“For you. But the adaptation—”
“—Would be a challenge, yes.” Then he thinks, for the first time in fifteen years: “How about Earth?”
The sheer audacity of this suggestion makes Abdera laugh, and a Venerian laugh is always worth witnessing; it draws sympathetic laughter from Jor, as he imagines the look on Miller Lennox’s face when confronted with his prodigal son. “I thought you couldn’t!” she says, meaning the reverse adaptation, Venus to Earth.
“There are ways,” Jor says, knowing of one experimental method—
“Am I interrupting?” D’Yquem is returning to his chair.
“A moment of speculation,” Abdera said, her mood suddenly solemn. Jor notices that her flowing sarilike garment is torn near her left elbow.
He is beginning to form a question when the building shakes, a violent jolt that breaks glass at the bar and triggers shouts of alarm.
“What in God’s name was that?” D’Yquem says.
“The Lens!” Petros calls.
Crunching on broken glass, Jor rushes toward the bar and its big view window—
The evening is still unusually clear, and it makes the sight all the more horrific: there is a hole in the big dish of the Lens.
By the time Jor, Abdera, and D’Yquem emerge from the ground floor of the 13-Plus tower, the situation at the Lens is more troubling: the evening marine layer has rolled in, obscuring the ground view of the top of the structure—except for flashes of light, which mean additional explosions. (Any flashes of light are anomalies.) Jor cannot hear explosions, of course. The dense, rolling fog damps distant sound. Nor can he feel the ground shaking, but that could be due to the mud.
Even after years on Venus, he has never gotten used to the fact that the evening mist is hot, not cold as it would have been in an Earthly port city.
It takes far too much time to reach the Lens. TA has always skimped on rescue equipment, naturally, preferring to reserve precious cargo volume on spaceships for prefabricated construction materials, not fire or rescue trucks.
So Abdera, D’Yquem, and Jor are forced to travel in a Venerian skiff, which means letting Abdera serve as pilot. Terrestrians have never learned to operate the raftlike machines, especially since—owing to the lack of Venerian mass production—none is like another.
It makes D’Yquem unhappy. “Don’t we have more important things to worry about?” Jor says.
“We can fix the fucking Lens,” he snaps. “When you lose social status, you lose everything.” It is one of those passing remarks that makes Jor realize that D’Yquem’s pre-Venereal life must have been far different from his own.
Grumbling and petty, he climbs aboard nonetheless, and the trio commences a glide toward the smoking, flashing Lens at a speed they could easily exceed by walking.
Not that walking is possible. Venus Port is built on a delta. Instead of real streets, it has shallow rivulets and streams—more water than land.
And on most open land, and all “streets” and even on water near the shores, lay piles of newly raw material awaiting shipment via skiff.
Venus Port is being taken apart. According to Abdera, the process, known by the Venerian world as “reloquere”—has been going on for the equivalent of two hundred Earth years. The first human explorers originally thought that the open pits and half-built buildings were signs of construction.
It was quite the other way around. They were what remained of residence towers and palaces and businesses and manufacturing facilities and libraries—whatever one would find in a city.
Reloquere is the prelude, Venerians say, to the great Sunset of Time, that moment each ten thousand or hundred thousand or one million (accounts vary, depending on which Venerian clan is asked) years when the clouds fade … the Sun is clearly visible.
And it sets as Venus creaks into a partial rotation, unleashing storms, floods, quakes.
Remaking the landscape. Where once was Twi-Land would now be Noon, or Nightside.
Or so the legend has it. Most Terrestrians dismiss the idea, either for lack of scientific backing or their own theological reasons. But the Venerians seem convinced: wars between the city-states have ceased in the past few years as reloquere spread throughout the Twilight Lands.
So, even as the Terrestrian Authority raises the Lens to the heavens, the Venerians continue to disassemble their city brick by vine.
The process isn’t just a disassembly of structures … the individual elements of each structure are taken apart, too. Bricks are taken to a place to the north and east, where there is almost no dry land, and dissolved … returned to the mud whence they came.
Piping is melted down and returned to more solid ground. (TA’s long-ago offer to buy this metal was rejected so thoroughly, Jor knows, that a second request was never made.) Glass, the same—transformed back to sand and spread on the shore.
Even the wiring of the Venerians’ electronic grid has to be stripped out of structures, coiled, then melted down.
This strikes Jor as simply foolish: art and decorative items are also on the list. Venerians have statues though most are abstract rather than representational, and these are also victims of reloquere. Not long ago he happened to see the removal and disassembly of one obelisk from his Lens station over a tenday, and he was impressed with the care and even ceremony, like a state funeral.
Nevertheless, at the end of it a thirty-foot-tall piece of art had been reduced to a cooling vat of creamy goo.
He later asked Abdera how the artists felt about the death of their work, only to be told, “They are long gone.” Which, given the Venerian life span, suggested that the artists had completed their work centuries ago … or something more sinister.
The Venerians also have great gardens filled with broad-leafed ferns and purple Twi-Land flowers with blossoms as big as a human head, so richly fragrant that spending too much time too close might result in suffocation. (For a human, that is: the Venerians thrive when surrounded by Twi-Land’s blooms.)
What this means is that Jor’s skiff is forced to avoid the “streets,” since these are crowded with materials-to-be-shipped, in addition to Venerians now living in tents. There are also a few humans, stirred from their towers by the disturbance at the Lens.
It takes them an hour to cover a distance of less than five miles. Jor cannot speak to Abdera; she certainly does not turn and communicate with him or D’Yquem. Nor do Jor and D’Yquem have anything to say.
They finally reach the base of the Lens and are allowed inside the perimeter. “Someone tunneled under the fence on the Venerian side,” one of the security team, Hollander (2,4,7) tells Jor, who does not bother to correct the man: everything outside the fence is the Venerian “side.”
“Crawled up the Lens without using the lift or the backup ladder—”
“—Which explains why no one saw this,” Jor snaps. There are observers, and even cameras, watching the gridlike tower, not for saboteurs, of course, but for damage … stray vines.
Hollander flinches, anticipating punishment. “They attached an explosive with a timer, then crawled back to the ground to watch what happened.”
Jor has other orders to give Hollander, but there is a disturbance at the base of the Lens. Security wants to arrest Abdera.
“She’s with me, you idiots,” Jor snaps. There are three security shifts; the first two would know that Abdera and Jor are involved. The late shift, apparently not.
Then there is a problem with the lift: a security team has taken it to the top and won’t let it return.
So Jor begins to climb up the girder itself. If the Venerian bombers can do it—
Physical exertion is not advised for Terrestrians, especially those soggy with brue. But Jor is determined to see what happened to his Lens.
D’Yquem and Abdera follow though more slowly.
The Lens reminds most Terrestrians of the Eiffel Tower. The two structures share a common shape though the Lens is slightly shorter (850 feet as opposed to over
a thousand) and is topped by a rotating silvery disk that is itself 250 feet in diameter, and represents the greater engineering challenge. It is designed to gather, then focus, megahigh-frequency transmissions from the giant orbital Equatorial dish, opening a portal between Earth and the second planet.
Jor is aching, puffing, sweating heavily as he reaches the platform level. Pausing for breath, he takes in the view, the evening mist blanketing Venus Port as he hears Abdera and D’Yquem from below … the aural dampening effect of the fog making them seem closer than they are, as if all of them were in the cozy interior of 13-Plus, not hanging off the side of a tower.
Jor is quickly able to see that the saboteurs have blown a hole in the disk large enough to throw a skiff through.
He runs to the far end of the platform, which is still incomplete, with boards and slats instead of metal grilling. “Jor, be careful!” Abdera shouts.
He is not worried about falling. Although conflicted about the ultimate value of the Lens, Jor knows it is still his project, his life’s work; any attack on it is an attack on him.
Once he has completed his circuit and examined the gear joints of the steering mechanism, he relaxes so thoroughly that he laughs.
“How is this funny?” D’Yquem says, barely able to utter words, he is so out of breath.
“All they did was poke a hole in the disk,” Jor says. “We can fix that in a few days. If they’d really wanted to destroy the Lens, they should have put their bomb in the gears. That would not only take months to repair, it might have brought down the whole structure.”
Perhaps it is the residual effects of the brue. Or the climb. Jor shouts into the Venerian night, “Idiots! Tear your city down! Leave the Lens alone!”
He turns and sees Abdera staring at him with what can only be disgust.
Back at the base of the Lens, Jor, Abdera, and D’Yquem fall into a crowd of confused security types. D’Yquem goes off in search of information. Abdera and Jor stand by her skiff in the roiling hot mist, so thick now that Jor can barely see Abdera ten feet away.
“I’m sorry about what I said up there.” One lesson he has learned from his cruel father is, when necessary, be the first to apologize. (Because Miller Lennox never does.)
Among the many differences between Terrestrian and Venerian responses—they don’t shrug. If uncomfortable and unwilling to engage, they just stare.
And so Abdera stares. Jor cannot fail to notice that, even in the thick mist, which coats his skin and clothing, Abdera appears cool and dry. Her garments, standard for a Venerian female of her clan, are largely a series of varicolored wraps and scarves that bind her hair while not really covering her head. She wears sandals that could easily have been found on Earth.
There is no differentiation in garments by male and female, but rather by age and status: postfertile Venerians wear more structured clothing, prematable Venerians much less.
“I was angry,” Jor says. “Then I was overly elated because the Lens survived.”
Still she stares.
“What was it you wanted to talk about?” he says, changing his tone and, hopefully, the whole conversation. “Why did you want to meet me tonight?”
Finally, he engages her. She takes a step toward Jor, actually touching his arm (a rare event in mixed public). “It is a painful admission—”
“Hey!” D’Yquem shouts as he suddenly appears out of the mist. “They caught them!”
“The bombers?” Jor says.
“They were still inside the compound, still carrying climbing tools and explosives.” He shakes his head at the unlikelihood. “They didn’t even try to get away.”
He holds up an image. Jor and Abdera see five Venerians, two males and three pregendered youths.
Abdera is clearly upset, turning away. Jor reaches for her, but she runs off, disappearing into the mist.
“Now what?” he says.
“Maybe she knows them,” D’Yquem says. “They’re from her clan.”
Jor has no contact with Abdera the next day. In a way, he’s glad: he has no idea what to say to her. And too much other work.
His first eight hours are consumed by plans for repairs to the Lens, and five times the usual Venus–Earth–Venus message traffic, all of it reducible to two phrases: “Venerian damage to Lens.” “Stay on schedule and punish the criminals!” (This last related with great sternness by Tuttle.)
“Amusing sidelight,” D’Yquem says, as Jor emerges from the conference room, having applied classic team motivation to his own department heads (“Work faster, you fuckers!”).
“Please share. Amusement is hard to find today.”
“Your miscreants were up to other mischief.”
“Such as?”
D’Yquem hands him a flimsy. “They, and some team of yet-to-be-identified accomplices, staged a raid on our garbage dump.”
Jor cannot understand this; D’Yquem is amused. He nods toward the message. “They removed giant heaps of metal slag, soiled mud, vegetative matter, and took it somewhere.”
“That was all?”
“They apparently failed to disturb anything mechanical, including what was left of my Mark III device.” That had been D’Yquem’s first attempt at bringing computational science to the Lens. The device had overheated and melted down. Mark IV had an improved cooling system.
“If they left your garbage alone, why do you care?”
“I don’t, especially.” He smiles. “I just happened to be lurking by your assistant’s desk when the message arrived.” Jor’s secretary is a middle-aged Norwegian woman named Marjatta (2,3,4), now married after a brief and unsatisfactory affair with Jor a decade past. She is capable, but easily distracted, especially by D’Yquem, who seems to spend an inordinate amount of time hovering near her desk.
“Strange—” Jor suspects a connection. The attack on the Lens is such an outrageous action by the Venerians that every aspect must have meaning. But the alcohol, stress, and short night have left him fuzzy.
“If I were you, I would ask Security to track the theft. See where the material ends up.”
“Don’t we have better things to do? I know that Security feels quite stretched at the moment.”
“If you want to know why the Venerians attacked, you’ll press this.” Then he smiled again. “Or you could just ask your girlfriend. You’re both rebels.”
Jor blushes at the memory. The #2 and #6 in his Exile Quotient—as D’Yquem knows—are the result of a romance Jor had at college with a young woman from Sub-Africa.
Any sort of relationship, even a nonromantic one, would have made Jor and Njeri notorious … the fact that Jor’s father was Miller Lennox, one of the most powerful business and religious figures in Illinois, made the couple into outright targets. And not just to the public … it was Miller Lennox who arranged for Njeri to be shipped home in disgrace—
And for Jor to join the ranks of exiled Terrestrians on Venus.
Where, if D’Yquem’s analysis is correct, he resumed his old ways … becoming involved with an inappropriate partner. In self-defense, Jor would note that he lived at Venus Port for a decade during which he was involved with three human females, including Marjatta. His liaison with Abdera only began when she became the primary contact for the Lens team and her clan, which had some ancient rights to the air above the plot of marsh where the Lens was built.
It had happened quickly—from first handshake to intimacy, no more than a day, which was unprecedented in Jor’s prior relationships. And, he later learned, in the Venerian equivalent.
One night in 13-Plus, Jor had dared to ask D’Yquem, “What do you think she sees in me?”
D’Yquem snickered. “Money and power.”
“Besides that.”
“Well, maybe it’s because you look like a fucking Venerian male.”
Jor knows that his complexion is darker than many of his fellow Terrestrians—not the handful from Africa, of course. He is taller than most, thinner, too.
But
what D’Yquem almost certainly means is his face: all of the men in the Lennox family have prominent noses and close-set eyes. “We look like the business end of hatchets,” Jor’s older brother Karl once told him.
Of course, Jor also knows that physical resemblance, while key in initiating personal relationships, is not enough to sustain one. Especially a relationship that crosses social and biological and clannish lines.
“So it’s mutual rebellion,” he said, answering his own original question.
“More has been built on less.” D’Yquem tips his glass. “Say, remember the pilings?” D’Yquem says.
“They still haunt my sleep.” Sinking the pilings for the Lens almost broke the Lens project in its early going. In many places, Veneria’s mud is little better than brown water. “Soup” is what D’Yquem calls it. Pilings had to be sunk repeatedly and to depths three or four times greater than they would on a comparable terrestrial location.
“We learned something from them.”
“You mean, besides ‘don’t build a tall heavy structure on Venus’?”
“We got core samples.”
“I recall Rostov saying that the Venerians would never allow that.” Rostov (2,3,5) had been TA’s staff geologist in those days. He had begged to be allowed to take core samples to prove or disprove Venerian legends of reloquere and the Sunset. Naturally, he’d been denied, just as human archaeologists were denied the chance to dig in Jerusalem because religious leaders feared what they might find—or not find.
“And they never did, as research. But for structural engineering …” D’Yquem grins, always a disconcerting image. (Those English teeth!)
“So Rostov found—”
“Nothing. No evidence at all that Venus had ever undergone radical, transformative geological or climactic shifts. Not in the past half a billion years, that is.” He grins again. “Your girlfriend and her people live a long time, but not that long.”
Jor has never truly really believed Abdera’s stories—no more than he believed in the strict Christianity of the Lennox family.
Nevertheless, the work of reloquere has continued at a faster pace. When work on the Lens first commenced, Sunset was said to be far in the future—the equivalent of a human century.
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