“Yes,” the Mukhtar said, “that was part of the preparation for the new era. I still have much to tell you. This voyage of discovery, this journey beyond this solar system—it’s more than a search for the alien and a symbolic way to mark the new era. It is also to ensure that, if the worst happens here, some part of us, of our species, will survive elsewhere.”
“You sound as though you expect the worst to happen.” That was my remark, which escaped me before I could call it back.
“I deal in probabilities,” Tabib responded. “There is a strong possibility that our species may not survive this upheaval on Earth. That would deprive the Venus Project of the technological support that the settlements need in order to survive, so they would be doomed as well, unless the Habbers took over the Project The Habbers stand a good chance to survive regardless of what happens on Earth or on Venus, unless of course they get drawn too deeply into our troubles. But there are those who might contend that Habbers are no longer truly human, and perhaps they will lose interest in human affairs altogether and leave this system.” He fixed his gaze on Benzi and the Habbers sitting with him, then turned to Teresa. “If you wish to attend our sessions, you may do so. If you want to bring every one of your constituents to our meetings, we won’t stop you. Sooner or later, everything we say here will become public anyway. I had hoped that wouldn’t happen until certain issues were settled, and we had reached some kind of agreement, but perhaps I hoped for too much.”
Teresa looked down for a moment. “I may decide to attend,” she said, “or I may not, as long as I know I’m welcome.” There was a note of wounded pride in her voice. “I don’t think there’s any point in talking about this, among ourselves or with folks in other communes, as long as you say it’ll all come out in public anyway.” She looked up with a pensive expression on her face. “I know what it’s like at town meetings when everybody has to get in her say and people are so interested in pushing their own opinions that nothing gets decided. You haven’t made up your minds about anything yet, so you don’t need more of us butting in right now.”
The Mukhtar said, “I am grateful for your understanding.”
Teresa stood up and glanced at the townspeople nearest her. “We’d better let them go about their business,” she murmured, “and get things settled, before we end up with something worse than that Guardian Commander.” She left the room, with the others following, her back straight and rigid with dignity.
September 30, 657:
After over a month of discussions that sometimes reached a high level of intensity—
No, that isn’t the way to put it. After over a month of sessions where a number of my fellow Cytherians, Administrator Constantine Matheos in particular, often got into shouting matches with Mukhtar Tabib and any Linkers from Earth who happened to be present, we have the beginnings of an agreement. Only the Habber delegates kept the arguments from becoming even more angry and bitter than they were. Benzi and his comrades displayed a talent for being calm and soothing without giving off any obnoxious odor of superiority. Maybe that’s why they were able to win the kind of agreement they wanted.
It isn’t official, but it will be. The delegates, and the observers who might as well be delegates themselves, will argue some more, and then we’ll all admit that we’ve done about as well as we are likely to do. Few of the delegates want to be here during the harsh Plains winter.
Few of us also want to give any discontented and angry people with the capacity to organize themselves a chance to conclude that our deliberations are useless and to take matters into their own hands.
October 657
From: Mahala Liangharad, Commune of Teresa Marias,
Lincoln, Nomarchy of the Plains Communes
To: Chike Enu-Barnes, East Dome,
Cytherian Settlement of Sagan
The conference is over. Your brother Kesse may not have told you that yet, since it isn’t official, but our work here is essentially done, and not a moment too soon. I can feel winter in the air and in the wind every time I go outside. Mukhtar Tabib seems increasingly anxious to get back to the warmer climes of the New Islamic Nomarchy, and the Cytherians here are already making plans to leave.
I should be doing the same thing, but Benzi is staying on in Lincoln for a while, and I have decided to stay here with him. I miss you badly and would much rather be in the temperate environment of a dome than on this flat wind-swept prairie, but I have my reasons for remaining here for now.
Aides to the Council of Mukhtars and the Project Council, in consultation with various Habbers, will draw up the detailed agreement, making sure that every provision has no loopholes, and the whole thing is bound to be loaded with ceremonial phrases and clauses covering every possible contingency, but essentially the agreement will guarantee that the Venus Project will continue with the aid of both Earth and the Associated Habitats, with both Islanders and surface-dwellers having a lot more control over decisions. It also gives the Habbers who are building the interstellar Habitat the power to accept or reject anyone who wishes to be a voyager, although people who feel that they’ve been rejected unfairly will be able to appeal, ask for a public hearing, submit an assessment by a Counselor that they’re emotionally or mentally fit for the voyage, and so forth. The Habbers will consider all adults, meaning people who are at least twenty years old, and won’t take the parents of children who are younger than that. This is for ethical reasons, since the Habbers argued that young children can’t give informed consent to such a choice.
That makes it sound as though the process of selecting spacefarers could go on indefinitely, but most of the Habbers seem to agree with Benzi when he claims that this won’t be a problem, that the qualified applicants will not be so numerous that there won’t be space for them.
I didn’t believe my great-uncle when he first told me this, and I don’t believe him now. In Sagan alone, I can think of at least three hundred people who will want to be part of this voyage, including you. Multiply that by equivalent percentages from each settlement and Island, add in the number from Earth who will be clamoring to go, and the Habbers doing the selecting will have millions to deal with, and millions more who are children now but will want to be considered later, and—it all seems impossible, even if you assume that the Habber cyberminds might be able to speed up the process.
I’ve told Benzi that I want to go as soon as the worldlet is ready for habitation. He wants the same thing; he’s told me more times than I can count that this was his dream, as far back as when he was a young Islander planning to flee from Venus. But whenever I speak of my wishes, he gets a strange look on his face, as if he doesn’t really believe me.
The Lincoln Conference Agreement was made public on January 1, 658, on all public channels in various languages, with each version read by aides to the Council of Mukhtars, Venus Project Council members, or Habbers of indeterminate status. Mahala watched a reading of the agreement by Jamilah al-Hussaini in the common room of Teresa Marias’s house, but by then much about the conference meetings had become public. During the month preceding the announcement, there were rumors of riots in some of Earth’s larger cities, of violence against individual Habbers, but such stories remained rumors. That might mean that the tales were exaggerated, Mahala mused, or else that the Mukhtars were doing a much better job at keeping such incidents quiet.
The day after the announcement, Mahala walked with Chet Marjories to the floater cradles to say her farewells to him, trailed by her cousin Harriett and Jeremy Courtneys. The two young Guardians had stayed on in Lincoln with a small detachment after most of the delegates had left, volunteering for the extra duty; Mukhtar Tabib had thought the town might need some Guardians stationed there for a while. When the rest of the detachment had been ordered to their new post, Chet and Jeremy had been granted a week of leave in Lincoln.
The snow had drifted during the night, making small mounds against the houses and white dunes in the fields, but the air was clear and the sky a
piercing, cloudless blue. The wind had died down in the night; the floater would not have to postpone its scheduled stop at Lincoln. Mahala waded through the snow, shivering even in her felt hat, long woolen coat, and thick-soled boots. She no longer minded the cold and could look up at the vast dome of the sky without flinching; she had grown to see some beauty in this harsh piece of Earth. She would miss Lincoln when she left it and wondered how many other places on Earth she might have come to love.
“I love you, “ Chet had told her a month ago, after a summer and autumn of finding every excuse to be near her. He came to Teresa’s house for dinner with Jeremy and took Mahala to the tavern for a drink after meetings. Later, when the delegates were gone and she was spending alternate days assisting Shirl Heathers with her patients and supervising elementary biology classes at the Lincoln Academy, Chet was often waiting for her outside Shirl’s examination room or in the road outside the school. Being friendly but distant to him had made him even more persistent, but then he was a Plainsman, accustomed to women who not only welcomed his attentions but demanded them; part of her attraction for him had been the novelty of her behavior.
They had been lovers for a month now. She had grown comfortable with his affectionate ways and his unsubtle but straightforward mind. Even so, she might have continued to discourage him except for a message she had received from Chike two months earlier. The message had been full of news about plans for a new dome in the Sagan settlement and of expeditions to explore more of the surface. “We have a vehicle now,” he had said, “a modified crawler that can carry people inside it and remain outside a dome for a week or more.” Cytherians would begin to venture outside the domes themselves for longer periods of time. That prospect had clearly excited him; Chike had not sounded like a man who intended to leave Venus for interstellar space. That night, she had welcomed Chet to her room, at last relieving the women of Teresa’s household from worries that she might be, in their eyes, perverted.
His passion had cooled since then, and Mahala supposed that he would say his farewells to her with feelings similar to her own: He would remember her with some fondness and leave her without regret.
The floater had arrived and was tethered to its cradle when they reached it, the ramp down to receive passengers. Jeremy and Harriett held each other tightly in a wordless embrace while Mahala told Chet that she would send him a message from time to time, knowing that she was unlikely to keep that promise. Mahala stood with her cousin as the two men, bulky in their long black coats, walked up the ramp to board the floater; Chet lifted a hand in farewell before the door closed behind him.
“Mother of God,” Harriett whispered, “I’m going to miss Jeremy. I’ll miss him terribly.”
Mahala hooked her arm through Harriett’s as they walked back along the snow-covered load toward the town. “He said he’d be back in the spring,” Mahala said. “They’ve already promised him leave.”
“I know. I’ll still miss him. I think I’d be content if Jeremy’s the only man I ever share my bed with again.” Harriett glanced at Mahala, as if embarrassed at saying something so unconventional. “Well, we are both part of Iris Angharads’s line, and she took a bondmate for life.”
That was not quite accurate, but Mahala let it pass. “Would you have a ceremony and take Jeremy as a bond-mate?” Mahala asked.
“Oh, I wouldn’t go that far, but—” Harriett’s steps slowed. “He says that more Guardians are going to be assigned to civic patrols and police forces, since we may need more of them in places that don’t have them now.”
“I know,” Mahala said. That had been one of the issues discussed near the end of the conference.
“If that happens, Jeremy thinks there’s a good chance he’ll be stationed here. We could be together then. We’ve been talking about having a child.”
Mahala glanced at her kinswoman. “But I thought you wanted to be part of the space expedition. I thought Jeremy did, too. They won’t consider either of you if you have a child.”
“I know that, Mahala, but the more I think about it, the more I wonder if being one of the spacefarers is really what I want.”
“But—” It came to Mahala then that she had heard little from either Harriett or Jeremy about the interstellar expedition lately. “You’d be giving up a chance to be part of our greatest adventure,” she finished.
“And if I leave, I may be giving up a chance to be part of the greatest change in our history. Leaving now, without knowing what might happen here, without doing what I can to see that we get through it—I don’t think I can do it.”
Mahala said, “You might not get through it. The new era could become a very dangerous and violent time.”
“I know that, too, and maybe running away from it is a kind of cowardice.” Harriett’s grip tightened on Mahala’s arm. “I shouldn’t have said that to you. You still want to be a spacefarer, don’t you.”
“Yes, I do,” Mahala said, but she was already thinking of all the arguments that she could make against becoming one.
The courtyard surrounded by the four wings of Teresa’s house was warm and snowless. Overhead, the snow that had settled on the force field shielding the courtyard was visible in the soft light cast by the lanterns scattered about the grassy ground. The carpet of snow was melting into patches. Mahala looked up through a space between two patches of snow at the night sky and the beckoning stars. They still called to her, but she was growing more conscious of the price she would have to pay in order to reach them.
The women of the household were already asleep, but Benzi was still in the courtyard, sitting near the rosebushes. He had been coming out here more often, to sit with the women and hear the stories that had been passed on to them by grandmothers and great-grandmothers. Over a century after leaving Lincoln as a child, he was woven into the fabric of the town once more. Perhaps he, like Harriett, was having second thoughts.
She sat down on one corner of his blanket. In the false spring of the courtyard, the rosebushes were budding again. “I spoke to Harriett this afternoon,” she said. “She says that she may not want to become part of the interstellar expedition after all.”
His head turned toward her. “I know.”
“So she confided in you before she told me.”
“No. I guessed it. I expected it. She’s thinking of what she’d be leaving behind.”
“I’m thinking of that, too,” Mahala said. “It’ll be a long series of farewells, and when I leave, I’ll never see any of those people again. A time will come aboard the interstellar Habitat when I’ll know that all of them are dead, and then another moment will come when I’ll know that everybody who knew them or had any memory of them is dead, too, but I will have lost them long before that.”
“I know,” Benzi said.
“And that isn’t all of it. Those of us who leave may never know what happens here, whether the rest of our species comes through this transition or destroys itself. We may never know if we’re only a small branch of a thriving race or if we are all that’s left of it, even if we do manage to come back eventually. There may be nothing left to tell us what happened by then.”
“That’s possible,” he said. “It may be that the entire human species will abandon planets for Habitats and leave this system in the end.”
“Now I’m beginning to see why you think that there won’t be that many people wanting to be spacefarers.”
“Are you having your own doubts?” he asked.
“I wouldn’t call them doubts. They’re more like questions.
I’ll be leaving Venus. I won’t be one of those who stayed to bring it to life.”
Benzi said, “You might be trading that for a chance to see what Venus becomes.”
She breathed in the fragrance of the roses, another memory she would take with her from Earth. “It’s the uncertainty of everything now—that’s what’s getting to people.”
“Things always were uncertain,” Benzi said. “Most of us simply hid that fact f
rom ourselves for a while. Too many Habbers are still in danger of retreating from uncertainty. Now we’ll all have to embrace that uncertainty, whatever we choose to do.”
25
The bright spot on Mahala’s screen, a beacon orbiting the sun midway between the orbits of Venus and Earth, had begun as an asteroid enclosed in a metal shell. Engineering crews and robotic limbs guided by cyberminds had installed its matter-antimatter drive and its vacuum drive; the worldlet that would become a nomadic interstellar Habitat was acquiring the first members of its community.
Each prospective spacefarer would live inside the Habitat for some years before it began its journey, with the goal of Linking everyone aboard to the Habitat’s cyberminds before departure. Benzi claimed that this would not make Habbers of the Earth-folk and Cytherians aboard, that the minds integrated with the vessel and its functions were young artificial intelligences that would learn and develop along with the human beings to whom they were Linked. Mahala was not certain that he was right about that. In time, the difference between being a human being with a Link and being a Habber with a symbiotic artificial intelligence might be a lost distinction.
The first thousand people from Earth had already been ferried to the Habitat by torchship, and more thousands would follow them soon. The social engineers involved with the space expedition, both the Habbers and the Counselors from Earth and Venus, wanted to see a true community of starfarers established well before the Hab left the solar system, but there was another reason for bringing people aboard continuously over a period of several years. The artificial intelligences of the more unified net of the new era had predicted that a sizable minority of those volunteering to be spacefarers would eventually decide against being a part of the voyage, even after years of living inside the Habitat, even after the decade or more that it was likely to take for the voyagers to adapt to their new environment.
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