always the same, with warm air that seemed slightly heavier and more humid near the larger artificial bodies of water; they did not have to build against bad weather, for no storms ever raged inside the domes. Dwellings could be enlarged or taken down easily, as necessary, but lately it seemed to Mahala that even more houses were going up. She had not felt how crowded Oberg was becoming until she had visited Dyami in the more sparsely settled domes of Turing.
Solveig was standing on the footbridge leaning against the railing, tossing pebbles into the stream below. She looked up as Mahala and Ragnar hurried toward her.
“You took long enough,” Solveig called out. She rested her back against the railing. Solveig would soon be eleven, but already she was taller than Risa. She had let her pale hair grow long, and it hung down her back in two braids. “What did you see at the Center that kept you there so long?”
“That cliff,” Ragnar said, “the one where the diggers are mining. I’d like to carve something on that. I was looking at the patterns the diggers made and thinking about what I could do with them.” He flung his arms out. “A big face—I could carve a big face staring right into the dome!”
Solveig smiled. “You couldn’t go out there to do it.”
“So I’d use a digger.” Ragnar frowned at his sister as she shook her head. “What good is that cliff going to be when all the ore’s gone? Might as well do something with it.”
“Maybe there won’t be anything left of it,” Solveig said. “Maybe it’ll just become a hillside covered with trees.”
“As if we’re going to be around long enough to see any trees growing out there.”
Solveig plucked at a braid. “I wish I could be around that long,” she murmured. “Everything here could have been done without us. They could have just put more cyberminds inside the domes and had them manage everything.”
“They wouldn’t have needed domes at all,” Mahala said, “just the Islands and Anwara. The cyberminds and the Islanders could have done everything from there.”
“I don’t care what happens here later,” Ragnar said. “I’d just like to see some other places besides Oberg.”
Mahala had heard the boy say that often. “So do I,” she said fervently. Ragnar glanced at her; she had never admitted that to him before.
“Where would you go?” Solveig asked.
“I haven’t really thought about it that much,” Mahala replied. “The Islands, of course, and Anwara.” Given that the Islands sailed in Venus’s upper atmosphere and Anwara was the nearest space station, this did not sound very adventurous on her part. “I’d want to see Earth, too.”
“Earth’s a big place,” Ragnar said. “You’d never be able to see it all.”
“Well, I could see some of the places my people came from. And then—” Mahala paused.
“You’d come back here,” Ragnar said, “because there isn’t anywhere else to go.”
“There are the Habs,” Mahala said, “and maybe—” She turned toward the others. “But I’d come back.”
“You’ve been to Turing,” Ragnar muttered. “That’s farther away than I’ve been.”
They followed the creek toward the lake, walking between two rows of elms with boughs that formed a canopy overhead. Her teacher Karin had told Mahala that the trees here were not like those of Earth, however much they resembled them, that the elms and oaks and willows had been bioengi-neered to mutate into trees that produced more oxygen than did their Earthly counterparts. Mahala loved these elms and knew that they would be preserved by the people of Oberg; they were needed to maintain the dome environments, but more settlers were now encroaching on the open spaces near them.
Clusters of houses covered the land near the water; the lake’s silvery surface was almost as smooth as a mirror. “Did Karin tell you which new teachers you’re getting yet?” Solveig asked.
“Marina Delon,” Ragnar replied, making a face; his new teacher was reputed to be strict.
“Kiyoshi Tanaka,” Mahala said. According to rumor, Marina got the children who weren’t doing as well as expected, and Kiyoshi was assigned those who showed intellectual promise. Mahala was not sure she believed that. The teachers believed in keeping each class together for about three years before breaking it up, so her classmates would have ended up with different teachers even if they had all been doing equally well. They had to learn how to get along with others, and that would not happen if they remained with the same group throughout their schooling.
“You’ll be in my class, then,” Solveig said.
“For a while, anyway.” Solveig would probably soon move up to one of the smaller classes of older students, then divide her time among different teachers, depending on her interests and how well she did.
Everything was changing. With the new people in her grandparents’ household, Risa and Sef did not have quite as much time for her. Now there would be a new teacher and classmates to adjust to, and Risa would soon be expecting her to take on more household tasks.
Maybe she would not feel quite so uneasy if she had at least some idea of what her future work might be. True, she was only eight, with years ahead of her before she had to make any hard decisions, but she could already guess which of her schoolmates would leave school early to apprentice themselves and what kinds of further studies others might pursue. Unlike some of the more privileged children of Earth, who would be expected to assume positions of power and influence in adulthood, they did not have the luxury of postponing the biological changes of adolescence in order to concentrate on their studies.
Among their fellow students, only she, Solveig, and Ragnar seemed to have no particular direction. Ragnar neglected his lessons for his artistic hobby, while Solveig spent much of her time studying astronomy, a useless interest to pursue on their cloud-enveloped world. Mahala was unable to focus on any one subject. A lesson in the history of Venus would lead to curiosity about the engineering that had built the Parasol and the Islands, and that in turn guided her to readings and history mind-tours about the events on Earth that had originally led to the Project. Karin did not seem too worried about this tendency, but had mentioned it to Risa and Sef during conferences. “Your teacher made it sound,” Risa had said later, “as if you want to swallow the universe.”
She ought to have some sort of goal by now, even if it was still vague. She could aspire to an Island school, perhaps even fulfill her dream of seeing Earth by winning a place at its Cytherian Institute. If she did very well, she might be among the few chosen for Linker training, although she would have to show true brilliance for that. Yet whatever happened, she would eventually come back to Venus and live out her life on an Island or in a surface settlement. She might even end up back in Oberg, living in the west dome.
They came to a slope that led down to the lake. Three men were out fishing on one dock, while other fisherfolk had taken a boat out on the water.
“Maybe we can get a ride across,” Ragnar said. Sometimes a couple of the fishers, if they were in a good mood, would row the children to the othe
r side.
“I’d better not,” Mahala said. “Risa was furious when she found out about the last time. She thinks I’ll fall in and drown.”
“Our mother’s the same way,” Solveig said. “Somebody ought to teach us how to swim. Then they wouldn’t have to worry.”
“They won’t, though.” Ragnar kicked a loose pebble along the path. “They’d just say it’s a waste of time. You’re supposed to use a boat for fishing, not to fool around, and if you’re fooling around, you shouldn’t be in a boat. So why learn to swim when you’ll never use it except when you’re doing something you shouldn’t be doing?”
Risa would have agreed with the boy, although she would not have come up with such a convoluted argument. Mahala had a bond with Ragnar and his sister. He wanted to do his art, Solveig hoped for a glimpse of the stars, and she longed to see places that were impossible to reach. None of them would ever fulfill such dreams on Venus.
Risa’s housemates seemed awkward in Benzi’s presence at first, as they had the last time he had visited. Kristof and Barika showed off their son, Kyril, let him sit in Benzi’s lap when the Habber showed no objection to that, then vanished with the child to their rooms in Paul’s wing of the house, as if to ration his exposure to the Habber. Hoa was even quieter than usual, while her bondmate Jamil was completely tongue-tied. Only Grazie, content to fill Benzi in on the latest Oberg gossip, was at ease, chattering away as Benzi listened politely.
By supper, their shyness had passed, and Benzi, sitting next to Risa, seemed less distant. He laughed at Kolya’s jokes, told Noella how pleased he was to see her again, and ate everything the others urged on him. Sef was relating the news of Earth he had heard in the airship bay during his shift there. Mukhtar Kaseko Wugabe, it appeared, was retiring and relinquishing control of Earth’s Council of Mukhtars. After dropping from sight for several days, he had turned up in his homeland of Azania to announce that he was giving up his position to pursue a quiet life in a small town bordering the veldt. No one believed that his retirement was voluntary, and there was no word on who might be in control of the Council of Mukhtars now.
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