Chike had mentioned possible new uses for the Bats, as laboratories and places for research; it might be advisable to study any newly created molecular forms of life or molecular machines—and the distinction between the two was becoming harder and harder to draw—on the two satellites, where any potentially problematic organisms could be isolated and studied. It had occurred to Mahala after getting his messages that Chike had not spoken of the interstellar expedition at all.
“I knew things were going to change,” Ragnar continued, “but I didn’t think they would start changing so quickly. I just wish—” His voice caught, and she knew that he was remembering Frania.
“Everyone seems so involved in what’s going to happen here,” Mahala said, “that our interstellar effort seems all but forgotten.”
“Not quite. I know of at least forty people here who have already put in for the journey, and they’re only the first. You’re still going, aren’t you?”
“Yes. I won’t say I didn’t have my doubts, but I’ve made up my mind.”
They had come to the wooden footbridge. Ragnar halted and set her duffel down. “Solveig wanted me to tell you this. I told her that she should talk to you herself, but maybe it’s better if I prepare you for what she’s going to say. She’s decided she’s not going to go, that she wants to stay here.”
She heard his words, not feeling the truth of them yet, grateful for the numbness that kept what he was telling her at bay. In all her thoughts of what she would be losing, of the people she would be leaving behind, she had always seen Solveig at her side, traveling with her to the Habitat and what awaited them both beyond this system. She had never imagined that she might have to say a farewell to Solveig.
“No,” she heard herself say, as if from a distance. “No.”
“It’s true, Mahala. She struggled with it, she couldn’t make up her mind, but when she did—”
“She can’t mean it. This is what she always wanted. Maybe she just needs to think about it some more before she leaves here.”
Ragnar said, “You should be saying that to Solveig, not to me.”
Anger flared inside her. “You don’t care at all, do you? You don’t care about anything—” A look of sympathy and concern crossed his face, and she wanted to call back her words.
“I care,” he said, and picked up her duffel. “Chike’s not going, either,” she said. “Did he tell you that?”
“He doesn’t have to tell me. I know.” She followed Ragnar across the bridge.
Mahala had asked Ragnar to share a meal with her and Solveig, but he muttered an excuse about a darktime shift in External Operations and left them at one of the tables in the recently planted flower garden outside the dormitory. More of the dormitory residents were taking their meals here, according to Solveig, carrying their food from the common room’s kitchen out to the garden. Time spent on cultivating the flowers might have been spent on more practical tasks, but the sight of the budding rosebushes, rows of violets, and the bright yellow blossoms of an unfamiliar flower eased the knots of tension and sorrow inside Mahala.
Solveig spoke of all the considerations that had led to her decision. There had been too many farewells; she had soon lost the stomach for them. The new era would mean opportunities for her to work and to study aboard an orbiting observatory. She had learned that she was more attached to this world than she had realized and wanted to be part of the Project’s next phase.
Mahala forced herself to finish her small meal of parsley and grain salad and vegetables. Solveig poured her another glass of wine; her friend had spent some credit on a bottle of the wine, a local product made from a rapidly maturing strain of grapes. The wine was too sweet and no match for the Earth wines she had occasionally sampled and had learned to appreciate at Allison’s tavern in Lincoln, but the pink liquid soothed her a little.
“Maybe the dream was more enticing than the reality,” Solveig said. “When I thought it might never happen, I wanted it more than anything. When this kind of journey seemed a possibility, I longed to be part of it. And then the decision was upon me, and—” She looked down for a moment. “I knew then that I couldn’t go.”
“All the farewells,” Mahala said.
“Not just that. I haven’t forgotten that time you found me by the lake, after Ragnar and Frani’s bondmate ceremony. It suddenly came to me that I might become like that again aboard that Hab, alone and adrift, that the darkness inside me might swallow me up completely.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I know it,” Solveig said softly, “and as soon as I understood that, I knew that I couldn’t go. You know what I’m like—it hasn’t been easy for me to form attachments, to grow close to other people. I value those connections I made too much now to let go of them. And there’s something else.” She lifted her head. “This won’t be the first such expedition. There will be others, I’m sure of that. Maybe in time I can be part of one of them, and if not, I can be content knowing that someone else has realized that dream.”
“You might change your mind later,” Mahala said, feeling the hollowness of that hope.
“I won’t,” Solveig said, “and neither will you.”
“No, I won’t change my mind.” Mahala’s eyes stung. “But this is the closest I’ve come to thinking that I should have decided to stay here.”
Chike had moved into a house with wide windows built around a central courtyard. His housemates were a young couple with two children who had recently moved to Sagan, a physicist who had moved there from Island Seven, and two Habbers, a man and a woman. He had introduced them all to Mahala before retreating with her to the courtyard. She had already forgotten their names, not wanting to become acquainted with any more people to whom she would only have to say good-bye.
She had saved Chike the trouble of informing her that he had decided to remain by telling him that she had guessed what he wanted to do and had accepted it. She had relieved him of the burden of explaining himself to her.
“When did you know?” Chike asked.
“I think I sensed it when I was still in Lincoln, when I saw your messages.”
“Then you knew what I was going to do before I knew it myself,” he said. “I hadn’t decided anything then, not consciously. I was still wrestling with myself.”
“I suppose that I must still love you, then. That must be how I knew.” She forced herself to smile; she would not have him remember her as somebody who had reproached him.
They sat together on the ground, near a small tiled pool. Chike had told her that Ragnar had designed the labyrinthine pattern of ceramic tiles at the bottom of the pool for Chike’s two Habber housemates.
He leaned toward her and touched her face lightly. “You can still leave something of yourself on Venus,” Chike said. She knew what he meant. Those leaving Venus and Earth would be allowed to store their genetic material on their home worlds; descendants of the spacefarers could still remain among those they had abandoned. Mahala had not yet heard of any potential spacefarer taking advantage of that option.
“No,” she said, “I can’t.”
“You think it’s a test of some kind, that those willing to leave sperm or ova behind might be showing too much ambivalence about their choice.”
“I suppose they would be revealing some uncertainty, but that’s not my reason for refusing. I just don’t think it’s fair. The people who choose to make their lives here or on Earth deserve to have their own descendants inherit what they accomplish. And I’m not so sure that it would be fair to the children, either. I know what it’s like to grow up with parents I could never know and who would never know me.”
“Parents, children, all of those family and social structures—” Chike shrugged. “They may not mean as much to us later on. We may become more like Habbers.”
“Perhaps.” She reached for his hand and held it, caring for him still, even as she felt herself growing apart from him.
She had prepared for her departure, gi
ven away personal possessions that she no longer wanted, and said her farewells. To wait any longer would be both an indulgence and a cruelty. She would only be procrastinating, dragging out the leavetaking and tormenting those who had reluctantly come to accept her choice.
Mahala left her dormitory with only a lightly packed duffel and her physician’s bag. She was not likely to need the tools of her profession in the Habitat, but had picked up her bag automatically. Someone traveling with her might suddenly need her care, and later, she would have a tangible reminder of what she had once been.
She took the path that would lead her past the Administrative Center and the memorial pillar. As she walked, she tried to concentrate on her surroundings, knowing that she was seeing them for the last time, but Sagan had changed during the past year and had always felt like a temporary home to her anyway. It had been harder for her to say farewell to Turing and to Oberg.
Mahala had asked her friends not to come with her to the bay, but as she passed the glassy square of the Administrative Center, she glimpsed Solveig and Chike at the memorial pillar. She came toward them, knowing that they had come there to wait for her.
Solveig embraced her wordlessly. Chike held her for a while as she rested her head against his chest, then said, “I love you, Mahala.”
“Is this your last try at convincing me to stay?”
“No,” he replied. “I’m just telling you that I love you.”
She stepped back and gazed into his face. His sharp cheekbones, the warm dark brown of his skin, his short black hair, his penetrating black eyes—he was so familiar to her that she felt that she would carry his image in her memory for the rest of her life, that she could never forget him, and yet she also knew that his memory would fade in time.
She stared at the pillar for a while, at the image of Frania that Ragnar had made, then turned away. “My brother told me that he would come to see you,” Chike said, “when you’re on Island Two.”
“I won’t be there very long,” Mahala said; she did not have that many farewells to say there.
“Kesse wants to spend time with you anyway. I asked him to do that. If there’s anything that you forgot to say to me, you can tell it to him.”
“Farewell, Mahala,” Solveig said, hugging her. “I love you, too, I always have.”
“I know. Farewell.”
Mahala left the pillar, forcing herself not to look back. She was near the pilots’ dormitory before she saw Ragnar’s bright blond head in the distance. He was waiting by the gaping entrance of the bay with Tomas Sechen; apparently Ragnar had decided to prolong his farewells to her. At least she would not have to go through a painful leavetaking with Tomas, who would be joining the interstellar expedition after his last trip to Oberg.
The numbness she had felt when waking up earlier was still with her. Mahala felt as though her emotions had been muted and her senses muffled. She might weep once she was aboard the airship or when she reached Island Two, but for now she could approach Tomas and Ragnar calmly.
“Greetings,” Tomas said to her, “and there isn’t much more for me to say except have a safe journey.”
“And that you’ll be seeing me later,” Mahala added, trying to smile.
“That, too.” He strode away, almost too hastily, clearly anxious to leave her alone with Ragnar.
“Solveig and Chike were at the memorial pillar,” she said.
“I know.”
“Farewell, Ragnar.”
He clutched her by the arms. “I didn’t come here to say good-bye to you. I’ve put in for the expedition myself.”
She stared at him, still numb, not knowing what to say.
“I’ve been thinking about it for months. Tomas knows, and Orban, and a few others, but I didn’t want to speak of it to anyone else until I was sure. I want to go, and they’ll accept me. I didn’t know that until today, but I wanted to tell you before you left.”
“Ragnar,” she whispered.
“Now I’ll have to go around saying my farewells to everybody, and I don’t know how long that’ll take me, but you should be seeing me again within a year.”
“Ragnar.” She would not be abandoning this piece of her heart after all. She let him take her duffel from her and walk with her into the bay.
The Heavens
26
Mahala Liangharad, in common with all of the prospective spacefarers who were brought aboard the Seeker—for that was how we were soon thinking of our nomadic Habitat, as the Seeker—believed that she had measured up to some unknown and yet specific standards to become a part of the interstellar voyage. She and her companions had, to put it another way, passed a test.
In a sense, this was true. There were some who sought to become spacefarers who were dearly unsuited for the voyage, however qualified they might appear to be on the basis of their records. Their unsuitability had little to do with their physical or intellectual qualifications and much to do with the way in which their impulses and synapses and neurons and the components of their conscious minds interacted and reacted with others of their kind and with the environment around them.
Or, as Mahala and her fellow human voyagers might put it, becoming a spacefarer was, in the end, largely determined by an individual’s character. A human being without skills or learning could be trained, as long as she was willing to make the effort. A person with certain other qualities—determination, endurance, amiability, and a kind of social intelligence—would also have much to offer a spacefaring community.
Human brilliance was always of extreme interest to me, to all of us woven into the net of minds. The facets of such a mind were a jewel to be treasured, and contact with such minds and their workings made me appreciate anew the complex universe that exists inside each human mind. But what was needed aboard the Seeker was a brilliance that lay in the perspective of an individual; what I came to admire most was a mentality that could find something new in what was known, that could create a beauty or an intellectual construct that had not existed before, that could look out at the universe and glimpse a truth that had escaped the notice of others. Mental trickery, mastery of facts, a chaotic and unconscious eccentricity—such things had been taken for brilliance by human beings in the past, but that was never what I thought of as true genius. Such mentalities were not needed on the Seeker anyway, not with a net of cyberminds to gather and synthesize data and with Links providing access to that ocean of data. What was much more essential was an ability to sort through this information, to focus on what was important or of interest while ignoring that which was only distraction and to be able to synthesize.
Mahala and her fellow spacefarers believed that some sort of selection process, however invisible to them, accounted for their presence aboard the Seeker. There was indeed a process of selection, although the Habitat-dwellers and their artificial intelligences and the Counselors and Administrators and cyberminds had less to do with that process than Mahala realized. The process was largely one of self-selection: Most of the people of Earth and Venus and those living inside the Habitats preferred to stay where they were. Of the tens of millions who had a desire to become spacefarers, many soon came to realize that they were too psychologically bound to familiar people and places to take such an irreversible step away from them. That still left many millions who were willing to become part of the Seeker’s community, but of these, a few million more turned back of their own accord, some only moments before they were to board the torchships that were to carry them to their new home.
Then there were those who came to the Seeker, lived here, prepared themselves for the voyage, and then returned to their former homes, called back by emotional ties, unresolved regrets, feelings of displacement, or a growing fear of what might lie ahead. And then there were those who discovered in themselves a heretofore unsuspected craving for the chimerical but excessively pleasurable experiences and scenarios that the Seeker’s net of cyberminds could create for them. They might have remained among us, cared for as the
y explored their dreams, but that would have upset the balance of our spacefaring community; if too many others followed them in their retreat, our human community might have been damaged beyond repair. They were allowed to leave, to travel to another Habitat and to lose themselves among their illusions.
After the unsuitable and the regretful and the dreamers had left us, Mahala was struck by two facts. One was that few of the Habbers who joined us felt any obsessive desire for such illusory experiences; instead, it was the people from Earth who proved most susceptible. I could have explained to her that those Habbers who had come to the Seeker had either conquered such appetites earlier or had never been in thrall to them to begin with, but she was still getting used to her Link and often kept her channel closed.
The second fact that caught her attention was that a far smaller percentage of Cytherians, as compared to percentages of Habitat-dwellers or of Earthfolk, contributed to our rate of attrition. That, however, had been an expected outcome. The Cytherians among us were the products of a pioneer culture, people who had sought to shed the past and create a new society, the descendants of people who had broken old ties. They were in many ways well suited to be spacefarers.
What remained to be determined was whether or not they could readily adapt to us.
Most of the Habitats had begun as hollowed-out asteroids, and the same was true of the Seeker. The outer shells of our worldlet were the asteroid’s thick metallic layers of rock, covered by another shell of an alloy that would help to shield the Seeker’s inhabitants from cosmic rays. But the starfarers would not rely on that passive shielding alone; a force field produced by magnetic deflectors would be yet another protective skin.
Child of Venus Page 47
