by Sarah Zettel
The door to the Surveyors’ lab opened as soon as it identified Bennet Godwin, just as all the doors on Venera did. That fact could still amaze him. There had been a point when he assumed he’d never be trusted again.
And I may be about to blow all of it. He shoved the thought aside. This was not some petty academic political battle. This one was for the real world.
Except for Derek Cusmanos and several dozen neatly arrayed survey drones, the cavernous room was empty. All the personnel who’d been assigned to Derek were off either in the scarabs or in their own offices, poring over years of satellite data, looking for more alien bases. The mammoth wall screens showed a series of seemingly random still shots—the mushroomlike dome of a pancake volcano, the ripples of one of the lava deltas, the ragged, concentric rings of a collapsed crater.
Derek himself crouched in front of one of his drones. This was one of the surface surveyors, which looked like miniature scarabs with eyes and arms. Derek had it turned over on its side so he could get at the hatch in its belly. Whatever he saw there was so absorbing that he did not look up as Ben started across the floor.
“Derek?”
Derek grunted and held up one finger. Ben stopped where he was, folding his hands behind his back and getting ready to wait. Derek, like most of the mechanical engineers Ben knew, had the tendency to get completely absorbed in his work. Ben studied the rows of drones with their spindly arms, picks and containers for taking samples, lasers for measuring, cameras for every kind of photography. Derek knew them all. Had built half of them. Had come very close to losing his job because no one felt the need to fund a human mapmaker when drones and computers could do that just fine. The drones themselves could, of course, be cared for by the same staff that took care of the scarabs.
Derek finished his repairs or adjustments, closed the hatch, and heaved the drone upright onto its treads. Only then did he stand up and really acknowledge Ben’s presence.
“Afternoon, Dr. Godwin.” Derek plucked a sterile towel out of the box and started wiping his hands with it. “What can I do for you?”
“Afternoon.” Derek had been one of Ben’s students when he was still teaching. Ben had long ago given up trying to get the younger man to use his first name. “Have you got the new pictures of Ozza Mons?”
“Fresh in.” Derek tossed the towel down the recycling shaft and plunked himself behind the sprawling, semicircular desk that was in his main workstation. The desk woke up, and he typed in a quick command sequence. The wall image of the lava delta disappeared, replaced by the ragged, ashen gray throat of an old, massive volcano. “Looks pretty dead.”
“May just be dormant.” Ben studied the picture, but the familiar sense of excitement failed to rise in him. “We’ll have to go down and look at it.”
“If you can get a scarab for anything but ogling the Discovery.” Derek shook his head at his keyboard. “It’s amazing, you know? I mean, I knew, once we found it, that the Terrans wouldn’t think there was anything else worthwhile up here, but I thought the Board…” He stopped.
Ben held up his hand. “Now that the tourists are here, everybody’s supposed to go back to their normal duties. Dr. Failia wants to give your visitors plenty of room to play.”
Derek made a sour face. Ben returned a smile and changed the subject. “Have you found anything that looks like another outpost?”
Derek shook his head. “They’ve given me the entire geology department, and we’ve got every surveyor, from the satellites to the minirovers, set on fine-tooth comb, but there’s nothing.”
“Think we will find anything?”
Derek started but recovered quickly. “How would I know?”
Ben shrugged. “You found the first one. I thought you might recognize…traces.”
Derek didn’t look at him. His gaze wandered over the silent ranks of surveyors with their waldos, cameras, and caterpillar treads. They were heavy, blocky, reinforced things, completely unlike the delicate machines Ben had worked with on Mars. “The drones found the first one, Dr. Godwin, not me. But there are no traces of anything around it. It’s just sitting there, a random occurrence.” He paused and finally returned his gaze to Ben. “Or have your people found something new?”
Ben barked out a laugh. “You have all my people. You’re going to hear anything long before I do.” Then, he paused, as if considering a new thought. “Although…well, you’ve got a trained eye. Can I get you to take a look at one of the new batches of images your team passed me?”
“Sure.” Derek poised his hands over the command board.
“It’s file number AT-3642.”
Derek entered the number and brought up the picture on the wall screen. It was a black-and-white still shot, taken from one of their ancient satellites. It showed a gray raised ring with a dark center and long pale ridges radiating from the sides. Derek studied it for a moment.
Ben leaned one hand against the back of Derek’s chair and peered at the image, as if trying to see it in greater detail.
“Looks like a tick,” Derek said. A tick was a type of volcano found only on Venus. It got its name because from above it looked like a gigantic, round-bodied insect with its crooked legs sticking out at irregular angles.
“Yeah, it does,” said Ben, watching Derek carefully. “Except it’s never been mapped.”
“Oh? Well, that describes a lot of the planet.” Venus had three times the land area of Earth. Detailed mapping was the work of multiple lifetimes. “Do you want me to put it on the list for close study?”
“No, no.” Ben shook his head. Especially since it does seem you’ve never seen it before. “You’ve got your hands full. Just see about routing me a couple of close-ups during the next flyover, okay?”
“Okay.” Derek made a note on one of his flat screens. “Was there anything else?”
“Not really.” Ben straightened up. “Will I see you at the reception?”
“Maybe.” Derek turned his attention back to his command board. The lava delta reappeared on the wall, this time with the white lines of a measuring grid laid over it. “When I’m done here.”
“You should consider putting in an appearance,” Ben suggested with a small smile. “I think Grandma Helen is counting noses. If she isn’t, she’ll be reviewing the tapes later.”
Derek glanced up. “Thanks, Dr. Godwin. I’ll show myself.”
“Good choice.” He patted the boy on the shoulder and showed himself out.
Ben walked down the broad corridor to the elevator bays and, as was his habit, took the sweeping staircase instead. Space was Venera’s one true luxury, and Ben had to admit he reveled in it. The stairs were wide, and the ceilings were high. There was room for people coming up, going down, and just standing around talking or leaning against the outer railing. The elevator shafts made mini-atriums, so he could look the whole, long, dizzy way down and up again and hear the sounds of purposeful life drifting to him from each of the twenty-four decks. Ten thousand people living and working peacefully together. It could be paradise if it were allowed to be.
Ben turned off at the landing for the administration level, getting ready to head for his office. But he stopped in mid-stride and glanced at the clock on the wall. Quarter of five, with the reception at six. No one would think anything of it if he didn’t stay at his desk until the required hour.
And what Ben really wanted to do could not be done in the office.
So he returned to the stairs and walked down three levels to the residential section. The apartments took up most of the two levels above the farm and one level below. Everyone had a full suite of rooms: bed, bath, study, living, and kitchen. Even the visitors. With the soaring ceilings, full-spectrum lights, and generous use of e-windows and greenery, you could almost forget you were in a colony.
In his own rooms, Ben always kept one of his screens set to show the clouds outside. He did not want to forget.
Other than that, Ben’s apartment was pretty much as he had moved into it.
Someone looking for evidence of the owner’s personality would have had to work hard. After a while, they might have picked out the shiny chunk of obsidian on the end table by the couch, the brightly polished garnet on the half-wall that divided the kitchen from the living room, and the piles of open screen rolls on the desk, coffee table, and couch. From this they could have concluded that the owner liked rocks and was dedicated to his work.
As his door shut behind him, Ben crossed to the sofa. He picked up a pile of screen rolls to clear space for himself and sat down. His briefcase rested on the coffee table. He didn’t jack it in; he just woke it and called up a privately encrypted file that waited for both the password and the scan of his fingertips from the command board.
The file opened for him and displayed a picture identical to Derek’s AT-3642.
It did look like a tick. It had the circular center and the ridges radiating out like crooked legs. In black and white and two dimensions, those ridges appeared to be level with the grounds—until you had spent a day looking at everything you had as if they were alien artifacts because you couldn’t help yourself, until you enlarged it and refined it and squinted at it for hours.
Then you saw it was not level with the ground, that the ring was, in fact, sitting well above ground level, and that the “ridges” might be supports of some kind.
He couldn’t be sure, of course. The only way to be sure would be to fly one of Derek’s prize camera drones in there, shine a laser over the thing, and make a holograph of it. But close study of anything on Venera involved other people—assistants and their supervisors, Derek as the drone keeper; Helen, who had to know what was going on at all times. Ben did not want anyone, anyone, else involved in this yet. Anyone on Venera anyway.
What Ben knew currently was that this object was approximately 1.3 kilometers across and that it had been there somewhere between 40 and 170 years. The Magellan probe sent up in the 1990s hadn’t seen it, but the Francis Drake had, and the Francis Drake went up just as the first plates of Venera were being bolted together.
So never mind where the Discovery with its three little holes in the ground came from. Where did this…thing come from?
But no one was looking at it, except him. Derek’s complete nonrecognition had told him that. If someone else had been checking out this spot or this object, Derek would have confirmed it. Everyone else was looking in the ground for more holes. No one had looked up.
Ben’s first thought had been to rush to Helen with this, but he’d hesitated. He told himself that it was just because he wanted to be sure. He didn’t want to speak before he had the facts.
But that wasn’t it, and even as he was rationalizing his actions at three in the morning, he knew that.
Ben slumped backward and ran his hand over his scalp, scrubbing the gray bristles that were all that was left of his hair. Male-pattern baldness he’d never bothered to get corrected. He hated med-trips when they were necessary, never mind the idea of getting stuck in one of the capsules for cosmetic touch-ups.
He’d had a full head of chestnut hair at Bradbury. He’d been so young. Ben chuckled to himself. God, when did twenty-seven get to be young?
He’d taken his own sweet time getting through college. Some of his friends joked he was in on the “eternity program.” Ben replied he was just looking for something to get excited about. Comparative planetology, with its possibilities for exploration and discovery, had come close to filling the bill.
Then he went to Bradbury for his post-doc work and he found the real thing.
Theodore Fuller was just picking up steam when Ben arrived. No one on Earth took him seriously, but in the colony itself, that was another story. The stream was full of his words and of people talking about them.
Ben had arrived at Arestech, Inc., to set up shop in their lab and run their surveyors with every intention of ignoring Fuller’s message. But he couldn’t help hearing. To his surprise, Fuller didn’t talk about the good old days of the nation states, like most people who had grief with the U.N. did. He didn’t talk about the past at all. Instead he talked with enthusiasm and delight about the present—how modern technology had finally made possible a truly free flow of information, information available to each and every human being no matter who they were, no matter where they were. Information made it possible for everyone to control their own lives completely in a way that had never been possible before. It could bring them into contact with whomever and whatever they needed. They could pick and choose what their lives held. There was no more need for middlemen or for central government.
After all, what did governments do? Provide security? There were no more nations to wage war on each other. Personal security could be provided by electronics or a private company, depending on the needs and desires of the individual. The government regulated commerce? Why? The market, like nature, could take care of itself and had for a long time now. When was the last real economic collapse? Late twenty-first century, wasn’t it? Before the stream was truly established.
How about rule of law? Employment for lawyers and bureaucrats mostly. A person who felt unjustly treated could seek satisfaction in courts run on the same principles as any other business. The ones in which the arbitration and settlement procedures were seen as just and fair would have the most subscribers and work with the greatest number of private security companies. Those who didn’t like the justice of one system could subscribe to another which they read about and evaluated in-stream.
The central government did not need to exist. It was an idea from previous centuries. It was like the great North American weed called kudzu. It had invaded so long ago no one remembered where it came from. They just knew it was there, and they spent a lot of time, effort, and money dealing with it because no one knew how to get rid of it. No, because no one was ready to do what was necessary to get rid of it.
Well, the good news was that dealing with the U.N. was a lot easier than dealing with kudzu. All you had to do to get rid of government was say no. Simple. Direct. Say no, show the bureaucrats the nearest ship out, and get on with your life. Your life, your money, your future. Yours. No one to say who could and could not build on the planets, no endless rounds of licensing for ships and shipping, no one to hedge or ban scientific research that frightened them, no one to ever again supervise bloodbaths like the U.S. Disarmament.
Ben had had no blaze-of-light revelation. He’d started reading because he almost couldn’t help himself. Fuller and Fuller’s ideas were all anybody talked about. He had to find out for himself whether they would work or not.
The answer shocked and scared him. It could work. The free flow of information was the key, just as Fuller said. The U.N. had been, in some ways, a necessary stage to eliminate the barriers imposed by nation states and national currency. But now that it had nothing external to fight against, it had turned around, like all powerful governments had throughout history, and started to feed on its own, and people put up with it because they couldn’t see any way past it.
Bradbury and its people could show them. Bradbury could push the U.N. out the door and thrive. When they did, the rest of the worlds would see that it could be done, and done safely and quickly. It would start with Mars, out on the frontier, but it would spread all the way back down to Mother Earth herself.
It should have worked, but they moved too fast. Fuller got bad advice, or maybe he just got overconfident, but they overestimated the number of their followers in Bradbury. Too many people just stood around and did nothing. Too many other people actively tried to undermine the revolution and were judged dangerous to the implementation of the new system. Transporting all the dissenters back to Earth turned out to be a bigger problem than had been anticipated. During the process of transportation, someone got sloppy and didn’t run safety checks on all the ships that carried the dissenters away.
Then there were the ones who misunderstood what was happening and decided to take charge in their own way before the security systems could be
established. Revenge had overwhelmed the fragile court corporations.
None of that changed the basic principles. Fuller’s ideas still held. But twenty years had passed and no one else had found the time or the place to put them into practice.
Until now.
Ben stared at the clouds displayed on his view screen. They billowed and boiled, filling the world outside. Even after so long, they could still be awe inspiring.
When he’d first stood inside the Discovery, his thoughts had tumbled over each other, almost too fast for him to follow. Awe, fear, wonder, humility, and then, slowly, almost shamefully, came the idea that he might be able to use this great thing that had happened. This might be the catalyst for the shift in thinking that would be needed to finish what Ted Fuller had started.
The more he thought, the more he saw and uncovered on his own, the more certain he became. This was it. It just had to be managed, that was all. Not suppressed, not lied about, just managed. Everything could be made to work out for the best for all the worlds, including Venus, if they just moved carefully.
Well? He tapped his fingers restlessly against his thigh. If you’re going to do it, do it. If not, put your file away and go get dressed up for the yewners.
Ben leaned forward and jacked the case into the table. He set up a quick search code, attached his best encryption to it, and dropped it into the queue for the next com burst to Earth. Then he got up to shave and change for the reception.
One of the features of the stream that few people bothered to take notice of was that if you constructed your packet correctly, you did not actually have to store your information anywhere. So many different, completely untended machines were constantly receiving and rerouting data that it was possible to keep a packet bouncing between them. Ben had several packets that had been flying from relay to relay for twenty years now. He’d lost three to badly timed hardware upgrades that he’d failed to get wind of, but other than that, his most secret information bounced happily around the solar system, untraceable, not only because of its encryptions, but because it seldom landed anywhere long enough for any one machine to make a complete record of its contents.
