Dream of Venus and Other Science Fiction Stories

by Pamela Sargent

  “What’s the deadline?” Miriam said. “How long do we have to pull this thing together?”

  “Administrator Pavel indicated that he would like to have it completed before the New Year’s celebrations,” the older woman replied.

  “So we’ve got five months,” Miriam said. “Then I think we’ll see in the year 535 with one hell of a fine mind-tour.”

  Lorna pursed her thin lips, as if tasting something sour. “You may both have more time if you need it. The Administrator would prefer that you keep to his informal deadline, but he also made it clear that he would rather have a mind-tour that is both aesthetically pleasing and inspirational, even if that takes longer to complete.”

  Hassan bowed slightly in Lorna’s direction. “We’ll do our best to produce a mind-tour that is both pleasing and on time, God willing.”

  “And that isn’t a sloppy rush job, either,” Miriam said.

  “I may have to drag you away to our team meetings and your other standard tasks occasionally,” Lorna said, “but I’ll try to keep such distractions to a minimum.” She turned toward the doorway. “Salaam aleikum.”

  “Aleikum salaam,” Miriam said. Her Arabic sounded as flat and unmusical as her Anglaic.

  “God go with you,” Hassan added as the door slid shut behind their supervisor.

  “Well, Hassan.” Miriam sat down on one of the cushions at the low table. “I don’t know if you’ve ever seen any of the mind-tours I worked on. Most of them were for small children, so you probably haven’t. ‘Hans Among the Redwoods’—that was one of our more popular ones, and ‘Dinosaurs in the Gobi’.”

  He tensed with surprise. “I saw that dinosaur mind-tour—marvelous work. Maybe you made it for children, but I have several adult friends who also enjoyed it.”

  “And ‘The Adventure of Montrose Scarp’.”

  Hassan was impressed in spite of himself. “‘Montrose Scarp?’” he asked as he seated himself. “My nephew Salim couldn’t get enough of that one. He just about forced me to put on a band and view it. What I particularly admired was the way the excitement of the climb and the geological history of the scarp were so seamlessly combined.”

  “That was my doing, if I do say so myself.” Miriam pointed her chin at him. “Joe Kinnear—he was the director I worked with—he wanted to put in more of the usual shit—you know, stuff like having the mind-tourist lose his grip and fall before being caught by the rope tied around him, or throwing in a big storm just as you reach the top of the escarpment. He thought doing what I wanted would just slow the thing down, but I convinced him otherwise, and I was right.”

  “Yes, you were,” Hassan said.

  “And every damned mind-tour of Venus has the obligatory scene of Karim al-Anwar speaking to the Council of Mukhtars, telling them that what they learn from the terraforming of Venus might eventually be needed to save Earth from the effects of global warming, or else a scene of New York or some other flooded coastal city at evening while Venus gleams on the horizon and a portentous voice quotes from that speech Mukhtar Karim supposedly made toward the end of his life.”

  Karim al-Anwar had been the first to propose a project to terraform Venus, back in the earliest days of Earth’s Nomarchies, not long after the Resource Wars almost six centuries ago. “When I gaze upon Venus,” Hassan quoted, “and view the images our probes have carried back to us from its hot and barren surface, I see Earth’s future, and fear for our world.”

  “Followed by the sensation of heat and a hellish image of the Venusian surface,” Miriam said. “And the three most recent ones all have scenes of explosions on the Bats, which I frankly think is misleading and maybe even too frightening.”

  The Bats, the two winged satellites in geosynchronous orbit at Venus’s poles, serviced the automatic shuttles that carried compressed oxygen from the robot-controlled installations at the Venusian poles to the Bats. The process of terraforming was releasing too much of Venus’s oxygen, and the excess had to be removed if the planet was ever to support life. The workers on the Bats, people who serviced the shuttles and maintained the docks, knew that the volatile oxygen could explode, and many lives had been lost in past explosions.

  “There are real dangers on the Bats,” Miriam continued, “but we don’t have to dwell on them just for the sake of a few thrills. I’d rather avoid those kinds of clichés.”

  “So would I,” Hassan said fervently.

  “We should purge our minds of anything we’ve seen before and start over with an entirely fresh presentation.”

  “I think that’s exactly what Pavel Gvishiani wants us to do.”

  “We’re geologists,” Miriam said, “and maybe that’s the angle we ought to use. I don’t think past mind-tours have really given people a feeling for the Project in the context of geological time. I’d like to emphasize that. Hundreds of years of human effort set against the eons it took to form Venus—and if we get into planetary evolution and the beginnings of the solar system....”

  “I couldn’t agree with you more,” Hassan said.

  “Most of the people who experience this mind-tour are likely to be ignorant and unschooled, but that doesn’t mean we have to oversimplify things and lard the narrative with dramatic confrontations and action scenes.”

  “It sounds as though what we want is a mind-tour that would be both enlightening to the uneducated,” Hassan said, “and yet entertaining and inspirational to the learned.”

  “That’s exactly what I want,” Miriam said.

  It was also, Hassan thought, exactly what Pavel Gvishiani was likely to want. Judging by what Muhammad had told him about the Administrator, Pavel was not someone who cared to have his intelligence insulted. To have a mind-tour that would not just be an informative entertainment, but a masterpiece—

  “We should talk about how we want to frame it,” Hassan said, “before we start digging through all the records and sensor scans. Have a structure that encapsulates our vision, and then start collecting what we need to realize it.”

  “Exactly,” Miriam said. “You’d be surprised at how many mind-tour directors do it the other way around, looking at everything that could possibly have anything to do with their theme while hoping that some coherent vision suddenly emerges out of all the clutter. That isn’t the way I like to work.”

  “Nor I,” Hassan said, gazing across the table at her expressive face and intense gaze, already enthralled.

  * * * *

  Miriam, despite being a geologist and a specialist, lived in a building inhabited by workers, people who repaired homeostats and robots, maintained airships and shuttles, tended hydroponic gardens, looked out for small children in the Island’s child care center, and performed other necessary tasks. Hassan had assumed that there was no room for her elsewhere, and that her quarters would be temporary. Instead, Miriam had admitted to him that she had requested space there, and intended to stay.

  “Look,” she said, “I went to a university, but a lot of students there didn’t let me forget where I came from. I feel more comfortable with workers than with the children of merchants and engineers and Counselors and Linkers.” She had glanced at him apologetically after saying that, obviously not wanting to hurt his feelings, but he had understood. His family’s position might have brought him to this place, but with Miriam, he now had a chance to make his own small mark on the Project, to inspire others with the dream of Venus.

  “The Dream of Venus”—that was how he and Miriam referred to the mind-tour they had been outlining and roughing out for almost a month now. He thought of what they had been sketching and planning as he walked toward the star-shaped steel-blue building in which Miriam lived. As they usually did at last light, workers had gathered on the expanse of grass in front of the building. Families sat on the grass, eating from small bowls with chopsticks or fingers; other people were talking with friends, mending worn garments, or watching with pride and wonderment as their children reviewed their lessons on pocket screens. All children wer
e schooled here, unlike Earth, where education was rationed and carefully parceled out.

  It came to him then how much he now looked forward to coming here, to meeting and working with Miriam.

  Hassan made his way to the entrance. Inside the windowless building, people had propped open the doors to their rooms to sit in the corridors and gossip; he passed one group of men gambling with sticks and dice. The place was as noisy and chaotic as a souk in Jeddah, but Hassan had grown more used to the cacophony. Since most of the workers could not read, the doors to their rooms were adorned with holo images or carvings of their faces, so that visitors could locate their quarters. Miriam’s room was near the end of this wing; a holo image of her face stared out at him from the door.

  He pressed his palm against the door; after a few seconds, it opened. Miriam, wearing a brown tunic and baggy brown pants, was sitting on the floor in front of her wall screen, a thin metal band around her head; even in such plain clothes, she looked beautiful to him.

  “Salaam,” she said without looking up.

  “Salaam.”

  “We’re making real progress,” she said. “This mind-tour is really shaping up.”

  He sat down next to her. Unlike most of the people in this building, Miriam had a room to herself, but it was not much larger than a closet. Building more residences on the Islands would have meant cutting back on the gardens and parks that were deemed essential to maintaining the mental health of the Islanders.

  “Before you show me any of your rough cut,” he said, “would you care to have supper with me as my guest?” This was the first time he had offered such an invitation to her; he had enough credit to order imported delicacies from Earth for her if that was what she wanted. “We can go to the garden near the Administrators’ building, unless of course you’d rather dine somewhere else.”

  “Maybe later,” she said in the flat voice that was such a contrast to her lovely face and graceful movements. “I want you to look at this first.”

  They had decided to depart from tradition in their structure for “The Dream of Venus.” Miriam also wanted to dispense with the usual chronological depictions, which she found stodgy, and Hassan had readily agreed.

  The mind-tour would begin with Karim al-Anwar, as every other depiction of the Venus Project did, but instead of the usual dramatic confrontations with doubters and passionate speeches about Earth’s sister planet becoming a new home for humankind, they would move directly to what Karim had envisioned—Venus as it would be in the far future. The viewer would see the blue-green gem of a transformed Venus from afar and then be swept toward the terraformed planet, falling until the surface was visible through Venus’s veil of white clouds. Flying low over the shallow blue ocean, the mind-tourist would be swept past a small island chain toward the northern continent of Ishtar, with its high plateau and mountain massif that dwarfed even the Himalayas, to view a region of vast grasslands, evergreen forests, and rugged mountain peaks. Then the wail of the wind would rise as the viewer was carried south toward the equator and the colorful tropical landscape of the continent of Aphrodite.

  Hassan was still tinkering with the sound effects for that section, but had found a piece of music that evoked the sound of a strong wind, and planned to use recordings of the powerful winds that continuously swept around Venus below the Islands as background and undertones. Near the end of the sequence, the viewer would fly toward a Venusian dawn, gazing at the sun before a dark shape, part of what remained of the Parasol, eclipsed its light. There were a few scientists who doubted that any part of the Parasol would be needed later on to insulate Venus from the heat and radiation that could again produce a runaway greenhouse effect, but most Cytherian specialists disagreed with them, and Hassan and Miriam had decided to go along with the majority’s opinion in their depiction.

  At this point, the viewer was to be swept back in time, so to speak, to one of the Cytherian Islands, in a manner that would suggest what was not shown in the mind-tour—namely that in the distant future, when Venus was green with life, the Islands would slowly drop toward the surface, where their inhabitants would at last leave their domed gardens to dwell on their new world. Hassan and Miriam had inserted a passage during the earlier flight sequence in which the viewer passed over an expanse of parklike land that strongly resembled Island Two’s gardens and groves of trees. That scene, with some enhancement, would resonate in the viewer’s mind with the subsequent Island sequences.

  “What have you got to show me?” Hassan asked.

  Miriam handed him a band. “This is some stuff for the earlier sequences,” she said.

  Hassan put the band around his head, was momentarily blind and deaf, and then was suddenly soaring over the vast canyon of the Diana Chasma toward the rift-ridden dome of Atla Regio in the east and the shield volcano of Maat Mons, the largest volcano on Venus, three hundred kilometers in diameter and rising to a Himalayan height. The scene abruptly shifted to the steep massif of Maxwell Montes rising swiftly from the hot dark surface of Ishtar Terra as millions of years were compressed into seconds. He whirled away from the impressively high mountain massif and hovered over a vast basaltic plain, watching as part of the surface formed a dome, spread out, grew flat, and then sank, leaving one of the round circular uniquely Venusian features called coronae. He moved over the cracked and wrinkled plateaus called tesserae and was surprised at the beauty he glimpsed in the deformed rocky folds of the land.

  His field of vision abruptly went dark.

  “What do you think?” Miriam’s voice asked.

  He shifted his band slightly; Miriam’s room reappeared. “I know it’s rough,” she continued, “and I’ve got more to add to it, but I hope it gives you an idea. As for sound effects and the sensory stuff, I think we should keep that to a minimum—just a low undertone, the bare suggestion of a low throbbing noise, and maybe a feeling of extreme heat without actually making the viewer break out in a sweat. Well, what do you think?”

  Hassan said, “I think it’s beautiful, Miriam.” His words were sincere. Somehow she had taken what could have been no more than an impressive visual panorama and had found the beauty in the strange, alien terrain of Venus as it might have been six hundred million years ago. It was as if she had fallen in love with that world, almost as if she regretted its loss.

  “If you think that’s something,” she said, “wait until you see what I’ve worked up for the resurfacing section, where we see volcanoes flooding the plains with molten basalt. But I want your ideas on what to use for sensory effects there, and you’ll probably want to add some visuals, too—it seems a little too abbreviated as it is.”

  “You almost make me sorry,” Hassan said, “that we’re changing Venus, that what it was will forever be lost—already is lost.”

  Her gray eyes widened. “That’s exactly the feeling I was trying for. Every mind-tour about Venus and the Project always tries for the same effect—the feeling of triumph in the end by bringing a dead world to life, the beauty of the new Earthlike world we’re making, the belief that we’re carrying out God’s will by transforming Venus into what it might have become. I want the mind-tourist at least to glimpse what we’re losing with all this planetary engineering, to feel some sorrow that it is being lost.”

  Hassan smiled. “A little of that goes a long way, don’t you think? We’re supposed to be glorifying the Project, not regretting it.”

  “Sometimes I do regret it just a little. Imagine what we might have learned if we had built the Islands and simply used them to observe this planet. There are questions we may never answer now because of what we’ve already changed. Did Venus once have oceans that boiled away? Seems likely, but we probably won’t ever be sure. Was there ever a form of life here that was able to make use of ultraviolet light? We’ll never know that, either. We decided that terraforming this world and giving all of humankind that dream and learning what we could from the work of the Project outweighed all of that.”

  “Be careful, Mir
iam.” Hassan lifted a hand. “We don’t want to question the very basis of the Project.”

  “No, of course not.” But she sounded unhappy about making that admission. Hassan would never have insulted her by saying this aloud, but she sounded almost like a Habber, one of those whose ancestors had abandoned Earth long ago in the wake of the Resource Wars to live in the hollowed-out asteroids and artificial worlds called Habitats. There might be a few Habbers living here to observe the Project, but they thought of space as their home, not planetary surfaces. A Habber might have claimed that Venus should have been left as it had been.

  “You’ve done wonderfully with your roughs,” Hassan murmured, suddenly wanting to cheer her. Miriam’s face brightened as she glanced toward him. “Really, if the final mind-tour maintains the quality of this work, we’ll have a triumph.” He reached for her hand and held it for a moment, surprised at how small and delicate it felt in his grip. “Let me take you to supper,” he went on, and admitted to himself at last that he was falling in love with her.

  * * * *

  They would have a masterpiece, Hassan told himself. Three months of working with Miriam had freed something inside him, had liberated a gift that he had not known he possessed. He felt inspired whenever he was with her. In his private moments, as he reviewed sections of “The Dream of Venus,” he grew even more convinced that their mind-tour had the potential for greatness.

  There, in one of the segments devoted to the Venus of millions of years ago, was a vast dark plain, an ocean of basalt covered by slender sinuous channels thousands of kilometers long. A viewer would soar over shield volcanoes, some with ridges that looked like thin spider legs, others with lava flows that blossomed along their slopes. The mind-tourist could roam on the plateau of Ishtar and look up at the towering peaks of the Maxwell Mountains, shining brightly with a plating of tellurium and pyrite. What might have been only a succession of fascinating but ultimately meaningless geological panoramas had been shaped by Miriam into a moving evocation of a planet’s life, a depiction of a truly alien beauty.